Many may debate the various issues posing the greatest crisis facing America today. But, it may be that conflict itself is the greatest threat to our democracy as it stops us from working together to build a better world.
Best-selling author and investigative journalist Amanda Ripley looks at high conflict in a new episode of "The How Do We Fix It?" The podcast shares interviews with some of the world's most creative thinkers.
Gasoline prices have increased since the United States and Israel began their attacks against Iran on February 28, 2026.
In the image below, you can see how the national weekly average rose from $2.29 per gallon during the week of February 23, 2026, to $3.50 per gallon during the week of March 9, 2026.
As we explained in this Factchequeado article, the Strait of Hormuz is a waterway about 24 miles wide at its narrowest point, located between Iran and the United Arab Emirates. One‑fifth (20%) of the world’s oil trade—around 21 million barrels per day—passes through it. The Strait connects the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Oman, and the Indian Ocean.
Source: Google Maps.
Since the beginning of the war, there have been at least five reports of vessels attacked in the Strait, according to data collected through March 13, 2026, by the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations center. In addition, two sources told Reuters on March 11, 2026, that Iran was deploying mines in the Strait.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump said in a Fox News interview released on March 13, 2026, that the United States could escort ships traveling through the strait “if it’s necessary for us to do it, but, you know, let’s hope things go very well and we’ll see what happens.”
The vast majority of crude oil that passes through the Strait of Hormuz (84%) is destined for Asian markets, while only 7% reaches the United States, according to this 2025 report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). However, a disruption affecting 20% of global oil transit increases prices in all international markets—especially because traders do not know how long the Strait might remain impassable—John Browne, former president of British Petroleum (BP), told the BBC.
Tip: You can compare gas station prices in your area using apps like GasBuddy, Upside, Waze, or Google Maps to monitor real‑time gasoline prices anywhere in the United States.
David Ortega, a food economics professor at Michigan State University, told PBS that if oil prices remain high, the cost of fresh food could rise because “it gets to the supermarket using diesel, whether by truck or by ship.” Diesel prices increased from $3.80 per gallon during the week of February 23 to $4.80 per gallon during the week of March 9, according to EIA data.
Ortega also explained that oil prices affect agricultural production because they raise the cost of machinery fuel and fertilizers, which are produced from natural gas.
Gregory Daco, chief economist at the consulting firm EY‑Parthenon, estimated in a March 11, 2026, analysis that due to volatility and rising oil prices—and as long as hostilities in the Strait of Hormuz continue—inflation in March 2026 could increase by nearly 1% above the 2.4% recorded in February 2026.
How Tensions in the Strait of Hormuz Affect Your Wallet was first published as "Cómo las tensiones en el estrecho de Ormuz afectan tu bolsillo" by Factchequeado and republished with permission.
Rafael Olavarría is a Political and immigration fact‑checker.
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An analysis of Trump’s SAVE Act strategy, the voter ID debate, and how Pew data is being misused—exploring election integrity, voter suppression, and the political fight shaping U.S. democracy.
President Trump doesn't need the SAVE America Act to pass. He only needs the debate to continue. Every minute spent arguing about voter suppression repeats the underlying premise — that noncitizen voting is a real and widespread problem — until it feels like an established fact. The question is whether Democrats will contest Republicans’ definition before the frame hardens.
Trump's claim that 88% of Americans support the bill traces to a Pew Research Center survey — a survey that found 83% support a “government-issued photo ID to vote,” not extreme vetting for proof of citizenship. That support included 95% of Republicans and 71% of Democrats, indicating genuine, broad, bipartisan support for a basic civic principle. That's worth taking seriously.
What the poll doesn't show: Support for mandatory submission of complete state voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security; criminal penalties for local election officials who make paperwork errors; a verification database with a documented error rate that regularly misidentifies naturalized citizens as noncitizens; an effective date that dropped in the middle of primaries already underway. These are not voter ID provisions. They are enforcement mechanisms that poll respondents were never asked about.
The Pew data makes this gap concrete. It found that 58% of Americans support unrestricted vote-by-mail, including 32% of Republicans. And 59% support automatic voter registration, while 58% support same-day registration. Yet Trump's expanded version of the SAVE Act would eliminate mail voting for nearly everyone and require in-person registration. The survey confirmed majority support for a system that verifies who you are, while making it *easier* to participate. The SAVE Act delivers the opposite.
The SAVE Act bundles a popular principle with deeply contested restrictions and misrepresents a poll to call the whole package a mandate. Think of it this way: we all agree cybersecurity matters. Strong passwords and two-factor authentication make sense when protecting things that matter. But good cybersecurity isn't about eliminating all risks; it's about finding the threshold where protection is meaningful without defeating the purpose. Anyone who has worked in a large organization knows what happens when security becomes the overriding concern: legitimate work gets blocked, necessary tools become inaccessible, and the safest option from the security team's perspective is a computer that does nothing. The network is perfectly secure. It's also perfectly useless. The SAVE Act never looks for that threshold. By its reasoning, the safest election is one where the barriers to participation are so high that only the most determined voters clear them. That's not election integrity. That's a smaller democracy.
And the bill is only part of the story. While Congress debates the voter ID question, the Trump administration has been pursuing election control through other channels simultaneously — FBI subpoenas for 2020 election records, DOJ lawsuits against 29 states and D.C. demanding unredacted voter rolls containing Social Security numbers and driver's license data, and directing spy agencies to share classified intelligence with a White House election investigator. Taken together, these are not election integrity measures.
The debate Trump keeps resurrecting was never just a policy fight over voter ID; it’s a Trojan horse for future election denial. Every floor speech and news cycle spent arguing the point only reinforces the false assertion that elections are insecure. That's not a side effect of demanding ever stricter versions of the bill, that's the point. Defeating the bill won't end that campaign. It extends it, adding "Democrats blocked it" to a problem frame that was never really about legislation in the first place.
Which means the only move left is to change what the debate is about.
Democrats aren't wrong to call this voter suppression, but that label has stopped landing. There are also real strategic reasons to resist any voter ID framing: it risks legitimizing a problem definition built on exceptionally rare evidence, and it creates friction with civil rights coalitions that have fought these laws for decades. Those are valid concerns. But a better strategy is available: stop fighting voter ID and start defining it.
If broad public support for voter ID is real — and the Pew data confirms it is — then Democrats should propose a genuine voter ID system that actually delivers what those poll respondents said they wanted. Such a bill would expand rather than restrict acceptable forms of ID, provide free and accessible identification to every eligible citizen, and pair standard verification activities like getting a driver's license with automatic voter registration. It would explicitly exclude the DHS data sharing, the criminal penalties, and the error-prone databases the SAVE Act smuggles in alongside the provisions Americans actually support. Republicans say only the right Americans should vote. Democrats should be arguing that all of them should.
This is a flanking move, not a concession. It forces opponents to argue against a bill that gives every American free identification and easier access to the ballot — in line with what 83% of Americans support. It puts SAVE Act backers on the defensive, requiring them to explain why their version of voter ID needs a federal surveillance apparatus and criminal penalties for paperwork errors attached to it.
The messaging campaign needs to start now: a counter-bill introduced and named, talking points in circulation, surrogates making the same simple argument on every platform. The goal isn't immediate passage; it's to put SAVE Act supporters on the defensive before the frame hardens. With 237 days until midterm elections, the window to reframe this debate is open — but not indefinitely.
Dana Dolan, Ph.D., is Affiliate Faculty at George Mason University's Schar School of Policy and Government, where she specializes in policy process theory. She analyzes voting rights and other policy debates in real time at Views Through a Policy Prism (http://danadolan.substack.com), applying academic frameworks to understand how policy problems get defined, how solutions move through the political process, and who controls the terms of debate — topics that are rarely more consequential than in an election year.
Note: the number of days until the midterm elections can be found at https://www.tickcounter.com/countdown/6813168/2026-midterm-elections
A former U.S. House staffer reflects on 9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the human cost of U.S. foreign policy—urging honest debate, clear exit strategies, and lessons for future military action.
During the news on 9/11, at which time I had been coming up on a year working in the U.S. House of Representatives, I felt the deepest of sadness for the suffering of individual lives and anger at the unmitigated evil witnessed. I took comfort in the voices of friends and family. Being part of the political process, my mind turned to America's response. I listened to our leaders speak in Congress and on the news; I talked to my minister from back home despite my lapsed church attendance at that time; I thought about our troops leaving to take the fight against terrorism overseas. I was unsure of what to expect once those troops were deployed. I began hesitating when a new front in Iraq opened. What became between the two wars were too many patriots’ graves. Too many disabled veterans.
The foreign policy of the Trump administration is noteworthy both for its muscular nature and its opposition to “forever wars.” The need for debate over this approach is clear. Less clear may be the terms of the debate. With a series of military actions now reaching a new height with the attack on Iran, we should take some lessons from the past. Here, I concentrate on lessons related to the impact on U.S. soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen.
In hindsight, the debate heading into Afghanistan and Iraq would have been better served with a greater emphasis on the risks and costs of U.S. entanglement. One useful guide through all this includes at least one element of the so-called Powell Doctrine: Is there a plausible exit strategy to avoid an endless entanglement? Whatever the answer, Congressional and administration leaders owe it to the public to discuss what military action potentially means in terms of the demands on blood and treasure; this obligation becomes heightened when an exit strategy is not clear.
A truly honest conversation is necessary with the American people from the very beginning when considering the entanglement of U.S. forces in a foreign war. Are we approaching the situation from the perspective of the Powell Doctrine? This, in part, means an exit strategy for U.S. servicemembers. Former national security advisor, joint chiefs of staff commander, and Secretary of State Colin Powell argued that such a strategy should preexist the deployment of troops. The first Gulf War – which Powell commanded – did have an exit strategy: Push Saddam Hussein’s army back into Iraq, freeing a Kuwait that would certainly welcome us. We were never going to indefinitely occupy any part of Iraq; we were only going to roll back one of the most brazen acts of occupation since Hitler and Czechoslovakia. Add that the Kuwaiti oil fields would have helped fund the Iraqi government and its sizeable military - potentially next invading Saudi Arabia to take its oil fields, only building up its military more and being a brutal hegemon.
By contrast, the exit strategy for U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq II was murky. We wanted to build democracies. We, of course, failed in Afghanistan to create a lasting democracy; Iraq is currently ranked by Freedom House as having a score of 16/40 in political rights and 15/60 in civil liberties. At a cost of over 22,000 and 36,000 US casualties, respectively. This is a cautionary moral for deploying combat ground troops, not for an existing democracy, but for becoming entangled with building a new one.
If the American people believe a prolonged occupation is necessary in some situation that I personally have been hoping to never see again, I offer some more clarity: This necessitates a “clear, hold, build” approach. Meaning U.S. troops clear an area of the enemy, hold the area, and try to win hearts and minds. The goal of clarity, beyond democratic assent, is to ensure we are truly ready to exit if that is best or begin holding territory immediately – reducing the chances of a slowly escalating situation and its greater casualties and a decreasing likelihood of success. This, arguably, was the problem in Vietnam and Afghanistan, as well as the Iraq War from 2003 to 2007.
A “clear, hold, build” approach is best represented by the counterinsurgency strategy of Gen. David Petraeus during the troop “surge” stage of the Iraq War. This is different than the “light footprint” of the U.S. military that went before it. Gen. Petraeus writes in his book “Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Gaza”:
"In Iraq, we learned – or rather relearned – that shock and awe based on high-tech forces is not a substitute for troop numbers in counter-insurgency operation or for the proper employment of those troops. Iraq did not stabilize until Multi-National Force-Iraq and its Iraqi counterparts and tribal allies reached 600,000 personnel (which, as noted earlier, meant roughly one security person for every fifty Iraqi civilians), and deployed those forces properly. In counter-insurgency operations, numbers matter – as do the overarching big ideas that guide employment of those forces."
Importantly, I am not looking to relitigate the casus belli of the Afghan and Iraq wars. They are a part of history now. Courageous Americans and their allies gave a good fight for a good cause. They are heroes who took the fight from our shores to overseas.
What we cannot do is overextend our all-volunteer military again. What we should not do is continue to ask the less than 1% of our population serving in the military to continue to sacrifice so very much.
We should not abandon the world to a place without values like solidarity and justice and some degree of selflessness, especially when defending our present commitment to other democracies. However, an honest public debate is required. The end result of such debate may seem ad hoc. There is nothing wrong with that. The best we can do is have that debate, with the rules of debate demanding a consideration of all these points made by history.
Scott Miller is a graduate of Widener School of Law, a former chief of staff in Congress, and the author of 'Christianity & Your Neighbor's Liberty.
Trump’s ‘Just for Fun’ War Talk Shows a Dangerous Trivialization