European ‘war fatigue’ may be growing – but Ukraine’s recent momentum could buy time
As the Ukraine war approaches its four-and-a-half year milestone, the sustainability of the coalition of support for Kyiv has once again become a key question on the minds of Europeans.
YouGov data from February 2026 shows considerable variation among Europeans in support for maintaining the war effort. Support for a negotiated peace has overtaken that for holding out for Russian withdrawal in France, Germany and Spain. Ukraine has also become a key political issue in Italy ahead of elections in 2027.
Larger parties, such as Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy and the centre-left Democratic party, have maintained their support for Ukraine. But smaller parties both on the left and right, including the Five Star Movement and Lega Nord, are showing little appetite for continuing military aid.
How can we assess how much strain the coalition of western democracies supporting Ukraine is really under? After all, we have seemingly been here several times before. We believe the key is understanding the sources of “war fatigue” and the willingness and ability of parties to capitalise on it.
War fatigue
One the many unfair aspects of the war is the contrast between the autocratic Russian regime, which is able to mobilise societal resources rapidly and impose its will on its own citizens, and the coalition supporting Ukraine.
Maintaining this disparate coalition requires constant maintenance of the relationship with other coalition partners and with domestic electorates to ensure continued support is forthcoming and to prevent the defection of partners.
However, citizen support is not something that can be taken for granted. As conflicts become drawn out, this support can increasingly come to waver.
War fatigue isn’t just a question of the longevity of a conflict. It is also a question of the costs imposed upon citizens and their cumulative impact over time. Fighting wars implies trade-offs between public and military spending, which citizens may not be willing to tolerate over the long term.
Vladimir Putin’s weaponisation of the energy supply to Europe, by periodically tightening the flow of natural gas, reflects a keen awareness on the Russian president’s part of this dynamic. His bet seems to be that Russian resolve can outlast that of the Europeans.
War fatigue also depends on the perception of success. Citizens will be far more willing to support the cause if they think there is a high likelihood of victory. They will be less willing to back initiatives where there will be no return.
The first wobbles in the coalition, in late 2023, reflected these dynamics. They coincided with rising energy prices across Europe and the faltering of Ukraine’s strategic position as promised funds were tied up in the US Senate.
Translating citizens’ dissent into a direct challenge to the war effort depends on the supply of political opposition. And whether owing to deals and agreements between political leaders, ideological predisposition or a sense of responsibility, almost all mainstream parties in Europe continue to support the coalition.
Data from a December 2025 EU-VALUES survey, which asked experts to rate observations of fatigue for Ukraine support on a scale from 1 (not at all) to 5 (very frequently), highlights a significant divide between perceptions of elite and public fatigue across Europe.
Citizens seem to have become sceptical of supporting Ukraine. But this view does not appear to be shared by European political elites, who largely continue to support the policy.
Perceived war fatigue in EU member states
There is a significant divide between perceptions of elite and public fatigue over the Ukraine war across Europe.CC BY-NC-ND
So far, political opposition to supporting Ukraine has tended to come from radical parties on the far right and far left, such as the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany and Podemos in Spain.
But the overall picture among radical right parties on supporting Ukraine is mixed. There is similar equivocation among radical left parties. Parties such as Die Linke on the left in Germany and the National Rally on the right in France are deeply divided on the issue.
The efficacy of the challenge these parties present is also unclear. On the one hand, spoilers such as former Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán and current Slovakian prime minister Robert Fico have proved highly disruptive. They have been accused of holding EU sanctions packages on Russia hostage.
On the other hand, radical right parties have often remained out of government and where they have come close to power – as with Geert Wilders in the Netherlands – would-be coalition partners have extracted clear commitments not to pull support from Kyiv.
The election of Donald Trump as US president in November 2024 complicated this picture. Trump’s arrival and subsequent freezing of aid raised the costs of supporting Ukraine for European governments, made Ukrainian victory appear less likely and gave succour to the radical right.
But his attacks on European trade and security interests placed radical right parties in an awkward position and made a pro-Trump worldview more difficult to sell at home.
Shifting battlefield momentum
Recent evidence has suggested the battlefield momentum is shifting in Ukraine’s favour. Ukrainian strikes on the Russian energy grid and logistics centres, for example, have been well publicised.
In a meeting with Trump on July 28, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, also seemingly convinced his US counterpart of his ability to win the war. The meeting took place shortly before the Senate voted to approve new sanctions on countries purchasing Russian oil.
Such momentum may help to quell dissent among citizens and galvanise western support insofar as it suggests a speedier end to the conflict on terms that would vindicate the actions of coalition members.
It is too early to tell how these events will play out. But any reversal of Kyiv’s fortunes bodes well for the ability of western and European leaders to keep their citizens on board with the task of defending Ukraine.
Policy experts: Europe stuck between “rock and a hard place” on launch
A decade ago, SpaceX began to land the first stages of the Falcon 9 rocket with some regularity, but it’s only within the last five years that the company has begun flying the rocket dozens and then hundreds of times a year.
As a result, SpaceX has very rapidly become responsible for more than three-quarters of all mass launched into orbit. Much of this is the company’s Starlink satellites, but due to cost and the lack of alternatives, SpaceX has also stepped up to launch payloads from all comers, including direct competitors such as Amazon, Northrop Grumman, AST Space Mobile, OneWeb, and more.
New research is beginning to quantify just how much the introduction of the Falcon 9 rocket, the adoption of reuse, and the vehicle’s high cadence have upended the global launch market.
Cumulative payload to orbit
Public policy researchers based in the United Kingdom and Italy have published new research in Economics Letters that showcases the marked changes wrought by the Falcon 9 by mining a dataset of more than 6,700 launches from 1960 to 2025.
One of the more striking findings comes in the cumulative payload to orbit by nation. From 1990 to the early 2000s, the United States and the Soviet Union tracked fairly closely to one another. Then, in the wake of the Space Shuttle Columbia accident in 2003, Russia began to pull ahead. This trend slowly reversed course in the mid-2010s and then, amid the Falcon 9 ramp up in the early 2020s, the United States pulled ahead dramatically.
Just a handful of years later, the United States has now more than doubled all of Russia’s payloads to orbit since 1990.
Cumulative payload to orbit by country, 1990–2025.
Credit: Economics Letters
Cumulative payload to orbit by country, 1990–2025. Credit: Economics Letters
“Another way to look at it is to analyze the shares of yearly global payload captured by selected spacefaring nations,” the authors write. “Between 1995 and 2012, the US share of global payload collapsed from almost 50 percent to a trough of less than 20 percent, far below Russia and only a few percentage points above China and Europe. Since then, it accelerated rapidly to a peak of over 82 percent in 2024.”
Launch costs disparity
SpaceX has also made significant gains in controlling costs compared to other nations. A decade ago, the United States and Europe had similar launch costs. Today, according to publicly available data, launch costs in Europe are now three times higher than for comparable payloads in the United States.
The researchers estimate that the average cost of sending a kilogram of payload to orbit in the United States is now $3,225, compared to higher costs elsewhere: Japan ($5,287), China ($5,809), Russia ($6,682), and Europe ($9,897). India is higher still at nearly $15,000 a kilogram.
Average cost per kg to orbit by country in 2025.
Credit: Economics Letters
Average cost per kg to orbit by country in 2025. Credit: Economics Letters
“The very high figure for India might be counterintuitive as it stands in stark contrast with the narrative of the country’s frugal space program,” the authors write. “However, this is a result of focusing on small rocket sizes, which implies that, albeit being low by international standards, fixed costs get amortized over a limited payload.”
The key factors in bringing down costs are larger rockets, increased cadence, and reuse of launch vehicles.
“Poorly scalable domestic technology”
As for what other countries should do about this, the researchers assert that nations in Europe and elsewhere that decide to rely solely on their domestic rockets for launch needs will see their costs go up, which could slow their efforts to expand space-based operations such as satellite constellations. This leaves policymakers in a difficult position.
“Looking specifically at Europe, for now the continent is stuck between a rock and a hard place, having to choose between continuing to depend on lower-cost American launch technology and relying on expensive, poorly scalable domestic technology to expand its strategic presence in space,” the authors write.
Ultimately, to remain competitive, spacefaring nations will need to develop better and more modern launch capabilities. The United States is far and away the current leader of reusable launch, and virtually all new commercial rockets under development incorporate some aspect of reuse. Chinese firms are similarly pushing forward with this technology. To date, Europe’s efforts have been slow and stodgy.
For example, a European Space Agency program to demonstrate small, suborbital hops called Themis was originally supposed to perform low-altitude hop tests by 2022. So far, the vehicle has yet to get off the ground.
Hong Kong’s first regulated stablecoin faces its market test
Hong Kong’s stablecoin experiment has entered its first controlled market test.
On August 12, Anchorpoint began phase-one Beta Access for HKDAP, initially involving institutional distributors and professional investors. HashKey and OSL are among the first issuer-authorised distributors. HashKey has completed an initial client mint-and-redemption transaction with fiat on-ramps and off-ramps, while OSL provides distribution, liquidity, exchange, trading and settlement support.
It is more than a demonstration token, yet far from a broad retail currency. Anchorpoint has disclosed no circulation, distinct-user or sustained transaction-volume data. Wider retail access could begin by the end of 2026, subject to market conditions.
The launch takes Hong Kong beyond legislation and regulatory signaling. The commercial question remains: can a Hong Kong dollar token attract durable demand outside crypto trading?
Thirty-six applications, two initial licences
Hong Kong’s Stablecoins Ordinance took effect on August 1, 2025. It requires a licence to issue specified stablecoins in Hong Kong in the course of business, or to issue a Hong Kong dollar-referenced stablecoin outside Hong Kong in the course of business.
Issuers must maintain segregated reserve assets whose value at least equals the stablecoins in circulation. Valid redemption requests must be honoured at par as soon as practicable. The often-cited one-business-day standard comes from the Hong Kong Monetary Authority’s supervisory guideline rather than the ordinance itself. A non-bank licensee must maintain at least HK$25 million in paid-up capital or equivalent approved resources, and licensees may not pay interest on their stablecoins.
The HKMA also expects every holder to be identified, unless an issuer can demonstrate effective alternative safeguards. HKDAP’s Ethereum-based Beta makes that restriction concrete: Transfers are limited at smart-contract level to addresses verified through at least one issuer-authorised distributor. Transfers to unverified addresses are automatically rejected.
The HKMA received 36 applications and granted the first two licences, to Anchorpoint and HSBC, on April 10, 2026. Mainland regulators had meanwhile hardened their position on private stablecoins and offshore issuance. Ant Group and JD.com suspended planned Hong Kong initiatives following intervention by mainland regulators, according to reports. The HKMA has not disclosed the full applicant list, individual outcomes or the number of withdrawals.
Anchorpoint is a joint venture of Standard Chartered Bank (Hong Kong), HKT and Animoca Brands. HSBC plans to connect its coin to PayMe and its Hong Kong app for transfers, merchant payments and tokenised investments, but had not launched by mid-August.
The initial market is therefore bank-backed and institution-heavy. Hong Kong has licensed a supervised settlement instrument, not permissionless private money.
Different rules, different objectives
Across major markets, the common direction is full or near-full reserves, segregation, redemption rights and strict financial-crime controls. The policy objectives differ.
Europe has the most complete cross-border framework. Under MiCA, a token referencing one official currency is an e-money token whose issuer must generally be a credit institution or electronic-money institution. Holders can redeem at par without a fee, and issuers and crypto-asset service providers may not grant interest.
MiCA also requires an issuer to stop issuing when a non-EU currency token’s use as a means of exchange within a single currency area exceeds both one million transactions and €200 million a day on a quarterly-average basis. It is a monetary-sovereignty defence, not a general restriction on trading or redemption.
The United States is building a federal-state framework through the GENIUS Act, but its issuer regime had not taken effect by August 13. Distribution is further ahead: Visa lets participating institutions settle obligations in USDC seven days a week; PayPal and Venmo support PYUSD; Shopify merchants can accept USDC; and Stripe accepts stablecoin payments into fiat, although Connect USDC payouts remain a limited private preview.
Circle’s structure also shows where US policy is heading. Outside the European Economic Area, USDC was still issued under state authorities by Circle Internet Financial, LLC. Circle received final OCC approval in July for a national trust bank that will begin with custody, while a separately chartered New York trust is intended to assume non-EEA issuance. That migration had not been publicly confirmed by August 13.
Japan contains risk through regulated issuer types. JPYC, the first domestic yen stablecoin under the post-2023 regime, is live, but JPYC EX limits direct issuance to ¥1 million per transaction and redemption to ¥1 million a day. Singapore has moved in the reverse sequence: Its dedicated stablecoin label is not yet in force, but XSGD already works behind familiar wallets and QR payments as a clearing and settlement asset. Consumers need not hold the token directly.
Switzerland has no dedicated stablecoin statute in force. Its strength lies in regulated custody, tokenized securities and institutional settlement. In April 2026, six regulated banks joined Swiss Stablecoin AG in an industry-led live test of a franc-denominated coin. The pattern is institutional rather than retail.
The economics HKDAP must prove
Regulation can make a token safe enough to hold. It cannot make holding it economical.
HKDAP pays no interest. At the August 11 tender, the average accepted yield on 91-day Hong Kong Exchange Fund Bills was 2.69%. At that rate, moving HK$100 million into non-interest-bearing HKDAP for 90 days would forgo about HK$663,000, or HK$7,370 a day.
That is an illustrative gross benchmark, not a universal upper bound. The actual cost depends on a company’s marginal use of liquidity: It may be lower for idle deposits, but higher where HKDAP displaces money-market assets, collateral or debt repayment.
The issuer-level prohibition does not determine where incentives ultimately appear. PayPal pays rewards on eligible PYUSD balances even though Paxos, the issuer, pays nothing. Whether Hong Kong distributors offer rebates, fee waivers or funded settlement lines may matter more for adoption than the formal ban. Anchorpoint and its distributors have not addressed the question.
Companies should therefore treat HKDAP as working settlement inventory, not a treasury asset. Faster settlement, reduced prefunding, cheaper reconciliation or more efficient collateral must recover the negative carry.
Photo: Jeffrey Sze
For ordinary domestic transfers, around-the-clock availability alone provides little advantage. Hong Kong’s Faster Payment System already moves Hong Kong dollars and renminbi between banks and wallets in near real time, 24 hours a day. Project Ensemble is testing tokenized bank deposits as settlement assets, while a future e-HKD would represent central-bank money. The HKMA has made no decision on issuance.
HKDAP’s potential edge is portability: a common Hong Kong dollar cash leg moving across approved wallets, exchanges and smart contracts beyond any single bank ledger. It could support atomic settlement of tokenized bonds, funds or other assets. But its present portability extends across a shared, multi-distributor whitelist, not to unidentified users on an open network.
The economic gain is conditional. If HKDAP reduces by one full day the period for which HK$100 million is immobilised as settlement inventory, the released gross carry is about HK$7,370. Atomic settlement may also reduce principal risk and reconciliation, but a 24-hour cash token cannot deliver end-to-end settlement if the asset leg, compliance process or redemption bank remains closed.
Liquidity is the second test. OSL offers liquidity and fiat ramps; HashKey has completed an initial client mint-and-redemption transaction. Yet the legal redemption claim remains against Anchorpoint. The market still lacks a comprehensive fee schedule and evidence on committed market-making, spreads, depth, cut-offs, weekend exits and actual redemption times.
Access to mainland China remains tightly restricted
Hong Kong’s license provides no automatic route into mainland China. In February 2026, Chinese authorities reiterated that virtual-currency business remained illegal on the mainland, prohibited unauthorized offshore issuance of renminbi-linked stablecoins and barred overseas institutions from unlawfully serving mainland entities.
The same policy package also opened a narrower asset channel. The China Securities Regulatory Commission established a pre-issuance filing regime for offshore asset-backed security tokens whose repayment is supported by cash flows from onshore assets or related rights. It is not blanket approval for offshore real world asset issuance, and other approvals and reviews may still be required. The rules neither designate nor privilege Hong Kong, although its regulated tokenized-securities infrastructure makes it a plausible venue.
HKDAP could eventually serve as the cash leg for qualifying mainland-linked assets tokenized in Hong Kong. That is a legally conceivable settlement use case, not yet an established market. Its development will depend on actual filings, transaction structures and the willingness of regulated institutions to use a Hong Kong dollar token.
The credible near-term markets are therefore settlement for tokenized funds, bonds and other real-world assets; round-the-clock transfers among banks and licensed platforms; and payment corridors accepted by regulators on both sides.
Progress should be measured through circulating value, repeat corporate users, transaction turnover, redemption performance, secondary-market spreads and the value of tokenized assets settled in HKDAP. Those figures will distinguish useful financial activity from crypto speculation.
Hong Kong has built a credible gate. HKDAP must now prove that its settlement utility is worth the yield its holders surrender.
Jeffrey Szeis chairman of Habsburg Asia, general partner of Archduke United LPF,and Director of the Austria and Central Europe to Asia AI & Innovation Exchange. He specializes in high-value art transactions and real world asset tokenization operations and secured a cryptocurrency exchange licence in Switzerland in 2017.
‘Syria is Gaza on steroids’: Israeli minister says war with Damascus is ‘absolute certainty’
“Syria is Gaza on steroids, and that is the next war, with absolute certainty”, said Amichai Chikli Israeli Diaspora Affairs Minister. “There is no avoiding it.”
Israeli Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli on Syria:
Syria is Gaza on steroids, and that is the next war, with absolute certainty.
There is no avoiding it. pic.twitter.com/KbH0KndkWG
— Clash Report (@clashreport) August 13, 2026
Chikli’s remarks come as Israel is already waging military campaigns across multiple fronts in the region, including Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and Iran, while carrying out attacks elsewhere in the Middle East. Israeli leaders have themselves described the conflict as a war on seven fronts
The remarks are not the first time Chikli has openly threatened war against Damascus. In June, he said Israel would wage war on Syria “sooner or later”, claiming that Syria and Turkiye posed a greater challenge to Israel than Iran. “We will wage war on Syria, sooner or later, because it and Turkiye are far more worrying than Iran,” Chikli said at the time.
Chikli’s latest threat comes as Israeli forces already occupy Syrian territory and carry out repeated incursions into the country. Following the fall of Bashar Al-Assad’s government in December 2024, Israel declared the 1974 Disengagement Agreement void, moved into the UN-monitored buffer zone adjoining the occupied Syrian Golan Heights and established military positions deeper inside southern Syria.
Israeli operations have continued despite the new Syrian leadership repeatedly signalling that it does not seek war with Israel. Syrian President Ahmed Al-Sharaa has called for Israeli forces to return to the positions they held before Assad’s fall, while Israel has demanded a demilitarised zone extending through much of southern Syria.
READ: Katz says Israel to remain in ‘security zones’ in Lebanon, Syria, & Gaza
Only days before Chikli’s comments, Israeli troops again entered Quneitra province, erected checkpoints and searched civilians and vehicles. Israeli forces have conducted repeated raids, searches, arrests and artillery attacks across southern Syria in recent months. On Friday, Syrian state media reported that Israeli forces opened fire towards civilian homes in the Daraa countryside, forcing some residents to flee.
The declaration that another war is an “absolute certainty” comes as Israel’s aggression has expanded across multiple fronts. Israel continues to control territory illegally in Palestine, has seized a swathe of southern Lebanon following its latest war with Hezbollah and occupies additional Syrian land beyond the Golan Heights. Israel also launched a major war against Iran alongside the US earlier this year.
In Lebanon, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz said this week that Israeli troops would remain in what Israel calls a “security zone” until Hezbollah is disarmed, ordering the army to prepare for an “extended presence”. Washington responded that a permanent Israeli military presence in southern Lebanon would contradict commitments made under the US-backed agreement with Beirut.
Israel’s increasingly aggressive regional posture is widely seen as a contributing factor in the reordering of security relations across the Middle East. Last week, Saudi Arabia, Turkiye and Pakistan signed the landmark Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, under which an armed attack against one of the three countries will be regarded as an attack against all.
The pact brings together three of the Muslim world’s most consequential military powers: NATO member Turkiye, nuclear-armed Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the region’s largest Arab economy. Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan has compared its collective-defence provision to NATO’s Article 5, under which an attack against one member is treated as an attack against all.
READ: Israeli army opens fire on civilian areas in Daraa, southern Syria: State TV
Ukraine’s monthly civilian casualties highest since 2022
Civilian casualties in Ukraine have climbed to their highest monthly level since the early weeks of Russia’s full-scale invasion, according to the United Nations.
July recorded the highest overall number of civilian casualties since March 2022, while the number of people killed was the highest since May 2022.
The UN said the true toll was likely higher, with some reports still being verified.
Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, the UN has verified at least 16,874 civilian deaths and 51,273 injuries in Ukraine.
Long-range missiles and drones remained the biggest cause of civilian casualties in July, accounting for 38% of the total. Short-range drones operating close to the frontline accounted for another 27% of casualties.
“Civilians are facing intensified risks from the increased use of missiles and drones in urban centers, glide bombs in cities closer to the frontline, and short-range drones,” said head of the mission Danielle Bell.
Russia launched at least 429 missiles during the month, more than twice the number fired in June, according to the UN.
The deadliest attack came on July 2, when Russian forces launched 74 missiles and almost 500 long-range drones, mostly against Kyiv. At least 30 civilians were killed and 104 injured.
OpenAI and Anthropic in price war as Chinese AI rivals gain ground
Leading US AI labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic are releasing cheaper models as they fight to retain cost-conscious customers who are switching to cut-price alternatives from Chinese rivals.
The price war comes as rising AI bills push companies to curb usage and seek cheaper models, helping Chinese developers including Moonshot and DeepSeek make inroads with users from Silicon Valley to Europe.
OpenAI recently said that it was slashing prices for GPT-5.6 Luna, its “fastest and most affordable model”, by 80 percent. Anthropic has launched Claude Opus 5, touting the system’s “frontier intelligence… at half the price” of Fable 5, the company’s most capable model.
The moves have helped decrease prices that customers are paying for models from leading US labs by almost a quarter since mid-July, according to Silicon Data’s token price index. Tokens are the units of data processed by language models and are used to calculate many customers’ bills.
The cuts mark a shift for US AI groups that make proprietary “closed” models that have, until now, competed heavily on performance. Increasingly capable “open” Chinese models—which can be freely downloaded and tweaked by developers—have contributed to pressure on prices.
The moves also come as OpenAI and Anthropic plot initial public offerings at trillion-dollar valuations while investors seek evidence that the industry’s vast spending on AI can generate returns.
Corporate AI users face cost pressures as Anthropic and OpenAI shift some enterprise customers away from flat subscriptions and toward usage-based billing, under which companies pay according to the computational resources they consume.
Some businesses have responded to a rise in bills by imposing caps on AI usage or testing cheaper alternatives. Companies such as DoorDash and Airbnb have said they have started to use Chinese-made models in an effort to rein in bills.
That shift has coincided with a flurry of releases from Chinese labs that have narrowed the performance gap with leading US models, raising concerns in the US tech industry that American developers could lose customers even as they spend heavily to maintain their technological edge.
AI labs offer a range of models with different capabilities and prices, with costs varying further according to the version of a model and the “effort” settings used. Customers are typically charged for input tokens, used to measure data fed into a model, and output tokens, which measure what it generates in response.
The latest price cuts from US labs apply to mid-tier products and make them more competitive with Chinese offerings. OpenAI, for example, cut the price of GPT-5.6 Luna from $1 to $0.20 per million input tokens and from $6 to $1.20 per million output tokens.
Anthropic launched Opus 5 at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens—half the price of its Fable 5 model. This week, the company called off a planned rise in prices for its Sonnet 5 model, which had been due to take effect from September.
Headline token prices do not provide a straightforward comparison between AI models, however. More capable models can sometimes complete a task using fewer tokens or with fewer attempts, meaning a model that appears more expensive based on the headline price of tokens can ultimately cost less.
Additionally, most can operate at different “effort” settings, which vary the computing power used to answer a question and can affect both performance and the ultimate cost of completing a task.
Artificial Analysis, which benchmarks models across areas including math, science, coding, and reasoning, found Anthropic’s Opus 5 at “medium” effort delivered similar performance and cost per task to Moonshot’s Kimi K3 at “max” effort. OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Luna at “max” effort performed similarly to DeepSeek’s V4 Flash at “max,” but cost just under twice as much per task.
Anthropic and OpenAI declined to comment.
A person close to Anthropic said Opus 5’s pricing below its flagship Fable 5 was how the startup’s “family of models is built, so there’s no connection to competitors.”
Mantas Lukauskas, AI tech lead at Hostinger, a website hosting provider that has used large language models since 2020, noted that prices for the very best models were “flat to rising.”
He added that the recent pricing changes are the “first real test” of whether groups such as Anthropic and OpenAI can protect the cost of their most advanced offerings: “The US labs have cut the middle and are defending the top.”
How Imperial Japan turned to the sardine to help build a war machine
Empires have risen and fallen in their pursuit of precious resources such as oil, gold, tea or spices. But in the first half of the 20th century, an increasingly assertive Imperial Japan relied on a fishier form of wealth to build its military and industrial base: the sardine.
In Japan, sardines are among a group of fish fondly known as “the people’s fish.” Along with Japanese anchovy and round herring, they are collectively known as “iwashi” and have long been a common ingredient in the Japanese diet, whether consumed raw or used in a variety of dishes.
But this small fish, named in records from early 20th century Imperial Japan as “ma-iwashi,” was more than just food. Beginning with the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan embarked on its modernization project and aggressive empire-making to become an imperial power. Despite being a latecomer to imperialism, through military annexation and invasion Japan took control of large swaths of Asia.
As a scholar studying the history of the Japanese empire, I have profiled the key role of sardines in the making of Japanese imperialism. With a high fat content, a significant portion of the sardine catch was processed into fish oil, serving as a primary raw material for the empire’s war-oriented chemical industry.
From fish oil to dynamite
Prior to the demand for sardines for chemical manufacturing, sardine oil had long been a byproduct of processing the fish into fertilizer. Through the trading company Suzuki Shoten, the smelly oil was originally exported to Europe, where it was turned into a solid, odorless fat through a process called hydrogenation.
The technique was introduced to Japan in the early 1910s. Hydrogenated oil, after chemical processing, would become nitroglycerin – the main ingredient of dynamite.
Using fish oil to produce military weapons was not unique to Japan. In fact, it was a trend in imperial warfare during the early 20th century, as seen in Nazi Germany’s wartime operations as well.
Japan’s employment of sardines for this application meant it had to seek such a natural resource beyond its archipelago. For Imperial Japan, the relationship between sardines and its empire-making was twofold: Expanding territory facilitated its larger yield of the fish, which in turn allowed for more oil for the empire’s war apparatus. And placing waters around the Korean peninsula under control was key.
Korea’s ascension
Japan annexed Korea in 1910. But the year 1923 has been recognized as a watershed for sardine fishing in the region. That year, massive schools of sardines were reported off the coast of northern Korea. This was possibly due to ocean current changes following the Great Kanto Earthquake, newfound knowledge of sardines’ value among fishermen, or changes in the sea surface temperature.
With the sardine migratory route along the eastern coast of the Korean peninsula allowing for a nearly year-round fishing season, the colony’s importance within the empire grew as its rich sardine resources became key to Japan’s military ambitions.
Aggressively extracting oil from its iwashi resources, Imperial Japan became the world’s largest harvester of the fish. Its catch in 1931, including yields from colonies such as Korea and Taiwan, which was under Japanese control from 1895 to 1945, accounted for roughly 44% of the global total, according to Japan’s Fisheries Bureau.
As the data showed, the harvest from colonial Korea and the entire Japanese empire were, respectively, nearly three times and 10 times that of the United States, which was second behind Japan that year.
Underscoring the importance of sardine oil as an industrial raw material, a 1939 article in the Dong-A Ilbo newspaper extolled the fish as the “Darling of the Century” as it celebrated a record-breaking catch in North Hamgyong Province of present-day North Korea.
Dynamite used in both military operations and the full-scale war later were likely sourced from the empire’s sardines.
By then, colonial Korea’s Hungnam region had become the hub that produced such fish-sourced weapons. It centered on the Hungnam Complex, a massive chemical industrial facility that had been established as part of the Chosen Nitrogenous Fertilizer Corporation. Initially built as a chemical fertilizer plant, the complex grew into an expansive establishment encompassing glycerin and explosives factories by 1935.
As a self-sufficient production facility, turning locally caught fish into dynamite using chemicals produced within the same manufacturing center, the Hungnam Complex shortened the supply line for delivering dynamite to Manchuria. Previously it had to be shipped from Japan.
With Korea’s ascension from sardine-fishing hub to chemical industrial powerhouse, sardines were no longer the “people’s fish.” Instead, they became the “militarized fish.”
But the weaponization of the fish did not last long into World War II. Studies suggest Imperial Japan’s sardine catch declined drastically and even ceased during the early 1940s, constraining the empire’s military power relying on fisheries resources.
Japan’s defeat in the war ended its imperial ambitions shaped by sardines. But the industrial use of sardines continues today. According to Japanese government statistics cited in a Toyomi Fish Museum article, as recently as 2020 more than 70% of sardines were used for nonedible purposes, such as oil, fertilizer and fish feed.
The story of sardines feeding Japan’s war machine illustrates the convergence of technology, environment and imperialism. Even a tiny fish could be reconfigured as a foundational raw material that fueled a modern empire’s machinery.
Vietnam and Australia: steady delivery, familiar limits
Australia and Vietnam have agreed to closer cooperation across defense, security, trade and innovation. Photo: X
To Lam’s visit to Canberra on August 11 was the first state visit to Australia by a Vietnamese head of state since the 1975 reunification and the first meeting between the two leaders. Since taking the presidency in April, To Lam has visited China, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Singapore and the Philippines, and the Australia trip precedes a stop in New Zealand to meet Christopher Luxon.
Australia and Vietnam elevated relations to a comprehensive strategic partnership in March 2024, Hanoi’s highest partnership tier. The CSP designation was once reserved for a handful of major powers, but they have expanded rapidly the last few years. Both governments have spent two years building institutional mechanisms on top of the framework, including an inaugural trade ministers’ dialogue and ministerial security dialogue in 2024, and the announcement of a new energy and minerals ministerial-level dialogue. The joint statement issued on 11 August, read against the 2024 elevation statement, reflects steady, incremental progress on commitments already made.
The 2024 statement’s headline commitments are being delivered. The ministerial security dialogue was inaugurated in 2024. The peacekeeping partnership agreement was signed in July 2025. A defense cooperation plan for 2025–2027 is in place. The ministerial energy and minerals dialogue, committed in 2024 and still not convened as of the August 2025 foreign ministers’ meeting, was finally held alongside this visit. These are concrete follow-throughs, and they distinguish the CSP from partnerships where elevation produces communiques but little institutional change.
Defence cooperation has continued to build incrementally on that base. An updated Joint Vision Statement on Further Defense Cooperation was signed. Vietnam’s participation in Exercise Kakadu for a second consecutive cycle, in 2024 and 2026, and its observation of Exercise Talisman Sabre in 2025 extend a pattern of gradually expanding operational engagement. A maritime law enforcement agreement and a cooperation and mutual assistance agreement are in negotiation. These are meaningful for a country whose defense policy rules out military alliances.
On economics, the visit produced no new quantified commitment. The only significant figure in the statement is Export Finance Australia’s A$1.3 billion in finance to support infrastructure development and exports to Vietnam since 2017, a cumulative reporting figure rather than new money. Vietnam is a key focus of Australia’s blended finance portfolio, receiving A$83 million, over a third of Australia’s total financing.
The Aus4Skills program was extended for nine years to 2035. An amended investment registration certificate was issued for RMIT University’s Hanoi campus. These commitments share a common feature: all are publicly financed or government-facilitated. No private sector investment target was set, nor was any bilateral trade target agreed.
A new element is the Joint Statement on Economic Resilience Cooperation, which frames supply chain resilience across critical minerals, semiconductors, clean energy, grid infrastructure and agricultural essentials. Whether economic resilience cooperation acquires operational substance or remains a framing document will depend on whether specific projects follow. Currently, Australian figures put two-way trade in goods and services at A$30.0 billion in 2025, while the total stock of two-way investment sat at A$2.0 billion.
Several structural factors constrain investment beyond the partnership’s political settings. Vietnam caps aggregate foreign ownership in commercial banks at 30 per cent of charter capital. Foreign individuals and organizations do not hold land use rights under Vietnamese law, and are limited to leasing arrangements capped at 50 years under the 2024 Land Law. On the Australian side, institutional investors have limited exposure to frontier markets such as Vietnam. These are not problems a joint statement can solve, but they explain why the CSP’s economic section remains dominated by public finance rather than private capital.
On technology, the TechConnect forum launched in Sydney on 10 August and a Joint Statement on Science, Technology and Innovation Connectivity was signed, alongside a health cooperation MOU. Vietnam has pursued parallel technology cooperation with Japan, South Korea and Singapore in recent months, including joint semiconductor research projects with Japan and semiconductor and data center agreements with South Korea. What Australia can offer centers on research training, critical minerals supply chains and governance frameworks rather than in commercial technology.
The relationship carries significant people-to-people depth. Australia is home to around 350,000 people of Vietnamese heritage, and Vietnam is Australia’s fourth-largest international student market, with approximately 35,000 students currently enrolled and over 160,000 alumni. Vietnam’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Nguyen Manh Cuong’s briefing described this people-to-people dimension as social capital that cannot be created overnight by any agreement.
Yet, while both governments treat the diaspora as a bilateral asset, the community is not monolithic. A substantial portion is descended from refugees who arrived after 1975, and organized Vietnamese-Australian groups have routinely protested visits by Vietnamese leaders to Canberra, reflecting a historical distrust of the Communist Party leadership that annual Black April commemorations and the continued use of the heritage flag keep visible.
While the older generations are aging and the newer ones are less engaged with the political legacy, the absence of a substantive gesture from the party-state toward the community’s historical grievances has made reconciliation and efforts to tap into the diaspora’s full potential considerably more difficult.
The overall trajectory of bilateral relations is consistent. The CSP’s 2024 commitments have been acted on, which is itself a credible outcome. The new instruments agreed during this visit are largely continuations of existing programs, frameworks not yet operational, or reporting of cumulative public expenditure. The relationship continues to deepen where governments act directly, through defense exercises, public finance and publicly funded capability programs. It remains thin where progress depends on private actors whom neither government controls, and where political will to shift existing settings has not been forthcoming.
Drone Strikes and Intelligence Chief’s Killing Expose Libya’s Fragile Balance
The unclaimed attacks have not been linked, but they come as rival power centers compete for influence and the US seeks to reunify Libya’s divided institutions
Drone attacks on energy facilities in western Libya and the assassination of a senior intelligence official in the east have renewed fears of instability as Libyan factions maneuver ahead of possible political negotiations.
No evidence has emerged connecting the two sets of events, and no group has claimed responsibility for either. Their timing has nonetheless raised questions about whether Libya faces another brief outbreak of violence or a broader contest for influence.
Maj. Gen. Fawzi al-Mansouri, head of military intelligence for Khalifa Haftar’s eastern-based forces, was killed in Benghazi on Monday night, August 10, when an explosive device detonated at his vehicle in the Hawari district, according to security officials and the eastern General Command.
Al-Mansouri was buried the following day at a funeral attended by senior military figures, including Saddam Haftar, one of Khalifa Haftar’s sons. A security committee has opened an investigation, but authorities have not publicly identified a suspect or motive.
The assassination eliminated one of the most senior officials in an eastern security establishment that has portrayed Benghazi and much of eastern Libya as having left behind the instability of earlier years.
Hundreds of kilometers to the west, attacks were hitting some of the country’s most important energy facilities.
Drone strikes began targeting facilities in Zawiya on August 9. The following night, a drone hit a gasoline-storage tank at the Zawiya oil complex, west of Tripoli, causing a major fire and the tank’s collapse. The tank held approximately 4.5 million liters of gasoline when it was struck, according to Libya’s National Oil Corporation.
Another drone landed near a second tank without causing reported casualties or damage. Further attacks continued into August 11.
The National Oil Corporation said firefighters had contained the blazes and that the refinery itself was not damaged, although production was briefly disrupted. It warned that more attacks could force it to suspend operations.
The complex includes Libya’s largest operating refinery, which can process approximately 120,000 barrels per day. It is connected to the Sharara oil field and plays a central role in the country’s energy production and fuel-distribution network.
Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah, who heads the internationally recognized Government of National Unity in Tripoli, condemned the strikes as organized crime and promised to hold those responsible accountable.
Another drone struck the South Zawiya electricity substation on August 12, setting it ablaze and causing widespread outages. Libya’s state-run General Electricity Company said more than 700 megawatts of the nearby power plant’s 1,300-megawatt capacity remained unavailable.
US energy company GE suspended work at the power station and withdrew its technical teams because of the security situation.
The attackers and their objectives remain unknown. Zawiya is divided among armed groups with shifting alliances, and tensions have grown between Dbeibah’s government and forces associated with Mohamed Bahroun, a powerful commander in the city.
Libya has been divided between rival centers of authority for more than a decade. Dbeibah’s government operates from Tripoli, while authorities backed by Haftar’s forces control the east. A 2020 ceasefire ended the last major nationwide war but failed to produce unified political, military, or security institutions.
The latest violence comes as Libyan leaders and foreign governments seek arrangements that could narrow the east-west divide.
Misbah Omar, a Libya-based analyst at the Institute for Integrated Transitions and a member of the Mediterranean Platform, said the attacks could be part of a larger contest, although no wider pattern has yet been established.
What we are witnessing may represent an initial phase in the restructuring of Libya’s political and security landscape
“If this assessment is correct, what we are witnessing may represent an initial phase in the restructuring of Libya’s political and security landscape—one aimed at allowing the main actors to consolidate or redefine their respective spheres of influence before moving toward a clearer political process,” Omar told The Media Line.
Zawiya is particularly important in any contest over western Libya. The city sits west of Tripoli at the junction of armed influence, energy infrastructure, migration routes, and economic networks.
The attacks raise the possibility that armed factions or their opponents are shifting their focus from direct clashes to the resources and supply systems that sustain military power.
“Such actions would represent a significant shift in the nature of the confrontation,” Omar said. “Rather than focusing exclusively on the armed formations themselves, pressure could increasingly be directed toward the economic and logistical networks that sustain their influence and operational capacity.”
Potential targets could include infrastructure, revenue sources, supply routes, and other assets that help armed groups maintain their position, he added.
Ibrahim Mousa Said Grada, a former Libyan ambassador to Sweden and former UN adviser, also described Zawiya as central to the struggle over political power and economic resources.
“This happened in Zawiya, a city that deserves to be described as afflicted and targeted because it has become a meeting point for the contradictions of politics, conflicts of interest, and disputes over the division of power and resources in Libya,” Grada told The Media Line.
This happened in Zawiya, a city that… has become a meeting point for the contradictions of politics, conflicts of interest, and disputes over the division of power and resources in Libya
The violence coincides with renewed US efforts to encourage cooperation between Libya’s rival authorities.
Massad Boulos, senior adviser to President Donald Trump for Arab and African affairs, has promoted an initiative focused on institutional reunification and economic cooperation. He has met Haftar, Dbeibah, and other political and military figures across Libya.
Published accounts describe the initiative as an effort to reach agreements between Haftar’s eastern authorities and Dbeibah’s Tripoli-based government, with energy investment and economic development offered as incentives.
The plan remains controversial, and many of its details have not been made public. Critics warn that a power-sharing agreement could preserve the authority of Libya’s current leaders and armed factions rather than build representative national institutions.
Omar said the US approach seemed to favor a series of limited agreements rather than a comprehensive settlement.
“If this trajectory continues, the initiative could enter a more practical phase during the final quarter of this year and the beginning of next year, operating along two parallel tracks: economic and political, supported by corresponding security arrangements on the ground,” he said.
Grada was less optimistic about its immediate prospects.
“The Boulos initiative ‘appears’ to have been placed in a freezer during this scorching summer, so that it does not die or become buried altogether,” he said.
The recent attacks do not show that Libya’s factions have agreed on a new division of power. They could instead represent attempts by competing groups to improve their positions before negotiations, whose timing and structure remain unclear.
Al-Mansouri’s assassination creates another problem for the east. Grada said the loss of its military intelligence chief came at a sensitive time for Libya’s divided security services.
“At the same time, the absence of the head of military intelligence for the eastern Libyan forces coincides with the continuing dispute over the leadership of the General Intelligence Service, or external security apparatus,” Grada said. “This means an intelligence vacuum and state of confusion at a particularly dark and sensitive moment domestically and during a highly unstable and critical international environment.”
Foreign involvement adds to the uncertainty. Russia, Turkey, the US, European powers, and regional governments retain varying degrees of political, economic, and security influence in Libya.
“There is an increasing possibility that Libya could be transformed into an arena for proxy warfare between intelligence services and their military and media arms, as international and regional conflicts and rivalries expand and deepen,” Grada said.
The latest violence does not necessarily mean that Libya is heading back to nationwide war. Omar said a series of limited moves intended to change the balance of power was more likely than an immediate, large-scale confrontation.
These developments should not necessarily be interpreted as evidence of an imminent comprehensive military confrontation
“However, these developments should not necessarily be interpreted as evidence of an imminent comprehensive military confrontation,” he said. “A more plausible scenario may be a series of calibrated and limited moves designed to alter the balance of power gradually, while leaving room for negotiations and political accommodation.”
The next political agreement may depend as much on events outside formal negotiations as on what happens at the table. Control of territory, energy assets, and security institutions will help determine what Libya’s competing factions are willing—and able—to accept.
The Zawiya strikes and al-Mansouri’s assassination do not prove that anyone is carrying out a coordinated plan to redraw Libya’s balance of power. They do show how quickly an attack on an oil tank, power station, or security chief can unsettle a country whose rival authorities have never fully resolved the conflict between them.
The stunning momentum of the insurgent left hit a roadblock this week when democratic socialist Francesca Hong narrowly lost her primary race for Wisconsin governor to Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, a moderate who garnered significant support from establishment Democrats.
“The collective power of that Democratic establishment in a state, where there is a Democratic governor and there is a real Democratic Party establishment machine, all of that power was required to eke out a 0.4 percent victory in the party’s own primary against a previously unknown candidate running as a Democratic socialist,” The Lever’s David Sirota tells The Intercept Briefing.
This week on the podcast, host Jessica Washington speaks with Sirota, founder and editor-in-chief of The Lever, about the primaries and how the left is building power within the Democratic Party.
There were bright spots for progressives on Tuesday night. In Minnesota, progressive Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan defeated AIPAC-backed Rep. Angie Craig, D-Minn., in the Senate primary race. Craig had previously voted for the Laken Riley Act, which requires the federal government to detain people for certain crimes, including shoplifting and burglary. Flanagan, by contrast, told supporters on election night: “We need to rip ICE apart and stop them from terrorizing our communities.”
“What you’re seeing now is, and I don’t want to call it a Democratic Tea Party, but it is certainly organizing and pressuring to take back power in an adversarial way from a set of forces to the left of the Democratic establishment,” says Sirota. “That is what’s new, and that is what’s driving the political dynamic now.”
Washington and Sirota also discuss the intensifying democracy crisis unfolding in the United States. According to Sirota, it “stands on two pillars: concentrated executive power and the supremacy of money.”
Sirota explores this theme and more, in the new season of his show, Master Plan: The Kingmakers. The podcast is all about how a once-fringe legal theory moved into the mainstream and transformed the power of the American presidency.
For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.
Transcript
Jessica Washington: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at The Intercept.
On Tuesday night, democratic socialist Francesca Hong narrowly lost her primary race for Wisconsin Governor to Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley.
Hong lost by less than a percentage point. But her defeat was a blow to the anti-data center movement, which she had championed throughout her campaign, even as her detractors tried to make the race about her opinions on Thanksgiving and other major holidays.
But the night was not a total loss for progressives. In Minnesota, Lt. Governor Peggy Flanagan defeated AIPAC-backed Congresswoman Angie Craig for Senate.
Peggy Flanagan: And now let’s talk about Donald Trump’s out of control ICE force [crowd boos]. We need to rip ICE apart and stop them from terrorizing our communities.
JW: Last year, Craig voted in favor of the Laken Riley Act, which requires the federal government to detain people for a host of crimes, including nonviolent ones like shoplifting, and it allows states to sue over immigration enforcement, giving power to state attorneys general to shape immigration enforcement policy regardless of which party holds the White House. That vote appears to have cost her in a state that largely rose up in defiance of the Trump administration’s brutal immigration crackdown, after federal immigration agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens.
For more of our reporting on the primaries and the anti-data center movement, visit TheIntercept.com.
This week on The Intercept Briefing, I speak to David Sirota, founder and editor-in-chief of The Lever, about the primaries and how the left is building power within the Democratic Party.
David also talks about the parallels between how the left and the right have consolidated power, and we get into the second season of his amazing series Master Plan, resuming this week.
This new season is called The Kingmakers and is all about how a once-fringe legal theory moved into the mainstream and transformed the power of the American presidency.
It traces the people and institutions behind that campaign — from Richard Nixon’s downfall and Dick Cheney’s post-9/11 power grab to pivotal Supreme Court decisions and Project 2025.
David, welcome back to The Intercept Briefing.
David Sirota: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
JW: So Tuesday night, Francesca Hong narrowly lost her primary race for Wisconsin governor to the more moderate candidate, David Crowley. But it wasn’t a total loss for the left. In Minnesota, Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan defeated AIPAC-backed Angie Craig. Hong’s race was plagued by, honestly, the dumbest issues, like whether she supports Thanksgiving or how she views her “proximity to whiteness.”
David, what did you make of Tuesday night’s results? Does this, as The New York Times called it, show the “limits of the left,” or is something else at play here?
DS: I think this is a good test of the power dynamic in American politics right now, specifically inside the Democratic Party. I’m going to state a few empirical facts about what happened. People can use these facts to try to confirm their priors. But here are the facts that we know. Fact one is that the entire establishment of the Democratic Party came together towards the end of this race, really consolidated to try to shut down Francesca Hong’s campaign and defeat her.
“All of the power of the old Democratic machine was required to eke out the narrowest of victories against the longest of long-shot candidates.”
The collective power of that Democratic establishment in a state, where there is a Democratic governor and there is a real Democratic Party establishment machine, all of that power was required to eke out a 0.4 percent victory in the party’s own primary against a previously unknown candidate running as a Democratic socialist who was wildly under-resourced, did not air any television advertisements through her own campaign. So the point being that all of the power of the old Democratic machine was required to eke out the narrowest of victories against the longest of long-shot candidates.
A candidate who, by the way, had been effectively abandoned by other national left-of-center icons and politicians, democratic socialists. Bernie Sanders did not endorse Francesca Hong. AOC did not endorse Francesca Hong. The candidates who have been winning as democratic socialists did not come to Wisconsin to campaign with Francesca Hong. We can discuss why that is and the mistakes or stumbles that Hong made as a candidate. But the point is that the machine with all of the power and advantages it had against a candidate with no advantages at all, that ran to say the least, an imperfect campaign, still needed all of its power to barely win a race in Wisconsin.
So to me, what that says is that the Democratic establishment that has gotten very used to being able to easily control primary outcomes is now having to marshal all of its collective power and have everything break right for it in order to eke out these primary wins. That, I think, is a fundamental difference of the political topography of the Democratic Party.
JW: I’m thinking about the fact that we didn’t see Bernie Sanders supporting her. Obviously, AOC had come out and said that it was because she wanted to focus on Congress. So we can have that conversation.
But we also didn’t see that support for Cori Bush either. And she lost.
Do you think that progressives are making a smart play here by trying to decide who’s more electable in a general election? Or, is that just more of the same silly stuff we’ve seen from the Democratic Party in terms of electability and making those decisions before voters do?
DS: Yeah, I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. My take on so-called electability is that nobody really knows who is electable or not electable. I’m old enough to remember when the same media machine and Democratic Party apparatus insisted with certainty that Barack Obama could never possibly win a general election. I remember when that same machine laughed at the idea that Donald Trump could be elected president.
I tend to believe that this whole discussion about electability is silly, but also a Jedi mind trick that the establishment of the Democratic Party uses to try to manipulate voters into not voting for candidates and not seeing elections as forums for voting for good policies.
They’re trying to turn primaries into — and they’ve been successful at it in the past — trying to turn primaries into this idea that, “Don’t vote for the candidate who may be offering you policies that you actually support. Vote for our view of who is actually ‘electable’ in a general election. Forget the fact that we told you that Barack Obama wasn’t electable or Donald Trump wasn’t electable. Forget all that.” So my basic take is that the whole electability discussion is this moving target and a real sort of engine of manipulation.
I think that in every race, candidates are looked at for their viability, for how well they are running, and their basic competence as a candidate. It’s not wrong for folks and political organizations and activists on the left or really any political faction to try to evaluate the competence of candidates that they are going to spend resources on or organize for or endorse. That’s part of the political process in America, and that’s not a perfect process. But sometimes you can make mistakes. That happens all the time.
Did Francesca Hong not get endorsements because she was evaluated to be a less competent candidate? Same thing for Cori Bush. Were those candidates seen as not competent? Competent meaning as candidates, not as people, as candidates running a campaign. Were they seen as not competent versus was Abdul El-Sayed seen as a highly competent candidate?
My guess is that those calculations were at play here. I’ve worked on a lot of campaigns in my life at this point. A candidate’s competency is this intangible that’s really important.
So my guess is though all of those questions were on the table in the way that these decisions were made to endorse certain candidates and not go all in for other candidates.
JW: That makes a lot of sense. We’re also talking about having to run these candidates against the right, against the massive money machine that the right has.
So I want to talk a little bit more about Republicans and their power. Recently on your podcast, Lever Time, you spoke to Reed Galen, co-founder of the anti-Trump political action committee, The Lincoln Project. Galen talked about leaving the Republican Party and his warning that Democrats are making the same mistakes Republicans made, mapping the transition of the GOP to the Tea Party movement takeover.
Can you talk about that conversation and what Galen sees as the kind of dangerous mistakes the Democratic Party is making, and what’s your view?
DS: Yeah, I agree with his story of history, which is that to understand the current Republican Party, you have to really rewind history and look at what created it. You can go all the way back to Barry Goldwater and tell the story from there.
But in modern times, what you can see is that in 2008, Barack Obama won the presidency. A lot of the center-left foment gets driven into the Democratic Party and into Obama as a personality, and a lot of the center-right and hard-right unhappiness with our political system was driven first into the Tea Party, which ultimately became MAGA, which ultimately became the Trump presidency.
The Tea Party was operating outside of the Republican Party, although in conjunction with it, to transform that party. Ultimately, Donald Trump’s presidency, first the MAGA movement and then Trump’s presidency, becomes the culmination of all of that foment outside of the party.
Obviously the party has been transformed. It is a much different party than it was even 10, 15 years ago. I think a similar dynamic is happening right now vis-a-vis the Democratic Party and the American left. Obviously on totally different issues. They don’t share ideologies, they don’t share policy agendas.
But politically speaking, just the raw politics of it, I think this is delayed, I think it’s been belated. Whereas in 2008, there was a moment in the middle of the financial crisis where center-left discontent could have been channeled into something like a center-left Tea Party. I reported on this for a long time.
There was Occupy Wall Street and the like. But certainly it wasn’t as big a movement as the Tea Party on the right because a lot of that energy was, again, channeled into Obama and the Obama presidency. We’re now here 18 years later, many of the grievances of that moment back in 2008 in the middle of the financial crisis, really the supercharging of oligarchy, they’re still here.
But the difference is here — in the here and now — if you look at polls of people on the left, center-left, before in 2008 they were fairly confident in Democratic leaders to channel their grievances. Today, they have lost faith in the Democratic leadership. They are angry at the Democratic Party for what they perceive to be capitulations and unnecessary compromises with corporate power and with Trump and MAGA.
“What you’re seeing now is … certainly organizing and pressuring to take back power in an adversarial way from a set of forces to the left of the Democratic establishment.”
What you’re seeing now is, and I don’t want to call it a Democratic Tea Party, but it is certainly organizing and pressuring to take back power in an adversarial way from a set of forces to the left of the Democratic establishment. That is something I think we have not really experienced in our lifetimes. That is what’s new, and that is what’s driving the political dynamic now.
Whether it’s in any of these races happening across the country or in Congress itself, which I expect the next session of Congress, if Democrats take it back, to be a lot of push and pull inside the Democratic caucus, which of course will overlay the 2028 presidential campaign.
I very much expect candidates in the Democratic primary to be competing for that positioning. You might want to call it the Bernie Sanders lane, but it’s really the lane to say, “I am the outsider that is going to take back the White House for a particular faction,” or representing a particular faction of the Democratic Party. A faction that is most certainly not the corporate old-school establishment that has been running the party into the ground for the last 30 years.
I see the whole push and pull right now as something very healthy. I don’t think it is healthy for democracy, for an establishment of one of the major parties in this country to have clung onto power for so long, offering so little change through so many electoral defeats and through the rise of Donald Trump and authoritarianism.
For that establishment to still be able to hold on to power without much change at all really is the democracy crisis in practice. So the effort to change that party through democratic means, is entirely long overdue, is entirely necessary. People listening to this may agree or disagree with specific different parts of the policy platform being pushed by those outside the establishment, but the process itself is the democracy working.
“The democracy crisis is a set of elite power brokers being able to cling on to a political party’s power regardless of what is happening in the worldand in a way that sells out voters.”
A lot of liberals think about the democracy crisis. The democracy crisis is a set of elite power brokers being able to cling on to a political party’s power regardless of what is happening in the worldand in a way that sells out voters. That’s what’s been going on in the Democratic Party for a long time, and the effort to significantly change it and revitalize the party through democratic means is a healthy expression of democracy.
[Break]
JW: We have multiple crises of democracy happening. We obviously have Trump, but we also have the establishment [Democrats] and the fact that they’ve allowed Republicans to gain control of the government from the House to the Senate to presidency, and I would argue, also the Supreme Court.
Last week, the president’s personal attorney, Todd Blanche, was confirmed as attorney general with, to me, what seems like a clear mandate to target the president’s enemies. Then on Tuesday, it was reported that the DOJ issued a sweeping memo giving broad authority to the president to conceal his communications with so-called private advisers in what seems like just a clear effort to undercut Democrats’ ability to investigate the president if they retake Congress. That doesn’t even touch on the fact that we’re over 100 days into war with Iran without congressional approval.
I want to talk about how we got here, and you explore that in the new season of your show, Master Plan: Kingmakers, which is out this week, by the way. It tracks how a once fringe legal theory has transformed the American presidency into a pseudo-monarchy with term limits.
I listened to the first episode and loved it, by the way. It also feels incredibly relevant right now. David, how did we get here?
“We’ve turned elections into auctions. We’ve equated money with free speech, we’ve equated corporations with people, giving them human rights.”
DS: To my mind, it is the second part of a two-part story to understand the real democracy crisis. The democracy crisis I think, stands on two pillars: concentrated executive power and the supremacy of money.
They’re obviously interrelated. Season one of Master Plan traces the secret 50-year plot to effectively legalize corruption, deregulate the campaign finance system and make bribery essentially a permissible act in the United States. We all understand, implicitly, that we’re now living in that reality when we’ve turned elections into auctions. We’ve equated money with free speech, we’ve equated corporations with people, giving them human rights.
So we are living through that project of the American right to effectively legalize corruption, to turn the democracy from a “one person, one vote” democracy into a “one dollar, one vote” oligarchy. I think we all see the evidence of that. That came about through, among other things, the infamous Powell Memo.
That’s the sort of origin story where a lot of it started, which was a call to arms for corporations in the early 1970s when corporations and oligarchs felt under attack from the New Deal policies of the mid-20th century. The Powell Memo was a call to essentially make monetary investments in buying democracy.
The democracy was functioning too well. It was becoming too responsive to what people actually wanted, and the idea was we have to legalize corruption to be able to rig the system so that we can buy outcomes, we the oligarchy. So that was season one of Master Plan.
The other pillar of the democracy crisis is then to concentrate as much power in the executive branch in the hands of really one person so that the small-D democratic institutions of government have much less power, so that power is less diffuse. It’s all in the hands of one person, because if that’s your guy — you the oligarchy — then you’ve essentially ended democracy. This story starts in Watergate. Watergate was the moment that was seen as a so-called imperial presidency, a presidency that had gotten out of control and stepped over the boundaries and thresholds that had been established for the executive branch.
Congress passes a series of laws that are designed to take power away from the executive branch. So the story really starts there at a kind of small-D democratic moment of triumph, but it also hatches a backlash, and that’s what the new season of Master Plan is about, The Kingmakers.
It hatches a backlash among conservatives starting in the Ford administration with Dick Cheney, who was chief of staff to make legal arguments and start creating legal doctrines that are designed to grab back the power that was taken in the post-Watergate era, put it back in the White House, and then significantly expand it.
“The original Project 2025 was The Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership, a policy bible whose through line was how to use executive authority.”
That’s what happens soon after Ronald Reagan gets elected president. We all have heard of Project 2025. Back in the late 1970s into 1980, the original Project 2025 was The Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership, a policy bible whose through line was how to use executive authority to do what the conservative movement wanted regardless of what Congress or any other institution wanted, and how to grab as much of that power as possible under a new legal rubric called the unitary executive theory.
I’m guessing some people have heard that. This is cooked up inside of the Reagan Justice Department in its battles with a Democratic Congress. A legal doctrine that is then tested in the courts in strategic ways to try to get it enshrined into the law.
From the Reagan era into obviously the Bush era, the Bush’s war on terror, Dick Cheney, the guy who had been spearheading parts of this when he was in the Ford administration and when he was in Congress, the Bush administration sees a huge consolidation of power under the veneer of the so-called war on terror.
“All of these powers, from the unitary executive theories that were forged in the Reagan administration to the drone war national security powers that were fortified by Obama after the Bush era, all of this is now resting in the Trump White House.”
Then in probably our most controversial episode of this season, we go into how the Obama administration ended up consolidating power in truly unprecedented ways. The Obama administration didn’t champion the unitary executive theory, but it did make a set of precedential legal arguments about the executive branch’s alleged power to execute and target for assassination American citizens without charging them even with a crime.
I’m talking about the drone war here. Some may say that the drone war was necessary, others may say it wasn’t, but the legal architecture and the outlining of the powers asserted by the executive branch were unprecedented and were effectively validated during the Obama presidency. Powers that are now, fast-forward to today, all of these powers, from the unitary executive theories that were forged in the Reagan administration to the drone war national security powers that were fortified by Obama after the Bush era, all of this is now resting in the Trump White House.
So the point of this is that what we’re living through today didn’t just happen because Donald Trump showed up to the White House. Donald Trump, when he got to the White House, had a series of levers, if you will, an entire control panel of executive powers, unprecedented executive powers, that were created for him.
So when we see him use those powers, it’s not to say we shouldn’t be terrified by it or outraged by it, but it is to say, let’s understand where those powers came from, because they didn’t just happen. They weren’t just seized randomly, and they weren’t just created by Donald Trump himself.
JW: As you just mentioned, efforts to bring the unitary executive theory to reality have been decades in the making. We saw President George W. Bush’s administration push in that direction, and now it’s reached just a whole other level under Trump. First, just to make it clear, can you briefly explain just how powerful is the American presidency under Trump, and what is the unitary executive theory?
DS: The unitary executive theory is this idea that the president singularly is the controller, the master, the decider of every single thing that the executive branch does. The executive branch, that’s one term for it. Another term for the executive branch is the federal government, right?
At one level they are one and the same, but I bring that up so that people can understand how radical the unitary executive theory actually is. When I use the federal government, maybe you’re thinking of the military. Maybe you’re thinking of the Agriculture Department, the scientists working on food safety in the Agriculture Department.
We’re talking about everything, the sort of basic functions, the on-the-ground functions of the government. Technically all of those agencies are operating in what we understand in terms of separation of powers. We understand them to be the executive branch. There’s Congress that makes the laws. There’s the president that executes the laws. There’s the courts that adjudicate battles between Congress and the president, adjudicate what the law is actually saying, et cetera, et cetera.
The unitary executive theory is saying that the president as the head of the executive branch has complete and total power to effectively do whatever the president wants inside of the executive branch.
So the unitary executive theory undergirds something like DOGE, the rampage that we all experienced right when Donald Trump came into his second term. He said, for instance, I’m shutting off all previously approved congressional grants across the entire United States. I’m asserting my executive authority to do that.
Now, Congress had passed laws saying that the money must be spent, but Trump and his administration were essentially arguing the president makes the decision on whether to execute those laws. So I give that example as a way for people to understand how radical an idea this is.
By the way, this came up recently with independent federal agencies. There are a set of agencies that Congress had set up and that presidents had signed laws, signed them into law in the past, saying that, the FTC or the Securities and Exchange Commission that these agencies are quasi-independent because the commissioners have set terms.
It’s much harder to fire them. Donald Trump went into court saying, I’m the unitary executive. These independent agencies structurally are unconstitutional. I should be allowed to hire and fire whoever I want at any time for any reason. And the Supreme Court largely agreed with him.
So this is about an unprecedented consolidation of power in the hands of one person to say that at any level of the federal government, any granular level, there’s some EPA scientist who is issuing a report about climate change that the president doesn’t like, the theory would hold that the president has a right, regardless of what Congress has passed, regardless of what the courts have adjudicated, the president has the right to reach into the EPA, target that one person, and fire them himself.
So you can see the dangers of this, because here’s the thing: Part of the way modern civilization has modernized from the old era of medieval royal courts, is that we have professionalized a lot of the functions of government. Like line scientists doing food safety reviews or environmental reviews or making all sorts of technical technical determinations, et cetera, et cetera. We had previously said this is going to be insulated at some level from the political whims of just one all-powerful king, whichever party it is. There’s a civil service, there’s a sort of a professionalized bureaucracy, if you will, and the unitary executive theory is trying to dismantle all of that.
Now, I want to add one thing very quickly here. I do think there’s an argument that, when a bureaucracy, a professionalized government bureaucracy, is so insulated from what voters are voting for, there can be an undemocratic disconnect there. If voters are voting for certain kinds of change and a kind of permanent bureaucratic government, because of job protections and the like over many years, is not responding to what people want, I do think there is a nugget of an argument there that there has to be ways that elections happen and policy changes then flow from those election changes.
But I think the unitary executive theory is a radical overcorrection for that kind of alleged problem. The solution to that theoretical problem is not to turn the president into an all-powerful king who can wake up at any day or any moment, ignore all of the laws on the books, and do whatever he wants.
JW: It sounds like there’s a lot that’s going to be happening in your podcast, and I’m, for one, really looking forward to listening to the rest of the new season of Master Plan: The Kingmakers. David, where can people listen to it?
DS: They can find it on our website at levernews.com. You can also go on your podcast app and just type in Master Plan. And you can go to our YouTube page. We have video versions of the episodes. That’s youtube.com/@levernews. The URL, the easiest way to find it, masterplanpodcast.com.
JW: David, thank you so much for joining us on The Intercept Briefing.
DS: Thank you. Thanks so much for having me.
JW: We want to hear from you. Tell us what you’re following or want to see more coverage of. Email us at podcasts@theintercept.com or leave us a voicemail at 530-POD-CAST, that’s 530-763-2278
That does it for this episode.
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