Stop mad Donald’s Iran war: open letter to the US Congress
Dear Members of Congress,
In truly deranged remarks to world leaders at the UN, Donald Trump declared that “I have a big decision to make,” whether to negotiate a deal with Iran or instead to “annihilate the Islamic Republic” and drive Iran “into hell with no chance of survival.”
He posed it as his personal choice. The fact that the American people are dead set against Trump’s war means nothing. And as for the voters, he added that he gives “absolutely no credence” to the coming midterm elections in deciding on his actions and on Iran’s fate.
Nothing binds this President. He is not bound by law, the Constitution, the UN Charter, or public opinion at home and abroad. When asked at the start of the year whether he has any limits on his power, he said “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
Trump opened his speech with the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, hailing America’s freedom. The fact is that Trump’s authoritarianism far outdoes that of King George III, against whom the colonies rebelled.
Among the founders’ indictments of Mad King George was that “He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.” Yet our own mad king has decided that the survival of a whole civilization is in his hands alone.
Trump is emboldened in his contempt for Congress because the Republican members of Congress have abdicated their constitutional responsibilities, terrified of their own president, and forsaking their constituents for campaign lucre from AIPAC and the military-industrial complex.
The Constitution is unambiguous regarding Congress’s responsibility. Article I, Section 8 assigns Congress, not the President, the sole power to declare war. That is not a choice or an option. The Constitution doesn’t say that Congress can play dead and let the President declare war. The Framers made this choice deliberately, because they were explicitly rejecting the power of a king to take the nation to war.
In Federalist 69, Hamilton assured the public that the President’s war powers would be far less than the British monarch’s. Madison stated the principle plainly in a letter to Jefferson in 1798: “The constitution supposes, what the History of all Govts demonstrates, that the Ex. is the branch of power most interested in war, & most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care vested the question of war in the Legislature.”
The founders’ careful design has been overturned because of the unconstitutional subservience of the Republican members of Congress to Trump and to the military-industrial-digital complex. And yes, under Democratic presidents, most Democratic members of Congress also looked the other way when those presidents chose to go to war.
The war with Iran is Trump’s folly but Congress’s disgrace for not stopping it. It is a war without a purpose that has created mass suffering in Iran, tens of billions of dollars of direct outlays, and staggering damage to American military bases in eight countries of the Middle East.
The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has sent world and American prices soaring for oil, gas, fertilizers, and more. And the world has duly noted that Iran can hold its own against US aggression, albeit at great sacrifice to the people of Iran and the region.
America’s much vaunted AI battlefield has been exposed in the most horrifying way. On the first day of the war, an American missile struck the girls’ elementary school there, killing more than 150 people, most of them girls aged seven to 12, and the military’s own inquiry reportedly found that overreliance on artificial intelligence contributed to the targeting.
Trump blamed “Iran or somebody else,” and seven months later the administration has offered no findings, no apology and no compensation to the families.
The President’s threat to annihilate a member state of the United Nations, delivered from the General Assembly podium, disgraced Trump in front of the world. It also violated Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, which prohibits even the threat of force against another state. Nearly all the world stands aghast.
I write to you because you cannot simply walk away from Trump’s recklessness, shaking your heads silently. You have a job to do, so do it. The craven Republican Party has to find even a minimal level of guts to tell Trump, “No, you do not have the power to destroy Iran. Any war with Iran depends on us, and we don’t support you and our constituents want this war to stop.”
A clear majority of Americans oppose this war, and poll after poll shows that the opposition to the war is growing. A few Republicans have found that courage. Last week three more Republicans broke ranks to support ending the war. Their colleagues should follow.
Many of you receive campaign contributions from military contractors and technology companies deeply involved in the war. Many of you take money from AIPAC, which champions the war that Netanyahu did so much to help launch. This has to stop, as it is a dereliction of your constitutional duty and a violation of your oath.
Congress holds the power of the purse. The fiscal year ends on September 30, and every bill that funds the Pentagon is your opportunity to prohibit funds for unauthorized offensive operations against Iran.
The right course for the US is simple. Congress should cut off funding, and the US should stop further attacks and go home. We need no agreement with Iran or anyone else to stop the war that we started. By ending the war you will immediately restore some sanity and safety to the world energy markets, food supplies, and prices faced by Americans and others around the world.
How America has declined from the glorious moment when John F. Kennedy stood at the same podium at the UN on September 20, 1963, after having negotiated the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union.
He told the assembled leaders that the treaty can be a lever, and Archimedes, in explaining the principles of the lever, was said to have declared to his friends: “Give me a place where I can stand—and I shall move the world.”
My fellow inhabitants of this planet: Let us take our stand here in this Assembly of nations. And let us see if we, in our own time, can move the world to a just and lasting peace.
Members of Congress, to save our nation’s honor and our Constitution, you must do your duty to stop this war, and stop Trump’s brazen, destructive, and unconstitutional grab for power.
Jeffrey D. Sachs is a University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development. He has been advisor to three United Nations Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Sachs is the author, most recently, of “A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism” (2020). Other books include: “Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable” (2017) and “The Age of Sustainable Development,” (2015) with Ban Ki-moon.
George Clooney’s Heartbreaking Talks with Presley Gerber Revealed
George Clooney reportedly spent hours trying to support Presley Gerber through some of his darkest periods before the 27-year-old model’s sudden death.
The Hollywood star had become far more than simply a famous friend of Presley’s parents, Cindy Crawford and Rande Gerber. Sources familiar with the families told the Daily Mail that Presley and his sister, Kaia Gerber, knew Clooney as “Uncle George,” while Presley developed an especially close bond with the actor.
“George would spend hours talking to Presley,” one source told the outlet, adding that Clooney would do virtually anything to help Rande’s family.
The accounts have not been publicly confirmed by Clooney himself, but additional reports have described the same close relationship between the longtime friends and their families.
According to the Daily Mail’s sources, Clooney offered Presley advice for years, including after Presley’s 2018 DUI arrest.
One insider said Clooney warned him against making choices that could put his future at risk, telling him to be careful.
As Presley’s struggles continued, the messages reportedly became more personal.
The source said Clooney would send notes reminding the young model that he was there for him, while another person familiar with their relationship said Clooney’s recurring message was to “stay clean.”
Clooney had previously discussed his own youthful experimentation with cocaine in a 2025 Esquire interview, while making clear that he did not consider himself to have had an addiction.
That history, sources claimed, allowed Clooney to speak candidly with Presley about drugs without sounding judgmental.
The connection between the families stretches back decades.
Clooney and Rande Gerber were close friends long before Presley became a public figure and later went into business together. In 2013, Clooney, Gerber and entrepreneur Mike Meldman created Casamigos tequila.
Diageo later purchased the company in a deal valued at up to $1 billion in 2017.
Presley had increasingly discussed his mental health and substance-use problems publicly before his death.
He launched a social-media series called “Mental Health Mondays,” intended to encourage conversations about issues people often keep hidden. His sister Kaia also discussed how her brother’s struggles had affected their family in an August 2026 Vogue interview.
Just three months before his death, Presley appeared with his parents at a June 11 mental-health event in Malibu, where he spoke publicly about addiction, treatment and his efforts to improve his life.
That history makes the timing of his death particularly painful.
Presley died Sunday, September 20, at a rehabilitation facility in Santa Monica, California.
According to the Santa Monica Police Department, officers responded at approximately 9:35 a.m. to the 1000 block of Berkeley Street following a report of a possible overdose.
Police found an adult man dead at the location. The Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner later identified him as Presley.
Paramedics officially pronounced him dead at 9:45 a.m.
While police are investigating Presley’s death as a suspected overdose, authorities have not officially determined that an overdose killed him.
The distinction is important.
The Los Angeles County Medical Examiner performed an examination on September 21 but deferred both the cause and manner of death, meaning additional testing or studies are required before a final determination can be made.
The medical examiner said that process could take several months.
Santa Monica police have said there is currently no indication of foul play.
Presley’s family confirmed his death through a representative and asked for privacy during what they described as an extremely painful time.
Sources close to Clooney say Presley’s death has hit the actor especially hard because of both his bond with Presley and his decades-long friendship with Rande.
One source described Clooney as devastated by what happened, while another said there was no anger surrounding Presley’s struggles, only sadness.
Those comments remain secondhand accounts rather than public remarks from Clooney.
What is established is that Clooney and Rande have been close friends and business partners for decades, and Clooney has remained deeply connected to the Gerber family.
For a man Presley reportedly grew up calling “Uncle George,” the relationship appears to have extended well beyond Hollywood friendship.
And according to those who witnessed it, Clooney spent years trying to make sure Presley knew one thing above all — that he did not have to face his struggles alone.
Contrary to some reports, you don’t have two brains
Late last week, we started seeing headlines about how new research was suggesting we might have two brains instead of the one that seems to show up on MRI scans. As is so often the case, these rumors can be traced back to a single press release put out by one of the universities where the work was done.
You do not have two brains. It’s a silly way to look at the results of the new paper.
But there are far better ways to look at the results, ways that can help us understand how the brain gets put together and illustrate some of the general ideas behind developmental biology. So let’s take a look at what the research actually shows and place it in the context of brain development.
Where are you?
You may think body segments are something that show up in things like crustaceans and insects. But our nervous system also develops in segments. Vertebrates have four major ones: the forebrain, midbrain, hindbrain, and spinal cord. (Some of these later develop segments within them, but we’ll skip over those.) The new paper is largely focused on providing part of the answer to an obvious question: how do those segments get there?
That sort of question is the bread and butter of developmental biology, a field that focuses on how organisms start off as a single cell and, through a series of carefully timed and choreographed processes, produce all the tissues found in adults.
To think about the question, we need a bit of context. By the time the first cells that are committed to develop into neurons show up, the vertebrate embryo already knows its head from its tail, and its back from its belly. (We won’t go into how the embryo learns that, but we know a lot about that, too.) The embryo consists of three tissues at the time: the endoderm, which will line our guts, the mesoderm, which will form muscles and bone, and the ectoderm, which will go on to form the skin.
Neural cells form as a thickening of the ectoderm that runs down the center of the embryo from head to tail. The center of these thickly packed cells drops down, while the sides fold up, eventually forming an oval-shaped tube that pinches off from the rest of the ectoderm. All the signals that run up your spine, every sound and shape you process, every thought you will ever have—all of these and more depend on the descendants of these cells.
A section across a vertebrate embryo as development proceeds. At first, there’s nothing on top but ectoderm. At the center of the left-right axis of the embryo, the ectoderm thickens and adopts a neural fate (upper right). The neural precursors then start shifting in a way that causes them to adopt a deep V shape (lower right). This process eventually brings the two ends of the developing neural tissue together, and they merge, forming a tube (lower left).
Credit: JOHN TIMMER
A section across a vertebrate embryo as development proceeds. At first, there’s nothing on top but ectoderm. At the center of the left-right axis of the embryo, the ectoderm thickens and adopts a neural fate (upper right). The neural precursors then start shifting in a way that causes them to adopt a deep V shape (lower right). This process eventually brings the two ends of the developing neural tissue together, and they merge, forming a tube (lower left). Credit: JOHN TIMMER
(While this is being presented as a sort of “how vertebrates develop,” there are key differences among them. In mice, the formation of neural tissue happens nearly simultaneously along the entire head-to-tail dimension. In chickens, the process starts in the head and moves slowly to the tail, such that there are already brain structures forming at a time when some of what will be the spinal cord doesn’t even know it will be a nerve cell yet. And tadpoles form a fairly simple spinal cord that gets expanded and reorganized as they change into frogs. So, while the general process is similar in all vertebrates, many species have adapted it to different styles of development.)
By all appearances, all these newly formed neural cells look more or less the same. So we end up back at the original question: how do the segments of the nervous system form?
Remember that, by the time these cells start forming, the embryo already knows its head from its tail. That raises two very simple possibilities. One is that the ectoderm cells that the nerve cells form from already know where they are, and so the nerve cells inherit positional information from them. The alternative is that after the neural cells form, their non-neural neighbors can send signals to them to tell them where they are. So if cells in the head make a different collection of signaling molecules from those in the tail, this can transfer positional information to the developing nervous system, telling it where to form the brain and where to form the spinal cord.
Dividing up the brain
The new work builds on decades of studies that have identified many key regulators of early processes. One of those earlier findings was that the ectoderm of the early embryo activates two genes, one in the front half of the embryo, one in the back. So nerve cells can inherit at least some crude positional information from the ectoderm they form from.
The key to this work is that the researchers modified a copy of these genes so that it activated fluorescent proteins wherever the gene was translated into a protein. So, they engineered mice where half of the early ectoderm glowed red, and the other half glowed cyan. These colors were maintained as the embryo formed nerve cells and the cells started to develop into the brain.
They found that while the hindbrain glowed red, the rest of the brain glowed blue. The inherited positional information set up one of the key boundaries in the brain. In other words, as soon as cells know they’re going to eventually develop into neurons, they know whether they can potentially form part of the hindbrain and not the mid- or forebrain. (This is, roughly, where the idea of “two brains” in the press release comes from.)
Other experiments expanded on this. Similar genetic tools let them activate a fluorescent protein in individual cells in the early ectoderm. They found that, in 96 percent of the cases, the descendants of these single cells were all in the hindbrain, or all in the midbrain and forebrain. They also worked with human stem cells and showed similar things were happening there: Exposure to the right signals would tell the stem cells where they were, and the nerve cells inherited that information as they formed. If you wanted to form neurons that are only found in the hindbrain, you have to first send the stem cells down the hindbrain path.
Early cell labeling shows that the hindbrain and spinal cord (red) remain a separate fate from the midbrain and forebrain (cyan).
Credit: Jokhai et. al.
Early cell labeling shows that the hindbrain and spinal cord (red) remain a separate fate from the midbrain and forebrain (cyan). Credit: Jokhai et. al.
There obviously may still be some flexibility here—the 96 percent exclusive behavior they saw is not 100 percent. It’s not clear whether that’s a limitation of their experimental system or just a product of the fact that cells at the border between the front and back of the ectoderm can change fates if they wander a bit in the right direction. Things happen very quickly in early development, and it’s also not clear how the timing of what we can see compares to the timing of what’s going on with the genes that were used to mark different cells.
It’s also less certain what’s going on at the other key borders. Differences between the mid- and forebrain seem to arise later, and largely due to the action of signaling molecules that diffuse through the developing brain and provide positional information. In contrast, very little is known about how the hindbrain and spinal cord adopt different fates; the new paper cites only one reference on the topic. That reference suggests they are also separate fates very early in development, but it seems that more work needs to be done there.
Why does any of this matter?
Obviously, the different areas of our brain and the spinal cord go on to form very different structures, which later perform very different functions. So forming these segments is important. But it’s also important that the different identities get established early—in fact, it’s essential to their ability to develop so differently.
There are two key reasons for this. The first is that having a different identity allows cells to respond to the same signal in different ways. For example, early on when it’s a relatively simple tube, pretty much the entire nervous system is exposed to the same two signals: a molecule called sonic hedgehog diffuses from the bottom of the tube, and a group of molecules called BMPs from the top.
You might expect that, since all the cells of the tube are neural precursors, they’d respond to the same signals in the same ways. But they don’t. Instead, their segment identity directs these signals into overlapping sets of responses that differ in the different areas of the brain. In other words, when midbrain cells see BMPs, they respond in different ways than the cells of the spinal cord do. By dividing the nervous system up early, cells inherit a developmental history that allows a limited number of signals to trigger a great deal of complexity.
(The way that developmental history changes how things are interpreted also enables the signals to be recycled. BMPs initially tell cells whether to develop as neurons or not. Later, they tell developing neurons what identity to adopt once the neuron matures. Later still, BMPs help direct the migration of mature neurons in the developing spine. We don’t have to evolve entirely new signaling systems in order to do different things.)
The other thing is that the junction between segments can be a distinct environment, one where cells are exposed to influences from both of the neighboring identities. At the midbrain-hindbrain boundary, for example, cells activate a distinct set of genes that include signaling molecules that go on to influence the development of the neighboring tissues on both sides of the boundary. As you’d expect from the above, these signals made at the border trigger different responses in the midbrain and hindbrain, since those two segments have different developmental histories.
While the new work says nothing about how many brains you actually have (it’s one with several distinct regions within it), it provides another piece for the puzzle of how the incredible complexity of our brains gets generated from a flat sheet of cells that, just a few hours before, would have happily developed into our skin instead. And it provides a great window into how organismal development works in general and the sorts of experiments we can do to help however many brains we have understand these processes.
What is the extent of the UN’s impunity when it comes to the two-state politics?
Once again, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres stressed that there is no other option to the two-state paradigm. Speaking at a meeting hosted by France, Canada, the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, Guterres noted that there was a contradiction between diplomatic support for the two-state politics and actions on the ground that threaten its implementation.
And yet, “There is simply no alternative,” Guterres declared. Even while Israel is blatantly creating an alternative that involves a prolonged genocide and ongoing settlement expansion.
For several years Guterres has been denying the possibilities of other political solutions for Palestine. A single democratic state, which many Palestinians have spoken in favour of, is not an option for Guterres. Decolonisation is also not an option.
What Guterres deems the only solution is a defunct paradigm which not only shackles Palestinians to humanitarian aid, but also allows Israel ample time to colonise further Palestinian territory.
Time has already run out for the creation of two-states, as Guterres knows. It has also run out much more for Palestinians who, after having their land partitioned in 1947, were forced to adhere to international impositions supporting colonial expansion in Palestine.
Rather than say that there is no alternative to the two-state paradigm, Guterres should explain why. Why, in the warped reasoning of the UN, is it still considered legitimate to say that the two-state is the only solution when it hasn’t provided a solution at all?
Why is Guterres calling for the full implementation of Trump’s peace plan which provides no security for Palestinians in Gaza? What is Guterres actively supporting when the two main paradigms so far – the two-state compromise and Trump’s plan – have only enabled colonial expansion, military occupation, genocide and forced displacement?
According to Guterres, the plan is for two sovereign democratic states. Israel is a settler-colonial enterprise, and therefore not democratic. Palestine is symbolically recognised with barely any contiguous territory remaining. Without decolonisation, a Palestinian state will only remain symbolic and illusory, no matter the funds that are funnelled to the Palestinian Authority. Guterres has never explained how a defunct paradigm can bring about two democratic states, when the paradigm cannot even challenge the discrepancy between the coloniser and the colonised.
“For Palestinians and all those who care about peace in the Middle East, support for two States must go beyond words,” Guterres stated. Words, however, must first truly explain what the two-state politics intended to achieve. Those who uphold the Palestinian people’s right to liberation, self-determination and a Palestinian state cannot support the two-state, which is tantamount to supporting Israeli colonialism. Supporting Palestine means that international impositions are discredited.
There has been more than enough proof of where the international community’s loyalties lie, and this culminated in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Perhaps there is more confidence in impunity now, in calling the two-state paradigm the only solution after the international community created its own impunity for complicity in genocide. This makes the two-state politics more perilous than ever. If no steps were taken to stop Israel’s genocide, with a clearly visible kill toll, why would any world leader take any steps to discredit the defunct two-state compromise and its normalised statistics of forced displacement and ethnic cleansing?
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.
Cambodia an early warning of China’s AI surveillance exports
Chinese investment has long been a cornerstone of development policy for many Southeast Asian nations.
From roads and buildings to green energy that helps countries keep up with global environmental regulations, Beijing’s investment has created significant development opportunities.
But it has also provided a safety net for authoritarian governments seeking to consolidate power while limiting the economic consequences of Western sanctions. Traditional spheres of authoritarian cooperation, including financial dependence, military coordination, and political alignment, now look set to be joined by another: artificial intelligence (AI).
At the World AI Conference in Shanghai earlier this year, President Xi Jinping warned of “new historical injustices” arising from unequal access to artificial intelligence, signalling Beijing’s ambition to shape the future governance of the technology.
Already set to be a key topic during Xi’s visit to the United States this week, the speed at which China is extending its technological influence across Southeast Asia deserves greater scrutiny. Cambodia, where longstanding dependence on Beijing is increasingly intersecting with new surveillance capabilities, offers a glimpse of where these relationships can lead.
Like many countries in the Global South, Cambodia’s relationship with China has long been portrayed as one of economic necessity.
When Prime Minister Hun Manet took the reins of power from his father three years ago, many Cambodians and foreign diplomats hoped the country would change course and reduce its dependence on Beijing. There were also hopes that Manet, educated in the United States and United Kingdom, might reopen some of the democratic space lost under his father.
Instead, Phnom Penh has doubled down on China, to the point that the country is now Cambodia’s largest foreign direct investor and is deeply involved in major infrastructure projects, including the Funan Techo Canal and expansion of the Ream Naval Base on the Gulf of Thailand.
China’s growing role in Cambodia’s security apparatus has fueled concerns about Beijing’s long-term strategic influence and raised questions about where, exactly, Cambodia’s geopolitical loyalties lie.
Economic dependence, military cooperation and political alignment reinforce one another. The more deeply these relationships become embedded, the harder it will be for a future Cambodian government to change direction without confronting powerful interests at home and abroad.
Technology could make that dependence still harder to unwind. Artificial intelligence and digital surveillance tools offer governments new capabilities to track, identify and intimidate populations.
China is already rolling out new AI-enabled surveillance technologies, while Cambodia is developing comparable infrastructure through its China-backed “Smart Police” initiative and using it to crack down on dissenting voices.
Activists have feared this development for years, with experts from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace warning as far back as 2022 that Chinese surveillance technology was being deployed in more than 50 countries.
Through this so-called Digital Silk Road, China has exported such technology while helping shape cyber laws and internet infrastructure abroad, extending Beijing’s influence over how information is managed and controlled.
For Cambodians, the danger posed by this is not abstract. Attacks on opposition voices and critics of the regime are already commonplace, including beyond Cambodia’s borders. Expanding the state’s ability to identify, track, and monitor individuals could give authorities in Phnom Penh powerful new tools to target those already vulnerable to intimidation and repression.
As technological cooperation between China and other authoritarian governments deepens, such repression could become more systematic, less visible, and harder to challenge. In Cambodia, where democratic institutions have been steadily weakened and meaningful oversight is limited, there are few safeguards to prevent technologies presented as tools of public security from being turned against the government’s critics.
For Cambodia’s younger generation, this is a deeply frustrating trajectory. Many hoped Hun Manet represented a chance for a different future. A younger leader could have embraced greater political openness, strengthened independent institutions and built a more balanced relationship with China and democratic partners.
Instead, political space remains restricted, while Cambodia’s international partnerships increasingly reinforce the authoritarian model built under his father.
This should serve as a warning to Southeast Asia. Chinese influence is no longer confined to diplomacy, investment, and military cooperation; it is increasingly reinforced through technology and the exchange of governance models that reach deeper into state institutions and, potentially, the daily lives of ordinary citizens.
With AI surveillance infrastructure still being scaled across much of the world, there is time to establish meaningful safeguards around its export and use. That means protecting journalists, activists, and political opponents, increasing transparency over data collection and surveillance, and setting clear rules for cross-border intelligence sharing before authoritarian practices become embedded in digital infrastructure.
Washington has a particular responsibility to push for such safeguards, not simply because of its position in the global AI race, but because its negotiations with Beijing will help shape the norms governing the technology’s international use.
This week’s talks should look beyond strategic competition and confront a more immediate question: how to prevent AI from becoming another instrument of authoritarian influence, particularly across the Global South.
But the United States cannot do this alone. The European Union, the United Kingdom, ASEAN, South Korea, Australia and other middle powers must also help shape an AI governance framework that protects democratic freedoms rather than enabling state surveillance.
For countries like Cambodia, sovereignty is not only about controlling territory. It is about deciding how technology is used, whose data is collected, and whether a digital future serves citizens or entrenches the interests of those already in power.
Samady Ou is a Cambodian youth activist and Human Rights Foundation Freedom Fellow. He is also the author of ‘The Cambodia Briefing’ Substack, a fortnightly Cambodian news digest.
There’s a new way to break RSA that’s faster than anything we’ve seen before
The world has known for decades that the RSA cryptosystem’s days are numbered. Once quantum computing becomes practical (estimates for that range from 3 to 20 or more years), the foundational security it provides will crumble. New research has revealed a novel method that uses classical computing to reduce the current RSA security level to an unacceptably low threshold.
The finding poses little to no practical threat in the immediate term, except possibly in a few edge cases. Even applying the attack against the deprecated use of 1024-bit keys, the method requires more computation than just about anybody—short of nation-states or companies with massive resources—can achieve. Widely used RSA implementations are also safe.
Nonetheless, the research has taken cryptographers by surprise because it introduces signature forgery, a new way to break RSA keys without factoring. Equally important, this novel method reduces the required computing resources by orders of magnitude.
Out of reach no more
“If this result holds up under peer review, it would indeed be a conceptual break-through,” Karsten Nohl, a cryptography expert and the head of innovation at Allurity, said in an interview. “RSA is as difficult to break as it is to factor large integers, at least so we thought. The researcher suggests that you can practically break RSA without cracking its key.”
Nadia Heninger, a University of California at San Diego professor and lead author, elaborated:
Cryptographers thought that the only way to compute valid RSA digital signatures was to first compute the private key by factoring, and then use the private key to compute the signatures. For 1024-bit RSA, this was thought to be very expensive, albeit probably doable if you have the computational resources of the large tech companies or the NSA—on the order of tens of millions of dollars of computation time for a single key. For 2048-bit RSA, it was thought to be totally out of reach.
The key forgery attack Heninger and the other researchers devised brings the breakage of 1024-bit RSA into the realm of possibility much sooner than previously estimated. Even for 2048- and 4096-bit keys, the method reduces the security of RSA to unacceptable levels. The National Security Agency, National Institute of Standards and Technology, and European Union Agency for Network and Information Security require that any cryptosystem should provide a level of no less than 128 or more bits, meaning the operations required must exceed 2128.
The forgery attack drops these levels to 265, 290, and 2119 for 1024-, 2048-, and 4096-bit keys respectively. These levels may further drop because Heninger’s team did all the coding by hand and used no AI or GPUs in performing the forgeries. The researcher said these tools will “almost certainly” drop the security levels further.
The attack works only against blind-signature implementations of RSA. The overwhelming majority of RSA in use today provides PKCS or PSS padding, a format that adds data to the plaintext before it’s encrypted. It prevents ciphertext from being deterministic and makes it less vulnerable to side channel and similar attacks. Still, some real-world systems continue to use blind-signature, also known as textbook, RSA. The best-known example, Heninger said, is Privacy Pass, a protocol that allows users to authenticate themselves without revealing their identity. Privacy Pass is used by both Apple and Cloudflare, among many others.
An attack on Privacy Pass would require an attacker to compromise a server belonging to Cloudflare, Apple, or another organization and generate 243 signatures. Heninger said the requirement “sounds [like] a lot, but is on the same order of magnitude of the network traffic that Cloudflare has said publicly it handles in about a day.” Most Privacy Pass implementations rotate keys regularly, a measure that greatly reduces, but doesn’t automatically eliminate, the chances of attacker success.
The technique implements a variant of the number field sieve algorithm that was invented in 2007. This “‘special’ number field sieve” is used against an “oracle,” a weakness in RSA and some other cryptosystems that gives yes-or-no answers to specific queries. By performing a massive number of operations, attackers can gather enough information to decipher the ciphertext. (Again, this technique poses no practical threat against RSA that uses PKCS or PSS padding, because they eliminate the oracle.) While factoring a 1024-bit key requires an estimated 280 operations and 500,000 to 1 million CPU core-years, using the sieve to forge a signature took just (as noted earlier) 265 operations and 1,380 core-years.
The paper’s authors and other researchers stress that the new attack poses little real-world threat. It does, however, drastically lower the estimated security of textbook RSA, and it does so in a way no one knew of previously.
Cryptographers have worked furiously in recent years to devise alternative cryptosystems that aren’t vulnerable to quantum computing attacks. The new attack will further increase the urgency of completely moving away from the cryptosystem. The paper authors provide an easier-to-digest explainer here.
US intelligence warns of Russiane drone operations in Mediterranean
US intelligence has warned European governments of a possible Russian drone operation targeting Spain, France or Italy, raising concerns about a potential new security threat in the Mediterranean. According to a report first published by Spanish newspaper El Mundo, Russia could use small Gerbera drones launched from commercial vessels operating in the Mediterranean. The drones can reportedly travel up to 600 kilometres and carry a limited explosive payload, meaning an attack could be intended to disrupt airports or critical infrastructure rather than cause mass casualties.
The warning is significant for southern Europe because it challenges the assumption that the Mediterranean is geographically removed from the security risks associated with Russia’s war against Ukraine. British military analyst Keir Giles told El Mundo that Moscow could target perceived vulnerabilities rather than countries closest to Russia, while NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has previously warned that southern European states cannot assume they are outside the potential reach of Russian attacks.
Spain, France and Italy are particularly relevant because of their strategic position in the Mediterranean, while the possibility of drones being launched from civilian shipping would create a different type of challenge for European surveillance and air-defence systems.
The reports have not been publicly confirmed by the CIA or the three governments, but the warning has added to concerns over the security of Europe’s southern flank.
As the Pentagon Expands Across the Pacific, Guam Offers a Warning
I.
Leevin Camacho was brushing his teeth one day last fall when his mother called. The water is contaminated, she said. Moments later, she texted him a photo of a flyer issued by the local water authority. “Cancer risk,” it warned. “Increased likelihood of adverse impacts on the liver.” And in bold capital letters, “DO NOT DRINK.”
Camacho stared at the message. Water flowed from the faucets as his children, who were 10 and 12, gulped and spit, their faces reflected in the mirrors above the two bathroom sinks.
Thumbing at his phone, Camacho looked up dieldrin. The search results included words like “organochlorine” and “insecticide” and “persistent environmental pollutant”; the United States had banned it in 1987. Worse, high levels had been detected in his community’s water since at least 2008. “Our kids have been drinking the water,” he realized. “They’ve been cooking with the water for almost their entire lives at this point.”
Camacho lives in Yigo, a northern village on the island of Guam. In time, he would learn that the U.S. Air Force base next to the well serving his house had reported “very high levels” of the pesticide, which it had listed as a “chemical of concern” since at least 1993. The Pentagon’s investigation, led by officials at Joint Region Marianas, is in its early stages. Local officials caution that although they suspect the base is a source of the pollution, there may be others because dieldrin was once widely used.
For Camacho, the news felt like the unfolding of a familiar story — one both predictable and infuriating.
Camacho had grown up as an Army brat, raised to think of the United States as Guam’s liberator from Japan during World War II. But over the past two decades, his understanding of that legacy has changed.
“There are certain actions that the military takes that are contrary to the interests of the people who are from Guam and who live in Guam,” said Camacho, whose measured tone rarely changes, even when discussing something as emotional as what his children have been drinking.
To Camacho, dieldrin is the latest reminder that the people of Guam continue to bear the costs of militarization. Unexploded ordnance litters jungles and lagoons. PCBs contaminate the fish. Pollutants taint the groundwater. The island and its people, who are U.S. citizens, have been inalterably changed by more than a century of American military presence.
Rear Adm. Brett Mietus, the head of Joint Region Marianas, the U.S. Navy’s regional command for Guam and neighboring islands, said he can’t speak to past pollution but the command is committed to protecting the environment and the people of Guam.
“We spend a lot of time and we spend a lot of money making sure that we meet every U.S. regulation when it comes to anything that we’re going to do here,” he said. “We’re meeting every letter of every law for environmental regulations and rules, and we’re doing that while we’re spending a ton of money to defend this island from the most advanced missiles in the world.”
Today, Guam sits at the center of an ongoing military buildup, one that is reshaping the island even as it spreads across the Pacific. On nearby Yap, more than 1,000 graves could be disturbed to make way for an American seaport and airfield. Indigenous leaders on Palau are suing to protect their lands.
Less visible but just as impactful are the climate impacts of this expansion. The Pentagon is already the world’s largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases, and its buildup will do more than contribute to the destruction of the region’s reefs, forests, and Indigenous sacred sites. It will accelerate the climate crisis that threatens the survival of Pacific islands.
The Pentagon often cites growing geopolitical tensions to justify the buildup. “The security environment in the Indo-Pacific is becoming more dangerous and defined by an increasing risk of confrontation and crisis,” Navy Adm. Sam Paparo, commander of U.S. Pacific Command, told Congress in April while seeking $122 billion for new weaponry to counter China, including offensive missiles on Guam. Three months later, a ballistic missile launched from a Chinese submarine flew near Guam, underscoring why many on the island see America’s military presence as both a source of vulnerability and protection.
Sometimes it can be too much to think about. “I need to compartmentalize these things,” Camacho said. “That’s sometimes the only way that you can do this, because otherwise you will just be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of things that are out there, the amount of injustice that is out there.”
Those injustices collide in Yigo. Neighbors lost their homes earlier this year to typhoons fueled by warming seas. The Army Corps of Engineers will soon begin clearing bombs from a nearby dump site created in 1945. A new machine-gun range just opened alongside a federal wildlife refuge to support the arrival of 5,000 U.S. Marines from Okinawa, Japan.
Then there’s the dieldrin contamination. “At some point,” Camacho said, “someone has to force them to do what’s right.”
II.
Years before he became one of Guam’s leading critics of the military buildup sweeping over the island, Leevin Camacho was a young lawyer who liked to run before work. As his sneakers hit the pavement, the sun rose over Yigo. Roosters crowed and streaks of pink lightened the sky. The road, little used and lined with jungle brush, was one of the few places he could run without encountering stray dogs or morning traffic. He always ran at first light, before oppressive heat would reflect off the asphalt and the concrete buildings. It was the perfect start to what was often a day spent listening to depositions and wading through case law.
It was 2009. Camacho had returned to Guam after law school and was making more money than he ever had as a school teacher. “You dream of going to law school to provide services and to fight for people who don’t have the ability to fight, right? I’ll be honest with you, I lost my way,” Camacho said. “I had a bunch of student debt, and I was satisfied just kind of going by day to day and just focusing on myself and my family.”
The U.S. military was the backdrop to Camacho’s life but not something he worried about. He didn’t think much about the invasive tangan-tangan trees lining his running route, or the fact that they had spread across Guam after the U.S. scattered their seeds to reforest the island following the war. On his morning runs, he was more likely to hear a military jet overhead than a native birdsong.
It hadn’t always been that way. Guam was among the first Pacific islands settled by seafarers, from what is now the Philippines, who navigated by the stars and waves an estimated 3,500 years ago. The CHamoru people built a thriving island society known for its towering latte stones and swift outrigger sailing canoes.
That changed when Magellan landed on Guam in 1521. Spain claimed the island and the rest of the archipelago, beginning more than 500 years of ongoing colonization. The Spanish forced the Indigenous people to embrace Catholicism and banned their canoes. The United States took over the island from Spain in 1898 and imposed military rule. Naval governors burned CHamoru language books and blocked Indigenous efforts to gain U.S. citizenship.
Then came Japan. Its invasion in 1941, on the same day it attacked Pearl Harbor, wasn’t unexpected. The U.S. Navy evacuated sailors’ dependents but left 20,000 CHamorus to endure nearly three years of forced marches and labor, malnutrition, and sexual servitude. More than 1,000 would die. When American forces retook Guam in 1944, they were welcomed as liberators. The island still celebrates Liberation Day every July. “I can’t remember a single discouraging remark that my maternal grandmother would have made about the U.S.,” Camacho said. But he does remember her saying of the Americans, “‘They saved us.’”
In this August 1944 photo, people of Guam pour out of the hills into the Agana refugee camp. Nearly 18,000 CHamoru were relocated to Manenggon and other concentration camps before the Battle of Guam.Photo: Joe Rosenthal/AP Photo
That was the narrative that Camacho grew up with. Even the military taking his family’s land — part of a massive military land grab after World War II — was accepted by his grandparents as the price of freedom from Japanese oppression. It wasn’t until Camacho learned that the Pentagon’s expansion plans would close his running route that he began to question what it meant for Guam to be an American military outpost. He pored over the buildup’s planning documents and was struck by the disconnect between how the military described its plans and the reality as he knew it. “They paid consultants a bunch of money. The comment was, ‘We drove by and we didn’t see any cars, so there’s no impact,’” he said of the running route. “And that was it.”
As Camacho read thousands of pages of documents, he saw the same pattern again and again. Proposals for bombing and machine-gun ranges, expanded undersea explosives, and projects that threatened forests and ancient latte stones were accompanied by detailed assessments that minimized what they would mean for the islands.
“They paid consultants a bunch of money. The comment was, ‘We drove by and we didn’t see any cars, so there’s no impact.’”
On a flight home from Honolulu, Camacho was reviewing the environmental analysis of the buildup on his laptop when one passage stopped him. The proposed influx of 80,000 people would leave too little water for fire suppression, particularly in Yigo. The solution, according to the document, was to send surplus water from Andersen Air Force Base to civilian communities. “That was the first time I just kind of lost it, just how stark it was,” he said. “The aquifer is our aquifer, right? Like, you’re taking our water for your people and then we don’t have enough and they’re going to divert whatever you’re taking from us that is extra.”
Camacho and other concerned residents started We Are Guåhan, a community group focused on raising awareness about what was happening. (Guåhan is the CHamoru word for Guam.) He sued to stop a machine-gun range from being built at Pågat, an ancestral village that’s home to millennia-old latte stones. Their campaign protected the site and helped persuade the Navy not to expand its landholdings on Guam. The Department of Defense also reduced the planned transfer of Marines from Okinawa from 9,000 to 5,000.
But it didn’t stop the buildup. The Pentagon activated Marine Corps Base Camp Blaz six years ago and opened a new machine-gun range alongside a federal wildlife refuge just north of Yigo. “It’s so heartbreaking,” said Lola Leon Guerrero, another member of We Are Guåhan. “All of that effort, and it still happened.”
Construction on Marine Corps Base Camp Blaz, located in the village of Dededo in northwest Guam and activated in 2020, proceeds in May 2026. Photo: Anita Hofschneider/Grist
III.
The yellow excavator scraped away at the pale rock that lies beneath Camp Blaz under the hot May sun. A limestone forest had already been bulldozed to make way for a new machine-gun training range. A sign next to the fence read “Guam National Wildlife Refuge” with an arrow pointing to the left and a picture of a turtle.
“Wow,” said Moneaka Flores, one of Camacho’s clients in the lawsuit he filed against the Navy to protect the island’s endangered species. She stopped at the side of the road to watch the digger work. It had been months since she’d been here, and they’d cleared so much more forest than she realized.
Busy construction vehicles are the most obvious sign of the Pentagon’s buildup. Beyond the new Marine Corps base, the Department of Defense is upgrading the island’s port and strengthening its infrastructure to support docked nuclear submarines. The agency is also pouring $8 billion into 16 new missile defense sites. After World War II, the Navy took two-thirds of the island. “Whatever made most sense for the military, the island was theirs for the taking,” said Michael Clement, a historian at the University of Guam. “Everyone was in refugee camps. They had the bulldozers. They built where they wanted to build. And then a year or two later, they started saying, ‘OK, where are we going to put the natives?’”
“That’s why Guam is kind of weird to drive around. … It was redesigned for military purposes.”
The military later relinquished some land but still owns at least a quarter of the island. “If you look at where the villages were set out in 1946 and ’47, it’s the land the military didn’t need. So that’s why Guam is kind of weird to drive around, right?” Clement said. “To go across from Tumon to Mangilao, you’ve got to go around Tiyan and the airport. It wasn’t redesigned for civilians. It was redesigned for military purposes.”
Even the island’s main highway, the six-lane Marine Corps Drive, was designed for the military, not the people. It connects Andersen in the north and Naval Base Guam in the south.
Gov. Lou Leon Guerrero (no relation to Lola Leon Guerreo) is among the many who welcome the financial boost that comes with the military’s investments. “They’re spending billions on their readiness plan,” she said.
One in 9 Guam residents joins the armed forces. Last year, a local economist told the Legislature that every dollar the Pentagon spends adds 75 cents to the island’s GDP and called the buildup an “unprecedented economic opportunity.” The funding infusions have helped Guam become far more commercialized than other Pacific islands, with multiple shopping malls, numerous high-rise hotels, and a growing real estate sector.
Leon Guerrero thinks activists should pursue political self-determination instead of resisting the buildup. “These guys can yell and scream all they can,” the governor said. “They’re going to do the military buildup regardless, right? So why don’t we work with them and see how we can benefit?” She wants the Defense Department to help harden local power lines and fund a hospital. “Our hospital cannot absorb mass casualties,” she said.
There are about 20,600 military personnel on Guam, a figure that’s expected to reach 29,400 by 2037. While the military is investing in additional housing both on and off base, the population influx will almost certainly continue pushing up construction and housing costs. The median home price on Guam was $216,100 in 2010, when Camacho sued the military to protect Pågat. Today it is approaching half a million dollars.
Fear of another war also fuels support for the buildup. “We’ve always been a target regardless, because of where we are geographically located,” Leon Guerrero said. Guam is the largest island in the Micronesian region of the Pacific. It’s just north of the equator, a three-hour flight from Tokyo, and has a deep-water harbor that supports naval submarines. “We were a target for Spain. We were a target for the U.S. We were a target for Japan.” She worries about China, which has a ballistic missile nicknamed the “Guam Killer.” “If I’m going to have a choice, I’d rather be under the U.S. than China.”
To Flores, more military presence on Guam heightens the risk of war. In March, President Donald Trump’s decision to bomb Iran prompted military bases on the island to raise their threat level. She feels that, as in World War II, the Indigenous people of Guam are expendable in a broader contest between empires. “What are they really here to protect if there’s so much harm taking place? Are we just collateral damage?” she said. “Because just looking at our history of being occupied by war, being used for weapons testing, it feels like the message is that we don’t matter. Our future doesn’t matter. Our survival doesn’t matter.”
Rear Adm. Brett Mietus, at Joint Region Marianas, said he understands such skepticism. “If I was born and raised on Guam, I would have similar concerns,” he said. But he believes the military’s investment proves the opposite of what Flores fears. “Choice A is not to defend Guam against ballistic and hypersonic missiles,” he said. “Or the other choice, which is the one that we’ve made, is to spend billions of dollars to defend Guam from hypersonic and ballistic missiles. And so from my perspective, that shows a commitment not just to the military things that are on Guam, but also to the people of Guam.”
Yet Flores is far from the only Guam resident who feels expendable. When Pedro Blas, the vice-mayor of Yigo, first learned about the dieldrin in his village’s water, his first thought was of his autistic sister. “All of us growing up, all our lives, our water bottles, we fill it up with the tap water, put it in the fridge: That’s our cold water,” he said. “Because we were instilled in our heads our whole lives: Tap water is OK.”
So far, Camacho’s firm has helped file more than 700 claims, worth $360 million, against local authorities on behalf of village residents. He hopes that pressures the island to seek compensation from the Defense Department. “I’m so glad [Camacho] got involved,” Blas said. “We’re not letting it get swept up under the rug.” Mietus noted that Joint Region Marianas has not found high levels of dieldrin in military wells, and the Pentagon is working with local officials to determine the source of Yigo’s pollution.
“They look at Guam as real estate.”
Still, Blas wonders why the investigations at Andersen Air Force Base are occurring quietly behind the fence, while he hasn’t seen anyone in uniform hand out water to his constituents. “It’s beautiful to be a U.S. citizen, don’t get me wrong,” he said. “But if you really take a step back and look at exactly the impacts that [the military] brought to us over the years, we should have a say in whether or not these practices are going to happen to our island. Even just being called the ‘tip of the spear’ — we’re susceptible to any war that they’re going fight, and we just have to be OK with it.”
“This contamination they bring to our island, it kind of just shows how much they really care about our people,” Blas continued. “And frankly, I think they look at Guam as real estate rather than ‘Those are our U.S. citizens. Those are our people. Those are Americans.’”
IV.
The men and women gathered in the p’ebay, the traditional open-air Yapese meeting house with a triangular tin roof, and settled quietly on the tiled floor along each wall to listen to Camacho speak. A projector, perched above a cardboard box stacked on top of a red cooler, cast his PowerPoint presentation onto a screen. Slide after slide described the American military’s plans. A cool breeze fluttered the fronds on the palm trees surrounding the p’ebay.
It was April in the village of Tamil on Yap, one of four states in the Federated States of Micronesia. Camacho’s dieldrin work was far from over, but he’d put that aside when the island state’s government asked him to help dissect a Navy proposal to expand the seaport and airport. Tamil was one of several villages he visited to explain the plan.
Over the past decade, Camacho has become one of Guam’s leading environmental lawyers. “The one thing about Leevin is he shows up. Again and again,” said Julian Aguon, a human rights lawyer on the island. “And he brings with him not only deep competence but a deep sense of responsibility to the people and places he serves.”
“Regulatory agencies will bend over backwards to not pick a fight with the military because of the mission and the protection and all of that,” Camacho said. “And ultimately, it’s people who aren’t lawyers who end up paying the price.”
He was elected attorney general in 2018 for one term and led a historic lawsuit to force the Navy to clean up a hazardous landfill it had abandoned in the 1940s. A lower court dismissed the suit, but the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled in 2021 that it could proceed — a decision that eventually prompted the federal government to pay Guam $48.9 million.
He has sued the Navy to protect endangered species harmed by the construction of Camp Blaz. “For too long, our island has been treated as a sacrifice zone,” he said.
The risk of Guam falling into enemy hands, as it did in World War II, is so tangible that America’s Pacific military strategy involves spending billions of dollars to spread airfields, seaports, and training ranges across the region to remain competitive in case Guam is once again occupied by enemy forces. The U.S. is invoking decades-old agreements with the peoples of the Republic of Palau, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the Federated States of Micronesia to expand its presence on those islands and upgrade World War II-era seaports and airfields. Under President Joe Biden, the U.S. even signed a new agreement with Papua New Guinea to use its seaports.
On Yap, the U.S. military wants to dredge the lagoon, including two-thirds of an acre in a marine protected area, to create a seaport. The plan would remove enough sediment to fill 334 40-foot shipping containers and impact sea life, Indigenous fishers, and divers. “Plume spreads up to 800 m from disposal sites,” Camacho’s presentation noted. “Long-term reef decline and impact on reef species (fish, clams, sharks, turtles) not assessed.”
The Navy also plans to expand the airfield to facilitate two military exercises, each two weeks long and involving up to 200 personnel, per year. The project could disturb more than 1,000 graves, including the 19th-century tombs of Chief Orothin and Chief Yaloth. Camacho noted that the military’s draft plan acknowledges a “significant adverse impact” to these cultural sites and doesn’t commit to rebury the dead or preserve ancestral sites.
Yap has a population of just about 11,500, compared to Guam’s 170,000. Although Yap is less than a 90-minute flight from Guam, it has none of the military bases, six-lane highways, or big-box stores that define the American territory. “In some ways, this will be more transformative for Yap State than the buildup was for Guam because there’s no military presence there today,” Camacho said. On Guam, he said, “It’s normal to hear a fighter jet flying over. It’s normal to see a bomber or C130. They don’t have any of that there. So this would be such a radical change.”
One month after Camacho visited Yap, dignitaries from across the Pacific gathered in an air-conditioned conference room at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Guam. The hotel sits on a long stretch of white sand beach and looks out over Tumon Bay, where high levels of dieldrin have also been found in fish samples.
Once everyone had taken a seat, the lights dimmed and the glow of a projector filled the room. A screen showed a map of military activity across the western Pacific: not just bases, but training exercises and the routes of research vessels searching the sea floor for the critical minerals essential to many military technologies.
“We’re faced with the reality that we’re part of a larger strategic vision,” conference organizer and former Guam congressman Robert Underwood said. “All of you are in someone’s strategic plans whether you know it or not, whether you like it or not. All of us are in someone’s strategic plan.”
In Palau, Indigenous people are fighting the Pentagon’s expansion in local courts and international forums. Leaders of Angaur, one of 16 states there, filed a lawsuit accusing the U.S. of violating environmental rules and its treaty with the island nation when it cleared land for a radar facility. Indigenous chiefs from Peleliu are suing to prevent a land transfer that would support American goals. Indigenous Palauan youth filed a complaint at the United Nations alleging the U.S. military violated their right to free, prior, and informed consent to what happens on their land.
In the Northern Mariana Islands and the Marshall Islands, the U.S. military presence that started with World War II is ramping up. On Tinian, the Marine Corps is building an airfield and two live-fire training ranges, one of them for explosives. The Navy is extending its undersea sonar and explosives training across half a million square nautical miles, along with bombing practice on the neighboring island of Farallon de Medinilla.
Some hope the military’s regional expansion will enable other island nations and territories to experience the economic growth seen on Guam. But others worry about the pollution and cultural loss, and other risks that come with being a U.S. military stronghold.
In public comments written in response to the Navy’s proposal, Jennifer Dugwen Chieng noted that Camacho’s fight to have the Navy address hazardous waste at Ordot Dump went all the way to the Supreme Court. “Additionally, there are sacred private lands and culturally significant ecosystems that no amount of money can ever replace,” she wrote. “The desecration of graves violates the general principles of respect for burial sites and human remains upheld in Yap’s traditional custom.”
She’s also worried about becoming a target in the next war. Like Palau, Yap was held by the Japanese during World War II and experienced heavy bombardment by the United States. Since then, the Pentagon hasn’t paid much attention to the island state — until now.
“With rising tensions in the region between the U.S. and China, what does the DoD envision combat to look like?” Chieng wrote. “Will it be based on a WWII tactic of island hopping? What is the likelihood of the island becoming a battlefield if tensions were to escalate into war? Yap will be caught in the crossfire. Does the DoD intend to protect and defend the people of Yap, and if so, how does the DoD intend to do that?”
Mietus, the Joint Region Marianas commander, said there’s always a level of risk in being allied with the U.S. during a conflict.
“Sometimes people believe it’s a plan to evacuate U.S. service members or family members if a war starts — there is not,” he said. “I’m in this, living in the same risk as every other person here.” He’s pushed back against Guam lawmakers’ calls for the Defense Department to fund bomb shelters for civilians, contending that the existing military projects like strengthening Guam’s harbor are a better investment. “Oftentimes people see this Department of War as kind of having an infinite amount of money, and we don’t.”
V.
Unlike Guam, Palau and the Federated States of Micronesia are independent countries that have achieved the political self-determination that Indigenous CHamoru on Guam have been denied for centuries.
Camacho wants a plebiscite to determine Guam’s political status. He believes the island’s status as a U.S. territory — without a vote for president or voting representation in Congress — isn’t working. But while some of his colleagues in We Are Guåhan have focused on independence, Camacho sees his own role as making the government answer for its actions.
“Unless someone’s forcing the issue,” he said, “the Department of War isn’t going to voluntarily agree to be held accountable and agree to do all the things that it’s supposed to do.”
That’s why he feels compelled to seek reparations for the dieldrin contamination. So often, toxic pollution lingers on Guam and no one takes responsibility. “As a lawyer, I don’t want to fall into this situation where we’re like [the village of] Malesso, and they show up every year and say you still can’t eat the fish. That’s just not satisfactory,” he said.
One question that drives him is what Guam will be like when his kids are grown. Will they be able to afford living there? Will they want to, given how much the island is changing? It’s a constant effort to find the right balance between working toward their future and being there for them day to day.
“I’m going to try to do the best that I can to protect my island and to have a safe place for my kids to want to live on Guam,” Camacho said. “But also be there for them and help them get better dribbling with their left hand and be good human beings.” Even though Camacho moved a lot growing up, his family never considers leaving. “That is not a choice,” he said. “Guam is home — there is nowhere else we are going to be.”
Pakistan Strikes Afghan Drone Network, Warns Taliban Against Further Provocation
Pakistan on Thursday carried out air and drone strikes on 10 locations inside Afghanistan as part of an operation against a drone network, alleging that the sites were used to store drones and dispatch them across the border for attacks in Pakistan.
Federal Information Minister Attaullah Tarar said in a statement on X that “the strikes were deliberate, precise, calibrated and proportionate and strictly limited to identified military objectives directly linked to the attempted attacks against Pakistan.”
Tarar added that Pakistan’s air defense systems had detected drones launched from Afghan territory on Wednesday and neutralized them before they could reach their intended targets.
Tarar said, “Pakistan will neither accept nor tolerate attacks launched from Afghan territory, whether by terrorist groups or by the Afghan Taliban regime itself. Any violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty will be met with an immediate and decisive response.”
He emphasized, “Threats, denials or attempts to deflect responsibility by Afghan Taliban will neither alter the facts nor constrain Pakistan’s inherent right to defend its territory, its people and its national security.”
Pakistan does not seek escalation and remains committed to regional peace, dialogue and constructive engagement. This commitment must not be mistaken for weakness or an unlimited tolerance of hostile actions, he added.
He vowed that “any further provocative act by Afghan Taliban will be answered with a firm and resolute response”.
According to information obtained by The Media Line, Pakistan Air Force jets targeted Camp Gecko, which was reportedly being used as a hub by al-Qaida and the banned Baloch Liberation Army, as well as weapons depots.
Pakistan has repeatedly urged the Taliban to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a safe haven for armed groups carrying out cross-border attacks, which have killed hundreds of security personnel and civilians. Kabul, however, denies the allegations.
On Monday, Pakistani fighter jets targeted locations in eastern Afghanistan that Islamabad described as militant hideouts.
Similarly, earlier this month, Pakistani security forces killed 15 gunmen who were attempting to enter Pakistan from Afghanistan.
Security and regional affairs experts told The Media Line that the latest escalation between Pakistan and Afghanistan threatens mediation efforts by China, Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia aimed at achieving lasting peace between Kabul and Islamabad.
The Russian Embassy in Kabul also voiced concern and advocated settling disputes through dialogue, consistent with Moscow’s stated policy of restraint.
Too “Woke”? Trump tried to fire one Smithsonian official and, after finding “ideological capture,” plans to install anti-woke warning signs outside the history museum.
Is This History? One exhibit speculated that Ben Franklin may have shocked enslaved people in electric experiments. Another displayed a “crotch harness” used for sadomasochistic sex.
A Longstanding Debate: As early as 1999, one critic argued that the history museum lacked focus, examining oppression rather than the central figures and episodes of U.S. history.
These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.
In November 2021, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History opened an exhibit called “The Electric Dr. Franklin,” describing “Benjamin Franklin’s pioneering contributions to electrical science.” The exhibit explained that, prior to becoming an abolitionist, he had enslaved people in his household. “Benjamin Franklin’s remarkable scientific accomplishments were, in part, enabled by slavery,” it declared.
The exhibit speculated that Franklin may have used enslaved people in his electrical research. “Franklin wrote about experiments in which he took shocks and used family and friends in these ways, although he seldom identified who in particular assisted him,” stated the exhibit, which closed in 2025 but can still be found online. “Indentured servants and enslaved people in his household could also have been used, although we may never know for certain.”
It was an eye-catching conjecture: one of the most revered of the Founding Fathers subjecting people held against their will to possibly painful shocks. And it was one of many details singled out for criticism in a blistering 162-page White House report released in July that argued that the museum had fallen victim to an “ideological capture” that “moved the Museum’s mission away from straightforward historical education and scholarship toward an extreme political activism that seeks to transform our country.”
For decades, the Smithsonian Institution, which draws some 15 million visitors every year to its assemblage of 21 museums — bounty that has no real global peer — has managed to stay mostly above the political fray. There have been occasional exceptions, such as the uproar over the National Air and Space Museum’s planned 1995 exhibit of the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. By and large, though, the institution maintained bipartisan support as the guardian of America’s history, ingenuity and natural heritage, even as political polarization spread and culture wars raged.
But that institutional exceptionalism is now imperiled as never before. In March 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring that the Smithsonian had succumbed to “divisive, race-centered ideology.” This July 4, timed to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, came the White House report. Later in July, two House committees held back-to-back hearings on the report, where Republican members took turns lambasting the museum’s director, Anthea Hartig, and forcing her to answer questions about exhibit items such as a “chrome and rubber crotch harness” designed for sadomasochistic sex. That week, Trump signed an executive order instructing the Department of the Interior to erect signs outside the museum “warning visitors about the ideological capture” on display there. The signs have yet to go up, but in late August, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum sent a letter to the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents declaring that other federal agencies “cannot in good conscience continue to support the Smithsonian under current leadership.”
The Smithsonian is independent of the executive branch, governed by a 17-member board led by the chief justice of the Supreme Court and with six members of Congress, three from each party, serving with nine private citizens and the vice president. But it depends on the federal government for 62% of its funding, receiving more than $1 billion per year, and warnings of deep budget cuts have grown ever louder. Finally, on Sept. 8, Smithsonian secretary Lonnie Bunch, the first African American person to lead the institution, announced he was stepping down at age 73, saying “it has been stressful.”
Seen from one vantage, the battle over the Smithsonian is but another example of Trump attempting with characteristic bombast to put his stamp on Washington institutions, alongside shuttering the Kennedy Center, replacing the East Wing of the White House with a huge ballroom and planning a 250-foot arch near Arlington National Cemetery.
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.Elizabeth Frantz for ProPublica
But unlike some conflicts initiated by Trump, this one has been festering for years, independent of him, with complaints lodged by board members before he returned to office. The American history museum, the main focus of the administration’s ire, has wrestled for years with how, or even whether, it should present a unifying national narrative, an ambivalence that left it susceptible to the administration’s broadside. Meanwhile, the Smithsonian underwent a political awakening during the 2020 upheaval over the COVID-19 pandemic and murder of George Floyd that echoed responses in academia and other progressive realms.
This left it exposed to a new administration that viewed itself as a corrective against perceived woke excesses. “I said over and over again that there’s going to be a day of reckoning,” recalled Garret Graves, a Republican former congressman from Louisiana who served on the Smithsonian board in 2023 and 2024, in an interview. “You can either participate in it, help guide the Smithsonian back to something that makes more sense, or you can have an abrupt shift. I didn’t realize my words would ring as true as quickly as they did.”
Now, in the year that was supposed to be a crowning celebration of the nation’s 250th anniversary, the Smithsonian is instead in Trump’s crosshairs. And the question of how the country’s premier history museum should tell the nation’s story is suddenly up for grabs.
The National Museum of History and Technology opened on the National Mall in 1964. Its mission, said former assistant secretary of the Smithsonian Remington Kellogg that year, was to “awaken” a “clear understanding of the inspiring story of the United States — its origins, struggles, development, traditions, strength.” As the name reflected, the museum contained duelling missions from the start, showcasing American technological advances and telling a more general historical story.
A 1974 exhibit depicted the evolution of American fashion.Alfred Harrell/Smithsonian Institution Archives
In 1980, it was renamed the National Museum of American History, but the tension lingered. “It started out as a technology museum, and even now it has a lot of equipment, and to move from that to American history, that’s a huge change,” said Ivan Selin, a former chair of the museum’s board. “Unless you’re going to throw everything out and start over again, you’re going to have a very incoherent thing. Unless you have a clear strategy, you’re going to have some apples and oranges.”
Two decades after the name change, the lack of a unified approach had become an issue. In 1999, David Brooks wrote a scathing critique in the Weekly Standard, lamenting that the museum had so little on display about the nation’s defining moments (the Constitutional Convention, the Lewis and Clark Expedition, the Great Depression, etc.) and prominent figures who shaped them (Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., etc.). “It ignores or virtually ignores most of the major events in American history,” he wrote. “This is a museum of multicultural grievance, which simply passes over any subject, individual, or idea, no matter how vital to American history, that does not have to do with the oppression of some ethnic outgroup or disfavored gender.”
In 2001, in response to such critiques, the Smithsonian convened a blue-ribbon commission of historians and others led by Richard Darman, a former top aide in Republican White Houses. In 2002, the commission released its report, declaring that the museum “requires what its own leadership has described as a ‘transformation.’ It lacks aesthetic appeal, organizational coherence, and the perception of substantive balance.” The report recommended, among other things, a chronological introductory exhibit that contains “central theme lines for the examination and interpretation of American history” and that “should celebrate America’s remarkable strengths and achievements while also treating fairly and responsibly the ways in which America may have failed to meet the high standards it has proclaimed for itself.”
This would prove easier said than done. For one thing, the museum’s physical structure itself has never been coherent — “an awkward attempt to marry the classical and the modern, the building is legitimately neither,” wrote New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable at its opening. “It’s a challenging space,” Brent Glass, who became director shortly after the blue-ribbon report in 2002, told ProPublica.
Above all, though, the commission’s recommendations faced resistance among the museum’s curators to the sort of great-man-of-history approach that Brooks and others were hankering for. There had been a trend in museum scienceaway from this, and away from straight chronology. “There was this whole museum movement to get away from a march through time, to a more episodic or specific sort of story,” John Gray, who succeeded Glass in 2012, told ProPublica. “It wasn’t done to get away from the story; it was finding a way to get people interested.”
In addition, the museum’s curators tended to be specialized in material culture — collecting and studying the museum’s several million objects and artifacts — rather than in conceptual storytelling. To make up for this, Gray’s team tried to enlist several leading academic historians to instill more of an overarching narrative structure. But they declined, saying they were concerned that such an approach could seem triumphalist and provide fodder for an America-first agenda. “We tried to organize [the museum] around ideas and ideals, ideals that were aspirational,” Gray said. “And we failed many times.”
The museum’s eventual solution was to divide the national story into subject areas, each represented by a standing exhibit: “American Enterprise” on business and innovation, “American Democracy” on politics,” “Many Voices, One Nation” on immigration, “The American Presidency,” “The Price of Freedom” on the nation’s wars, “Entertainment Nation” on culture, “America on the Move” on transportation.
Developing these required extensive debate, said the former directors. Some donors supporting the enterprise exhibit were upset that it devoted so much space to the role of slavery in American business. In crafting “The Price of Freedom,” the museum consulted with veterans’ groups to try to avoid a backlash like the one that arose on the Enola Gay. This effort succeeded, Glass said, despite the exhibit’s candor about the darker elements of the nation’s military history. “People can handle complexity,” he said. “They don’t feel bad about the country when told the whole story, and they’re grateful that they have access to the information.”
The museum’s “American Enterprise” exhibit includes an advertisement for slave traders.Elizabeth Frantz for ProPublica
Scattered throughout the museum are countless highlights: the desk on which Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence; the top hat Lincoln wore to Ford’s Theatre on the last night of his life; the actual lunch counter from the 1960 Greensboro, North Carolina, Civil Rights sit-in; and, in a recent addition, a gunboat sunk during the Revolutionary War that is being restored on-site. But the overall effect can be disjointed and disorienting. And, with the museum’s dim lighting, dated technology and underutilized areas, it can feel at times as if one is wandering in a past-its-prime shopping mall or in the forgotten corner of an airport terminal.
It’s a stark contrast to the National Museum of African American History & Culture, which opened in 2016 under the direction of Bunch and, notably, has a clear chronological design. Of course, said Selin, the former American history museum board chair, the African American museum and the National Museum of the American Indian, which opened in 2004, have the advantage of a more focused subject, leaving it even less clear what remains for the American history museum, where attendance has declined in recent years. “You can find nowhere in any Smithsonian document a theory of what should be in the American history museum or the more particular museums or how many of these particular museums there should be,” Selin said. “There’s no charter whatsoever that says how they fit together.”
In March 2020, the Smithsonian shuttered its museums for the pandemic. A few months after that, Washington and other cities erupted in protests over Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis. Bunch, who became secretary of the Smithsonian in 2019, and other top officials embarked on a push to rethink the institution’s priorities, as reflected in the minutes of the Board of Regents meetings, which were now being held online. Bunch “briefed the Regents on his efforts to navigate the dual pandemics caused by the Coronavirus and issues surrounding race, racism, and racial identity,” the minutes of the June 2020 meeting stated. He announced the launch of “Smithsonian Cares,” a digital resource that would “provide tools and guidance to empower and inspire conversations about diversity, equity, access and inclusion.”
That October, the board discussed “the potential creation of a Chief Diversity Officer position, a review of organizational processes and policies that may have inadvertently created barriers to inclusivity, integrating and standardizing DEAI training across the organization, strengthening supervisory DEAI skillsets, increasing senior leadership’s focus on inclusivity, and identifying funding and resourcing strategies to implement DEAI efforts across the Institution’s functions and operations.” In February 2021, Bunch told the board that the Smithsonian’s five strategic priorities would include positioning it as a “trusted source for critical conversations and helping the nation grapple with important issues like race and identity.”
As the meeting minutes show, the institution’s elevation of identity was being encouraged by the newly installed Biden administration. In October 2021, the Smithsonian’s Office of Government Relations reported that the Smithsonian had “brought objects from the National Museum of American History to the White House for a temporary display recognizing Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Pride Month.” Three months later, the office stated that it “continues to work closely” with the White House on “diversity, accessibility, access and inclusion efforts.” The Smithsonian noted plans for exhibits at the White House to mark “Black History Month in February, Women’s History Month in March, Asian-American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month in May, LGBTQ in June and Hispanic History Heritage Month in September.”
The post-2020 shift extended to the various museums, which started to reopen to visitors in spring 2021. To cite just one example, the National Portrait Gallery revised the signage for a portrait of Henry Laurens, South Carolina’s delegate to the Continental Congress, to reflect that he had made his wealth through chattel slavery. “When Floyd was killed, everyone acknowledged that now is the time to ask: What are the stories that we’re telling and were we being honest and fair in recounting those stories? We all looked at it through this lens,” Kim Sajet, who became the director of the Portrait Gallery in 2013, told ProPublica. “Everyone felt energized by that. We can’t change the past, but we need to acknowledge what happened in order not to repeat it in the future.”
But the new direction caused misgivings for some conservative supporters of the institution, such as Graves, who joined the regents as one of the three Republican congressional appointees in 2023. Graves told ProPublica that he had high regard for Bunch — “his accomplishment with the African American museum was remarkable” — but that he became worried that the Smithsonian was operating within a bubble. Its staff were living in a metro area that had voted overwhelmingly against Trump (and museum employees are generally among the most left-leaning of any profession), yet they were charged with presenting exhibits to visitors from all over the country and the world, a disconnect that the institution seemed insufficiently aware of.
Many board meetings would kick off with tours of a certain museum, and Graves and a fellow Republican appointee, Adrian Smith of Nebraska, would often be taken aback by what they saw. “Seventy-five percent of the time Adrian and I would be walking around and say, ‘Are you kidding me?’” Graves said. “It wasn’t interpreting science or history. It seemed to have an agenda, and that’s not what a museum should be.” What was missing, he said, was a sense of the nation’s achievements. “This country is a remarkable experiment,” he said. “We’ve had some grave sins, but my gosh, America is a net victory for the world. It’s unbelievable what happened here in 250 years and it’s worth celebrating.”
Graves retired from Congress at the end of 2024. In his farewell address to the regents that October, he warned against allowing the Smithsonian to become seen as affiliated with one party or ideological bent. “I felt like they were causing sustainability problems for the institution,” he said. “Politicizing the Smithsonian is an awful, awful idea, because then you only receive funds when there’s a Democratic majority. This is America’s museum and there should not be anything partisan about it.”
One week later, Trump won the election to return to the White House.
In his first term, Trump largely ignored the Smithsonian. In 2017, Bunch gave him a tour of the new African American museum, which Bunch recounted later in his memoir: “The president paused in front of the exhibit that discussed the role of the Dutch in the slave trade. As he pondered the label I felt that maybe he was paying attention to the work of the museum. He quickly proved me wrong. As he turned from the display he said to me, ‘You know, they love me in the Netherlands.’ All I could say was let’s continue walking.”
It took little time for Trump to make clear that, as on other fronts in his second term, things would be different this time around. First came the March 2025 executive order, which directed Vice President J.D. Vance to rid the Smithsonian of “improper ideology.” Two months later, Trump said that he was firing Sajet at the Portrait Gallery, calling her “a highly partisan person, and a strong supporter of DEI, which is totally inappropriate for her position.” The Smithsonian noted that Trump did not have the authority to remove Sajet, but she left anyway, hoping to spare the institution.
In August 2025, the White House issued a 120-day ultimatum to replace “divisive or ideologically driven language with unifying, historically accurate and constructive descriptions,” but with little follow-up, and for nearly a year, it looked as if the storm may in fact have passed. Then came the White House report on the American history museum, with such an exhaustive litany against Hartig, its director since 2018, and Bunch that it made plain the authors had been scouring their public statements and the museum. (Through a spokesperson, Bunch declined to be interviewed. Museum representatives did not respond to requests to speak to Hartig.)
In addition to citing the Franklin exhibit, the report noted that an exhibit called “Girlhood (It’s Complicated)” had included “the pages of a 6-year-old girl’s diary where she expresses fear about ‘getting boobs’ and wishes for her nonexistent ‘penis to grow.’” Another exhibit, on gay history, had “included a two-piece chrome and rubber crotch harness designed for sadomasochism.”
An image from “Girlhood (It’s Complicated),” a Smithsonian exhibit that drew complaints from Republican lawmakers for its explicit comments about gender identityKrystal Quiles
It criticized the museum for having trained staff using the “Museums as a Site for Social Action Toolkit,” a 200-plus-page roadmap on how to “truly transform the museum space,” which is linked “with white supremacy, hetero-patriarchy, abuse of labor, colonization, imperialist theft of art and artifacts, destruction or absencing of alternative ways of interpreting or representing art and artifacts, structural racism and other oppressions.”
Above all, though, the report criticized the museum on grounds that echoed Brooks and the 2002 blue-ribbon commission, saying that it failed to offer visitors a unified narrative of the nation’s history. “That story should be a basic consensus view that is not ideological or politicized, but presents the facts of history — what actually happened — as accurately as possible with minimal present-day bias,” the report stated. “It should tell the whole story of a nation, including the good and the bad, so Museum visitors can understand the development that led our nation to where it is today.”
For years, the Smithsonian had avoided major conflagrations partly by engaging in what one former official called the “care and feeding” of members of Congress on the two committees with purview over it, Appropriations and House Administration. If there was a potentially controversial exhibit, the museum would bring members over for a preview tour, so they had some context for complaints they might receive. But these efforts were on hold for a while because of the pandemic closures, and the Smithsonian’s government relations office experienced heavy turnover, as one of its directors had cancer and another died suddenly.
This context, combined with the fuel provided by the White House report, helped explain the level of vitriol that Hartig faced when she appeared at the two hearings in late July. Even by the standards of today’s decorum-less Congress, the hearings were wild affairs. At the first, held by the House Oversight Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency, Chair Tim Burchett, a Tennessee Republican, kicked things off by playing a lengthy string of video clips of Hartig offering tribal land acknowledgements at the start of her speeches. “I’m wondering, have you ever planned on deeding any of your personal property or property of the Smithsonian to any of these tribes?” he asked Hartig.
She adopted a conciliatory tone, saying the Smithsonian “takes the concerns raised in the White House Domestic Policy Council’s report seriously” but that “it does not fairly or accurately characterize the full body of work at the museum.” She assured the committee, “I love the United States of America. I consider it the privilege of my career to help preserve its treasures and serve the American people.”
This did not assuage committee Republicans. Burchett displayed museum images including the crotch harness and the diary mention of the 6-year-old girl wishing for a penis. “Ma’am, I mean, you have pictures of bondage. You have some overtly sexual things up there,” he said. “I’m not a fan.” Rep. Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Republican, pressed the point: “Are images of sexual fetishes appropriate for children? Yes or no?” Rep. Brandon Gill, a Texas Republican, noted that the toolkit that the museum used for staff training had referred to “politeness” as a feature of “white supremacy culture.”
U.S. Rep. Tim Burchett, a Tennessee Republican, poses questions to Anthea Hartig, director of the history museum, in July.Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
Those defending Hartig were hardly less outspoken. David Blight, a Yale historian also testifying, compared the White House’s attacks on the Smithsonian to the German Third Reich, saying “their model may indeed be Joseph Goebbels’ committee on enlightenment, which is what the Nazis called their committee that tried to control museums.” Rep. Jasmine Crockett, a Texas Democrat, opened her remarks by saying, “Welcome to the White Pride Committee.” Rep. Kweisi Mfume, a Maryland Democrat, vowed to sacrifice his life for the Smithsonian. “We will not let you destroy that museum,” he said. “No matter how long it takes, how many battles are required, how much effort is needed, we will not allow that to happen unless you find a way to kill all of us and walk over our bodies to change history.”
The next day’s hearing, before the House Administration Committee, was more of the same. The bipartisan consensus around the Smithsonian appeared to lie in tatters.
On a recent Sunday, a group of visitors made their way into the centerpiece exhibit at the National Mall entry to the history museum, the giant Star-Spangled Banner that was flying over Fort McHenry in 1814 and inspired Francis Scott Key to write what became the national anthem. For safe-keeping, the flag is displayed in very low light, giving the chamber a sacred feel, like a cathedral crypt. “Oh my god, it’s huge,” said one woman. “I am shivering,” said another. “It’s insane,” said a third.
Every day, the museum, for all its imperfections, still makes a strong impression on many visitors. But its longstanding search for identity helped make it a target for an administration looking for weak spots, and now its future and that of the entire Smithsonian hangs in the balance. Three of the nine citizen slots on the Board of Regents are vacant, and three more will be next month. Whoever the remaining members of the board — which include Vance — select to fill those slots will help determine who is chosen to replace Bunch as secretary, and the institution’s future course. Much will depend on how much Chief Justice John Roberts, at the head of the board, decides to engage.
Any large institution can benefit from reassessment, and the Smithsonian and the American history museum in particular may well be overdue, especially as yet another focus area is about to be cleaved off, for the National Museum of the American Latino, scheduled to open early next decade. What gives so many supporters pause is for that reevaluation to happen under Trump, who hasn’t shown a lot of interest in how the various museums interact, much less in the nuances and subtleties of history.
“There will be a moment,” Sajet said, “when the American people will have to stand up and decide, is this what they want?”
