Stephen E. Herbits is an American businessman, former consultant to several Secretaries and Deputy Secretaries of Defense, executive vice president and corporate officer of the Seagram Company, advisor to the President's Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets, and secretary general of the World Jewish Congress. He was the youngest person to be appointed commissioner on the Gates Commission. Herbits' career has specialized in "fixing" institutions – governmental, business, and not-for-profit – with strategic planning and management consulting.
I have had the unique privilege of working with the Defense Department on six presidential-level transitions, in addition to holding two non-transition posts within the Department.
Simply stated, Senator Tommy Tuberville’s puerile, anti-democratic behavior is seriously degrading our national security every single day, an issue clearly shown as related to the current crisis in the Middle East.
His tactic is a blockade of all general officer promotions (excepting the three on which he caved to unimaginable pressure) until the Department amends its abortion policy, a topic unrelated to the positions he is withholding. Such behavior is a form of extortion, holding our security for the ransom of the Senator’s personal views.
As nominations and assignments for General Officers of all the services require Senate confirmation, the process for accomplishing that has been in place for decades and has worked smoothly, even when there have been differences between the parties. But at no time has a single senator done such egregious damage to our national security. The result of tying up these nominations is that the best and brightest of our senior military are leaving their service prematurely, reducing the pool for promotion and therefore, the ultimate quality of our uniformed personnel. Anyone who has worked for any organization with promotion opportunities understands this notion.
Tuberville has created gaps in our talent pool at the most senior levels, requiring our Defense establishment to nominate officers with higher qualifications who may have spent over 30 years gaining needed experience, education, and further qualifications for the top posts. As the pyramid structure narrows, he forces out the most important personnel the taxpayers have spent decades preparing. Just as these senior officers have the most to offer our nation, he refuses to give the best of them the opportunity to do their jobs. Without opportunity for promotion, many officers will leave for the private sector just when we need them the most.
Having held up approximately 300 nominations for months on end, his actions are a disgrace to our democratic system of working with others in the Senate and coming up with a solution to the issues about which he is concerned. He is able to do this because of Senate rules, not laws nor Constitutional loopholes.
But it is not only Tuberville who should be ashamed.
The Minority Leader, Senator Mitch McConnell has tremendous power over his caucus removing Tuberville from all committees but has chosen to remain silent. However, it is not just the Republicans who are behaving badly. The current Majority Leader of the Senate, Chuck Schumer (D. NY) had two options at his disposal to address this behavior, which he has yet to utilize.
The first option would have been to attempt to amend the rules, perhaps for an agreed one-time use, to require that votes on military nominations may not be held up by a single Senator unless the reason relates directly to the person’s qualifications for the position for which he or she has been nominated.
Of course, that would require a simple majority vote, which puts Senators Kristen Sinema (I-AZ) and Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) on the spot. They don’t like changing rules, even if the rule change is reasonable and/or for one particular use, such as in the case for essential military nominations. If they are preventing this kind of rule change, then the voters in their states who consider our national security important should defeat them at the polls.
The Majority Leader had another option. After being unreasonably patient, he should have held the Senate in session at the end of July for seven days a week, 24-hours a day and dealt with each nomination separately if necessary. How long would the rest of the Senate tolerate this infringement on their summer recess before forcing Tuberville to end his blockade.
A solution is necessary now before any further damage is done to our national security and standing in the world. Tuberville’s actions must be stopped so that these essential military promotions can resume. Whatever option, or another if one is available, is necessary now. Tuberville’s petulance suggests he returns to getting paid for calling plays for football teams without damaging the rest of America.
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.