Welcome to another issue of NZNet Digest, a collection of highlights from NonZero Network member newsletters and other worthwhile media outlets. Paid subscribers to the NonZero Newsletter can get a 50 percent discount on an annual subscription to any NZNet member newsletter.

SINICA

After two weeks on the ground in China, investment strategist Andy Rothman reports that Beijing sees the Iran War’s energy shock as validation of its green-tech bet. The expectation is that higher oil prices will boost foreign demand for Chinese batteries, EVs, and such renewables as solar panels, somewhat as the 1970s energy crises boosted the demand for fuel-efficient Japanese cars. But, now that the US has performed this service for China by attacking Iran, it’s not clear to Beijing that President Trump has much more to offer. Rothman frames Trump’s scheduled visit to China in mid-May this way:

Beijing will give Trump the pomp and circumstance he craves but does not trust him enough to engage in serious negotiations, I was told. The Chinese will be happy to agree to do things that are in their interest, such as buying more soybeans and signing non-binding MOUs [memorandums of understanding] to purchase Boeing aircraft, but they won’t make any real concessions to a leader they don’t trust. Note that the two sides still haven’t published a written statement of what Trump and Xi agreed to when they met last fall in Korea, and Beijing hasn’t even verbally acknowledged its side of that deal. China’s objective is simply to maintain stability in the bilateral relationship…

EXECUTIVE FUNCTIONS

Operation Epic Fury (aka Attacking Iran) is “already among the most consequential unauthorized presidential uses of force in all of American history—probably the second most consequential, after the Korean War.” That’s the assessment of Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith, legal scholars who served in the Obama and George W. Bush administrations, respectively. In their newsletter Executive Functions, they argue that the administration’s failure to get Congressional approval for the Iran war isn’t just a constitutional problem—it’s a strategic one. The chaos of the last month, they suggest, is partly a product of the president not having to explain himself:

There is a direct connection, we think, between the absence of real consultation with Congress, before or since the conflict began, and the volatility with which the administration has conducted the war. This is not necessarily because congressional leaders have great military insight (though some may). It is because the need to justify and explain to government leaders outside the presidential bubble might have surfaced the many problems that have become apparent over the last month and counseled a steadier course. … But, and it is a meaningful “but,” Trump will soon have to ask Congress for appropriations to support this very expensive war. This is the one constitutional check that he must face. Soldiers, defense contractors, and others must be paid. Appropriations are the point at which Congress can and must hold the administration to account for its unilateral decision to go to war.

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GLOBAL DISPATCHES

The risk of nuclear war is growing, according to international security expert Wilfred Wan—not just because such treaties as New START have lapsed, or because of heightened tensions among nuclear-armed states, but because of technological advance: The growing military importance of such domains as AI, outer space, and cybertech is creating new and poorly understood pathways to nuclear escalation. Wan, speaking to Mark Leon Goldberg on the Global Dispatches podcast, noted that various new technologies, including remotely steered or autonomous drones, can render nuclear-armed militaries more vulnerable and hence raise the chances of nuclear counter-attack.

Last June, we saw a number of Ukrainian drones target and damage Russian strategic bombers because these bombers were being used to launch conventional cruise missiles into Ukraine. But by doing this, [Ukraine] also attacked Russian nuclear forces, which were undermined as a result of the attacks. And in fact, some Russian experts called for a nuclear response to those attacks because of the strategic impact that they had… A lot of these capabilities in space and cyber, they can serve conventional and nuclear missions, they can serve civilian and military missions in a manner that can contribute to confusion or unintended consequences. … Multi-domain operations contribute to greater destabilization and more frequent crises because there’s a lack of agreements on thresholds, on red lines, on what would be a proportionate response … and all of that, in turn, impacts on escalation pathways.

THE BEINART NOTEBOOK

In recent weeks the Israeli military has displaced more than a million Lebanese and seized lots of Lebanese territory, but the operation is encountering much more resistance than expected, according to Rami Khouri of the American University of Beirut. He tells Peter Beinart that, after Israeli strikes destroyed much of Hezbollah’s infrastructure and leadership in 2024 and 2025, the organization reconstituted itself to an extent that now impedes Israeli and American goals.

If you go back now, document all of the mainstream media and US political and Israeli political statements about Hezbollah [having] been “dealt a death blow, they can’t do anything anymore,” and then look at what Hezbollah is doing today, most of what the US mainstream media and political class and the Israeli media and military class [have] said about Hezbollah is not true….

Khouri says Israel’s goal is regional hegemony—to turn nearby nations into “unofficial vassal states” and to accomplish that with no constraints from international law:

Before the Israelis did the genocide against Gaza, they and the Americans conducted a political genocide against the international rule of law… The ICC [International Criminal Court], the ICJ [International Court of Justice], the UN resolutions, the Human Rights Council [have] been neutered if not wiped out. The law is what Trump and Netanyahu say it is. But what’s going on on the ground, in Iran and Lebanon, suggests that Trump and Netanyahu may not achieve what they want because the pushback has been so severe and so significant.

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THE GLENN SHOW

When the Pentagon asked for $200 billion to fund war with Iran, some Democrats pointed to such alternative uses for that money as medical care for Americans. But will that kind of messaging really resonate with voters? Glenn Show regular John McWhorter is skeptical. It’s “a little too abstract to move people into the voting booth,” he said to host Glenn Loury, who promptly disagreed:

Here’s $200 billion. Let’s see. What can we do with it? We can indemnify our citizens against the possibility that they’ll be driven into bankruptcy by health care costs, or we could drop some more bombs on Tehran. Let’s see—which one is making America great again? I mean, I don’t think that’s one that you need a degree in rocket science to be able to figure out. … Everything depends on how long this thing goes on. And oil, too. What’s going to happen with oil? … I’ve been reading stories about urea, the substance that goes into the manufacture of fertilizers, that is derived from processing natural gas, and that is in short supply, and that will affect agricultural planting cycles. … The consequence of agricultural yields going down means starvation in some places in the world. All this is very serious stuff.

SMALL POTATOES

This just in from the frontiers of psychological research: Losing sleep to a newborn feels different from losing sleep to insomnia. Paul Bloom, a month into the life of baby Zoe, reports that he’s tired and stupid—but weirdly cheerful. The veteran insomniac hypothesizes that the misery of sleeplessness has less to do with the sleep you lose than with the story you tell yourself about why you lost it:

I’ve long been an insomniac, and a bad night often leaves me angry and bitter the next day. So I expected newborn sleep deprivation to make me miserable. But it hasn’t. I’m tired—and, yes, stupid—but still pretty cheerful. I think the difference is that my usual insomnia feels like failure: I’ve ruined the next day, and it’s my own fault. But being awake because you have to keep your tiny baby alive feels purposeful, even virtuous—like your legs burning after a long run.

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SINICA

Why did China fly classicists business class to a 400-person conference in Beijing in late 2024? Some Western observers have answered defensively: China is trying to mine the West’s source code—this is nothing less than civilizational appropriation! But writer Chang Che—author of a recent New Yorker piece on the boom in interest in the classics in Chinese universities—tells Sinical Podcast host Kaiser Kuo that the reality is more complicated:

There was an interpretation that China was trying to use classics like offense. I don’t think that was the case. … If you are a Chinese scholar studying at, let’s say, Yale and you go into a cocktail party and you say, “Who is Shakespeare?” or “Who is Plato?”—you’d be laughed out of the room. That’s just unacceptable. But if you’re an American scholar at [Beijing University] and you ask who Du Fu is, that’s completely fine. That’s not a thing that you will be socially ostracized for. So there’s a cultural asymmetry in the global expectations about how we understand Chinese civilization versus Western civilization. And in this current era, China is like— ‘Why? Why should that be the case?’ … The goal is for people in the Chinese classics departments to be well-read in both Eastern and Western traditions. It’s going to be a home for Plato as much as Confucius.

THE BEINART NOTEBOOK

With Passover arriving amid multiple Israeli military campaigns—including ongoing assaults in Gaza and the West Bank—Peter Beinart spoke with Rabbi Ismar Schorsch, chancellor emeritus of the Jewish Theological Seminary, about whether Judaism can be disentangled from the policies of the Israeli state. Schorsch says tension between religious identity and government action is ancient, stretching back to the biblical prophets’ critiques of Israelite kings, and reads the Passover narrative itself as implying moral constraints on national power:

So, the first stricture that Israel faces is to remember its slavery, remember the cruelty and the political oppression which you suffered, for that is the polar opposite of the kingdom that I want you to create. And the second stricture on this political entity coming out of Egypt is Mount Sinai. Mount Sinai follows the Exodus. The Exodus is not an end in itself… Mount Sinai is the giving of the Torah. It is the giving of commandments. It is the imposition of principles and values that are to guide this political entity. The political entity created after the Exodus is not to be driven by greed; it is to be driven by constraints, morality, and fundamental principles. So, the nation to come out of Egypt had quite severe constraints placed upon itself in order to help it become the model political entity that might inspire the ancient world. I believe thinking of Passover in that context gives us values and inspirations that can help us celebrate Passover in the contemporary era.

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AI policy: Some of the summaries (the short introductions that precede the italicized blocks of text) in this issue of NZNet Digest are based on AI-generated drafts. In all cases the summaries were edited, and substantially altered, by a human (me), and in all cases the summary was checked for accuracy by a human who read the text that the summary characterizes.
—Bob

Banners and graphics by Clark McGillis.

Welcome to the third issue of NZNet Digest, a collection of highlights from NonZero Network member newsletters and other worthwhile media outlets. Paid subscribers to the NonZero Newsletter can get a 50 percent discount on an annual subscription to any NZNet member newsletter.

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GLOBAL DISPATCHES

Yes, lots of Americans are finding fault with Trump’s war on Iran. But, laments Oxfam America’s Scott Paul to host Mark Leon Goldberg on the Global Dispatches podcast, their reasons tend to be disappointing:

It’s now the latest chapter in a series of events where either the US or Israel or Russia or some other state has announced that it’s going to do something internationally unlawful. And the arguments against it either haven’t materialized or have materialized along prudential lines. You know—“This is stupid” “This is costly” “This is going to not work out well for us”—as opposed to “This is wrong,” and “This undermines a pillar of world order that we all depend on to keep ourselves safe.”

…So we’re looking at a world where there really are—I know this is starting to sound cliché—but following this, following the Venezuela attack in January, the threats against Greenland, the blockade of Cuba, it’s starting to look more and more like a world that not only is less bound by rules but that doesn’t believe that it’s bound by rules anymore.

FOREIGN EXCHANGES

Derek Davison writes about Ali Larijani, the head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council until his assassination by Israel this week:

Larijani was one of a small and shrinking cadre of civilian officials who could be said to have real authority in Tehran at present. I don’t think there’s much question that the IRGC is running Iran right now, but Larijani was probably the senior figure interfacing between it and the country’s political apparatus. He also likely would have been heavily involved in any attempt at ceasefire talks, which may be part of the reason why the Israelis targeted him. If one kills all the potential negotiators, it makes organizing negotiations more difficult.

Derek also notes that, while Israel is drawing headlines for its military strikes on Iran and Lebanon, less attention is paid to a recent surge of Israeli attacks in Gaza and the West Bank. He writes:

The IDF killed at least 13 people in multiple attacks across Gaza on Sunday, including two children and a pregnant woman. The previous day Israeli attacks killed at least five people in Gaza. The IDF seems to be targeting police officers in the territory, having killed at least 11 of them over the weekend, perhaps in an effort to prevent security forces connected to Hamas from becoming part of the police force that’s supposed to be established under the ceasefire. In the West Bank, Israeli forces gunned down a family (two parents and two children), then claimed that the parents attempted to ram a group of soldiers with their car. A settler mob attacked two Palestinian villages on Saturday and that violence is continuing on basically a daily basis at this point.

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SINICA

Andrew Methven writes the “Chinese phrase of the week” column for Sinica, and this week’s winner reflects an important trend in the world of AI. The Chinese, it seems, are experimenting prolifically with the same open source AI agent that many Americans are experimenting with: the famously pro-active OpenClaw. Methven’s etymological exegesis:

“Raising the lobster” (养龙虾 yǎng lóng xiā) is a newly coined expression which means training your OpenClaw AI assistant. Breaking it down: “to raise or keep” (养 yǎng), as in raising children, keeping pets, or nurturing habits; and “lobster” (龙虾 lóngxiā).

The lobster connection starts with the name and the logo. The project was originally called Clawd—deliberately similar to Anthropic’s AI, Claude. When Anthropic pushed back over the trademark, developer Peter Steinberger kept the lobster theme through a brief rename to Moltbot, before deciding on the name OpenClaw. The red cartoon lobster stayed as the logo throughout.

In China the lobster theme stuck, so the Chinese name became “crayfish”, or literally “small lobster” (小龙虾 xiǎo lóngxiā). Running your own OpenClaw became “raising a lobster” (养龙虾 yǎng lóngxiā).

The idea of “raising” implies how users need to feed their AI agents with tokens, train it with new skills, and monitor and improve performance. The AI requires ongoing attention like a pet which needs “feeding” (喂饲料) and “training” (调教), which are both essential phrases in the process of “raising the lobster”.

And this is exactly what so many people are doing in China right now — “raising their lobsters” (养龙虾)...

THE GLENN SHOW

Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker appears on the Glenn Show to talk about his new book When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows..., which explores how the line between what is quietly known and what is publicly acknowledged can shape things ranging from small talk to revolutions. Asked by host Glenn Loury about whether the book is relevant to the rise of Donald Trump, Pinker offered this thought:

One of the things that Trump has done probably throughout his career, even as a business person, is that he sensed where there was a norm, a way of doing business—or politics, for that matter. It wasn’t literally enforced with punishment, but it was held in place by common knowledge. You don’t do it. Why don’t you do it? Well, because everyone knows you don’t do it. No one does it. And he would find that, like, if you’ve got a subcontractor who doesn’t have deep enough pockets to challenge you in court, if you refuse to pay him, then you don’t pay him. Decent people don’t work that way, but, knowing that he could get away with it, he did. He broke the norm. And likewise, when he switched to politics. … Every one of those things which was previously considered fatal to a politician, which existed, again, not because they were literally outlawed, just because common expectation—everyone knows you don’t do that—well, he did that. And by breaking the norm, he not only showed that it was nothing but a norm, but the norm then, since it existed as common knowledge, was or is in danger of unraveling.

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THE BEINART NOTEBOOK

Nothing Israel does could justify the actions of the gunman who opened fire on a synagogue in suburban Detroit last week, says Peter Beinart in a new video oped. “There’s a basic principle here. The principle is that Americans are not responsible for the actions of foreign governments or foreign organizations just because they share a religion, an ethnic, national ancestry, a race, with that state or foreign organization.” Beinart continues:

And—not but, but and—Synagogues in the United States should take down the signs that many have on their lawn that say, “We stand with Israel.” They should take them down, because those signs make the congregants less safe, and because they are immoral. ...They encourage exactly the same conflation between Israel and American Jews that we must resist…

Now, if it were morally correct for our synagogues to say in this moment, “We stand with Israel,” then I think you could make an argument that, even though those signs may make the congregants less safe, that it would be legitimate to do so. You could say that it’s even courageous for Jews in a synagogue to come together and say: We’re going to take a moral action that’s going to create some risk to our safety because it’s the right thing to do. But how could one possibly argue that this is the right thing to do in this moment? That it is morally right to put yourself at risk by conflating yourself with the Israeli government when the Israeli government is doing the things that it is doing now?

TECHNICALLY

Some Wall Street analysts say that “vibe coding”—the AI-imparted superpower that allows even non-coders to build increasingly complicated software—could wipe out whole companies that now provide software services to other companies. These analysts may be wrong, according to a piece by Sachin Benny in the Substack Technically. Vibe coding reminds him of last decade’s Maker Movement, the burst of DIY hardware enthusiasm that promised to turn amateurs into manufacturers. He writes

The central promise—that distributed digital fabrication would bring manufacturing back to America, that every city would have micro-factories, that 3D printing would decentralize production—simply didn’t materialize. What happened instead follows a pattern that Joel Spolsky described years ago in his essay on commoditizing your complement: cheap 3D printers and Arduinos made prototyping nearly free, which was genuinely useful. But the deep, compounding knowledge of how to actually manufacture things at scale continued to accumulate in industrial bases like Shenzhen. Prototyping got democratized. The cheap tools commodified one layer of the stack and made the layer beneath it more valuable by comparison.

You can watch something structurally similar happening with vibe coding right now. People are rapidly prototyping tools that threaten to displace entire SaaS business models. But the value generated by all that rapid iteration and prototyping… accumulates at the model layer, in the training data, in the infrastructure. The vibe coders themselves risk becoming interchangeable, each one spinning up impressive demos without accumulating durable value of their own. The pattern rhymes: cheap tools democratize one layer, and the layer beneath captures the surplus.

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SMALL POTATOES

Paul Bloom continues to have a pretty good excuse for the recent paucity of Small Potatoes posts. Namely: his small potato—the newborn daughter he’s caring for. This isn’t Paul’s first child, but—as he noted in an update we linked to last week—this time is different:

I’m not merely a dad; I’m an Old Dad. I won’t trouble you with my exact age (if you’re curious, look it up, you nosy perv), but I had my two sons when I was much younger. I loved being a father then, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to love it now, but this is plainly going to be different. Thinking about those differences—and what they tell us about aging, mortality, memory, and love—may make for a post or two down the line.

GIDEON’S SUBSTACK

Noah Millman takes a close look at Tablet editor-in-chief Alana Newhouse’s much-discussed essay “Zionism For Everyone,” which argues that Israel offers a model of cohesion that could serve as a template for the renewal of societies all over the world. While Newhouse’s argument has drawn an enthusiastic response from many commenters on the right, Millman finds it unconvincing.

Millman suggests that maybe “plain old nationalism is all we’re talking about here, with the use of the word ‘Zionism’ being just a kind of rhetorical trapping.” He continues:

[T]he most obvious problem with advocating a nationalist revival is that the first round of nationalism was incredibly bloody, and continues to be so today; pay a visit to the Donbas if you doubt it. Contrary to the theory that the often violent birth of nations was a mere transition, nationalists have not generally been happy to tend their own gardens but often take a keen interest in those of their neighbors.

And then there’s this irony:

The whole point of the essay is that Newhouse thinks Zionism is a “technology” that is available to anyone. “Anyone” presumably would include the Palestinians. What might their version of Zionism—focused, necessarily, on the same land that Israeli Jews call home and that Jews around the world have prayed and yearned toward for millennia—be? And how might it be distinguished from the Palestinian nationalism that actually exists and that has motivated over sixty years of struggle against actually-existing Zionism?

NONZERO

On the NonZero podcast, British-Israeli analyst and commentator Daniel Levy tells Bob that the war on Iran will cause various nations, including longtime US allies, to consider investing their efforts in an alternative international order:

We no longer live in a unipolar world, and America has just demonstrated a degree of danger that it poses—unseriousness and unreliability—even to its closest allies that we need to construct a very different order. And part of that is you launched a war where, yet again, a lot of the backlash spillover effect is going to be felt by people who have no skin in this game. You know, in Vietnam they’re being told to go to work two days a week because they’re needing to conserve fuel. So you have the beginnings of, and the potential for, a much deeper food-fuel-fertilizer crisis that is going to hit people who are like, “Why the hell am I being hit because these crazies launch this war?”

NONZERO

Is vibe-coding over-hyped? Or, as those of us who abhor creeping redundancy in English usage would put it: Is vibe-coding hyped?

Not according to coder (and AI doomer, and host of the podcast Doom Debates) Liron Shapira. On an episode of the NonZero podcast he recounted his experience with Claude Code:

I’ve really just dived into this in the last few weeks, and just, long story short: I think I’m pretty much hanging up my title as a software engineer. My relationship to the software is very much like senior software engineering manager, where I have an army of roughly four software engineers. It’s as if I just got a budget of a million dollars a year to spend on four full-time software engineers who work for me, and check and code very quickly, doing exactly what I tell them to do. And [they] have excellent judgment, excellent speed, excellent breadth of knowledge. And it’s, like, better than hiring four humans…

I’ll write one sentence, like, ‘Hey, if you look at this file of code, I wrote it in 2023, some libraries have changed, can you rethink how to do it better?’ … And they’re like, ‘Yeah, sure, give me two minutes. Okay, here’s a plan.’ And it’s a full-page plan, and I’m like, ‘Oh, good plan,’ and then they’ll do it. And I’ll be like, ‘Well, good execution… One small question,’ and they’ll fix it, and then boom, Git commit, like, 500 lines of code change, looks perfect. That’s the experience of being a programmer today. It’s just truly insane.

The conversation will show up Thursday evening in the NonZero Podcast feed. But paid subscribers can watch or listen now (including the overtime segment, which will remain exclusive to paid subscribers after the rest of the conversation has gone public). Here’s the link:

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This is the second issue of NZNet Digest, a collection of highlights from NonZero Network member newsletters and other worthwhile media outlets. Paid subscribers to the NonZero Newsletter can get a 50 percent discount on an annual subscription to any NZNet member newsletter.

Which leads to some local news: NZNet will expand next week when The Beinart Notebook, Peter Beinart’s excellent Substack, officially joins the network. So let’s start there:

THE BEINART NOTEBOOK

Last week, a Marine Corps veteran named Brian McGinnis made headlines by shouting “America does not want to send its sons and daughters to war for Israel” during a US Senate hearing. In a video op-ed, Peter Beinart offers some thoughts on why this should worry American Jews:

What this Marine Corps veteran was saying has actually become the mainstream public understanding of why the US did go to war, that it was pushed into it by Israel. And there’s a significant kernel of truth to that. And this is happening in a moment in which real antisemitism is already rising…

It’s rising partly just because all forms of bigotry are now rising as American liberal democracy fails, and this kind of authoritarian ethno-nationalism rises. But it’s also rising because of this specific claim that America has been pushed into wars by Israel with the support of large Jewish donors like Miriam Adelson and Jewish organizations like AIPAC. And if you wanted to supercharge that antisemitism, nothing–nothing–could have supercharged it more than what we have seen right now.

Peter expanded on this subject in a conversation with Bob on the NonZero Podcast this week. (On Thursday of this week we’ll post a conversation with Iranian-born commentator and author Hooman Majd about ways the Iran war could conclude—or fail to conclude.)

A number of observers have suggested that Trump thought “decapitating” the Iranian regime--killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and other top officials—would empower an “Iranian Delcy Rodriguez,” a new leader who, like Venezuela’s new leader, would prove pliable. In an interview with Novara Media, Iran expert Vali Nasr drove home how far Trump was from being right. The segment begins with a question about Ali Khamenei’s refusal to authorize the development of long-range ballistic missiles.

Interviewer: Many of our viewers and listeners are familiar with the fact that Iran didn’t develop nuclear weapons because Khamenei was a handbrake on the development of an explicitly weapons-based nuclear program. But… you’re saying that Khamenei [also] stopped a missile program that would have potentially been able to go beyond the Eastern Mediterranean, maybe even to Western Europe?

Vali Nasr: Yes. I mean, in a way, he was a hardliner—he was anti-American, he was not a friend of the West. But he also was far less a risk taker and far less confrontational than what’s coming after him. I mean, we’ll see how his son will be, but it’s very clear that… the IRGC [Revolutionary Guard] leaders that Israel eliminated were more—and this is a comparative term of course—more moderate than the ones that replaced them. The new commander of the IRGC is far more risk-taking and dangerous than the one that Israel killed in the supreme leader’s house…

So what Israel has achieved essentially is a generational change in the IRGC. And now at the top of the Iranian system—and contrary to what Trump thinks, that decapitation brings sort of an Iranian version of Ahmed al-Sharaa, the Syrian leader, somebody who’s willing to put a tie on and come and shake hands—the opposite is happening. You’re getting military commanders that are much more willing to take the fight to the United States….

Decapitation always makes military organizations more dangerous because the new generation that comes up actually escalates to prove itself… And ultimately wars shape regimes. And this war, the way the Iranians see it, this is the last war they want to fight with the US.

And now this is turning into a war of survival of Iran—it’s not about the regime any more. So when the United States and Israel bombard Iran’s historical heritage in Isfahan, in Tehran, when President Trump says that the borders of Iran are in question and they may change at the end of this war and ‘I’m going to arm separatists to break away from Iran,’ this becomes an existential moment for the country. And that’s not the point at which you’re going to get more moderate forces coming to the front or pragmatic forces coming to the front. It is the ones that are willing to fight and die and wage a battle to save the country that are going to become the more prominent voices. So for now this war has hardened Iran, which is exactly the opposite of what President Trump imagined—that somehow the war would soften Iran.

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FOREIGN EXCHANGES

Now that she has been fired as Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem is bringing her know-how to a new role as special envoy to Trump’s “Shield of the Americas.” But what is the Shield of the Americas? Derek Davison explains:

Essentially it’s supposed to be a hemispheric coalition against drug trafficking, but in Trumpian fashion it’s neutered right out of the gate by the fact that he’s petulantly refusing to involve any countries that are run by left of center governments. That excludes Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico—three of the four largest economies in Latin America and all seemingly critical would-be participants in any meaningful counternarcotics project.

GLOBAL DISPATCHES

One thing we know for sure about the long-term consequences of the war with Iran: We don’t know what they’ll be. That point was driven home this week by Mark Leon Goldberg, who observed that “perhaps the most enduring pathology of war is the law of unintended consequences.” Consider, says Goldberg, a connection between a war launched 23 years ago and an attempted act of terrorism this week in New York City, “where two men tried to set off an improvised explosive device outside the Mayor’s residence.”

The 2003 US invasion and occupation of Iraq may have displaced Saddam Hussein, but it also gave birth to the Islamic State, which at one point controlled a large swath of Iraq and Syria and committed genocide against the Yazidis. Though [ISIS was] defeated on the Iraqi and Syrian battlefields, we are still living with the aftermath of the Islamic State’s rise to power 15 years ago. On Monday, two teenagers who allegedly pledged allegiance to ISIS were arrested for trying to detonate a bomb outside Gracie Mansion. Such are the unpredictable chain reactions that war inevitably sets into motion.

SINICA

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, among others in Silicon Valley, sees the US as engaged in an existential race with China to “artificial general intelligence” or AGI, with the outcome determining whether the world is run by a benign alliance of democracies or an axis of authoritarian autocrats. But is it possible that China hasn’t gotten that memo? On Sinica’s Trivium China Podcast, Kendra Schaefer, a consultant who has been following developments in Chinese technology for two decades, notes that China’s latest Five-Year Plan calls for exploring “development paths for general artificial intelligence” but stops short of suggesting a major government initiative:

Rather than urging tech firms to pursue AGI or indicating that the state will support basic research in AGI and funnel a bunch of state resources into that particular technology or that development direction, it [the Five-Year Plan] uses very cautious language, only calling to explore pathways towards this amorphous thing. And the hedging is really telling, because it suggests Beijing is not really fully convinced that current scaling approaches represent the only or even most viable route to AGI capabilities. And it could also just reflect genuine ambiguity within Chinese policy circles about what AGI actually means…. So, the state acknowledged that the term exists, but I wouldn’t say that they’ve named it as an explicit pursuit.

SMALL POTATOES

It’s not your fault if you can’t finish most of the non-fiction books you pick up these days. Instead, argues Paul Bloom in a post from the Small Potatoes archive, the fault lies with “the system”:

Authors are expected to write non-fiction books that are about 70,000 to 100,000 words long. Maybe this was a reasonable length in the past, but now there are too many other distractions in the world, and few of us have the Sitzfleisch anymore for that kind of long book.

You might think the market would correct this. Suppose Omakase dinners were 61 courses. Suppose most movies were over five hours long. People would lose interest, and in response, restaurants and movie studios would ratchet things down, working to give people what they want.

It’s a mystery to me why this sort of correction hasn’t happened with books.

Yes, it’s puzzling. And it may bode ill for some worthwhile forthcoming books.

But, on the brighter side: Every month lots of future readers are born, and this month one of them was named Zoe Elaine Starmans Bloom. Paul sometimes refers to her as his small potato. Congrats to all concerned!

THE GLENN SHOW

American Prestige podcast co-host Danny Bessner joined a livestream of The Glenn Show last week (as did NonZero alumnus and American Conservative senior editor Andrew Day) to discuss the war on Iran. Bessner told host Glenn Loury that the war is helping to sustain what had already been a sharp drop in support for Israel among Democrats:

Bessner: [Israeli Prime Minister] Netanyahu, I think, overplayed his hand. One of the rules of Israeli politics, until basically the second Obama administration, is that you don’t really piss off an American president, and you don’t really align with one particular political party. I think Netanyahu made the gamble—and I think he turned out to be right—that this was the opportunity to basically take over Gaza and the West Bank… I see that happening. But it came at the expense of bipartisan support for Israel.

KEN KLIPPENSTEIN

Secretary of State Marco Rubio says that Iran is “led by radical clerics” who “make decisions on the basis of theology—their view of theology, which is an apocalyptic one that has to be taken very seriously.” But you could say something similar about American military policy, argues independent journalist Ken Klippenstein:

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Welcome to the inaugural issue of NZNet Digest, a (more or less) weekly collection of highlights from NonZero Network member newsletters, and from a few other notable Substacks as well. Paid subscribers to the NonZero Newsletter can get a 50 percent discount on an annual subscription to any NZNet member newsletter.

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FOREIGN EXCHANGES

Amid reports that the son of assassinated Iranian leader Ali Khamenei is the frontrunner to succeed him, Derek Davison explains what such a succession would signal about the future direction of the government. Though any successor would likely “serve more as an enabler/figurehead for an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-run system than as an active head of state,” writes Davison, the appointment of Mojtaba Khamenei “would effectively amount to a full (or fuller) IRGC takeover of the state. This is not a choice that would endear the Islamic Republic to Iranians who have soured on it, as Mojtaba is not a particularly public or popular figure and the symbolism of turning the supreme leader office into an inherited monarchy is unlikely to go over well.”

Derek’s daily roundups of world events are especially valuable during times of unfolding crisis or conflict.

GLOBAL DISPATCHES

What is Trump’s endgame in Iran? Dalia Dassa Kaye of UCLA’s Burkle Center for International Relations suggests that one approach to answering this question is to imagine an ending that Trump would like to see in his authorized biography. Appearing on Mark Leon Goldberg’s Global Dispatches podcast, Kaye said:

Given this is his second term, his age, and so forth, it looks like he’s really looking at these legacy issues. So it’s like: I did Venezuela, I did Iran, Cuba’s in the mix. So what is he willing to live with that can say, ‘I really did something with Iran that nobody else did.’… And if he could say, “Look, it’s killing the leadership. It’s killing the supreme leader, the symbol of the revolution. And whatever comes after, you know, they may say they’re still the Islamic Republic, but they’re just a shell of their former self… America won.

But, added Kaye, “I don’t think the Israelis will be perfectly comfortable” with ending things there. Two days after she spoke, it looks like Trump, too, may hope for something beyond regime decapitation. Which leads to our next item:

NONZERO PODCAST

With US-Israeli strikes targeting Iran’s policing infrastructure, and Trump reportedly working to foster a Kurdish insurrection in Iran’s north, the collapse of government authority increasingly seems to be a war aim shared by the US and Israel. In a podcast conversation taped shortly before the war, Middle East expert Joshua Landis, drawing on recent Syrian history, suggested that many Iranians may be too sanguine about the prospects for avoiding civil war in the event of a power vacuum:

All my Syrian friends before 2011 swore to me—I would always say, “Do you really want revolution? You’re going to be like Iraq. It’s going to fall apart. Its emulous factions and people are going to start killing each other. It’s too scary to contemplate.” And they would say, “No, Josh, you don’t understand. We’re not like Iraq.” We are, you know, we’re a bourgeois nation and the urban elites are blah, blah, blah, blah. It was not true. So I distrust my Iranian friends who say, we’re a nation and we’re going to stick together. And we just saw last week, to underline this anxiety, that there were big demonstrations on some university campuses in Iran against the Islamic Republic authorities, but then the counter demonstrations and students came out and clashed with them who are pro regime. And, you know, it’s easy to try to dismiss those students as just rent-an-opposition type thing or rented loyalists, but I think these countries are deeply divided.

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SINICA PODCAST

China is outmatching everyone on drones and batteries and many other technological fronts, and a lot of Americans are scared about that—probably more scared than they should be, according to Kyle Chan of the Brookings Institution. Appearing on the Sinica Podcast, Chan told host Kaiser Kuo that China’s gain isn’t automatically America’s loss, because the two systems remain, even amid political tension, deeply intertwined:

CHAN: Continued progress in technology development means that a lot of engineers, a lot of developers, a lot of companies—they are looking to partner with the best out there … For example, Google’s Waymo, the robotaxi service, is using Zeekr electric vehicles from China’s Geely. And there I think the argument is, those Chinese EVs are a cost-effective, highly reliable, scalable platform to use, and then Waymo can add their own sort of autonomous vehicle systems on top of that … As China continues to move up the technology ladder, as Chinese companies continue to move up the value chain, we’re going to see those forces pulling [the US and China] together even more.

SMALL POTATOES

Some people worry that a coming AI-enabled utopia could, by satisfying all human craving, leave our lives devoid of meaning. Small Potatoes author Paul Bloom says they’ve got it all wrong. Even if we get everything we want materially, Bloom argues, we can never get everything we want socially:

Scarcity generates pleasure, anxiety, and purpose. But a world that is post-scarcity in the sense that there is more than enough material resources for everyone will still have another form of scarcity—people’s respect, admiration, attention, desire, and love. The bad news about a post-scarcity utopia is that we will still be unhappy much of the time. The good news is that our lives will still have meaning.

TRANSFORMER

That Anthropic has decided to rewrite–and, some would say, abandon–the safety protections laid out in what it calls its “Responsible Scaling Policy” is a sure sign we need tougher AI safety regulation, writes Shakeel Hasim:

The original RSP articulated a clear principle that should guide all AI development: we will not build what we cannot confidently make safe. That principle is dead, and what remains is an admission that voluntary commitments simply won’t work … [Voluntary commitments] were supposed to create the political capital for governments to step in and force all companies to meet a baseline level of safety and security. That has not happened. Instead, the frontier developer ostensibly most committed to building safe AI is admitting that even it can’t be trusted to do so. We can only hope that exposing the futility of such commitments makes the case for measures that can’t so easily be discarded.

THE GLENN SHOW

What happens within powerful institutions when common dissenting beliefs on contentious political topics–over, say, affirmative action or gender-affirming care for teens—get treated as moral abominations? According to Glenn Loury, who offered his thoughts during a recent lecture at Stanford, the moderate voices begin to self-censor, leaving the field to extreme views on both sides… Loury calls such censorship the inevitable product of “incentives, information, and equilibrium behavior”:

When reputational penalties attach to certain conclusions, the people most likely to speak are either those insulated from the penalties or those who reject the moral premises of the audience altogether. Extremes become over-represented. The cautious, empirically minded middle withdraws. This is not because moderate views vanish, but because they are priced out of public expression. This process of adverse selection … can be self-reinforcing. Once some people suppress their views, others update their beliefs about what can safely be said, and the perceived reputational risk of expressing those views increases. Silence begets silence.

GIDEON’S SUBSTACK

What the attacks on Iran and the recent blacklisting of Anthropic by the Pentagon have in common, argues Noah Millman, is an indifference to rulebooks. Millman believes the resulting precedents are dire and durable. The point of having the government abide by the law, writes Millman, “is to foster trust generally, not only of the state but between people who don’t know each other.” He continues:

When you move outside the realm of law and trust, and into the realm of power and fear, that’s no longer really possible. So regardless of whether the war in Iran “works out” in the sense of leading to at least a somewhat less terrible regime there and minimal American and allied casualties, and even if the sanctions against Anthropic “work out” in the sense that the company isn’t driven out of business and the Pentagon doesn’t wind up powering up Skynet—even if we avoid the worst, we’re entering a new world.

BEINART NOTEBOOK

Peter Beinart cites the 1946 Nuremberg Tribunal in arguing that the US-Israeli attack on Iran constitutes “the supreme international crime”—but the crime he’s talking about isn’t the one we typically associate with Nuremberg. In a video op-ed, Beinart says:

We think now of Nuremberg as having put Nazi leaders on trial for genocide and crimes against humanity and those evils. But in fact what the tribunal said was that the crime of aggression was, quote, “the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” There was a time when leading Americans saw attacks on countries that did not threaten them as the core evil in the world, because it unleashed so many other evils. It was what they associated with the evil of the Nazis’ unprovoked attacks in Poland, in France, in the Low Countries. They associated it with the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. It was considered fundamentally immoral and fundamentally un-American. And now this is the world that Israel and the United States are bringing us towards.

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NUKESLETTER

Carnegie fellow Ankit Panda argues that Iran took a “catastrophic approach to deterrence” that wound up emboldening its adversaries:

The U.S. intelligence community repeatedly assessed through 2025 that Iran had not decided to build a weapon. Khamenei’s fatwa [against the development or use of nuclear weapons] was cited by Iranian officials as proof of restraint. But this very restraint, which was intended to signal responsibility, was read by adversaries as a signal that Iran could be struck before it weaponized. Iran had, in effect, constructed the worst possible nuclear posture: close enough to a bomb to justify preventive attack, yet unwilling to cross the threshold that might have actually deterred one.

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