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Foreign Affairs J.D. Vance’s Mixed Signals on Iran The vice president’s realist impulses sit uneasily alongside reflexive hawkism.  Credit: Sean Gallup/Getty Images As the U.S. and Iran are engaged in a diplomatic effort to avert an all-out war, Vice President J.D. Vance’s recent comments on Iran present a study in contradictions. They exposed the unresolved tension within the Republican Party’s foreign policy—a tension between a pragmatic desire to deal with the world as it is and a reflexive hawkishness. In an interview with Megyn Kelly, Vance said the Trump administration did not want to repeat the quagmire of the Iraq war and was focused on American security, not trying to spread democracy to Iran. He said President Donald Trump was willing to talk to everybody but noted that “the person who makes the decisions in Iran is the supreme leader” not Iran’s president. That, of course, is not a new insight, but it does reflect a dispassionate analysis for which Vance deserves credit. He was stating an operational fact, not launching a moral crusade, and his frustration that “we can’t just talk to the actual leadership” stems from a transactional, realist mindset. He correctly identified the core dysfunction: the president of the United States can “pick up a phone and call” Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, Chinese leader Xi Jinping, or even the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un, but not the ultimate leader of Iran, which makes conducting diplomacy with that nation exceedingly difficult. This framing by Vance is significant because it consciously sidesteps the dominant, moralistic one used by hawks in both the Republican and Democratic parties, especially after a recent massive crackdown last month on protestors in Iran. Vance praised the Iranian opposition but did not declare that talking to the regime grants it “legitimacy.” Instead, he focused on the mechanics of power—who holds it and how Washington can engage them to advance U.S. interests. This is a foundational insight of foreign policy realism: You must deal with regimes as they are, not as you wish them to be. However, Vance undercut his own realist impulses in the same interview by inflating the threat from Tehran to U.S. interests. “Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon,” Vance said. “If [Trump] feels like the military is the only option, then he’s ultimately going to choose that option.” The problem, of course, is that military action is clearly not the only option, however challenging diplomacy may be. Iran has consistently denied it is seeking nuclear weapons—a claim corroborated by U.S. intelligence—and engaged in negotiations with the U.S. during the first half of 2025 until it was struck by Israel, later joined by the U.S. And even after the June war, Tehran continued signaling its availability for nuclear talks—which is the very reason U.S.–Iran talks took place in Oman yesterday. And Iran has complied with a nuclear deal in the past and consented to an inspections regime. Vance’s language, in that part, abandoned his own pragmatic analysis of impediments to diplomacy with Iran for implied maximalist goals, backed with a threat of war. This rhetoric does not create a diplomatic off-ramp; it builds a ladder to escalation. It is precisely the kind of framing that his comments on the Iraq war and Iran’s political system appeared to be moving beyond. The political reaction was a perfect mirror of this tension. Vance’s threat was promptly endorsed by AIPAC, the standard-bearer for the hawkish, neoconservative foreign policy that Vance’s populist base distrusts. As Daniel McAdams of the libertarian Ron Paul Institute noted, this alignment is a liability with the rising generation of Republican voters. “AIPAC thanking Vance is not the win Vance may think it is. It is no longer a force-multiplier you want on your side and out front. It is a political liability you want to remain in the background,” McAdams wrote. Vance’s statements expose a deeper, more personal political dilemma as he positions himself for 2028. The vice president is caught between a need to project unwavering loyalty to Trump and the strategic challenge of defining a distinctive, winning foreign policy lane for a post-Trump Republican Party. Politically, Vance begins the 2028 cycle in a position of strength, widely regarded as the heir to the Trump movement. However, potential rivals are already maneuvering. Among them, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas has chosen to attack Tucker Carlson, a key Vance ally and staunch opponent of America’s endless wars in the Middle East. In doing so, Cruz is establishing a clear, hawkish, pro-Israel contrast to Vance’s more restrained posture. He is effectively staking an early claim to the neoconservative and traditional lane within the party. This brings us to Vance’s fundamental political problem, which his Iran comments embody. On one hand, the traditional, interventionist wing of the GOP—represented by Cruz and institutional forces like AIPAC—remains a potent force. By endorsing the threat of military force against Iran, Vance signals to this faction that he can be trusted on core security issues. On the other hand, the evolving Republican coalition, particularly the newer, younger, and more populist voters central to the MAGA base, show markedly different foreign policy instincts. They are more skeptical of foreign entanglements, more critical of unconditional support for allies, including Israel, and desire a foreign policy tightly focused on tangible national interests. Vance’s clear-eyed diagnosis of the dangers of Mideast wars and his focus on U.S. interests rather than spreading democracy spoke directly to this realist, deal-making impulse. In trying to satisfy both camps, he may satisfy neither. Vance will never be seen as the natural candidate of the AIPAC–neoconservative establishment; that lane is already being occupied and fortified by rivals like Cruz and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. His comparative advantage lies in his connection to Trump’s populist base and a growing appetite among the Republican voters for a more focused, interest-based foreign policy. Vance’s dilemma is thus not just about Iran; it is a preview of whether he can forge a coherent foreign policy identity that doesn’t sacrifice his unique political strengths in a futile attempt to win over a faction that will never be fully his. The post J.D. Vance’s Mixed Signals on Iran appeared first on The American Conservative.

Culture The Moral Bankruptcy of the Consultants Some people’s suffering is more enjoyable than others’. https://www.flickr.com/photos/51035626656@N01/521083416/ Credit: ste3ve La Rochefoucauld said that there was in the misfortunes of our friends something not entirely unpleasing.  I remember the shock with which I first read that; I was very young at the time. It was not the same kind of shock as that of discovering that your best friend has been stealing from you for years. It was more the shock of recognition of something that you have always known to be true but have failed fully to acknowledge.  But it is not only in the misfortunes of our friends that we take an illicit pleasure: We do so in the misfortunes of those barely known to us and against whom we can have nothing personal. If you listen to people talking on a bus, or anywhere else, a good proportion of the time they are recounting with relish the misfortunes of others. Schadenfreude is so universal an emotion that I am surprised no one has declared it to be, like health, a human right. As a human right, it is almost as important as that of having someone to look down on.  A few days ago, a neighbor of mine, with whom I enjoy very friendly relations, telephoned me and asked whether I had heard. When someone asks you whether you have heard, it means something bad for someone, though not for the person who asks it.  I hadn’t heard, but I knew that I was about to do so. Another neighbour, with whom we pass the time of day but nothing more, had gone bankrupt—over what for us would be a large sum of money, but would be mere small change for some.  There was no mistaking my neighbor’s pleasure in telling me this. I do not want to make him out to be any worse than I, for I confess to a frisson of pleasure at the news, though I had no real reason, apart from a generalized malice and ill-will towards my fellow creatures, to find pleasure in it. True, the new bankrupt lived in the grandest house in the neighbourhood—but of envy I acquit myself. I do not regard myself as being in competition with everyone around me and am satisfied with what I have. My malice was not 100 percent disinterested or causeless, however. I knew the bankrupt in the days of his prosperity to have been engaged upon that parasitic activity known as “consultancy.” He had seemed to be doing very well out of it. The modern world is plagued by consultancy. I have very little idea of what it is, or of what consultants actually do. I suppose they go round telling people how to do things in a way that is supposedly better than the way in which they are already doing them, but it seems not to be necessary for them to have any special knowledge of the things that they are being consulted about, or indeed any special knowledge of  anything: no knowledge, and no experience either, for it also seems to be the case that young people come out of college or university and go straight into consultancy without any experience of anything. It is true that when I was their age, I too was full of advice to give, but the world was sufficiently sensible in those days to have taken no notice of me. Only in a world of assumed incompetence can so much consultancy be thought necessary. No doubt it is sometimes true that a third party can see things that the people more directly involved cannot see. This is one of the arguments in favour of psychotherapy: A person is so involved in his own affairs that someone viewing them from outside, with no vested interests or axes to grind, is able to see what the person cannot even if he is in other respects an intelligent and sensible person.  But there are now giant companies of consultants, which must surely have a vested interest in the inefficiency and incompetence of others, because inefficiency and incompetence are what makes consultancy necessary in the first place. There was a time when bureaucrats were expected themselves to manage the organizations of which they were in charge, but now the more bureaucrats there are, the more consultants they seem to need. The latter charge fantastic sums for their  good offices, the results of which are impossible to gauge. Worse still, bureaucrats and consultants are like molecules that pass by osmosis through that semipermeable membrane that now divides bureaucracies from consultancies.  Bernard Shaw once wrote that he who can does, while he who cannot teaches. He wrote before the age of consultancy. He would now write that he who can does, while he who cannot consults. And yet to say of a man that he cannot requires that you know what he is trying to do. A consultant who makes a large amount of money cannot be accused of not being able to do anything, because what he is trying to do is make a large amount of money—ex hypothesi, precisely what he does. A politician cannot be accused of incompetence merely because he has reduced his country to ruins and despair, if his object is to remain in power and he succeeds in doing so.     A consultant such as our neighbor who specializes in telling people how to run their businesses is incompetent because he goes bankrupt, not because his ministrations do no good to anyone. Even going bankrupt is not necessarily a manifestation of incompetence if, over the years, the bankrupt has managed to extract enough money from his business to his personal use so that his bankruptcy hardly affects his personal comfort. Of late, the distinction between public and private, never absolute, has become ever more blurred. Does a consultancy company whose principal client is the government or other public agencies belong to the public or to the private sector? As my neighbor and I discussed the bankruptcy of our other neighbor, we managed to invest our malicious pleasure at his misfortune with a semblance of moral outrage—another great source of pleasure, of course.   The post The Moral Bankruptcy of the Consultants appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs Scott Horton Debunks Iran War Propaganda The antiwar, libertarian author sat down with The American Conservative to discuss Tehran’s nuclear program and the misinformation surrounding it. Credit: Borna_Mirahmadian Scott Horton sat down with The American Conservative’s Harrison Berger to discuss the forces driving U.S. confrontation with Iran, focusing on the legal status of Iran’s nuclear program, the intelligence record on weaponization claims, and the collapse of the 2015 JCPOA nuclear agreement. Horton explains how successive U.S. administrations, under constant Israeli pressure, have framed Iran’s uranium enrichment itself as a casus belli, despite the nation’s continued membership in the Non-Proliferation Treaty and repeated U.S. intelligence assessments finding no active nuclear weapons program. It was reported that Trump has given the Iranian authorities an ultimatum. They have to not only end their nuclear program, but must also stop producing missiles that can reach Israel, and end support for what are called these “Iranian proxy groups,” like Hezbollah and the Houthis. We’re always told that Iran or Russia—or whichever country that the hawks want to send us into war with at the moment—that they’re always the most intractable enemy, they just can’t be negotiated with. But it seems like the side that is impossible to negotiate with, at least in this case, is the United States, who keeps shifting these terms at Israel’s behest and demanding that Iran accept terms that we already know are unacceptable to that country. Is that incorrect? No, that’s the way I look at that. A close parallel from history would be the Rambouillet Accord, Madeleine Albright’s ultimatum to Slobodan Milosevic to prevent the Kosovo War of 1999. It was a deal that was made to be rejected. And I think this is the same kind of thing where they’re essentially laying down demands that are, certainly in the case of the missiles, just impossible. Demanding that they stop supporting Hezbollah and the Houthis and then entirely abandoning their nuclear program, not just enrichment, I mean this has been an absolute hardline position of the Ayatollah since 2006, that once they mastered the nuclear fuel cycle that they’re never going back and they’re never going to stop enrichment. It’s a matter of national independence and national pride. And then the missiles, I mean, what good is a missile deterrent if it has to be short of the range that can hit the country that’s threatening you? And it’s just such an unreasonable demand on its face. If you compare this to 2003, that was all lies. But at least Colin Powell built a whole sandcastle for you there. But here, all they’ve got is conventional missiles. It’s hard to even call that a pretext. I want to ask you and redirect back to the Iran nuclear program because there has been this propaganda campaign around it for many years, going back at least three decades, to try to convince Americans that Iran’s civilian nuclear program is actually a very dangerous weapon and that it’s a threat not just to Israel but to us here in the United States. You are probably one of the only people who has this kind of encyclopedic knowledge about that topic, not just the politics but also some of the nuclear science involved. Can you take some time to explain how that propaganda campaign has evolved and why it makes no sense? Yes, huge topic. So let’s start with the fact that Iran has been a member of the non-proliferation treaty since 1968. And as part of their agreement under that treaty, they have a deal with the International Atomic Energy Agency, which has the authority under their safeguards agreement to inspect any facilities where nuclear material is being introduced into any machines of any kind, are used in any way. In order, in their terminology, to verify the non-diversion of this declared nuclear material to any military or other special purpose. And so that’s the same deal that all non-nuclear weapon states who joined the NPT promised to do. They began to try to start building nuclear reactors in the Shah’s time in the ’70s, but all that got put on the shelf after the revolution of 1979, until this century. The thing is they had no source of their own fuel for the reactors until they built their Natanz enrichment facility in 2005 and 2006. They had their own domestic supplies of uranium and they bought the equipment on the black market from the Pakistanis, from A.Q. Khan. In the 1990s, they tried to buy a light water reactor from China. But a light water reactor cannot produce weapons-grade plutonium. Its waste is so polluted with other isotopes that it is impossible to process for fuel for a weapon. But Bill Clinton stopped China and interfered in that. And so they ended up building heavy water reactors instead that can produce plutonium that can be reprocessed potentially into weapons fuel. So just a hint of the beginnings of the counterproductivity of American intervention on this question in the first place there. But then, in 2006, they opened Natanz. What happens there is you take partially refined uranium ore and convert it into uranium hexafluoride gas, which you introduce into centrifuge cascades. Those centrifuges spin the gas at super high speeds and separate uranium-235 from uranium-238. At 3.6 percent, you would use that enriched uranium for your electricity program. At 20 percent, you use that for medical isotopes; for radioactive dye and radiation for cancer treatment. At closer to 90 percent, now you’re talking weapons grade uranium. The 60 percent enriched uranium was just a bargaining chip in the first place. They got a loophole in the non-proliferation treaty which allowed them to pursue nuclear technology for peaceful purposes. But that includes mastering the fuel cycle. From the point of view of the American hawks, particularly those inspired by Likud, that has to be unacceptable. That’s obviously a policy made in Tel Aviv, not Washington. What the Ayatollah seems to have done was create a bluff, a latent nuclear deterrent, not an atom bomb, but the ability to make one. This is essentially the same position that Brazil, Germany, and Japan are in. They are all nuclear threshold states. Although nobody is threatening them. From the Israeli point of view, enrichment at all is unacceptable. They’ll sabotage facilities, murder scientists, and pressure the United States. George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden all swore they would go to war before allowing Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon. In 2007, the National Intelligence Estimate said Iran had stopped studying how to make a bomb. The claims of a secret parallel weapons program could never be proven because it didn’t exist. The so-called smoking laptop was an Israeli forgery smuggled through the MEK. The IAEA and CIA confirmed that. The warhead nose cone story fell apart. The green salt story fell apart. Obama pursued the JCPOA to prevent a war. Iran poured concrete into the heavy water reactor, they scaled back centrifuge cascades at Natanz, they converted Fordow into a research facility rather than a production facility, and they expanded inspections far above and beyond any safeguards any other country had with the IAEA. In exchange, sanctions were supposed to be lifted, but they largely were not. Trump tore up the deal in 2018 at Netanyahu’s insistence and imposed maximum pressure sanctions. Biden kept the same policy. Last June, Trump accepted the idea that enrichment equals a weapons program and bombed Fordow and Natanz. From what I’ve seen, Fordow and Natanz have been taken offline, and the conversion facility at Isfahan was destroyed.  Iran agreed again not to build nuclear weapons. They’ve agreed to that since 1968. Whether they give up enrichment now, I don’t know. Face and sovereignty matter to leaders of sovereign governments. What do you think we should expect from the new talks between the U.S. and Iran? I don’t know whether Trump is trying to build an escape hatch or if he means to give them an offer they can’t possibly accept. My money’d be on that, but I really don’t know. Trump talked about Operation Eagle Claw, when Jimmy Carter tried to rescue the hostages and it ended in a debacle. Trump went on about how when he sent the Delta Force guys in to get Maduro, he was risking that kind of disaster. That goes to show he does have some fear about consequences. Starting a war in an unprovoked, aggressive fashion, a war of regime change that leads to unlimited and unpredictable commitments, he’d be out of his mind to do it. That’s the best argument against it. He has no real reason to do it and a hell of a lot of reasons not to risk it. Editor’s note: This transcript is an excerpt from a longer conversation and has been lightly edited for readability. The post Scott Horton Debunks Iran War Propaganda appeared first on The American Conservative.

There's an extremely niche but surprisingly popular corner of the Internet devoted to grime and muck being scrubbed away. Yes, really. People find it to oh-so satisfying, and it's known as #CleanTok. It's mostly wholesome, cathartic fun, but every once in a while, controversy comes in. For a mom named Audrey (who clearly has a passion for cleaning hacks, given her TikTok handle of @organizedchaos4), that moment came in October 2024 after she filmed herself doing a deep clean of her then 12-year-old daughter’s room. Several people chimed in to accuse her of spoiling her kid, more or less.Granted, Audrey admitted that she had posted the video “hoping that the trolls would get those thumbs a-movin’.” So when they did indeed come after her, she was ready. “I surprised my daughter by cleaning her room for her. She's been getting herself up for 6 a.m. practices, she gets herself to school, she's out of the house before the rest of us have even woken up,” Audrey says in the clip.“Keep in mind she's 12. In return for all that she's been doing, I thought it would be a nice treat if I just did a quick speed clean of her room. It was no big deal.”Audrey goes on to say that the point of her follow-up video was to reiterate the importance of “extending grace.” @organizedchaos4 TikTok · Organized Chaos | Audrey "That's what I did for my daughter. She had fallen behind on her room and I helped her,” she says. “It costs you nothing, and it creates this ripple effect of kindness. We all have setbacks, we all have failures, we all make mistakes and if you say you don't you're lying. By extending grace we are spreading kindness, we are spreading compassion. If you can't extend grace to your own children then there's no way you're going to extend it to anyone else in the world and that's a scary world to live in.”Audrey then argues that being kind to others often makes it “easier” to be kind to ourselves, which is “vital for our mental health.”She then concludes, “So if you watched the video yesterday or you're watching this one today and you're thinking negative thoughts, ask yourself, ‘Am I quick to judge, be resentful, be negative or am I quick to extend grace?' or ask yourself, 'Have I ever stumbled and wish grace had been extended to me?’” Tired tween needing a break sleeps at her desk.Canva Photos Down in the comments, it's clear Audrey is certainly not alone in her thinking.“Kindness costs nothing and provides everything,” one person wrote.“This will only inspire your daughter to keep working hard and give back when she has a chance to, and know she can rely on you when she struggles,” added another.Several other moms even chimed in about doing something similar for their kids.“Exactly I did the same thing for my 23-year-old daughter who works full-time and is a full-time college student. She’s 100% independent. I just want to take some off stress off her plate,” one mom sharedAnother said, “I do this for my daughter still, and it's her house.”As with all things in parenting, balance is key. Of course we don’t want to instill laziness, but at the same time, kids can’t be expected to overachieve in all areas at all times. Adults can’t even manage this without a little help. It sounds like this is truly a case of a good kid acting as responsibly as humanly possible, and a mom just wanting to help out where she can, all why'll teaching her the world can be a safe place. Hard to see anything wrong with that!Cleary, none of the negative comments have dissuaded Audrey from taking care of her daughter this way. In fact, in one video, she mentions that, due to her love language being "acts of service," she actually enjoys doing it. @organizedchaos4 For everyone in yesterday’s video saying “if she can’t keep it clean she doesn’t deserve it” let’s apply that logic to you, as well. If you’ve ever had a semi-messy home, you don’t deserve it.

The human body is capable of some pretty strange feats. Did you know there's a condition called Stoneman Syndrome where a person's ligaments slowly transform into bones? Or how about Persistent Sexual Arousal Syndrome where a person lives their entire life on the brink of orgasm? Or how about Auto-brewery Syndrome, where a person's gut biome naturally creates alcohol out of normal foods and beverages, thereby making them intoxicated without drinking a drop of booze?That was certainly the case when then 20-year-old Savannah Stuthers went in for a relatively routine cyst removal that turned out to be anything but.Stuthers dealt with months of cramps, pain, and even bleeding—which doctors told her was normal after having an IUD inserted—before she couldn't take it anymore and took herself to the emergency room.There, ER docs discovered a sizable cyst on one of her ovaries. Because the cyst was so large, the OBGYN at the hospital wanted to have it removed as soon as possible. Within a few days, Stuthers was wheeled into surgery. The doctors went in to remove Stuthers' tumor and go more than they bargained for. Photo by JAFAR AHMED on Unsplash When she woke up from the anesthesia, the doctors had news. Her mom was there to capture the moment Stuthers heard that what was removed from her body was no normal ovarian cyst. It was a teratoma—a unique kind of tumor that grows from germ cells (cells that eventually become sperm or, in Stuthers' case, eggs). Because of their origin, teratomas frequently grow hair and even teeth, along with various kinds of tissue. The teratoma inside Stuthers' ovary had all that, and more... The surgeons even thought Stuther's teratoma may have had an eyeball! (Later testing ruled this out... close call!) Typically, they grow in women's ovaries but men can get teratomas as well, usually showing up in the testicles.Here's the exact moment Savannah Stuthers learned what had been growing inside of her. And here's her recounting the whole story later on: @savannahstuthers Replying to @jadieee my teratoma nightmare story #teratomatumor Stuthers posted the photo on TikTok where it went mega-viral to the tune of nearly 40 million views. The morbid curiosity in the comment thread was absolutely off the charts. Many people had never heard of teratomas before, and most of them wish they still hadn't."Girl I could have went my entire life without looking up what a teratoma is," one wrote."I just looked at photos of teratomas and it made my arm get chills," a user added."it's crazy the body can actually create new eyes and teeth and THIS is what it chooses to use that ability for," said another.Other commenters were just here to applaud the teratoma representation:"this happened to me, they removed my ovary with the teratoma and my surgeous said it burst on her