Anderson edited "Leveraging: A Political, Economic and Societal Framework" (Springer, 2014), has taught at five universities and ran for the Democratic nomination for a Maryland congressional seat in 2016.
The war between Russia and Ukraine has given President Biden an opportunity to reset his presidency. His State of the Union address made an effort to do that, but it only partially succeeded. We need a more coherent synthesis of the strategy against Russia and the strategy against dysfunction in Washington.
Why are we helping Ukraine? And why are we not sending troops into Ukraine to help them?
Answering the second question is easier. Ukraine is not a member of NATO, and the United States (like the 29 other member states) is only committed to protecting NATO members attacked by a foreign foe. Biden is not sending U.S. troops into Ukraine or U.S. planes to fly over the country because we have no obligation to do so.
Why, then, are we leading a coalition that is both imposing financial sanctions on Russia and sending anti-tank missiles, automatic weapons and armored vehicles into Ukraine?
First, it is in our self-interest to push the Russians out of Ukraine. If Russia succeeds in occupying Ukraine and seizing control of the government, then our NATO allies in Europe, most notably Poland will be under threat of invasion also. To the extent that our NATO allies are threatened or indeed run over, the safety of all NATO nations, including the United States, is threatened. Indeed, if Ukraine falls, the entire post-Cold War European order will be shattered.
Second, it is pathetic to see Russian President Vladimir Putin attack Ukraine for no good reason. The United States does not always intervene when we believe there is grave injustice around the world — there are over 50 wars (admittedly many are civil wars) going on in the world right now where we have no involvement — but in this case our commitment to NATO permits us to stand up for a country being brutalized and bullied.
How is the Ukraine conflict tied to dysfunction in Washington?
Biden's domestic agenda must put aside a purist kind of argument in the same way that his agenda in Ukraine has put aside a purist argument. We could be idealists in domestic affairs and pragmatists in world affairs, but it seems wiser to be pragmatists in both.
The idealists in the Democratic Party are the progressives, the left wing led by Sen. Bernie Sanders, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Pramila Jayapal. They not only have very progressive solutions to problems, ranging from the Green New Deal to single-payer health care, they exhibit a moral certainty about the truth of the views they express.
The pragmatists in the party, and Biden has been one at different times in his career, are less doctrinaire and more open to bipartisanship: The very call for bipartisan solutions expresses a pragmatic viewpoint because it says that forming a compromise in dysfunctional Washington with the other party is the best way to proceed.
Biden's State of the Union address sounded more Wilsonian in foreign policy and more Jeffersonian in domestic policy. Although he called for bipartisanship on a number of policy issues several times and thanked the Republicans for their work on the infrastructure bill, he spent the majority of his address telling Congress and the American people what we have to do because it is the right thing to do, whether it's offering child care subsidies, providing insulin at an affordable price for diabetics or establishing universal background checks for gun purchasers.
You can argue for policies from a pragmatic point of view and still draw on moral principles, but you have to be more honest with your audience and tell them where you are coming from.
In the case of Russia and Ukraine, it means explaining to the American people how our self-interest is at stake along with the self-interest of our NATO allies. In the case of domestic policy, a more explicit effort is needed to build bridges with Republicans who have rejected the massive Build Back Better bill, a pragmatist effort to find compromises that will lead to legislation that passes.
If Biden adopts a pragmatist standpoint with respect to both foreign affairs and domestic affairs, he will end up with a strong centrist standpoint in domestic affairs that reflects his temperament and a realistic standpoint in foreign affairs that enables us to stand up for allies who are being treated in grossly unfair ways — without taking the Wilsonian step of sending our troops into battle to save democracy wherever it is threatened.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.