In this episode of the Politics in Question podcast, the team discusses thermostatic politics to explain what it means and how it works.
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George Washington saved the American Revolution not by winning battles, but by refusing defeat. From the daring 1776 Brooklyn evacuation to lessons for the 2026 US-Iran conflict, this story explores how wars are won through endurance, not just victory.
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Washington, the Military Escape Artist
Mar 31, 2026
Many wars are remembered for decisive battles. The American Revolution survived because one army refused to be destroyed.
George Washington understood that reality during the darkest months of the Revolutionary War. In 1776, the American rebellion stood on the edge of collapse. The Continental Army had been defeated repeatedly, and the British believed the conflict might soon end with a single decisive blow.
The Night the Revolution Almost Ended
On the night of August 29, 1776, George Washington had not slept in two days.
His army, 9,000 men, was trapped on Brooklyn Heights. British forces had driven them there after a crushing defeat, routing the Continental Army through the undefended Jamaica Pass and shattering its forward lines in a matter of hours. Now the survivors were pressed against the East River, the Royal Navy controlling the surrounding waters, British troops digging siege lines just 600 yards away. Captain Sir George Collier, commanding HMS Rainbow off Long Island, recorded in his journal that all of Washington's men "must be killed or taken prisoners. . . . If we become masters of this body of rebels, the war is at an end."
Washington had other plans.
He ordered a silent evacuation. Through the night, Colonel John Glover's regiment of Marblehead fishermen and sailors rowed small boats back and forth across the East River in darkness and rain. Oars were muffled in cloth. Washington himself rode the lines through the night, then stood at the landing to supervise each embarkation, cheering, calming, and encouraging his troops through what one historian called one of the most difficult trials a soldier can endure.
By dawn, the army was still not fully across.
Then the fog came. A thick morning mist settled over the harbor so dense that one soldier wrote you could scarcely discern a man at six yards distance. The final battalions crossed under its cover. Washington was the last man to board the last boat, with British forces already closing in on the shore behind him.
In London, bells rang across the city, candles were lit in windows, and King George III awarded General Howe the Order of the Bath. The rebellion, it seemed, had been broken.
It had not.
His Only Job Was Not to Lose
The fog that morning was luck. The decision to cross was strategy.
What Washington understood that Howe did not was this: the army was the revolution. Lose it, and everything collapsed. Keep it alive, and the rebellion could survive any number of battlefield defeats. As he wrote to Congress during the campaign, "We should on all occasions avoid a general action, or put anything to the risk, unless compelled by necessity."
Over the following months, his forces were pushed across New Jersey toward the Delaware River. Soldiers marched without proper shoes. Enlistments were expiring. Thomas Paine described the moment as "the times that try men's souls." Yet the rebellion refused to die.
Henry Clinton's own narrative of the campaigns returns again and again to the same frustration: the Americans would not be brought to a decisive engagement. The British captured New York and Philadelphia. They won nearly every engagement. But as long as Washington's army survived, Britain faced another campaign season, another round of ships and soldiers and money crossing 3,000 miles of Atlantic. The conflict widened as France entered the war in 1778, followed by Spain and the Dutch Republic. Winning battles did not end the war. They lost because they could not convert battlefield success into strategic closure.
The British controlled the battlefield. The Americans controlled time.
What Washington Would Recognize
Washington's endurance strategy depended on one condition: the army had to survive. That condition is worth keeping in mind as the United States wages war against Iran in the spring of 2026.
When this piece was first drafted, the US-Iran confrontation looked like a recognizable asymmetric contest. Iran possessed missiles, drones, and regional proxy networks designed to complicate and prolong any conflict with a technologically superior adversary. The strategic logic seemed familiar: not battlefield dominance but cumulative cost and political attrition.
Events since February 28 have, if anything, deepened the parallel.
US and Israeli forces launched surprise airstrikes killing Supreme Leader Khamenei and numerous other Iranian officials. Iran's missiles, nuclear infrastructure, air defenses, navy, and proxy command networks have all been severely degraded. Yet US intelligence assessments suggest Iran's regime will likely remain in place, weakened but more hard-line, with the IRGC exerting greater control. Atlantic Council analysts warn that Iran's long history of asymmetric conflict suggests the kinetic portion of this war could be just a start.
Washington lost battles, too. He kept fighting.
This is where Washington's lesson bites hardest. The British did not lose because Washington outfought them. They lost because they could not end the war on terms that justified its cost. Destroying Iran's conventional military resolves one question and immediately raises another: what does strategic closure actually look like, and is the United States prepared for the long, irregular campaign that may follow the airstrikes?
That question, as of this writing, has no public answer.
The Fog Lifts. The Question Remains.
Strategic success is not always about imposing outcomes. Sometimes it is about denying them.
Washington's campaign offers a reminder that wars can turn not on moments of victory but on the refusal to accept defeat.
Some conflicts are not decided by who wins but by who cannot be defeated.
Edward Saltzberg is the Executive Director of the Security and Sustainability Forum and writes The Stability Brief.
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U.S. President Donald Trump on March 11, 2026.
(Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
Empty Bravado: Trump’s Hollow Swagger Behind Iran War
Mar 26, 2026
In moments of war, a president’s words carry enormous weight. They can steady markets, reassure allies, and signal strategic clarity — or they can do the opposite. President Donald Trump’s handling of the 2026 conflict with Iran has been a case study in the latter: a torrent of contradictions, self‑justifications, and evasions that leave the public less informed and the world less stable.
Across the political spectrum, reporting paints a consistent picture. Even as U.S. and Iranian negotiators scrambled to establish a cease-fire framework, Trump continued to insist the conflict was “limited,” “short,” or “nearly wrapped up,” despite ongoing strikes and regional spillover. Diplomats described the situation as “fragile” and “volatile,” yet the president publicly framed it as a minor dust‑up rather than a major regional crisis. Minimizing a war’s scope doesn’t make it smaller — it simply obscures its costs.
Members of Congress, including Republicans, raised serious concerns about whether Trump’s authorization for the initial strikes complied with U.S. and international law. Rather than address those questions directly, Trump dismissed them as “nonsense” and “political attacks,” sidestepping the core issue: whether the United States entered a major conflict without a lawful basis. A president who cannot articulate the legal foundation for war invites both domestic backlash and international instability.
The absurdity of Trump’s wartime messaging has not gone unnoticed. The Guardian highlighted Jon Stewart’s blistering critique, in which he skewered Trump for treating the Iran conflict like a branding exercise — alternating between bravado and victimhood, claiming total control one moment and blaming unnamed advisers the next. Comedy often reveals what official statements try to obscure, and here it exposes a commander‑in‑chief whose public posture resembles improvisation more than strategy.
Trump’s public comments about the war have been riddled with contradictions. He has alternated between threatening overwhelming force and insisting he seeks peace; between claiming Iran is “on its knees” and warning that they remain a “grave threat”; between promising swift victory and suggesting the conflict could last indefinitely. It’s inconsistency — and inconsistency in wartime is dangerous.
Wars are not branding opportunities. They are not campaign rallies. They are not opportunities for improvisational rhetoric. They demand clarity, honesty, and seriousness — qualities that have been conspicuously absent from Trump’s public handling of the Iran conflict. The president cannot or will not communicate coherently about a war he initiated. That should alarm anyone who believes that military power must be paired with responsible leadership.
We deserve a president who treats war as a solemn responsibility, not a stage for contradictory sound bites.
Hugo Balta is the executive editor of The Fulcrum and the publisher of the Latino News Network.
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man in gray hoodie and blue denim jeans kneeling on green grass field during daytime
Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
Cancel Cesar Chavez: Continue The Fight For Justice
Mar 25, 2026
As a young journalist, I covered the funeral of Cesar Chavez in 1993 and have interviewed Dolores Huerta several times over the past 30 years.
They were heroes to me and my family, icons of the Chicano civil rights movement.
Reading this week in The New York Times the allegations that Chavez raped Huerta and groomed and assaulted minor girls was devastating. My heart felt like it split open knowing one of our greatest civil rights leaders was capable of such evil.
As a child my mother’s family in the 1950s migrated from picking cotton in Texas to Midwestern states, where they picked beets and tomatoes.
They eventually made it to rural Illinois and transitioned from farm work to factory work in Chicago. But my mother never forgot her farm worker roots.
Growing up in the Chicago suburbs in the 1970s, as a family we picketed local grocery stores asking people to boycott lettuce and grapes. My parents taught us about the history of the farm worker movement and its leaders Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta.
For more than 60 years, Huerta held on to the secret of her coercion and assault that resulted in her secretly having two of Chavez’s children.
Huerta issued a public statement Wednesday, “I have never identified myself as a victim, but I now understand that I am a survivor — of violence, of sexual abuse, of domineering men who saw me, and other women, as property, or things to control.”
In the 1998 interview I did with Huerta she acknowledged that she and Chavez would argue. It was her idea for a grape boycott. He wanted it to be a potato boycott.
“It took a fight to get that. In fact, probably the only reason I won that fight was because he was on the seventh day of a fast and he was weak,” she told me. “We never argued about philosophy because we shared the same philosophy. We argued about strategy. Should it be grapes or potatoes? Sometimes he would win, and sometimes I would win.”
She did not reveal to me or anyone until now the deeper reality of their encounters.
For too long we haven’t believed women, or offered them protection from predators. This has created a culture of silence.
In the case of Jeffrey Epstein, an estimated 1,000 girls and young women were trafficked. Besides Epstein, who died in prison, and Ghislaine Maxwell, sentenced to 20 years in prison for conspiring to sexually abuse minors, nobody else has been charged.
We know the names of other men in the files from former President Bill Clinton to current President Donald Trump, the latter mentioned at least 38,000 times. They should and other men in the files should be investigated.
At least in the United Kingdom Prince Andrew was arrested but not for sexual abuse but for alleged misconduct in office.
It is unconscionable the U.S. is not investigating the men in the Epstein files.The accountability for the victims is nonexistent. Now who will be held accountable since Chavez died in 1993?
It’s important to investigate who knew about Chavez’s grooming of girls at his compound and if there are other victims who may yet come forward.
The message must be swift and clear. Cesar Chavez day, celebrated in California and other states as an official holiday on March 31, should be cancelled as a holiday.
Already the United Farm Workers Foundation has cancelled Chavez Day activities. There are reports of cancellations of events in Arizona, California and Texas. A Chavez memorial statue at Fresno State was immediately covered up after news broke. Chavez’s name should be taken off streets, schools and other landmarks. His murals should be painted over.
Instead on March 31 the world should honor all people who have been victims of sexual abuse and violence.
It’s important to remember the values of the movement of economic equality for the farm workers who feed our country and still toil in the fields.
Today, the movement matters as farm workers, immigrants and Latinos are targets of the ICE raids. The fight for economic justice, civil rights and worker protections continues. Huerta, 95, who has fought for this justice, fairness and equity, continues her pursuit.
“The farmworker movement has always been bigger and far more important than any one individual,” Huerta said in her statement. “Cesar’s actions do not diminish the permanent improvements achieved for farmworkers with the help of thousands of people. We must continue to engage and support our community, which needs advocacy and activism now more than ever.”
I’m reminded of how Huerta leads a chant at the end of most of her speeches. I last heard her speak in Albuquerque in the summer of 2023.
“Who’s got the power?
We’ve got the power!
What kind of power?
People power!
She ended with the phrase she coined, “Yes, we can.”
¡Sí, se puede!”
Yes, we can keep fighting for justice for women and workers.
Cancel Cesar Chavez: Continue The Fight For Justice was first published on CA Latino News and was republished with permission. CALN is an affiliate of the Latino News Network.
Teresa Puente is an assistant professor at California State University, Long Beach. She teaches courses in News Reporting and Ethics, Social Media Communication, and Bilingual Magazine Reporting and Production.
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U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to reporters as he and Secretary of State Marco Rubio (L) depart the White House on their way to Florida on March 20, 2026 in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
President Trump Demonstrates Why Euphemisms Damage Democracy
Mar 24, 2026
In politics, words matter. In democratic politics, they matter even more.
Great political leaders have long recognized that fact.
Perhaps no modern American President understood that as much as John F. Kennedy. Speaking at Amherst College, one month before his assassination, Kennedy paid tribute to the power of words this way: “Poetry,” he said, is “the means of saving power from itself.”
“When power leads men towards arrogance,” Kennedy continued, “poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.”
I cannot imagine President Trump ever thinking or saying anything like that. The president seems to have little feel for the English language.
He uses words as weapons, not to inspire or cleanse, but to demonize and trivialize. When he does not use them that way, he turns to euphemisms to distract citizens and hide what is really going on.
Trump’s assault on language is an assault on democracy itself. “Authoritarianism,” Mike Brock argues, “thrives in ambiguity. It requires linguistic fog to operate…. Every euphemism is a small surrender. Every hedge is a tiny collaboration. Every refusal to speak plainly is a gift to those who profit from confusion.”
The latest example of the president’s assault on language is seen in his insistence on calling the war in Iran an “excursion.” On March 11, he described the war this way: “We did an excursion. You know what an excursion is? We had to take a little trip to get rid of some evil, very evil people.”
A little trip? An excursion?
When we think of excursions, we think of vacations, the object of which is relaxation, exploration, or pleasure. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, its earliest known use dates from 1537.
But from then until now, I dare say no one has used it to describe dropping bombs, devastating cities, killing civilians, and disrupting the global economy. Trump’s use of a euphemism to describe those things is cynical and dangerous.
Recall the words of former Vice President Dick Cheney, who warned of “the emergence of euphemisms that strive to put an imaginary distance between the American people and the terrorist enemy. Apparently, using the term ‘war’ where terrorists are concerned is starting to feel a bit dated. So, henceforth we’re advised by the administration to think of the fight against terrorists as ‘Overseas contingency operations.’”
He went on to say, “In the event of another terrorist attack on America, the Homeland Security Department assures us it will be ready for this, quote, ‘man-made disaster’ – never mind that the whole Department was created for the purpose of protecting Americans from terrorist attack.”
Of course, Cheney himself had euphemized torture as “enhanced interrogation.” But his warning is valuable, nonetheless.
Decades before Cheney’s admonition, the great writer George Orwell pointed out that when governments commit grave injustices or inflict pain and suffering on people, they often try to sanitize what they are doing by using euphemisms. Writing in the immediate aftermath of World War II, Orwell said, “All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.”
Seems like an apt description of the Trump era.
“Political speech and writing,” Orwell noted, “are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face….”
“Thus,” he observed, “political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.”
Trump is not the first president, since Orwell wrote, to dangerously abuse language during wartime. Almost before the ink was dry on Orwell’s essay, President Harry Truman was calling the Korean War a “police action.”
But avoiding the language of war is about more than simply getting around the Constitution’s allocation of the power to declare war to Congress. As the Atlantic’s Gal Beckerman observes, “Leaders are sidestepping the term not just to avoid liability, but because Americans clearly want nothing to do with what it signifies. For most people, after the experience of Iraq and Afghanistan, war is just another word for ‘quagmire.’”
When the president calls the Iran war an “excursion,” he trivializes the suffering that the war in Iran has brought there and around the world. Moreover, as Virginia Senator Tim Kaine observes, the president’s way of “characterizing this (the war) is deeply disrespectful” to those in the service and to their families
As the New York Times notes, “Bombs are exploding in Iran and the Middle East, but the fallout is rattling households and businesses in neighborhoods all over the globe. In Kansas, home buyers saw 30-year mortgage rates edge above 6 percent this week. In Western India, families mourning the death of a loved one discovered that gas-fired crematories had been temporarily closed.”
“The widening war,” the Times says, “…has delivered a stunning punch to a worldwide economy that has already been walloped by a breakdown of the international trading order, war in Ukraine, and President Trump’s chaotic policymaking.”
And beyond that, there is the untold environmental damage being done by billions of dollars' worth of bombs. A report in Forbes explains that “Explosions can release huge amounts of particles into the air…The environmental consequences of this process can last long after the fighting stops.”
But the damage does not stop there.
The president’s resort to euphemism does serious damage to the democratic process. Democracy can only thrive when leaders care about what they say and say what they mean.
Orwell gets it right when he observes, “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” That is Trump’s project, to use language to corrupt thought.
It is odd but not surprising that a president who has made a career of using the most violent and inflammatory language to carry on his campaign of demonizing his opponents turns to euphemism to describe his campaign of violence in Iran.
In words that seem prescient, Orwell warned, “that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language.” Only by rescuing language can democracy be rescued as well.
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College.
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