Hello Reader,
​
​Want to share this? Here's a link.
​

Editor's Note: this piece breaks format — a single feature-length essay instead of the usual mix of shorter dispatches. Consider it an experiment: more analysis, fewer scenes, a different rhythm than the story-driven voice this newsletter was built on.

Next week, we’ll return to the usual format. In the meantime, I'd love to know what you think — please consider hitting reply to let me know.

The Global Fight Against Tyranny

The smoke was still rising over Tehran when the chorus began.

"War of choice" filled the coverage within the hour. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who led dozens of colleagues in a formal letter protesting the strikes that killed Ali Khamenei, called it exactly that — "a war of choice without Congressional authorization." House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries agreed: "the reckless and costly war of choice."​

This episode isn't interested in defending every choice the Trump administration made about whether and how to fight this war — there are real questions about its wisdom and its strategy, and we'll return to them in future episodes.

Zoom out, though, and the strike on Iran looks like one flashpoint in a longer war — one Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea have been fighting against the United States for years, to whatever extent each has been able to.

Winston Churchill published The Gathering Storm in 1948 to show how easily that earlier war could have been prevented — how, in his telling, "the malice of the wicked was reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous."

Churchill argued the peace-loving Allies had invited aggression. Restraint born of "inertia and timidity," he wrote elsewhere in the book, could itself become one of "the prime agents of mortal danger."

Those warnings apply today, and the danger is becoming ever more mortal.

Iran, Russia, China, and North Korea didn't start this particular war. But each has spent years doing everything in its power to hurt the United States, hurting it exactly as much as Washington has allowed — killing as many Americans as it could, and opposing the interests of the American people at every turn.

“The Malice of the Wicked”

Iran has spent 47 years trying to kill American soldiers. 241 Marines died in a single truck bombing in Beirut in 1983. Nineteen U.S. airmen died at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996. More than 600 died at the hands of Iranian-trained militias during the 2003–2011 Iraq War. Add it up, by conservative counts, and no nation on Earth has killed more American soldiers since 1979.

Russia's count is smaller, but not for lack of effort. Its military intelligence service reportedly paid Taliban fighters roughly $200,000 for every coalition soldier they killed in Afghanistan, Americans included. And for a decade, American diplomats and intelligence officers have collapsed worldwide with sudden headaches, vertigo, and brain injuries — a condition publicly unattributed but increasingly tied by independent investigators to a Russian military intelligence unit whose members were rewarded for developing "non-lethal acoustic weapons." Roughly 1,500 people have been affected.

As the American far left and far right converge on a consensus that the West is the world’s primary oppressor, up to a million Uyghurs sit in Chinese detention for the crime of being a religious minority. If that isn't slavery in 2026, the word means nothing. Russia's war has killed nearly 17,000 verified Ukrainian civilians, and likely many more. Iran killed an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 of its own people in January, for protesting in the street.

None of these four countries holds a real election, tolerates a free press, or gives its minorities genuine representation. Forget LGBT rights — they don't exist.

This is the governance model they actively seek to export to the world. Russia's Africa Corps, the rebranded Wagner Group, executes civilians and raids gold mines across Mali, Sudan, and the Central African Republic. In addition to the $1 trillion global influence campaign, the Belt and Road Initiative, China trains foreign officials in the mechanics of one-party rule at Tanzania's Nyerere Leadership School, and runs surveillance for at least 80 governments worldwide.

Ninety miles from Florida, Chinese signals-intelligence stations in Cuba have intercepted American communications since the 1990s; in Peru, its $1.3 billion Chancay megaport prompted a State Department warning that "cheap Chinese money costs sovereignty." And Iran, which has never wavered on exterminating the nine million souls who comprise the nation of Israel, funded, armed, and trained the group that carried out October 7th to the tune of roughly $70 to $100 million a year, for decades – as it lent its own assistance to the Assad regime.

This is the company China now keeps more closely than ever.

“The Prime Agents of Mortal Danger”

Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs and not a man prone to overstatement, told the Senate last year that China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea were "pursuing unprecedented levels of cooperation." Last month, testifying again, he sharpened it: the four now share intelligence and combat capability directly, converging on the same goals across multiple fronts at once.

A new book, Axis of Aggressors, lays out the inventory in alarming detail: Iran supplied the drone Russia now builds domestically. North Korea sent ballistic missiles, artillery shells by the millions, and soldiers by the thousands. China supplied 70 percent of the machine tools and 90 percent of the legacy chips rebuilding Russia's war machine.

And more dangerously, the traffic now runs both ways. Reuters reported in May that China secretly trained 200 Russian soldiers, some of whom later fought Ukrainians in Crimea. Since 2024, Chinese officers have trained the other direction, at a Russian complex near Volgograd, harvesting lessons from a war China hasn't had to fight itself.

“Virtuous Motives, Trammelled by Inertia and Timidity”

Georgia in 2008. Crimea in 2014. Each time: strongly worded statements, then nothing. Europe's own defenses had already gone soft by then — NATO's European members spent barely 1.5 percent of GDP on defense in the decade before 2022, well under the alliance's own 2 percent floor, even after Crimea should have been the wake-up call.

In 2013, Bashar al-Assad gassed his own people after Barack Obama had called chemical weapons a red line. Assad gassed civilians again in 2017 and 2018 while Russia vetoed every attempt at the UN to hold him to account. In 2021, a chaotic American withdrawal closed out twenty years in Afghanistan with a country collapsing in days. It’s difficult to imagine that didn’t play a role in Putin’s Ukraine calculation.

Each decision was debatable in isolation, but together, they formed a clear pattern. Moscow, Tehran, Beijing, and Pyongyang are built to read patterns and probe for weakness. Every hesitation became evidence. Every unanswered provocation bought the next one.

“The Gathering Storm”

On July 6th, a Chinese submarine fired an intercontinental ballistic missile for the first time — built on quieting technology Russia supplied, the same day the two navies ran their first joint drone-warfare drills. Moscow once treated that technology as a state secret. It doesn't anymore. "China can now ask things of Russia that Russia cannot ask of China," one scholar told The Economist — a debt Moscow is increasingly willing to pay.

And new U.S. intelligence reported this month has Putin weighing a limited assault on a NATO country before 2029, aiming to fracture the alliance. On August 16th, NATO jets shot down a suspected Russian drone over Romania — the fourth such incursion since the Ukraine war began, part of what the alliance now calls a near-weekly occurrence.

Calculating. Probing. Expanding to whatever extent they can.

“Democracy Is Always Two Years Behind the Dictator”

The West still outspends this axis roughly three to one on defense. But Russia now pours 7.5 percent of its GDP into its war machine, more than double the NATO average — and the West's advantage assumes technology that takes years and billions to build. Cheap drones erase that assumption. A first-person-view drone guided by commercial AI can destroy a multimillion-dollar tank, a trade that rewards whoever builds the most drones fastest, not whoever spends the most. China has spent years subsidizing exactly that manufacturing base. The U.S. may spend three times more than China on its military, but most of that money maintains platforms already a generation old. Russia's economy, however battered, is now a wartime economy. Three-to-one starts to matter less than who turns a factory floor into a drone swarm first.

Watch the clouds darken. Watch whether Kim Jong Un finally boards his armored train for Moscow rather than Beijing — Pyongyang's foreign minister was laying groundwork there as recently as July 19. And watch whether NATO's summer of shot-own drones turns into something with a body count.

There are plenty of good reasons to question the wisdom and the strategy of Trump's war against Iran. But before settling on "unprovoked" and “war of choice” as the whole verdict, consider what Churchill wrote in The Gathering Storm about the cost of waiting for a safer moment to fight:

“If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.”

Or we could just kick back and watch the gathering storm.

Sources: Foundation for Defense of Democracies, RealClearDefense, The Economist, Kyiv Independent (Ukraine), Wall Street Journal, The Times of Israel (Israel), NPR, South China Morning Post (Hong Kong)

Already subscribed? Share this issue with someone who should be reading.