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John Jones knows about voter suppression. Currently the president of Dickinson College, Jones – nominated in 2002 by President George W. Bush and confirmed unanimously by the U.S. Senate – served for almost two decades as a federal court judge. In that role, Jones presided over a case, filed just prior to the November 2020 presidential election, in which a conservative legal foundation sued Pennsylvania’s top election official, alleging that she had allowed 21,000 dead people to remain on the voter rolls. The group asked Jones to stop those people from voting.

Jones denied the request. “In an election where every vote matters, we will not disenfranchise potentially eligible voters based solely upon the allegations of a private foundation,” he wrote in his memorandum on the case. In this interview with The Conversation politics and legal affairs editor Naomi Schalit, Jones discusses President Donald Trump’s March 31, 2026, executive order to wrest control of mail-in voting from states and give it to the U.S. Postal Service and the Department of Homeland Security; how the constitutional design of U.S. voting bars such federal control; and how Trump’s order would disenfranchise voters and is now the subject of lawsuits by voting rights groups and 23 states.

Article 1, Section 4, of the Constitution says, “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations.” When you saw the executive order by the president, what did you think?

My first thought was, this executive order is dead on arrival. It assumes two problems that really don’t exist.

States are empowered under Article 1, Section 4, of the Constitution to conduct elections and set the time, place and manner of those elections.

The president’s March order asserts that states don’t maintain active and appropriate voter rolls. That’s just not true. State after state takes that very, very seriously, and it’s a principle of federalism that states are given the responsibility for conducting elections. This includes maintaining accurate voter rolls, which, despite the noise to the contrary, states have historically done very well.

The second inaccuracy that undergirds this executive order is that there is rampant fraud in mail-in voting. There is absolutely no evidence to show that that is true.

So you have those twin rationales that are, in my view, demonstrably untrue. And as someone who believes that we need to defer to the laws and the Constitution, not to mention find accurate facts, this is deeply troubling. It’s just beyond the president’s authority to do this.

There are other problems. They are less critical but equally fatal.

President Trump said on signing the executive order that “the cheating on mail-in voting is legendary.” So the order gives the U.S. Postal Service the job of determining who may cast mail ballots, in cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security. Is that one of the problems you see?

That is not what the post office is equipped to do. I could joke here that they have a hard enough time at the U.S. Postal Service getting the mail delivered. Now they’re supposed to develop a program in concert with Homeland Security so that they could work to disqualify voters because they’re not on the list that Homeland Security provides to them that supposedly contains U.S. citizens. Homeland Security is simply not equipped to do this either. This is out of their skill set as well.

What’s the upshot?

Setting aside all the legal and constitutional hurdles, if this would survive judicial scrutiny, it clearly would disenfranchise voters. We have a country that has an increasing group of citizens who really like to vote by mail – including, by the way, the president of the United States.

And now the administration is in effect saying, “We want to make it really, really difficult for you to vote by mail,” because of these contrived and, quite frankly, false premises that have to do with voter rolls and fraud in elections. There are legal challenges over this order in federal courts in D.C. and Massachusetts. The result will be a legal race to see which of those courts enjoins the policy first.

Why does anybody have to sue if this is simply not in the president’s power to make happen?

Because if they don’t sue to enjoin this, since these agencies – the Postal Service and Homeland Security – are under the executive branch, they’ll just go ahead and implement this cumbersome and impossible initiative.

Secretaries of state have pushed back against this. In a separate move by the administration, the Department of Justice has asked states to turn over their voter rolls, and many have refused to do so, standing on the principle that it’s beyond the executive to demand those. Various federal courts have backed the states so far. One of the problems with the request is a lack of confidence that the information can be kept safe by the federal government. And states work very, very hard to do that.

When I was on the federal bench and denied the injunction in the lawsuit filed by a conservative legal foundation that sought to take 20,000 plus voters off the rolls, I did so because there was no good proof that they were, in fact, deceased, which is what the suit asserted. Subsequent to the election, at the now infamous Four Seasons landscaping press conference, Rudy Giuliani was waving my decision in the air and decrying the fact that dead people voted in Pennsylvania. That was simply not true.

These types of hyperbolic claims, made up out of whole cloth, stoke fears. This recent executive order is a solution that is looking for a problem that doesn’t exist.

Why did the framers of the Constitution set up a process where states run elections and not the federal government?

Well, first of all the federal government didn’t have the apparatus to conduct elections. And states had been running elections; they knew how to do it. There was a great deal of trust in the states’ ability to run elections. And there was the core debate of federalism, as to what powers states could retain, and they didn’t want to abdicate many of those powers. There was also a debate about the potential for fraud, that if there was a single entity controlling all the elections – that is, if you centralize elections under one politically motivated executive – it’s a really fraught situation which can be abused.

The Constitution is clear, and unless amended, Article 1, Section 4, is – to use the trite phrase – what it is. The power rests with the states, absent congressional action. There is no mention of the president. None. This executive order is thus, in my view, patently unconstitutional, and I harbor little doubt that it will be found to be so.

John E. Jones III does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

It may sound hard to believe, but the almost trillion-dollar U.S. military is struggling to fight cheap drones in its war with Iran.

Iran has built a simple drone, the Shahed, with a motorcycle-type engine, loaded it with explosives and successfully targeted its neighbors’ cities and power plants.

Iran has also hit U.S. military bases with these drones, including an early April 2026 attack on the U.S. Victory Base Complex in Baghdad.

The drones cost between US$20,000 and $50,000 to build. In response, the U.S. military sometimes fires missiles worth more than $1 million to shoot one down.

As a former U.S. Air Force officer and now national security scholar, I believe that math is a problem: The U.S. military for now has a $1 million answer to a $20,000 question. This math tells you almost everything you need to know about one of America’s biggest national security headaches.

And the frustrating part is that the U.S. military watched this happen in Ukraine for years. It knew the threat was coming.

The weapon that changed modern war

The Shahed isn’t impressive because it’s high-tech. It’s impressive because it isn’t.

Inspection of captured Shahed drones has found that many of their parts are made by ordinary commercial companies. That includes processors from a U.S. manufacturer, fuel pumps from a U.K. company and converters from China.

These military components aren’t hard to get. You could find similar parts in factories or farm machinery. That’s exactly what makes the Shahed so tough to deal with.

Russia, which also produces the drone, tolerates losing more than 75% of its Shahed stock because even at those loss rates, it’s winning the math battle against Ukraine. Russia or Iran don’t need every drone to hit its target. They just need to keep sending waves of them until their opponent runs out of expensive missiles to shoot back.

Ukraine, which had no choice but to learn fast, eventually figured out a better answer. Ukraine developed cheap interceptor drones that could slam into Shahed drones before they reached their targets. Each interceptor costs about $1,000 to $2,000, and Ukrainian manufacturers are producing thousands of them per month. That’s better math: a $2,000 interceptor against a $20,000 attacker.

Ukraine’s battlefield experience, as a result, has become one of the most valuable resources in the world, with American and allied forces asking Ukrainian drone experts to share their knowledge.

Why can’t the U.S. churn out a solution of its own? Because the U.S. military doesn’t have a technology problem but a bureaucracy problem.

The Pentagon’s three-legged slowdown

The U.S. Department of Defense typically can’t just buy things. It follows a long, complicated process that can take a decade or more to go from “we need something” to “here it is.” That process runs through three separate bureaucratic systems, each of which can cause years of delay.

First, someone must write a formal document, known as a requirement, that explains exactly what they need and why. A military service, such as the Air Force, for example, drafts up a requirement and routes it through an internal service review within only their branch.

Until recently, this service-vetted requirement went through a Pentagon review process, the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System, where all joint services took a look. This process, which the Department of Defense ended in 2025, required approval from military officials.

Even though the joint requirements process was ended, implementation of a new system is far from complete, and the existing culture potentially remains. Under the old requirements process, it took over 800 days to get a requirement approved.

Second, any new program then needs money. This is handled through the planning, programming, budgeting and execution process, a budget cycle designed in 1961. Getting a new program into the budget typically takes more than two years after the requirement is approved, because the military must submit its budget request years in advance. By then, the threat has potentially already moved on.

Third, once a requirement is approved and money allocated, the program then must be developed and built. The average major defense acquisition program now takes almost 12 years from program start just to deliver an initial capability to troops in the field, according to a 2025 Government Accountability Office report.

Add it up and you get a system where the military sees a threat, begs for a solution, argues for money and waits a decade.

Why the system is built this way

The Shahed drone exposed a gap that defense experts have been warning about for years: The U.S. military is very good at building the most advanced, most expensive weapons in the world, but it struggles to build cheap, simple things fast. That is the opposite of what this new kind of warfare demands.

It would be easy, but inaccurate, to blame the military for the decade-long contract process. The real answer is more complicated.

The Pentagon’s lengthy process was designed by the Department of Defense and Congress for a reason. Policymakers created the current system during the Cold War to combat excessive and redundant spending by the separate service branches. The system is built with checkpoints, reviews and approvals to make sure taxpayer money isn’t wasted.

Legacy military contractors also benefit from this dysfunctional process and resist change. They have the capital and know-how to wait out the predictable and stable existing contracts, while vying for new ones. These military contractors rarely need to worry about upstart contractors because they know small companies cannot survive waiting for a decade to secure funding for their prototypes.

The problem is that those rules were built for a world where the biggest threat was another superpower’s expensive jets and missiles. It wasn’t built to fight a flying bomb made from tractor parts. This type of threat requires fast innovation from lean companies, the exact companies that struggle in the current budget process.

What’s changing

There are signs of movement. In August 2025, the Pentagon killed its old requirements process entirely and replaced it with a faster, more flexible system.

However, killing the requirements process dealt with only one leg of the three-legged monster. The 1960s-era budget process that determines how money flows remains largely intact.

The most important reforms still need Congress to act, and Congress moves slowly, too. Congress has launched studies into reforming this system numerous times, with the answers being too politically difficult to implement.

Officials are expanding the use of flexible contracting tools, such as Other Transaction Authority, that let the military skip some traditional rules to get anti-drone technology faster. Yet these flexible contracting tools still represent a small slice of the Defense budget, and their effectiveness is unclear.

Ultimately, instead of using flexible contracting tools to quickly buy new prototypes, the bureaucratically easier solution could be to buy more of the expensive, already approved missiles.

This quick fix would reload the military’s stock of interceptors with existing weapons systems, which is the source of the bad math. The math would get worse and at the same time the operational imperative to find cheaper and better solutions might disappear.

So, as the Shahed keeps flying, the most powerful military in the world is still figuring out the paperwork and looking to other countries for help.

Aaron Brynildson served in the U.S. Air Force from 2016-2025.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

On a spring morning in 1914, miners in Ludlow, Colorado, were celebrating Greek Easter when the Colorado National Guard and a private security agency opened fire on their camp with a machine-gun-equipped armored car called the Death Special.

The miners waged a pitched battle with the National Guard for 10 days before President Woodrow Wilson ordered federal soldiers to intervene. An estimated 69 to 199 people were killed. It was the end of one of the most bitter and violent miner strikes in U.S. labor history, which had begun in September 1913. The strike and massacre prompted Congress to take a hard look at labor reform. But significant changes in labor relations and unionization didn’t come until the mid-1930s.

Some state labor laws were on the books, but in 1914 the U.S. House Committee on Mines and Mining reported: “Colorado has good mining laws and such that ought to afford protection to the miners as to safety in the mine if they were enforced, yet in this State the percentage of fatalities is larger than any other, showing there is undoubtedly something wrong in reference to the management of its coal mines.”

Once the initial shock of the violence wore off, the Ludlow strike received little public attention outside of the immediate families affected and some Colorado residents until late in the 20th century. In “Where Are the Workers,” Mary Anne Trasciatti, a professor at Hofstra University, and I edited a collection of essays written by labor historians and archivists that explore nationwide efforts to bring the history of labor and working people into mainstream narratives of U.S. history.

The Ludlow Massacre is one of the most dramatic and deadly of those stories. It rivals the West Virginia Mine Wars of the 1920s.

The Ludlow Massacre

In September 1913, roughly 10,000 mostly immigrant miners who worked for the Colorado Fuel & Iron Co. went on strike. The miners were represented by the United Mine Workers of America, which submitted a list of demands when the strike began, including implementing the eight-hour workday, being compensated for the time miners spent in the shafts, and the right to select their own housing and doctors.

Since national strikes were called in the 1880s demanding the eight-hour day, this had been a goal for workers throughout the U.S. In Colorado, voters had endorsed such an amendment to the state constitution in 1902, but it was not uniformly enforced.

Coal mining in the early 1900s was labor intensive and dangerous. Death rates were high. Workers had no say in how the mines operated. From 1884 to 1912, more than 1,708 men died in the state’s coal mines, a rate twice the national average. In 1910, explosions at two Colorado Fuel & Iron mines killed 131 people. In 1912, 125 workers lost their lives in mine accidents across Colorado. That year, the annual death rate in Colorado’s mines was 7.06 per 1,000 employees, compared to a national rate of 3.15. Every trip down a shaft was fraught, with workers paid only for the weight of the coal they mined, not for their travel time.

John D. Rockefeller, the nation’s wealthiest man at the time of the strike, was the main owner of the fuel and iron company. With about 10,000 workers and nearly 70,000 acres of land under control, Colorado Fuel and Iron was one of the most powerful mining companies of that era.

Coal companies often owned entire towns, including miners’ homes, which was the case in Ludlow. Worker protests often led to widespread evictions. As a result of the Ludlow strike, 1,200 coal miners and their families were evicted and took refuge in tent colonies around the mines during the winter of 1913-14.

Colorado Fuel & Iron hired and armed 300 members of a private security agency known as Baldwin-Felts when the strike began. The agency was founded in the early 1890s by William Gibbony Baldwin and employed by mining companies in West Virginia and Colorado to repress strikes. Their job was to keep order and – if possible – break the walkout and reopen the mines.

Members of the United Mine Workers of America armed themselves as conflicts with the mining company’s private security force intensified.

Eventually, the Colorado governor, Elias M. Ammons, ordered the Colorado National Guard to join the fray on the corporation’s side, with the Rockefellers paying their wages. The Guard arrested hundreds of strikers.

Then, on April 20, 1914, the National Guard and the private company opened fire on the tent colonies where the miners lived. After several hours of gunfire, with miners defending their camp, 25 people were dead, including two women and eleven children trapped when the camp was intentionally set ablaze.

Months earlier, miners had dug foxholes under tents so women and children could avoid bullets randomly fired through the camps. When the armored vehicle opened fire, everyone in the camps ducked into the holes. Later, women and children were found by miners huddled together at the bottoms of their burned-out tents.

Many miners’ family members were saved when the engineer on a passing train witnessed what was happening and stopped on the track to shield them from the gunfire.

This violence led to 10 more days of conflict before President Wilson finally ordered federal troops to disarm both sides.

Changes to labor law

In Congress, the House Committee on Mines and Mining conducted an investigation into the events and released a report in 1915. John D. Rockefeller Jr. was summoned before the committee, where he was questioned for several hours on May 20, 1914. There, he admitted that he had not visited the site since the incidents that led to the deaths of workers and their families.

According to a New York Times report, when asked whether he knew that thousands of his employees had been evicted from their homes and were living in tent colonies, and that the striking workers and their families were suffering without work or food, Rockefeller replied that he could not say, but that company officials could provide the facts. None were forthcoming.

A federal Commission on Industrial Relations also held hearings, determined to quell the upsurge in early 20th-century labor violence.

In 1912, the immigrant- and women-led Bread and Roses strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, also led to a congressional investigation. In its report on the 1914 miners’ strike, the commission described the strike by workers as “against arbitrary power.” It summarized that miners “passionately felt” that they were denied “a voice in fixing working conditions in the mines” and that political democracy had been “repudiated by the owners.”

The commission determined that the strike raised a fundamental question about whether workers had a right to a voice at work. This question would animate labor struggles into the 1930s.

In 1935, Congress passed and President Franklin Roosevelt signed into law the National Labor Relations Act, which provided federal guidelines for labor union formation and stated that workers had a federal right to bargain over wages, hours and conditions of employment, the very things Colorado coal miners sought when they went on strike in 1913.

Commemorating the Ludlow strike and massacre

In 1915, officers of the United Mine Workers of America purchased 40 acres of land north of the Ludlow, Colorado, train depot, on the site where the tent colony had sheltered coal miners and their families during the 1913-14 strike.

Three years later, United Mine Workers officials dedicated a granite monument at the site where the women and children were killed. Labor historian James Green noted that of all the violence against workers at the time, none shocked the nation or troubled its collective conscience more than the Ludlow massacre because of the deaths of children. However, even incidents like the Ludlow Massacre did not become a significant part of the public discourse. This has changed some in the recent past.

Today, the tent colony site is a National Historic Landmark.

The labor movement in the United States remains a bulwark of democracy, and workers have often been a driving force for social and economic equality in their communities. Yet its stories are not widely known, even one so dramatic as this battle in the Colorado coalfields.

The recognition of the Ludlow site as a National Historic Landmark and the recent release of a Library of Congress research guide propel the history of labor and working people into the mainstream. Such place-based labor history promotes our understanding of how and why things we sometimes take for granted – such as the eight-hour workday, paid holidays or workplace safety laws – came about only because people were willing to risk their lives fighting for these rights.

Read more of our stories about Colorado.

Robert Forrant does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

For the past 13 years, Maricopa County in Arizona has attempted to reform its sheriff’s department after Joe Arpaio made it into a national flash point for extreme immigration tactics. After a legal immigrant sued Arpaio and the county Sheriff’s Office, a federal district court ruled in 2015 that Arpaio and his deputies relied on racial profiling to target Latinos.

Arpaio was at the center of that suit. From 2006 to 2017, he implemented his own immigration detention program, instructing deputies to detain anyone who did not carry a valid identification and did not speak English. One U.S. Department of Justice attorney characterized Arpaio as overseeing “the worst pattern of racial profiling by a law enforcement agency in U.S. history.”

Federal oversight has since aimed to reform the sheriff’s department and improve trust with the county’s Latino residents, which had been destroyed under Arpaio’s tenure.

As a historian of U.S. immigration, I believe Arpaio’s immigration detention methods are clearly echoed in the hardline immigration policies devised by presidential aide Stephen Miller. That’s evident in actions by immigration agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection that have been described as inhumane by some lawmakers and civil rights groups.

A blueprint for ICE facilities

From his election to sheriff in 1993 until 2017, Arpaio made constant headlines for his creation of a tent jail and his heavy-handed immigration enforcement tactics.

Using surplus army tents from the Korean War to house up to 1,700 inmates, Arpaio built Tent City in August 1993 to address overcrowding in Phoenix jails. By the time the jail closed in 2017, Sheriff Paul Penzone estimated that running Tent City cost taxpayers US$8.5 million annually.

Tent City was initially used for detaining criminals, but after 2009, Arpaio used the facility for housing detained immigrants.

News reports said Arpaio forced inmates to wear pink underwear and often fed them expired food and undrinkable water. The tents did little to shield inmates from the Arizona desert, where temperatures rose to 130 degrees Fahrenheit, (54 degrees celsius) at times. Tent City stirred a national uproar.

Starting in 2006, Arpaio and Maricopa County sheriffs engaged in a pattern of “unlawful discriminatory police conduct directed at Hispanic persons,” according to Deputy Assistant Attorney General Mark Kappelhoff. During these operations, he directed deputies to detain people suspected as being undocumented immigrants without legal immigration authorization.

Arpaio’s deputies explicitly targeted Latino drivers in their traffic stops. A Department of Justice investigation concluded that Arpaio used race as a criteria for stopping and detaining Latino drivers. Legal U.S. residents and U.S. citizens were occasionally arrested in these sweeps.

Phoenix News-Times journalist Stephen Lemons in January 2009 noted that, during operations, some Maricopa County sheriff’s deputies wore ski masks and carried assault rifles while conducting immigration sweeps.

Camp East Montana

Tent City appears to be an early version of the detention facilities used by ICE today, where detainees have complained of squalid conditions and poor food.

ICE currently detains some 70,000 people in 224 detention centers nationwide. Of those, two camps, Camp East Montana near El Paso, Texas, and Alligator Alcatraz in Florida, are eerily similar to Tent City.

Camp East Montana is the most recent of these new facilities. Opened in August 2025, the 60-acre detention center has become one of the largest ICE facilities in the U.S., holding 5,000 detainees.

Like Tent City, Camp East Montana was constructed using tents that do little to shield inmates from the elements. The Washington Post reported in September that the facility’s poor food, shoddy living quarters and exposure to the desert sun violated 60 federal regulations.

The cost of inhumane policies

During Arpaio’s tenure, his office faced 6,000 federal lawsuits.

Those included a $9 million payout to the parents of Charles Agster III, after a federal jury found Arpaio and jailhouse nurses negligent in his death. And they included a $2 million payout to the parents of Brian Crenshaw after the disabled man died following an altercation with a sheriff’s detention officer.

The most costly, though, was the 2013 ruling in Melendres v. Arpaio. U.S. District Judge Murray Snow found Arpaio guilty of racial profiling. The ruling placed Arpaio’s office under federal monitoring with orders to overhaul the department. As a result, Maricopa County residents have paid $323 million to reform the department.

Arpaio left office in January 2017. Months later, Tent City closed. After a failed attempt to run for U.S. Senate in 2018, Arpaio retired from politics.

But I believe that the resemblance between Arpaio’s fixation on immigration and Trump’s deportation campaign remains.

Since Trump’s second election, ICE and CBP agents have followed Arpaio’s playbook. Along with erecting tent jails for detaining immigrants, agents have used racial profiling during immigration raids. Consequently, hundreds of U.S. citizens have been detained during raids and protests.

On April 2, 2026, Judge Jennifer Thurston ruled that CBP agents violated court orders and “again detained people without reasonable suspicion” – tactics similar to those used by Arpaio.

Arpaio’s policies foreshadowed Trump’s deportation policy: one that uses racial profiling and shows little regard for human rights.

As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted in her dissent in Noem v. Vazquez-Perdomo in 2025, many Latinos now carry proof of citizenship out of fear of racial profiling.

In July 2017, a federal court found Arpaio guilty of criminal contempt for violating a 2011 federal order to stop detaining people solely on suspicion of illegal immigration status.

A month later, before Arpaio’s sentencing, Trump pardoned Arpaio. He described the sheriff as a “great American patriot” who had “done a lot in the fight against illegal immigration.”

Jonathan van Harmelen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Thousands of Americans will soon gather to celebrate April 20 – or “4/20” – the most important day of the year for cannabis enthusiasts.

But this year, a cloud of uncertainty will hang over these celebrations. After years of success, the movement to legalize recreational and medical cannabis has stalled.

It’s a moment unlike any that I have seen in the 12 years that I’ve been researching cannabis legalization as part of my broader interest in U.S. drug policy.

Not so long ago, the movement had so much momentum that nationwide cannabis legalization felt virtually inevitable. That momentum is now gone.

The strategy to legalize cannabis through ballot initiatives is no longer working. The coalition of supporters that made this strategy work has frayed, and new research is raising concerns about the health impact of regular cannabis use. All of this constitutes the most significant challenge to the movement since it went mainstream in the 21st century.

Years of success

As a social movement, cannabis legalization has been extremely successful. Since 2012, 24 states and Washington have legalized recreational cannabis use. Forty-nine states and Washington have legalized medical cannabis use, though programs vary from state to state.

While cannabis remains illegal at the federal level, changes have happened there, too.

The 2018 Farm Bill, for instance, legalized hemp, a non-psychoactive derivative of the cannabis plant used to make textiles, rope and other consumer goods. While it wasn’t lawmakers’ intent, entrepreneurs figured out how to make products from hemp that contain enough of the chemical compound tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, to be psychoactive. This fueled growth of the hemp market, which in 2023 was valued at US$1.63 billion.

Additionally, the Biden administration in 2024 began the process of rescheduling cannabis under the Controlled Substances Act. It’s a course that has continued under the second Trump administration.

The scheduling system classifies substances based on accepted medical use and potential for abuse. Federal rescheduling would not legalize cannabis, but it would move it from the most restrictive Schedule I – which includes substances like heroin and LSD – to Schedule III, with substances like anabolic steroids, ketamine and codeine. It would recognize cannabis as having medical use.

Challenges emerge

With rescheduling still underway, it may seem odd to say that the legalization movement has stalled. But a closer look reveals significant challenges.

The biggest challenge can be found at the ballot box. The 2024 election was the legalization movement’s worst showing in years.

All three recreational legalization ballot measures failed. Only Nebraska’s medical legalization measures passed, but it has yet to be fully implemented due to ongoing political and legal challenges.

Then there’s the 2025 tax and spending package approved by Congress. When its new provisions go into effect later this year, they will dramatically alter the hemp market.

Many hemp products currently on shelves, like THC-infused beverages and gummies, will become illegal. Many businesses currently selling these products will be forced to close.

Some of this is already happening, as states like Tennessee and Iowa rush to pass restrictions on hemp products.

For instance, the dispensary closest to my university in Iowa has just closed. Once a growing business that employed 30 people, it was forced to shut down after new state laws significantly limited what they could sell. This crackdown on the hemp market is particularly significant in states like Iowa that have no legal market for recreational marijuana use and only a limited medical marijuana market.

No single reason for current slump

Several factors are driving these changes.

One is politics. While the vast majority of Americans support marijuana legalization, the approval is much higher among Democrats and independents than it is among Republicans.

Of the 26 states where recreational marijuana has not been legalized, 20 of them have state governments that are under total Republican control. Another four have Republican-controlled legislatures. Pennsylvania’s legislature is split between Republicans and Democrats. Only Hawaii has a Democrat-controlled state government that has not legalized recreational cannabis.

Then there is the health issue. A growing body of evidence is raising concerns about the negative impact of regular cannabis use that includes the risk of cannabis addiction, psychosis, anxiety and depression.

Researchers are also questioning cannabis’ efficacy as medicine. Several recent reviews have concluded that there is insufficient scientific evidence to support the therapeutic use of cannabis for most of the conditions for which it is consumed, such as insomnia and acute pain. A review of cannabis’s use for treating mental health conditions came to a similar conclusion.

Citing such evidence, The New York Times editorial board recently recanted some of its earlier support for legalization. The newspaper wrote, “The unfortunate truth is that the loosening of marijuana policies … has led to worse outcomes than many Americans expected,” adding, “It is time to acknowledge reality and change course.”

The coalition of supporters frays

Still another issue is conflict within the legalization movement itself, particularly between the business and activist wings.

The tension between these groups is long-standing, with activists often accusing members of industry of being more focused on money than justice. And as the cannabis industry has grown, these tensions have become more acute.

In 2022, for example, the pro-cannabis organization True Social Equity in Cannabis sued three Illinois cannabis companies for engaging in coordinated anticompetitive practices and violating federal antitrust laws. In court documents, they called the three companies the “Chicago cartel,” before voluntarily dismissing the case.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis used a similar strategy in 2024 in his successful campaign against the legalization of marijuana for recreational use in the state. He consistently criticized “corporate cannabis,” a catchall phrase often used by critics to describe the large cannabis companies that increasingly dominate state markets. He warned voters that the law would create a “weed cartel.”

Prominent cannabis activists like former Massachusetts regulator Shaleen Title have also called out corporate cannabis in their accounts of what’s wrong with the legalization movement.

In many ways, these challenges are the result of the movement’s earlier success. Making marijuana legal has meant more people trying it, more people studying it and more people making money from it.

The insights from the past 12 years could help inform whatever comes next. The fact that public support for legalization remains high suggests that a return to the days of blanket prohibition is unlikely.

Still, as the history of cannabis law and policy has shown, there are no guarantees.

William Garriott’s work has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives set April 21, 2026, as the date to hear from and question top Pentagon officials Adm. Brad Cooper, the head of U.S. Central Command, and Gen. Dagvin R.M. Anderson, head of U.S. Africa Command, about the war in Iran. But Republican legislators put off the hearing for a month, giving up – for now – the opportunity to exercise oversight of the war.

Adam Smith, the top Democratic member of the House Armed Services Committee, told The New York Times, “We are six weeks into this conflict. And we still haven’t gotten a public briefing from anyone in the administration about the war.”

President Donald Trump’s military campaign against the Iranian regime is currently in a ceasefire. Despite the low approval rating of the war, the president has not drawn the conflict to a close, and the result of the operation is so far unclear.

The postponed hearing was only one example of how Congress has been noticeably meek about the war, with most Republicans killing the many Democratic efforts to exercise constitutionally granted power over engaging in such military conflicts. For the fourth time, the Senate on April 16, 2026, rejected a war powers resolution.

As scholars who research war powers and have a book coming out about President Barack Obama’s decision-making about the Afghan war, we know that the reluctance of Congress to assert its power is, in fact, history repeating itself, as is the president’s unilateral action.

Historically meek Congress

Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war, not the president. But most modern presidents and their legal counsel have asserted that Article 2 of the Constitution allows the president to use the military in certain situations without prior congressional approval – and have acted on that, sending troops into conflicts from Panama to Libya with no regard for Congress’ will.

Based on the 1973 War Powers Resolution – passed over President Richard Nixon’s veto – the president has an obligation to inform Congress about his actions within 48 hours of initiating military action and requires him to seek legislative authorization if the military operation will last over 60 days.

Since its passage, presidents have dutifully informed Congress within the 48-hour window when they unilaterally initiate military operations. Typically, they use the following language: “Pursuant to” their power as commander in chief and chief executive, they are initiating an operation.

Yet presidents since Nixon have never formally acknowledged the constitutionality of the War Powers Resolution. They have, however, mentioned it in their letters to Congress about their actions, and for the most part they have abided by its restrictions. So language is crucial and presidents tend to use the phrase “consistent with” the War Powers Resolution when they inform Congress about military operations.

The second Trump administration has broken with that standard. In Trump’s message to Congress about the Iran war, sent on March 2 2026, he did not acknowledge the War Powers Resolution or the Constitution, let alone pay lip service to either.

Instead, Trump has sidestepped the traditional use of the War Powers Resolution – and avoided the congressional oversight that comes with it – by relying on executive orders to convey his intent to use military power against the Iranian regime. That move, whether legal or not, has provided the president with a great deal of freedom to decide what the military can do, what tools they can use to do it and how long they can do it. His decision to send another carrier group and the addition of thousands of U.S. troops to the region is just the latest example.

Congress has proved incapable or unwilling to check this presidential unilateralism. Shortly after the start of the military campaign against Iran, Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy introduced war powers legislation to constrain Trump that failed to pass the Senate. In the House on March 5, members narrowly rejected a resolution to impede a broader or longer operation.

To a meaningful extent, we are watching history repeat itself: Over the past seven decades during times of war, members of Congress have not wanted to act, and presidents have not wanted to ask permission.

From alacrity to deference

Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt made their case for war and obtained a formal declaration from Congress within three days in 1917 and within the same afternoon in 1941, respectively.

Since the start of the Korean War, however, members of Congress have demonstrated more deference and less assertiveness.

In Korea, President Truman did not get congressional authorization for the war.

Following North Korea’s invasion of the South in June 1950, Truman bypassed Congress, making his case for war to the United Nations Security Council. In July 1950, United Nations Security Council Resolution 84 “authorized the United States to establish and lead a unified command comprised of all military forces from UN member states, and authorized that command to operate under the UN flag.”

Truman’s rhetoric about American combat operations on the Korean peninsula being part of a U.N. “police action” became increasingly tenuous, but he managed to avoid seeking congressional permission. In doing so, Truman created a precedent in which a congressional declaration of war was no longer necessary for the American military to carry out combat operations. Sen. Robert Taft, a Republican, opposed this lack of congressional deliberation, declaring that Truman’s actions represented a “usurpation” of the war powers authority.“ But Congress did nothing to stop the war as the tactical and strategic picture in Korea stalemated.

In Vietnam, in the aftermath of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident – a purported attack by the North Vietnamese on American naval vessels that did not, in fact, occur – President Lyndon Johnson used the alleged crisis to push for congressional authorization for the escalation of force in Southeast Asia.

Johnson presented the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution to Congress, which quickly passed it. The resolution allowed Johnson to freely escalate American military involvement in Southeast Asia with a vague authorization to engage militarily as he saw fit, in contrast to the very clear declarations of war that came before it for previous wars.

Col. Harry G. Summers, who wrote an influential strategic analysis of the Vietnam War, points to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution as evidence that the relevant actors – the executive, Congress and the military – failed to foresee the scale of the course of action they were embarking on.

The resolution significantly increased the president’s freedom of action – and freedom from oversight – and marked a major step toward the Americanization and escalation of the war in July 1965. Despite the deeply troubled engagement in South Vietnam and the passage of the War Powers Resolution, we still see presidents acting alone, without consulting members of Congress, let alone getting authorization.

Refusing responsibility

In Summers’ Vietnam postmortem, he relates a telling anecdote of a professor at West Point. The professor, an Army officer, remarked, “When people ask me why I went to Vietnam I say, ‘I thought you knew. You sent me,’” a comment indicative of “the civilian sector’s growing refusal to take responsibility for the kind of army it needs.”

In the case of Trump’s decision-making concerning hostilities with Iran, Americans will one day need answers to the questions: Why did the United States engage in this war with unclear political objectives? And why did Congress allow it to continue?

This story contains material from an article published on March 6, 2026.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

In Latin America, as in other parts of the world, the second Trump administration has adopted an increasingly aggressive policy.

From drone strikes on purported drug traffickers to increased tariffs on imports, and from the blockade on fuel shipments and threats of invasion in Cuba to the Jan. 3 military incursion into Venezuela, the U.S.’s more coercive approach to its hemispheric neighbors evokes an earlier period of U.S. foreign policy.

Many commentators have found echoes of the 1989 capture of Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega in the kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. Others highlighted the longer history of U.S. interventions in Latin America stretching back through the Cold War. That includes the Nixon administration’s support for the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende in Chile or the CIA-sponsored removal of Guatemala’s elected president, Jacobo Arbenz, in 1954.

Yet as a historian of early 20th-century Latin America, I believe the Trump administration’s approach to Latin America more closely resembles an older pattern of U.S. policy. Between 1900 and the mid-1930s, U.S. forces intervened in one Latin American country after another. This practice was often justified by the Roosevelt Corollary, President Theodore Roosevelt’s addition to the Monroe Doctrine. In cases of “chronic wrongdoing,” Roosevelt said in 1904, the U.S would find itself compelled to exercise an “international police power” in defense of U.S. interests.

But crucially, how Latin Americans responded to the U.S. exerting its dominance in the early 20th century may hold some lessons for the present day. One of the major side effects of the U.S.’s so-called gunboat diplomacy was an upsurge of resistance and anti-imperialist thinking in the region’s political life.

The roots of anti-imperialism

In the 30 years after Roosevelt asserted the U.S.’s right to intervene across the hemisphere, U.S. forces occupied Cuba three times – in 1906-09, 1912 and 1917-21. They also occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934 and the Dominican Republic from 1916 to 1924. In Nicaragua, the U.S. deployed the Marines from 1912 to 1925 and then again from 1926 to 1933, waging a counterinsurgency in which it used aerial bombardment for the first time.

Across much of the region, then, this was a time when the U.S. was quick to resort to force, unburdened by any concerns for Latin American countries’ sovereignty.

Yet this era of external intervention also coincided with a period of remarkable political ferment, which I describe in my recently published book, “Radical Sovereignty.”

In one place after another, from Buenos Aires to Mexico City and from Havana to Lima, movements sprang up that put forward sharp critiques of U.S power. Many of them grew out of student organizations in the late 1910s, while others drew on the rising strength of labor unions and newly formed leftist political parties.

In 1923, rural workers in the Mexican state of Veracruz formed a Peasant League. From the outset, they saw local issues as closely interwoven with international ones, and they argued that there was a compelling reason for this. As the league put it, “Our internationalism is not the child of a crazed enthusiasm for empty phrases … but of the need to take preventive measures, to bolster ourselves against the enemy,” which they identified as “the imperialism of North America.”

Many of Latin America’s radical movements at this time were inspired by the recent example of the Mexican Revolution. The new Mexican Constitution of 1917 had nationalized the country’s land and natural resources, putting it on a collision course with U.S. companies and landowners.

Others still were energized by the global repercussions of the Russian Revolution. This, of course, included several brand-new communist parties across the region. But at the time, many others in Latin America saw the Bolsheviks as part of a global anti-colonial wave.

Mexico City as activist hub

My book explores the key role Mexico City played as a gathering point for these different political tendencies.

They included groups ranging from Mexican peasant leagues to the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, an anti-imperialist movement formed by Peruvian exiles. Many of these organizations converged under the umbrella of the Anti-Imperialist League of the Americas. Founded in Mexico City in 1925, it soon had chapters in a dozen more countries across the region.

Between them, these movements brought into focus the novel features of U.S. power. As the Cuban student leader and communist Julio Antonio Mella saw it in 1925 – at a time when his native country was highly dependent on the U.S. but formally sovereign – the U.S. was distinct. Unlike European empires, it largely refrained from direct control of territories, though it had pressed the Cubans to include in their 1901 constitution a provision allowing it to intervene in the island at will.

In Mella’s view, the U.S. was clearly an empire, one that mainly exercised its dominance through commercial or financial pressures. For him, the dollar and Wall Street were as central to U.S. power as the halls of government in Washington, D.C.

For Ricardo Paredes, an Ecuadorean doctor who founded the country’s Socialist Party in 1926, a new term was required to capture Latin American countries’ contradictory position. Formally sovereign, they were not colonies as such. Yet they were economically and politically subordinated to Washington and Wall Street – “dependent countries,” as he phrased it in 1928.

For the Peruvian poet Magda Portal, a leading member of the anti-imperialist American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, U.S. dominance played out differently in different parts of Latin America.

In a series of lectures she gave in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic in 1929, Portal divided the region into zones. While countries such as Argentina or Brazil were mainly sites for U.S. investment, Mexico and the Caribbean were regularly subjected to U.S. military force. Or, as Portal put it, “Here imperialism wears no disguise.”

Portal concluded her lectures with a phrase that combined her analysis of U.S. dominance with a resonant appeal for unity: “We have a single and great enemy; let us form a single and great union.”

United states of resistance?

Yet while there was much Latin American anti-imperialist thinkers could agree on, there were also profound divergences between them. This included questions of strategy as well as issues of principle. What role should different classes play in their movement? How radical a transformation of society were they pushing for? And what kind of state should emerge from it?

Over time, these differences turned into deep rifts that pitted revolutionaries against democratic reformists, internationalists against nationalists, and pro-Soviets against anti-communists. These disagreements played an important role in Latin American politics over the rest of the century.

While many of these rifts became especially prominent during the Cold War, they developed out of earlier divisions over how best to counter U.S. dominance.

The anti-imperialist upsurge of the 1920s and ’30s was formative for a generation of Latin American radicals. Several of those who entered political life during these years went on to play key roles in major events of the 20th century. Raúl Roa, for example, who served as foreign secretary for Cuba’s revolutionary government from 1959 to 1976, was first politicized in the island’s anti-imperialist movement of the 1920s.

The men and women whose political visions were formed in the interwar period carried those ideals forward into the Cold War era. In important ways, the 1920s and 1930s laid vital groundwork for later and better-known radical movements.

Past is, of course, not always prologue. It is impossible to predict what the long-term consequences of current U.S. policy in Latin America will be, especially given the rightward tilt that is currently unfolding across the region.

But looking at the region’s anti-imperialist traditions does point to one possible outcome: The U.S.’s newly aggressive stance will, sooner rather than later, fuel a resurgence of anti-imperialist sentiment as the organizing principle for a new generation of activists.

Tony Wood does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

President Donald Trump has again threatened to oust Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, putting at risk a keystone of good economic policy and inflation management: central bank independence.

The president said on April 15, 2026, that he would fire Powell if the Fed chair stayed on in that role after his term officially ends on May 15. Powell has said he intends to remain at the helm after that if his replacement has not yet been confirmed by the Senate. Legally, Powell is allowed to do this.

Trump has promised to fire Powell a number of times, and his Department of Justice has launched a criminal investigation into renovations at the Fed building. Trump has also tried to oust another Fed governor, Lisa Cook, over allegations of mortgage fraud. In an unprecedented video response to the investigation, Powell called it and other actions “pretexts” for Trump’s ultimate goal of getting the Fed to lower interest rates.

While Trump’s actions are seen as particularly aggressive, as political economists, we are not surprised to see politicians try to exert influence on central banks. For one thing, central banks remain part of the government bureaucracy, and independence granted to them can always be reversed – either by changing laws or backtracking on established practices.

An economic power struggle

At the heart of threats to Powell and Cook – and other moves to undermine the Fed by the Trump administration – is a power struggle.

Central banks, which are public institutions that manage a country’s currency and its monetary policy, have an extraordinary amount of power. By controlling the flow of money and credit in a country, they can affect economic growth, inflation, employment and financial stability.

These are powers that many politicians would like to control or at least manipulate. That’s because monetary policy can provide governments with economic boosts at key times, such as around elections or during periods of falling popularity.

The problem is that short-lived, politically motivated moves may be detrimental to the long-term economic well-being of a nation. They may, in other words, saddle the economy with problems further down the line.

That is why central banks across the globe tend to receive significant leeway to set interest rates independently and free from the electoral wishes of politicians.

In fact, monetary policymaking that is data-driven and technocratic, rather than politically motivated, has been seen as the gold standard of governance of national finances since the early 1990s and has largely achieved its main purpose of keeping inflation relatively low and stable.

But despite independence being seen to work, central banks over the past decade have come under increased pressure from politicians.

Trump is one recent example. In his first term as president, he criticized his own choice to head the Federal Reserve and demanded lower interest rates.

Attacks on the Fed have accelerated in Trump’s second administration. In April 2025, Trump lashed out at Powell in an online post, accusing him of being “TOO LATE AND WRONG” on interest rate cuts, while suggesting that the central banker’s “termination cannot come fast enough!” And in August, Trump took the unprecedented step of firing Cook, which a court later blocked. The Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling in the case this year.

Moreover, the reason politicians may want to interfere in monetary policy is that low interest rates remain a potent, quick method to boost an economy. And while politicians know that there are costs to besieging an independent central bank – financial markets may react negatively, or inflation may flare up – short-term control of a powerful policy tool can prove irresistible.

Legislating independence

If monetary policy is such a coveted policy tool, how have central banks held off politicians and stayed independent? And is this independence being eroded?

Broadly, central banks are protected by laws that offer long tenures to their leadership, allow them to focus policy primarily on inflation, and severely limit lending to the government.

Of course, such legislation cannot anticipate all future contingencies, which may open the door for political interference or for practices that break the law. And sometimes, central bankers are unceremoniously fired.

However, laws do keep politicians in line. For example, even in authoritarian countries, laws protecting central banks from political interference have helped reduce inflation and restricted central bank lending to the government.

In our own research, we have detailed the ways that laws have insulated central banks from the rest of the government, but also the recent trend of eroding this legal independence.

Politicizing appointees

Around the world, appointments to central bank leadership are political – elected politicians select candidates based on career credentials, political affiliation and, importantly, their dislike or tolerance of inflation.

But lawmakers in different countries exercise different degrees of political control.

A 2025 study shows that the large majority of central bank leaders – about 70% – are appointed by the head of government alone or with the intervention of other members of the executive branch. This ensures that the preferences of the central bank are closer to the government’s, which can boost the central bank’s legitimacy in democratic countries, but at the risk of permeability to political influence.

Alternatively, appointments can involve the legislative power or even the central bank’s own board. In the U.S., while the president nominates members of the Federal Reserve Board, the Senate can and has rejected unconventional or incompetent candidates.

Moreover, even if appointments are political, many central bankers stay in office long after the people who appointed them have been voted out. At the end of 2023, the most common length of the governors’ appointment was five years, and in 41 countries, the legal mandate was six years or longer.

And the Fed chair position has traditionally been protected by law, as Powell himself acknowledged in November 2024: “We’re not removable except for cause. We serve very long terms, seemingly endless terms. So we’re protected into law. Congress could change that law, but I don’t think there’s any danger of that.”

In the 2000s, several countries shortened the tenure of their central banks’ governors to four or five years. Sometimes, this was part of broader restrictions in central bank independence, as was the case in Iceland in 2001, Ghana in 2002 and Romania in 2004.

The low inflation objective

As of 2023, all but six central banks globally had low inflation as their main goal. Yet many central banks are required by law to try to achieve additional and sometimes conflicting goals, such as financial stability, full employment or support for the government’s policies.

This is the case for 38 central banks that either have the explicit dual mandate of price stability and employment or more complex goals. In Argentina, for example, the central bank’s mandate is to provide “employment and economic development with social equity.”

Conflicting objectives can open central banks to politicization. In the U.S., the Federal Reserve has a dual mandate of stable prices and maximum sustainable employment. These goals are often complementary, and economists have argued that low inflation is a prerequisite for sustainable high levels of employment.

But in times of overlapping high inflation and high unemployment, such as in the late 1970s or when the COVID-19 crisis was winding down in 2022, the Fed’s dual mandate has become active territory for political wrangling.

Since 2000, at least 23 countries have expanded the focus of their central banks beyond just inflation.

Limits on government lending

The first central banks were created to help secure finance for governments fighting wars. But today, limiting lending to governments is at the core of protecting price stability from unsustainable fiscal spending.

History is dotted with the consequences of not doing so. In the 1960s and 1970s, for example, central banks in Latin America printed money to support their governments’ spending goals. But it resulted in massive inflation while not securing growth or political stability.

Today, limits on lending are strongly associated with lower inflation in the developing world. And central banks with high levels of independence can reject a government’s financing requests or dictate the terms of loans.

Yet over the past two decades, almost 40 countries have made their central banks less able to limit central government funding. In the more extreme examples – such as in Belarus, Ecuador or even New Zealand – they have turned the central bank into a potential financier for the government.

Scapegoating central bankers

In recent years, governments have tried to influence central banks by pushing for lower interest rates, making statements criticizing bank policy or calling for meetings with central bank leadership.

At the same time, politicians have blamed the same central bankers for a number of perceived failings: not anticipating economic shocks such as the 2007-09 financial crisis; exceeding their authority with quantitative easing; or creating massive inequality or instability while trying to save the financial sector.

And since mid-2021, major central banks have struggled to keep inflation low, raising questions from populist and antidemocratic politicians about the merits of an arm’s-length relationship.

But chipping away at central bank independence, particularly in the name of lowering interest rates to boost the economy, as Trump appears to be doing by threatening to fire the Fed chair and his attempted removal of a member of the bank’s Board of Governors, is a historically sure way to high inflation.

This is an updated version of an article that was originally published on June 14, 2024.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Six weeks of U.S. and Israeli bombardment have served to degrade Iran’s nuclear facilities and cripple parts of its military.

But the Islamic Republic’s offensive capabilities have been built up over nearly 50 years, during which Iran has been either at war or under the threat of conflict.

As an expert in military history and theory, I believe that to understand what may come next in Operation Epic Fury, it’s valuable to grasp the development of Iran’s modern military structure, capabilities and international activities.

Iranian military technology

Prior to the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979, Iran’s military was largely supplied by Western powers, particularly the United States.

It entered the Iran-Iraq war in 1980 with a substantial amount of then-modern equipment. That included nearly 80 F-14 fighter aircraft, over 200 F-4 and F-5 aircraft and thousands of tanks.

But Iran’s military was exhausted when the war ended in 1988. And the government had by then become a world pariah, making resupply all but impossible.

Although Iran imported some military equipment from the Soviet Union and China in 1990, its economy could not support substantial military spending.

Ironically, the arms embargoes that Iran faced during and after its war with Iraq made the regime self-reliant on its weapons stockpiles. And that triggered the development of a substantial domestic arms industry.

Most modern Iranian military equipment consists of reverse-engineered American and Soviet equipment, much of it obsolete. Since 1990, however, Iranian missile technology has substantially improved. That’s due to domestic production and importing expertise from other marginalized states, such as North Korea.

Starting in the 1990s, Iran also innovated a series of one-way attack drones, a relatively inexpensive way to attack distant targets.

The modern Iranian military

The Iranian military is split into the regular military, or “Artesh,” and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The Artesh plays a domestic defense role akin to a militia, while the Revolutionary Guard serves as the more professional military force.

The Revolutionary Guard projects regional power. During the 2003 U.S.-Iraq war, for instance, it provided improvised explosive devices to insurgents targeting American forces.

The Revolutionary Guard tends to receive the bulk of Iranian military resources, including the best personnel and equipment. Quds Force, the unconventional warfare wing of the Revolutionary Guard, has long played a role in exporting the revolutionary beliefs of the Iranian rulers. The Quds Force provides arms and guidance to proxies throughout the Middle East, primarily by fomenting insurrections against Arab Sunni governments.

Iran has long been the patron of Hezbollah, based in Lebanon, whose primary goal is the eradication of Israel. More recently, Iran has also engaged in substantial support of Hamas in Gaza, despite the fact that Hamas is a Sunni organization, while the rulers of Iran are members of the Shiite branch of Islam.

Iran has constantly sought means of exerting military influence beyond its borders, without risking external attack. It has embraced the use of cyber warfare, a method of attack with a relatively low cost for participation and a potentially outsized influence on the world stage.

Iranian hackers have attacked Western military and government networks, including a hack of FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal emails. Iranian-backed hackers have also launched attacks on infrastructure and cultural institutions, including U.S. wastewater treatment plants and electrical grids.

Iran’s pursuit of atomic weaponry

Iran’s government has relentlessly pursued nuclear weapons since at least the 1980s.

The Iranian government has always maintained that its nuclear program is to provide power for the developing nation, rather than weaponry. But definitive evidence of uranium enrichment far beyond the requirements of power generation have caused Western states to demand an end to the Iranian nuclear program.

In 2010, cybersecurity researcher Sergey Ulasen discovered an incredibly complex malware program, dubbed Stuxnet, that was created to undermine the Iranian nuclear program by disrupting the function of enrichment centrifuges. No nation has ever taken responsibility for the attack, which set back Iranian uranium enrichment efforts by years.

In 2015, after negotiations with the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany, Iran agreed to halt its uranium enrichment program in exchange for relief from economic sanctions and the release of frozen Iranian assets. The negotiations resulted in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA.

Although the Trump administration withdrew the U.S. from the JCPOA in 2018, the agreement continued to function, and Iran seemed poised to reenter the global economy.

However, in 2020 the Iranians restarted their nuclear program. They also ramped up production of ballistic missiles and one-way attack drones.

In June 2025, the United States and Israel launched a massive aerial attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, an effort that Trump characterized as having destroyed Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Iran responded by launching a wave of ballistic missiles and drones toward Israel, most of which were intercepted before entering Israeli airspace.

The missile and interceptor war

Prior to Operation Epic Fury, analysts estimated that Iran possessed 3,000 ballistic missiles and tens of thousands of one-way attack drones. They also concluded that Iran had a substantial production capacity to increase its stockpiles.

In the first six weeks of the current conflict, Iran expended at least 650 missiles in attacks on Israel and hundreds more against other targets in the region.

The U.S. has placed a heavy emphasis on attacking missile production and storage facilities. But it’s difficult to ascertain how many missiles and drones the Iranian military might still possess.

Iranian production and transportation has almost certainly sustained substantial losses in capacity. And U.S. and Israeli aircraft prowl the skies over Iran seeking signs of mobile launchers or attempts to transport missiles to firing locations.

The rate of Iranian missile fire has substantially declined since the first days of the conflict, but it has never dropped to zero. That has led some analysts to suspect that Iran maintains a significant cache of long-range weaponry in reserve, while U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth argues that it has lost the capacity to launch major barrages.

Paul J. Springer is a Senior Fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. His comments represent his own opinion and do not reflect the official policy of the United States Government, the U.S. Department of Defense, or the U.S. Air Force.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is engaging in “a proselytizing Christian campaign” in his job, according to The Washington Post.

Hegseth hosts prayer services at the Pentagon and virtually crusades as a Christian, praying at the Pentagon for U.S. troops to inflict “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy in Iran.” Politics editor Naomi Schalit spoke with Dickinson College President John E. Jones III about the legal implications of Hegseth’s actions.

Jones was a longtime federal judge, and his most famous decision, Kitzmiller v. Dover, was a case in which a district school board ordered the teaching of so-called intelligent design – claimed by advocates to be an alternative to the theory of evolution. Jones’ 139-page decision concluded that it was “abundantly clear” that the board’s policy violated the establishment clause of the Constitution, which forbids the government from creating an official religion or favoring one religion over another.

Schalit: What issues do Hegseth’s behavior and statements raise for you, if any?

Jones: From afar, it looks as if he is flirting with a violation of the establishment clause as contained within the First Amendment. The establishment clause mandates that there can’t be a national religion, nor can the government favor one religion over another.

What appears to be happening at the Pentagon are services that basically recognize only a particular religious tradition. And it’s very notable that Americans United for Separation of Church and State filed suit against both the Defense Department and the Labor Department because there are similar activities that are taking place there.

What they’re seeking under the Freedom of Information Act are certain records, because they likely can’t attend these sessions. Any information they receive could support a separate lawsuit that, in effect, says the government – via the departments of Labor and Defense – is violating the establishment clause.

From my perspective, it sure looks like they are in violation. These activities are hosted on government property. They’re potentially coercive and appear to promote one particular religious viewpoint above others. While they may say they’re not requiring people to attend, you don’t know whether there may be some incentivizing or negative consequence if somebody doesn’t come.

Let me be the casual bystander and say, “Gosh, it’s just really nice. He’s a God-fearing man, and you know, he’s saying things that show his belief, which is a good thing to have.” Why did the authors of the Bill of Rights have a problem with the government establishing a state religion?

They were people of their time. They knew England had the Church of England and thus a national religion that was intertwined with the state. It ultimately caused untoward problems. They wanted everyone to have the freedom to worship, or not, as a personal choice and felt very passionately about that.

What has been long debated is the concept of a wall of separation between church and state. That phrase is not in the Constitution, but it is something that appears in cases, or is at least implied. And I’ve often said that wall is somewhat porous because there are circumstances where courts have allowed a little bit of seepage of religion under certain circumstances into the so-called public square.

What is really interesting is the tilt of the current Supreme Court court towards relaxing what have been generations of jurisprudence holding that the establishment clause should be more strictly enforced.

The Kennedy v. Bremerton School District case of 2022 involved a high school football coach assembling his players for prayer after games. It was pretty remarkable in the fact that the Supreme Court ultimately decided that that was not a violation of the establishment clause.

Some of the reasons were that it was after the game and that it was not a required activity for the players. Those who opposed it claimed that it was a violation of the establishment clause and that it was inherently coercive.

These current activities by the government – assuming that Americans United for Separation of Church and State files a lawsuit, not just an information request – are very likely to get to the Supreme Court.

The other thing the Supreme Court has done is it abandoned the so-called Lemon test, which courts utilized to determine whether a law or practice violated the establishment clause. Particularly in Kitzmiller v. Dover, I found the Lemon test to be a really helpful vehicle to use in measuring whether the policy in that case, which involved a school board mandating the teaching of the so-called alternative to evolution – intelligent design – violated the establishment clause.

How did the Lemon test work?

The Lemon test says that a judge should first measure the purpose of the government’s action, and then the effect on a reasonable person. You can then go to a third point, which is whether it represents an excessive entanglement with religion.

It doesn’t fit every case, but it worked in most establishment clause challenges.

But the Supreme Court, first in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, pronounced it dead.

They in effect said to judges, “You have to look at historical antecedents and traditions and so forth.” That’s great writing at the Supreme Court level, but it leaves district judges completely unmoored. So whomever the poor judge is who gets this case is likely going to have a difficult time trying to read the tea leaves to determine whether it is, in fact, a violation. And I guarantee you, there won’t be unanimity among jurists and lawyers on that point.

So you’ve got a case where in the old days there was legal scripture that said, “OK, apply these tests and you can tell whether the government has stepped over the line into endorsing religion.” But now the Supreme Court has made it unclear where that line is?

Yes, and the very fact that Americans United for Separation of Church and State is trying to get information under the Freedom of Information Act means that they know that you have to come armed with a lot of salient surrounding facts in order to have this declared unconstitutional.

If this had been 10 or 20 years ago, they probably wouldn’t have filed that action under the Freedom of Information Act. They would have directly challenged the law and in effect said, “Look, it speaks for itself. You have services favoring one religion over others within the Pentagon and Labor departments. It’s inherently unconstitutional and a violation of the establishment clause.”

But we’re in a post-Lemon world today where there is a relaxation of the previously recognized constraints of the establishment clause.

Where does that get the country?

I fear where it goes if the progression continues. The proponents of this kind of behavior ask, “What’s wrong with a little of that good old-time religion in the public square?”

They never appear to contemplate the fact that in generations hence, America could, for example, be a predominately Muslim population. Suppose that became the favored religion in a country, or any religion that may be embraced by some but be disfavored by others became the favored religion. The establishment clause is meant to protect everyone, including, by the way, nonbelievers and atheists.

There’s nothing in the establishment clause that says that you can’t worship – or not – as you see fit. And that’s the beauty of this country. The founders knew that if there was a move towards a favored or national religion in the eyes of the government, that could replicate what took place in Great Britain, where religion and politics mixed with occasionally terrible results.

Failure to adhere to the dictates of the church could render you a second-class citizen, or worse. My hope is that judges will be very, very careful about a systemic creep that totally eviscerates the purpose and intent of the establishment clause.

John E. Jones III does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation