In a million years we will never understand what Donald Trump, JD Vance, Marco Rubio and congressional Republicans are thinking. Being a loyal ally and putting “America First” DO NOT have to be mutually exclusive endeavors. We can be faithful to our interests without insulting (and abandoning) the entire world. America First doesn’t have to mean America Alone.

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Of course we should always put America first. Few people in this country would argue that. And of course there will be times when we should embrace sovereignty. But we must reject isolationism at all costs. Isolationist rants may make for a great show at campaign rallies but, in the real world, it is reckless and puts Americans in danger.

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​The way our friends around the world have been treated by the Trump/Vance administration is so utterly horrifying – and completely unacceptable.

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Time after time, the boorish actions and behavior of Trump & Co. have made our nation look smaller and weaker, not bigger and stronger. They obviously don’t get that it’s unnecessary for America to be a bully. It’s unnecessary for America to be threatening and hostile. It’s unnecessary for America to be arrogant and petty. America does not need to overtly flaunt our strength because we are actually strong.

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There are many foolish assumptions that fuel the Trump/Vance administration’s disastrous approach to the world, but one of the worst is their false belief that, if America disengages from the rest of the world, the rest of the world will just somehow disappear – leaving America in a gloriously isolated bubble of nothing but fabulous health and wealth.

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Their thought process reminds us of the mythical ostrich that sticks his head in the sand to avoid danger. If we can’t see them, they can’t see us, right? Well, not exactly guys. < Honestly, they are getting so good at this trick that we have a mental image of hundreds of little ostrich butts sticking straight up in the air on the lawn of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. >

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Clearly, these guys take American exceptionalism for granted, believing we are somehow owed this honorable distinction instead of understanding that we must continually earn it. They can’t seem to grasp that, while being a world leader is an enormous responsibility and is at times costly, the bigger picture is that being one gives us tremendous advantages.

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No more! Anyone who believes we can keep our superpower status without diplomacy, generosity, and humility needs to think again. That is exactly what the Greeks, Spanish and Romans thought, and they are now named in history books as failed empires. We better stop thinking their fate can’t happen to us, because it absolutely can.

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The strongest part of the American brand – even more impressive than our economic dominance – is our unprecedented and unparalleled time-honored reputation as a collaborative, compassionate, and supportive global leader and friend… yet another enormous advantage that has taken decades to build.

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We are the people who initiated the Lend-Lease policy – which helped defeat Germany, Japan and Italy in World War II by providing weapons, food, oil, and other supplies to the United Kingdom, China, the Soviet Union and France – and enacted the Marshall Plan, enabling Europe to rebuild after years of devastating war.

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Our security and support have provided countries the opportunity to foster democratic governments and strong economies. With our support, South Korea evolved from a poor, vulnerable autocracy to a vibrant, healthy democracy – as did Japan. We were instrumental in creating landmark global organizations like NATO, the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank.

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We liberated concentration camps, greatly advanced human rights around the world, prevented a nuclear war, and stopped communism in its tracks. We steadfastly fought HIV/AIDS in developing countries, providing millions of people antiviral drugs and preventing hundreds of thousands of precious babies from being infected with HIV at birth.

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Through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), support from the American people vastly increased access to education and healthcare for millions; helped achieve significant reductions in child and maternal mortality; was instrumental in eradicating smallpox and reducing malaria deaths; helped secure democracy for vulnerable nations; and is responsible for sparking economic development in regions throughout the world. We have provided critical assistance during natural disasters, famines, and other emergencies and provided access to clean drinking water for millions of desperate people.

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There is a major misconception in our politics today that the United States did these things for other countries just to be nice. The story seems to be that the billions and billions we have given to people in other countries (which equals less than 1 percent of the annual federal budget, by the way) is nothing more than a wasted gift given to foreigners while the American people get nothing in return as we suffer through our own problems here at home.

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This is 1000% false. Sure, helping people in need is a nice thing to do – and we do believe at our core Americans are super nice people – but we did many of these things in our own self-interest as much as anything else. After World War II, for example, we helped rebuild many economies from afar mainly to put us in a position to create a new world order… which we did.

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We not only rebuilt this new international order to our advantage by making sure we would lead and operate it, but we also restored prosperity to a shattered world, repaired and strengthened our global alliances, and put mechanisms in place to prevent future conflicts. These actions ensured we would enjoy political, economic and security cooperation around the world, plus created stability, predictability and financial gains not only for ourselves, but for many grateful nations.

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The global rules, institutions, and alliances that emerged from this period – that WE wrote and formed – remain the foundation of our modern-day global structure. A structure that still significantly benefits the United States.

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Our unprecedented and unparalleled reputation as a collaborative, compassionate, and supportive global leader and friend is also rapidly collapsing under the Trump/Vance administration. In fact, the words “rapidly collapsing” are hardly adequate to describe the absolute trainwreck that has happened here.

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A 29-country Ipsos poll from April 2025 found that the number of people saying the United States would have an overall positive influence on global affairs had fallen in 26 out of 29 countries in just six months. On average, almost 46 percent across the 29 countries said the U.S. would have a positive influence, down from 59 percent who said the same in Sept/Oct 2024. While 52 percent of Canadians saw America as a positive influencer before the U.S. presidential election, only 19 percent felt the same way six months after.

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Likewise, results from the 2025 Democracy Perception Index – the world’s largest study on how people around the world perceive democracy – was heartbreaking. For the first time, more countries around the world had a positive view of China than of the United States. The perception of the United States had declined noticeably – the proportion of countries where the United States held a net positive image decreased from 76 percent to 45 percent – with our global net perception rating similar to Russia’s.

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When it came to the perception of political leaders in 2025, “Donald Trump had an almost universal negative perception rating: in 82 percent of countries around the world, Trump had a net negative rating, significantly worse than both Putin (61 percent) and Xi (44 percent).”

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In the 2026 survey, global perceptions of the United States fell below those of Russia for the first time. The survey found that views of the U.S. deteriorated for a second consecutive year, citing perceptions to U.S. foreign policy decisions, including tariffs, tensions with NATO allies, reduced support for Ukraine, and threats involving Greenland.

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In July 2026, the Pew Research Center reported that China is now seen more positively than the U.S. in most of 36 countries surveyed. The gap is especially large in several Asia-Pacific and Middle Eastern countries, and Canadians and Mexicans also view China more positively than the United States. This happened quickly. A majority of Canadians (57 percent) had a positive view of America in 2023, while only 14 percent viewed China positively. In 2025, Canadians were equally favorable toward America and China. Now, however, more Canadians have a favorable view of China (44 percent) than America (33 percent).

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Further, “confidence in these countries’ respective leaders to do the right thing regarding world affairs has followed a similar pattern. In the latter half of Joe Biden’s presidency, confidence in him was higher than confidence in Chinese President Xi Jinping across most countries surveyed, though Biden’s rating declined in many places from 2023 to 2024. During the first two years of Trump’s second term, ratings of the U.S. president worsened significantly. While many people still lack confidence in Xi, positive views of him have become more widespread, and more overall now say they have confidence in Xi than in Trump.”

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Without question, the Trump/Vance administration’s isolationist, transactional, conditional and antagonistic approach to foreign policy has shaken the world’s fundamental assumptions about American exceptionalism and called into question the special role we have been so fortunate to play.

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It’s not just the policies they initiate or fail to initiate – which are bad enough. It’s also the insults, the tantrums, the mixed signals, the inconsistencies and contradictions, the reversals, the dismantling of key global agreements and institutions, and the outright lies that cause so much harm. It’s the complete absence of risk versus reward analysis, serious deliberation with experts, or even the most rudimentary inquiry into potential consequences.

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Instead of strengthening and solidifying our envied position on the world stage, Donald Trump, JD Vance, Marco Rubio, and many other Republicans have done the opposite – hell-bent on tearing down eighty years of proven success and replacing it with an imperialistic, protectionist foreign policy that has zero chance of long-term success.

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The National Security Strategy released by the White House in November 2025 reads like a declaration of surrender more than anything else. We're not conspiracy theorists, but if anything were going to convince us that Donald Trump is a Russian asset, this document – plus his 28-point “plan” to end the Russia/Ukraine war – would be it.

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The Trump/Vance administration skewers our European allies, saying the European Union is not only “adverse” to American economic interests but is also facing “civilizational erasure.” They warn that “within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European,” meaning they are trying to export their vision of a white-preferred immigration system overseas. (We wonder how devastated these guys are going to be when they finally realize there are just not enough white people on planet earth to execute their grand plans?)

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They condescendingly suggest that because the European Union is jeopardizing “political liberty,” repressing free speech, and “cratering birthrates,” the “goal” of the United States “should be to help Europe correct its current trajectory.” (For people who claim they value national sovereignty, they sure do like to get up in everyone’s business. They’re like the Gladys Kravitz-s of nations.)

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Apparently, the U.S. can achieve this goal by elevating “patriotic European parties” (read: far-right populist parties). This reaffirms Vice President JD Vance’s diatribe in Germany in February 2025, when he sneeringly lectured our allies about their retreat from “traditional values” – while, at the same time, meeting with and lavishing praise on the leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, who many accuse of aligning, at least on some level, with Nazism.

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< Sidebar: The Trump/Vance administration’s full-scale attack on our European allies – together with President Trump’s threats against Greenland and his saying things like the continent is a “decaying” group of nations led by “weak” people and that European soldiers “stayed a little back, a little off the front lines” in Afghanistan – have been so disrespectful and misguided that even the far-right nationalist leaders there, who once saw the administration as an ideological ally, are now distancing themselves from them. >

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Most frightening, the administration says that European nations should take “primary responsibility” for their own defense, signaling that they believe the United States should no longer guarantee Europe’s security – taking direct aim at the U.S.-European military cooperation that is fundamental to the peace and security of the United States.

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This is a continuation of the war Donald Trump has waged against NATO for years. On the 2016 campaign trail, candidate Trump made references to NATO’s waning effectiveness, even calling it “obsolete” at one point (he backtracked on this in 2019, saying NATO has “a great purpose, especially with the fact that NATO is becoming much more flexible, in terms of what it looks at,” whatever that means).

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On the 2024 campaign trail, he said he wouldn’t defend NATO members if they didn’t meet their defense spending targets. This obviously alarmed many of our European allies, whose anxiety was also heightened by President Trump’s selection of Pete Hegseth as his second administration’s Defense Secretary.

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In Hegseth’s book, The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free, he wrote: “Why should America, the European ‘emergency contact number’ for the past century, listen to self-righteous and impotent nations asking us to honor outdated and one-sided defense arrangements they no longer live up to? Maybe if NATO countries actually ponied up for their own defense – but they don’t. They just yell about the rules while gutting their militaries and yelling at America for help.”

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Donald Trump’s bombastic campaign rhetoric and Pete Hegseth’s insulting words highlight their belief that our European allies had been taking advantage of our military protection for decades without paying their fair share financially.​ While it’s true that many NATO members fell short of their defense-spending commitments for years, those days are over. In 2025, all 32 members of the alliance met or exceeded the benchmark of spending two percent of GDP on defense – the first time that has happened since NATO adopted the target in 2014.​ And NATO has now raised the bar considerably. At the 2025 summit in The Hague, members committed to investing five percent of GDP annually in defense and security by 2035: at least 3.5 percent for core military requirements and up to another 1.5 percent for critical infrastructure, cybersecurity, civil preparedness, resilience and the defense industrial base.

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Although President Trump takes credit for this, naturally, we feel it’s more a response to Vladimir Putin’s unrelenting aggression, Europe’s rising apprehension of Russia and China, and the Trump/Vance administration pulling the U.S. away from global alliances than it is a reaction to rants and threats made by the likes of Donald Trump, JD Vance, Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth (meaning it could have been achieved without them being such jerks about it).

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President Trump’s ire at NATO has gone into overdrive since he chose to go to war with Iran. He has repeatedly lashed out at our NATO allies for not, in his estimation, “helping” enough with the war effort – obviously forgetting that 1) he forgot to loop them in beforehand, and 2) that he had been a complete jackass to them for months.

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This all came to a head at the White House on April 8, 2026. After a meeting between President Trump and Mark Rutte, the secretary general of the military alliance – where President Trump reportedly ranted and raved at the poor man – the U.S. president posted: “NATO WASN’T THERE WHEN WE NEEDED THEM, AND THEY WON’T BE THERE IF WE NEED THEM AGAIN. REMEMBER GREENLAND, THAT BIG, POORLY RUN, PIECE OF ICE!!!” – whatever in the world that non sequitur even means.

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Then, of course, came the July 2026 NATO summit in Turkey, where our president once again blasted allies he believed had failed to adequately support the U.S. in Iran. Spain received particularly harsh treatment: “Spain is a wasted cause. We don’t want to do any trade business with Spain anymore.”

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He wasn’t finished, then calling Spain a “terrible partner in NATO” and instructing Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to “cut off all trade with Spain” – even saying the United States should stop visits and communication with the country. Incidentally, Spain had already reached NATO’s previous benchmark of spending two percent of GDP on defense; its dispute with Trump centered in part on its refusal to embrace the alliance’s new five-percent target on the timetable he wanted.

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In August 2026, as the 60-day U.S.-Iran ceasefire arrangement expired, Trump weirdly threatened Oman – a key mediator in efforts involving Iran – warning that if Oman “gets in the way,” the United States would “bomb the shit out of them again.” Around the same time, he ordered the Pentagon to substantially scale back the annual Ulchi Freedom Shield military exercises with South Korea. He cited the cost of the exercises and his relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, but he also made clear in a discombobulated Truth Social posy that Seoul’s refusal to participate in the Iran campaign was very much on his mind: “While somewhat unrelated (?), I recently asked the President of South Korea if they would like to join us in the Denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and they said, ‘No thanks!’”

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Typically, the connection was apparently not so “unrelated” after all, since Trump’s order regarding the military exercises ultimately resulted in the U.S. and South Korea agreeing to shorten the exercises from eleven days to five and reduce field-training activities – modifying one of the longstanding pillars of our military alliance with Seoul while an erratic, nuclear-armed North Korea remains just across the border.

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Please believe, the United States needs NATO now as much as we did in 1949, when the group was formed as a defense against Soviet aggression. NATO provides the U.S. valuable partnerships that fortify our national defense and security plus crisis-management capabilities around the world.

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If nothing else, we benefit greatly from NATO’s Principle of Collective Defense, which is the idea that an attack against one of its members is considered as an attack against all (this principle is commonly known as Article 5). Article 5 has been invoked only once, in response to the 9/11 U.S. terrorist attacks. On one of the worst days in our nation’s history, our faithful allies didn’t blink and had our back 100%. NATO troops then fought alongside us in Afghanistan for two decades – which is why Donald Trump saying that NATO soldiers “stayed a little back, a little off the front lines” in Afghanistan is so incredibly offensive.

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Denmark suffered one of the very highest per-capita military death rates of any NATO ally in Afghanistan – which makes Donald Trump’s Greenland temper tantrums even more horrifying. Every single American should be beyond embarrassed that our leaders are acting like mob bosses overseas. It’s not only mortifying but, if we don’t stop this madness, it will come back to haunt us in ways we can’t even imagine.

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The Trump/Vance administration’s insulting answer to a “weak” Europe and “ineffective” NATO is to expand the “Board of Peace,” a scheme originally designed to supervise their plan to transform Gaza into the new Las Vegas. Lately, however, the Board of Peace is marketing itself as a new international peacekeeping body. Kind of like a global Mar-a-Lago, countries can upgrade to permanent membership if they pay over a billion dollars in cash. “This is not just a board of peace,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared. “This is a board of action.” (insert: eye-roll emoji)

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Surprising no one, the Board of Peace will be permanently led by one Donald J. Trump, who posted on social media that the board is “the Greatest and Most Prestigious Board ever assembled at any time, any place.” The charter explains that the chairman has the “exclusive authority” to create other entities to carry out the board’s mission and has the power to invite states to join, adopt resolutions and directives, veto resolutions, dissolve the board, and to decide how the billions are spent. The chairman can only be removed by voluntary resignation or if he becomes incapacitated – meaning, he doesn’t have to leave when he is no longer the U.S. president. Plus, Donald Trump and only Donald Trump can designate his successor. (insert: facepalm emoji)

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The Trump/Vance administration reportedly reached out to around 60 countries to join the board, but a full list was not made public. I’m not sure you could trust any list the White House released anyway, because at one point they said Belgium had joined the board but Maxime Prévot, the country’s deputy prime minister and minister of foreign affairs, was quick to deny that report, saying Belgium, like other European nations, had “reservations” about this new endeavor. Belgian then reported that, according to a government source, the United States had apparently confused Belgium with Belarus. (insert: is there an emoji for humiliation?)

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Not so with former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who posted on X that, “We have, of course, accepted this honourable invitation” (insert: throw-up emoji).

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Many bewildered countries are stalling, but others have officially joined, including Albania, Argentina, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Belarus, Bulgaria, Egypt, Hungary, Israel, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Mongolia, Morocco, Pakistan, Paraguay, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam.

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Norway, Sweden, Slovenia, Spain and France have definitively said they would not join – France making Donald Trump so mad that he threatened to impose 200% tariffs on their wine (surprise, surprise). Canada’s invitation has been rescinded since Prime Minister Mark Carney upstaged President Trump at the World Economic Forum in Davos (surprise, surprise) – although we doubt Mr. Carney is losing much sleep over it.

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In fact, it’s hard to imagine France – or China, Russia or the United Kingdom – joining, not wanting to weaken the United Nations in any way since they serve permanently on its Security Council and have a veto over its actions – but good ‘ol Vladimir, ever crafty, said the Kremlin would consider joining and paying the $1 billion initiation fee if he could get it from frozen Russian assets.

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In July 2026, the Board of Peace announced its 15-point proposal to achieve peace and security in Gaza, which included a plan for the disarmament of Hamas and an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza – a proposal that was met with an immediate escalation of Israeli bombings. Israeli bombs killed 18 people right after the announcement, making it one of the deadliest days there since the “cease-fire” announced in October.

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In case the bombings didn’t make clear the Israeli position, a spokesman for the Israeli prime minister’s office said, “The version that has been made public does not reflect Israel’s positions. Israel has conveyed its comments and concerns on the proposed framework to our American counterparts.” 

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So, seven months after Donald Trump, JD Vance and Marco Rubio unveiled their shiny new Board of Peace, its inaugural peace project has reached the awkward stage where one side says it has accepted the board’s plan, America’s closest ally in the conflict refuses to accept it, and the “peace” being overseen by the Board of Peace continues to include Israeli bombs falling on Gaza. In fact, Jared Kushner – Donald’s son-in-law, informal advisor and key negotiator on Middle East policy – personally met both Hamas leader Khalil al-Hayya and Netanyahu trying to rescue the deal… and still couldn’t get Israel to accept it. Is this really better than NATO can do?

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This, of course, was all playing out amid President Trump’s proclamation (yet again) that the U.S. would acquire Greenland “the easy way” or “the hard way” – a once unthinkable threat to take over the sovereign territory of a European Union member and NATO ally by the president of the United States.

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….so unthinkable that Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said such an act would mark the end of NATO: “If the United States were to choose to attack another NATO country, then everything would come to an end. The international community as we know it, democratic rules of the game, NATO, the world’s strongest defensive alliance – all of that would collapse if one NATO country chose to attack another.”

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Far from being chastened, President Trump, America’s very own Michael Corleone, took delight in rubbing Europe’s face in his threat, posting a map showing Greenland, Canada and Venezuela all as part of the United States and putting a 10 percent tariff increase on imports from Britain, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden – all of which had recently deployed troops to Greenland – until they helped the United States strike a deal to obtain the Danish territory.

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A few months earlier, our allies may have just rolled their eyes and kept their mouths shut – even when the president of the United States (who is 79 years old, not 12) taunted them, saying things like, without America’s help in World War II, “you’d all be speaking German” and “the United States is keeping the whole world afloat” and their “countries are going to hell.”

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But the Greenland episode made clear they have had enough of his foolishness. Whereas, before, they tried everything from capitulation and false flattery – sending him love letters, building custom-made McDonalds food trucks, draping banners of his face around their cities, nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize, actually giving him their Nobel Peace Prize, creating peace prizes to give him, and calling him “daddy” at a NATO summit – this debacle seemed to be the last straw.

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Miraculously, Donald Trump seemed to sense that the rest of the world had lost patience with his unquenchable ego and unpredictable hissy fits but, unfortunately, despite President TACO’s (Trump Always Chickens Out) whiplash reversal – where he pivoted from double-digit tariffs to settling for a “framework of a future deal” within literally an hour – the damage was done.

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Belgium Prime Minister Bart De Wever: “Until now, we tried to appease the new president in the White House. We were very lenient, also with the tariffs, we were lenient, hoping to get his support for the Ukraine war. But now so many red lines are being crossed. Being a happy vassal is one thing, being a miserable slave is something else.”​ Polish prime minister Donald Tusk: “Appeasement is always a sign of weakness. Europe cannot afford to be weak – neither against its enemies, nor ally. Appeasement means no results, only humiliation.”

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In a brave speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos – where he received a standing ovation – Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said that the United States had basically abdicated its once unassailable leadership role in NATO: “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.” The “middle powers must act together – because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu… When the rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself.”

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In July 2026, President Trump revived his crusade to seize Greenland at the beginning of NATO’s annual summit in Turkey – – saying “Greenland should be controlled by the United States, not by Denmark” – – forcing the Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen to reiterate that “we are ready to defend every inch of NATO, including our own territory. One of the reasons why we built NATO many, many years ago is if anything happens to one of us then everybody should stand up for each other.”

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Make no mistake, the two people who benefit most – or perhaps the only people who benefit at all – from Donald Trump, JD Vance and Marco Rubio blowing apart our relationships with our European allies are Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. Hands down.

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Since NATO was founded in 1949, Soviet, then Russian, leaders have tried to undermine the alliance. Vladimir Putin especially loathes the trans-Atlantic bond because, as NATO expands eastward, it’s the only thing that stands in the way of his imperial aspirations.

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The more NATO membership extends to former Soviet states and their former communist allies, the harder it is for Putin to re-establish his own sphere of influence (already, Estonia, Lithuania and Poland are some of NATO’s most committed members). By creating such a deep rift between the United States and Europe, Donald Trump, JD Vance and Marco Rubio are doing the Kremlin’s dirty work for them, helping achieve what has alluded them for over 75 years.

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So, of course the Russians were downright giddy over this turn of events. “Trans-Atlantic unity is over,” declared Russian presidential envoy Kirill Dmitriev. “Collapse of the transatlantic union.”

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 “It was hard to imagine before that such a thing could happen,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said, marveling over a scenario where “one NATO member is going to attack another NATO member.” He quickly likened President Trump’s strategy for Greenland with Russia’s annexation of the Ukrainian Black Sea peninsula of Crimea: “Crimea is no less important for the Russian Federation than Greenland is for the United States” – and just like that, the world understood that the United States of America was now operating from the same playbook as Russia.

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Likewise, China is thrilled by the Trump/Vance administration’s National Security Strategy and foreign policy – particularly the military strike on Venezuela – because it gives Xi Jinping the perfect excuse to forcefully assert his ambitions in his own neighborhood, including his aggressive plans for the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait. In a January 20, 2025 commentary, Xinhua, the Chinese state-news agency, said that the United States’ “true colors are revealed” and the U.S. is now a “purely extractive superpower” that is returning “the world to a barbaric colonial era of plunder. The world map is no longer a political chart of alliances and sovereignties,” they said, “but a crude inventory of assets. A country’s status – ally, rival or neutral – is irrelevant beside the fundamental question of its utility.” Ouch.

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Really think about the direction Donald Trump, JD Vance and Marco Rubio are taking us. The United States used to lead by example – and in many ways that was enough to keep China and others in line. Now, however, we have no right to say anything if Xi Jinping decides to overthrow Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te. Worse, now that Trump, Vance and Rubio have successfully ticked off all our allies, we may not be able to coordinate an international response if they do (which we have already seen happen in Iran).