Why Trump wants to own the Pentagon, CNN.com

Analysis by Peter Bergen, CNN
6-minute read
Updated 12:44 PM EST, Mon February 24, 2025

CNN
—
In a dramatic Friday night purge, President Donald Trump took decisive action to avoid a repeat of his first term when he tussled with senior military leaders, by firing America’s top general and removing others in an effort to ensure he has a fully compliant Pentagon.

At a good time to try and bury major news— Trump’s most senior military adviser, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown and the top US navy officer, the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Lisa Franchetti were both fired. Trump’s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also announced he is seeking nominations to replace the top military lawyers at the Air Force, Army and Navy who sign off on the legality of US military operations.

None of these officials seem to have been fired for cause, such as poor performance on the battlefield or insubordination, other than a purported obsession with DEI in the case of General Brown, according to Hegseth’s 2024 book.

Trump wants to remake the Pentagon, so he has total control over it. Of course, he is the Commander in Chief so it’s his prerogative to do so, but by firing Brown who is Black and Franchetti who was the first woman to run the Navy, Trump signaled that unquestioned loyalty will be the key qualification for these jobs rather than providing the best military advice to the president irrespective of American domestic politics, which is meant to be the key function of the roles.

Trump has been obsessed with the US military from an early age. He attended a military-style boarding school in New York and one of his heroes is General George Patton, an aggressive battlefield commander during World War II.

So, when Trump took office in his first term, he quickly surrounded himself with senior generals; retired four-star General John Kelly was his second chief of staff; retired four-star General James Mattis was his first secretary of defense and active duty three-star Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster was his second national security adviser.

Trump reveled in talking about “my generals” such as “Mad Dog” Mattis, and he also took a boyish delight in the ceremonial aspects of being the commander in chief. Trump was wowed by the French display of military hardware that he saw at the Bastille Day celebration in Paris on July 14, 2016.

Trump ordered the Pentagon to put on a similar show for his “Salute to America” Independence Day speech on July 4, 2019, and the generals didn’t disappoint. During his speech, Trump did a play-by-play account of a fly-by of advanced US Air Force planes flying overhead, announcing, “You will soon see beautiful brand-new F-22 Raptors” and “a magnificent B-2 stealth bomber.”

But Trump’s bromances with his generals soured over time (nota bene, Elon!) because Kelly, Mattis and McMaster each in their different ways wouldn’t comply with Trump’s wishes, as I found when I was reporting my book, “Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos.”

McMaster wore out his welcome with Trump, in part, because he advocated for staying the course in Afghanistan and expanding the US troop presence there. Trump had long wanted to get out of Afghanistan and after McMaster was eased out after just over a year on the job, Trump authorized his team to start negotiating with the Taliban a total US withdrawal from Afghanistan.

For his part, Mattis worried that Trump would start World War III and when in 2017, Trump was ratcheting up his rhetoric against the nuclear-armed North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un, Mattis “slow rolled” providing potential military options against North Korea. Mattis also delayed providing military options, for any kind of potential conflict with Iran.

President Donald Trump speaks as national security advisor H.R. McMaster, left, White House chief of staff John Kelly, second left, and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, right, listen during a briefing with senior military leaders in the Cabinet Room of the White House in October 2017.
President Donald Trump speaks as national security advisor H.R. McMaster, left, White House chief of staff John Kelly, second left, and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, right, listen during a briefing with senior military leaders in the Cabinet Room of the White House in October 2017. Andrew Harrer/Pool/Getty Images
Trump’s final break with Mattis came over the fight against ISIS in Syria. Mattis believed US troops should stay in Syria after ISIS’s defeat there to prevent any return of the terrorist group, while Trump insisted on withdrawing from Syria. Mattis also felt that this left the Syrian Kurdish forces that had been fighting ISIS vulnerable to attack by the powerful Turkish military and would mean abandoning an ally on the battlefield.

On December 19, 2018, Trump tweeted about his order to pull all US troops out of Syria. The following day Mattis met with Trump in the Oval Office and tried to persuade the president to reverse his decision. Trump wouldn’t budge so Mattis resigned.

Kelly, Trump’s chief of staff, viewed his time in the White House by what he’d managed to prevent on his watch, for instance, Trump abruptly pulling US troops out of Afghanistan, or withdrawing from NATO. Trump hates being “managed” so his relationship with Kelly soured too and he left the White House in December 2018.

US President Donald Trump holds up a Bible outside of St John’s Episcopal church across Lafayette Park in Washington, DC on June 1, 2020. – US President Donald Trump was due to make a televised address to the nation on Monday after days of anti-racism protests against police brutality that have erupted into violence.
The White House announced that the president would make remarks imminently after he has been criticized for not publicly addressing in the crisis in recent days. (Photo by Brendan Smialowski / AFP) (Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)
President Donald Trump holds up a Bible outside of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington, DC, on June 1, 2020. Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images/FILE
A decisive break between Trump and many US flag officers came during the nationwide protests sparked by the murder by Minneapolis police of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. Just outside the White House grounds on June 3, police, with National Guard troops in reserve, attacked peaceful protesters near St. John’s Church. At the church Trump held up a Bible for the cameras.

After resigning Mattis had said little about Trump. Now he released a damning statement saying: “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us.”

Trump’s then-Defense Secretary, Mark Esper, a former officer in the US Army who had replaced Mattis, publicly said that he would not support using active-duty US troops to quell protests which Trump had recently threatened to do. Esper was fired by tweet six months later.

Yet another break with the Pentagon happened following the January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol by Trump supporters. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley called his Chinese counterpart to assure him that there was no chance of the US launching a military attack against China. On Twitter Trump then suggested that Milley should be executed for his conversation with the Chinese general.

The scar tissue from Trump’s past fights with Pentagon leaders has resulted in Trump’s intention to take total control over the Department of Defense. We saw a hint of that in the final months of his first term when Trump installed an ultra-loyalist, Kash Patel, to the powerful job of chief of staff at the Pentagon. Patel was recently voted in by the Senate to become the new director of the FBI.

Trump expects nothing less than Patel-levels of loyalty in his generals and top officials at the Pentagon. And Friday night’s purge of six senior military officers is likely to be just the aperitif since Hegseth is now looking for tens of billions of dollars of cuts at his department and he’ll likely have to lose significant numbers of personnel.

No Way But Forward: Life Stories of Three Families in the Gaza Strip, New America ONLINE

What is life really like in the Gaza Strip? Few outside observers have spent as much time on the ground in Gaza exploring this question as Brian K. Barber. In his new book, No Way But Forward, Barber traces how three ordinary young Palestinian men have experienced life in Gaza over the past thirty years—including the year following October 7, 2023. Their lives have been riddled with oppressive military constraint, violence, humiliation, and loss. Yet along with their parents, wives, and children, they have persevered. These narratives are gripping tales of survival, endurance, and hope.

Join New America’s Future Security Program as they welcome Brian K. Barber for a discussion of his new book and life in Gaza. Brian K. Barber, PhD, is Professor Emeritus at the University of Tennessee and the author of No Way But Forward: Life Stories of Three Families in the Gaza Strip. He is a former New America Future Security Program Fellow and was a 2016 Jacobs Foundation Fellow with New America’s Fellows Program. Among other books, he is the editor of Intrusive Parenting: How Psychological Control Affects Children and Adolescents (2002, American Psychological Association), and Adolescents and War: How Youth Deal with Political Conflict (2008, Oxford University Press).

His latest book is available at www.bkbarber.com.

Join the conversation online using #NoWayButForward and follow @NewAmericaISP.

Participants:

Brian K. Barber
Author, No Way But Forward

Former Fellow, New America Future Security Program

2016 Jacobs Foundation Fellow, New America

Moderator:

Peter Bergen
Vice President, New America
Co-Director, Future Security

Is A New Nuclear Arms Race Inevitable?

Jan 28 2025
Very quietly, and with little public discussion, the U.S. military has undertaken a $1.5 trillion project to modernize America’s nuclear triad – the planes, submarines and missiles that deliver nuclear weapons. It’s one of the biggest and most expensive projects in American military history – more costly, even, than the Manhattan Project. But how necessary is this modernization effort? And what message does it send to our nuclear adversaries?

Special Operations Forces (SOF) Week, Tampa

SOF Week
Held in Tampa, Florida, Special Operations Forces (SOF) Week is an annual conference for the international SOF community to learn, connect, and honor its members. Jointly sponsored by USSOCOM and the Global SOF Foundation, the 2024 edition attracted over 19,000 attendees.

SOF Week 2025 aims to be the premier global gathering of special operators, industry leaders, and strategic partners. This event will foster collaboration, innovation, and excellence, showcasing the cutting-edge capabilities and strategies that define modern special operations.

How the CIA got into the Venture Capital Game

With the rise of technology in the late 1990s, a new national security threat quickly emerged. And the U.S. government had to find a way to protect itself — and its secrets — from foreign adversaries and cybercriminals. It needed the cutting-edge technologies coming out of Silicon Valley, from startups that had never done business with the government — and probably didn’t see much reason to. Enter In-Q-Tel, a non-profit venture capital firm designed to fund innovations that would meet U.S. intelligence needs. Twenty-five years later, the firm now sits on approximately $1 billion in assets. What is this strange, secretive VC firm? How does it work? And what value does it deliver to ordinary Americans? Sue Gordon, a career intelligence official and one of its founders, tells us all about it on Audible.

Trump’s ambition to retake the Panama Canal could have a heavy cost, CNN.com

Analysis by Peter Bergen, CNN
3 minute read
Published 10:04 AM EST, Tue January 21, 20
—
In recent weeks, when he was president-elect, Donald Trump publicly said that Panama should return the Panama Canal to the United States and that he would not rule out using military force to reclaim it. At his presidential inauguration on Monday, Trump doubled down.

Trump’s threat to upend decades of American policy and a war to seize the canal would be a major undertaking from a president who has railed against American military involvement in conflicts in the Middle East and would surely be hard to sell to the American public.

It was President Jimmy Carter who negotiated the return of the Panama Canal to the Panamanians and secured the more-than-two-thirds vote in the US Senate necessary to ratify the Panama Canal treaties in 1978.

Carter felt that returning the Panama Canal to Panama’s government was the right thing to do since it was a legacy of a time when the US exerted a quasi-colonial policy over Central America.

It’s worth noting that it wasn’t just Carter who signed on to the Panama Canal treaties; presidents of both parties – Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton – all felt bound by the terms of the treaties, which were only fully implemented when the United States entirely transferred the operations of the Panama Canal over to Panama on December 31, 1999.

Since then, the operation of the canal by the Panamanians has been a non-issue, and more than two-thirds of the ships transiting the canal are either coming or going to American ports, according to the US International Trade Administration.

Following Trump’s assertions that the canal should be returned to the United States, Panama‘s President José Raúl Mulino issued a statement in December saying, “As President, I want to express precisely that every square meter of the Panama Canal and its adjacent area belong to PANAMA, and will continue to be.”

That would seem to have settled it, though, earlier this month, Trump added the potential threat of US military action to take back the canal.

A war to secure the canal zone wouldn’t be a small matter. It’s more than 500 square miles of territory, and the population of Panama is 4.5 million people, many of whom presumably wouldn’t be thrilled to be under some form of American occupation.

Estimates by the US Army suggest you need a minimum of “Twenty counterinsurgents per 1,000 residents … for effective [counterinsurgency] operations.” So, given Panama’s population, that would be a force of around 90,000 US troops.

This kind of military operation would also get the US involved in another land war of the type that Trump has long criticized.

Also, under what authority could Trump order US troops to seize the Panama Canal? Typically, there would need to be a US congressional resolution for the use of such force, as there has been in place since the 9/11 attacks that authorizes the use of force against groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS.

Any military seizure of the Panama Canal also would be quite disruptive to global trade. Around 6% of global trade passes through the canal. Any military action over the canal would also come at a time when the Houthis in Yemen have disrupted another key trade route by regularly targeting ships in the Red Sea with drones and missiles that are coming and going from the Suez Canal, which accounts for another 12% of global trade.

Trump has built his political career thinking outside the box, but attempting to take back the canal — whether by bullying the Panamanians or using military force — would be a risky undertaking unlikely to succeed.

Doha Security Forum, Doha, Qatar

Global Security Forum 2025
The Impact of Non-State Actors on Global Security
April 28-30 2025
The 2025 Global Security Forum (GSF) will take place from April 28-30, 2025, in Doha, Qatar, hosted by The Soufan Center and the Qatar International Academy for Security Studies (QIASS). Under the auspices of His Excellency Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani, Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs of the State of Qatar, this year’s gathering will address the theme “The Impact of Non-State Actors on Global Security.” This pivotal theme will explore the evolving roles and influences of non-state actors—ranging from private military contractors and transnational terrorist groups to organized criminal networks and violent extremist organizations—on the global security landscape. Our website will be regularly updated with information about this year’s event.

60
Countries

5
Strategic Partners

43
Sessions

1400
Attendees

Future Security Forum, New America DC with Arizona State University

The worst thing LA could do as it recovers from fire disaster, CNN.com

Analysis by Peter Bergen, CNN
13 minute read
Published 6:00 AM EST, Sat January 18, 2025

CNN
—
Despite the finger-pointing about who is to blame for the spread of the Los Angeles fires, Jeff Goodell believes there’s no level of preparation that could have fundamentally changed the trajectory of this massive disaster, which was propelled by urban planning decisions made decades ago and more than a century of fossil fuel pollution that has made 2024 the hottest year on record.

LA — and much of the rest of the world — was built for a climate that no longer exists, said Goodell, a journalist and writer who has covered climate change and the environment for the past quarter century. We must reimagine how we build our world and the kinds of urban planning, water supplies, building insulation, and public transportation that are necessary to adapt to a hotter climate.

Jeff Goodell is a journalist and author. His most recent title is “The Heat Will Kill You First.”
Jeff Goodell is a journalist and author. His most recent title is “The Heat Will Kill You First.” Courtesy Jeff Goodell
In a conversation last weekend, Goodell and I also discussed how the Biden administration has presided over the most significant amount of gas and oil production in American history — a fact that the Biden team has been reticent to advertise and a trend that the incoming Trump administration will likely only amplify.

Goodell, who — full disclosure — was a fellow at New America, the research institution where I’m a vice president, also described the emergence of “attribution science,” which increasingly allows scientists to attribute the responsibility for certain extreme weather events to climate pollution. It’s a significant step forward in research that could ultimately enable those harmed most by climate change to hold fossil fuel companies accountable.

Our conversation was edited for clarity.

PETER BERGEN: Are you surprised by what’s unfolding in Los Angeles?

JEFF GOODELL: I wish I could say that I was, but I’m not, partly because I’m a fourth-generation Californian and I grew up seeing wildfires. And I know that fire is deeply a part of the California landscape. I’ve also been writing about climate change for 25 years. I know about the relationship between heat and fire, and as we build a hotter and hotter world, bigger and more intense fires are inevitable.

BERGEN: Southern California is prone to fires, and the Santa Ana winds are a recurring weather event. Are these LA fires different from anything we’ve seen before?

GOODELL: What’s different about these are the fires’ scale, speed and intensity. Another thing that’s very different is that it’s in January, which is not typically fire season in Southern California. And this elongation of the fire season is a hallmark of our changing climate. It used to be that in Southern California, there were five or six months a year of fire danger. And now it’s virtually year-round.

BERGEN: And what were those five or six months typically?

GOODELL: June through the end of October used to be the worst. I was just in New York at a conference with some of the best climate scientists in the world. The conversation was all about the Los Angeles fires and the changes in the hydrologic cycle. There was a lot of rain last spring and that caused a lot of brush and vegetation to grow up because there was so much water. And then you had an extreme dry cycle. So you had this excess vegetation, and then it gets dried out by these hotter summers and longer and longer dry seasons, which make it much more flammable.

BERGEN: There’s a lot of finger-pointing in LA right now. What do you make of it?

GOODELL: There’s always going to be finger-pointing after an event like this, and there’s obviously lots of things that could have been done better. But I think the blunt truth is that there’s no level of preparation that could have changed the trajectory of this in a fundamental way.

When you have 100 mph Santa Ana winds and you have this kind of dried-out vegetation and this kind of housing packed together in these inaccessible, difficult-to-reach hills, it’s just a recipe for this kind of terrible disaster. So, yes, if we would have thought differently about urban planning and restricted building in Pacific Palisades and 30 years ago required different building materials, and if the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere weren’t so high and the drought cycles and heat cycles weren’t so extreme, that could have been a different scenario.

There will be many lessons learned from this. But the biggest lesson that we need to learn is that we are just plain not prepared for the climate that we have created. Our world is not built for the climate that we live in, and the biggest change is going to require acknowledging that fact.

I’m scared that we’re going to rebuild LA more or less the same way, without using this as an opportunity to rethink how LA is built and reinvest in important public infrastructure like better water supply systems, as well as coming up with a strategy to force a retreat from building in the most risky areas.

This is an opportunity to reimagine the urban landscape and its relationship with nature in Southern California, and if history shows us anything, it’s not going to happen. We have to stop and think, “Okay, we have to do this differently now. We have to use this tragedy as an opportunity to really learn, really think this and rebuild in a way that acknowledges the dangers of the world that we live in right now.”

BERGEN: You begin your new book, “The Heat Will Kill You First,” in the Pacific Northwest, which generally has a temperate climate. What happened there?

GOODELL: The book’s opening describes the heat wave that hit in the summer of 2021 in the Pacific Northwest, where you saw a spike in temperatures in places like Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, up to around 121 degrees. A “heat dome” settled over this region for five or six days. And it led to these temperatures, which were virtually unheard of. It was the heat equivalent of snow in the Sahara. And the reason it was important is because It was an example of this new extreme kind of climate that we are creating by continuing to burn fossil fuels and put CO2 in the atmosphere, where we’re seeing these kinds of climate extremes that go beyond what even climate models are able to predict.

A lot of the talk about climate change and global warming is about average temperatures, about things like whether we have passed the threshold of a 1.5 degrees Celsius warming from pre-industrial conditions. But within that general warming is this more extreme weather phenomenon, where we have these sudden heat spikes, dramatic precipitation events, and bigger and more intense hurricanes. So, I wanted to capture these extremes and their unpredictability.

The Palisades Fire ravaged the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles on January 8.
Related article
How do you clean up a fire disaster unlike any other in modern times? ‘It’s going to be an enormous undertaking’

BERGEN: How did you get into reporting on climate change?

GOODELL: It was in 2001, just after George W. Bush had been elected. The New York Times called me up and said that Bush and Dick Cheney were going to release the “Bush-Cheney Energy Plan,” and the editors said, “There’s going to be a big push in fossil fuels, and coal is going to be a big part of that. Why don’t you go down to West Virginia and write about the comeback of the coal industry?”

I had never written about climate or energy. I had no idea that, at that time, half our electricity came from burning coal. But I thought it was an interesting assignment and went down to West Virginia. Going into the coal fields opened my eyes to a lot of things, and one of the things that made me start to think about is, “Okay, what is the consequence of burning all this coal?” And that’s when I started to think about climate change, which then grew into a book called “Big Coal.” And that was my first real dive into climate science.

BERGEN: You have spent a quarter of a century writing about climate change and traveling around the world reporting on it. Whatever their views about the causes of climate change, many people need to see it with their own eyes to acknowledge that climate change is happening. Has that changed the way that your work is received?

GOODELL: There is a much more widespread understanding that something is happening; everybody is noticing it. I live in Austin, Texas. In the summer of 2023, we had 45 days above 100 degrees. If you’re a human being living on planet Earth, you see what’s going on. But a lot of people say, “Well, you know, there’s always been variability, and it was hotter in previous times, and this is just natural variability.” They understand that it’s changing, but what exactly is changing is still up for dispute among many people.

It’s not up for dispute at all among scientists. It hasn’t been up for dispute among scientists for 40 years. But in those 40 years, the fossil fuel industry has ramped up a campaign of misinformation and disinformation and has deliberately clouded the communication around the consequences of burning fossil fuels.

So, our understanding of the risks of climate change in the public sphere is still not an accepted relationship, the way it is among scientists. The straightforward relationship between higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, mostly from burning fossil fuels and these extreme weather events is as solid as the science of gravity.

Firefighters work from a deck as the Palisades Fire burns a beach front property Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2025 in Malibu, Calif. (AP Photo/Etienne Laurent)
Related article
LA fires were larger and more intense because of planet-warming pollution, study suggests

BERGEN: Something that the Biden administration hasn’t advertised is that more gas and oil were produced during the Biden administration than at any other time in US history. Which is somewhat ironic, given where the rest of the Democratic Party is generally speaking on the question of climate change.

The Biden administration has been pretty permissive in terms of gas and oil production. Trump, is likely going to ratchet that up considerably, right?

GOODELL: Correct. And there’s no question that the Biden administration continued on the path of fossil fuel production with natural gas exports and drilling in a way inconsistent with any kind of serious grappling with the risks of climate change.

I think one of the things this LA fire shows is that it’s essential to talk about reducing fossil fuels, because they are ultimately the main driver of climate change, and that is ultimately the way we’re going to slow down this rise of temperature and increase of extreme weather events.

The environment that LA was built for — a lot of the buildings constructed in the 1920s and 30s and 40s — that climate does not exist any more, and we are not going back to that. We have to reimagine how we build our world. And that means all kinds of things, from how we design buildings, the kind of fireproofing, urban planning, water supplies, building insulation and public transportation.

On that score, Biden has certainly been better. In the Inflation Reduction Act, there were a number of measures that helped along the path of climate change adaptation.

It’s also really important to say that the transition from fossil fuels to cleaner energy is happening. It is a done deal. The issue is how fast it will happen, and I think the Trump administration will try to slow that transition so that the oil and gas companies have another decade or however long of insane profitability.

I live in Texas. During the summer this year, depending on the day, roughly 70% of the power on our grid came from renewable energy, and that’s mind-blowing. And that’s not because Texans are tree huggers. It’s because renewable energy — wind, solar, and geothermal — are the cheapest ways to generate power now.

So, this transition is going to happen. It’s just a question of how fast it happens.

BERGEN: One of the things I learned from your book was something called “attribution science” when it comes to extreme weather events. What is it?

GOODELL: Attribution science is a really powerful development in the world of climate science, and it has big political, legal and economic implications.

The easiest way to think about it is a kind of forensic science that can look at an extreme weather event, for example, the 2021 heat wave in the Pacific Northwest. They took a lot of the data points of this heat wave and put them into a computer model. And then they run that same computer model without the present higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, with a much lower level of CO2 and they run these models thousands of times.

If they can’t replicate the extreme weather event in the models, they can say that this event could not have happened, or was highly unlikely, without the higher levels of CO2, And in the case of the Pacific Northwest heat dome, where some 600 people died, they were able to say this event would not have happened without higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.

To be able to make a statement like that is a huge scientific breakthrough.

With attribution science you can begin to say, “Okay, who was responsible for putting the higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere?” And you can look at companies like ExxonMobil and Chevron, and you can say, “Well, they’ve known about these risks for decades, and they’ve continued to sell this product that they’ve known is dangerous.”

And in some cases, Big Oil starts to look a bit like Big Tobacco, and you can just play it out from there in the sense of litigation. This is why some 2,000 climate litigation cases worldwide are looking at these questions of responsibility.

Editor’s note: Since this interview took place, scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, published a rapid analysis that suggests human-caused climate change was responsible for 25% of the LA fires’ fuel, making them larger and more intense than they would have been without fossil fuel pollution in the atmosphere.

A firefighting plane makes a drop on the Palisades fire in Pacific Palisades on January 7, 2024.
Related article
2024 was the hottest year on record, breaching a critical climate goal and capping 10 years of unprecedented heat

BERGEN: Your most recent book is “The Heat Will Kill You First,” which is a very arresting title. How did you come up with it, and why?

GOODELL: Well, I came up with the title in the kind of brainstorming that one does looking for titles, and at first some people at my publishing house worried that it was too scary, that nobody would ever buy the book.

But I said, “No, I really want this to be the title of the book.” I think that a lot of the conversation, the media coverage and everything about climate change has been too far off in the distance. And I wanted this book title to do basically what the LA fires doing, which is focus the reader’s imagination on the here and now. Climate change is not about what might happen to your grandchild in 50 years or about what’s happening to polar bears on ice fields somewhere. It is about your life and the risks to your life now in a very personal and direct way.

People always ask me, “After covering climate change for so long, why aren’t you living in your basement drinking a bottle of bourbon and scrolling on the wall with crayons about the lost future for your children?” And it’s because I actually find this story both tragic, but also incredibly inspiring because I spend a lot of time talking with people every day who are doing amazing things.

They are doctors who are trying to better understand what heat does to the human body; wildland firefighters who are thinking differently about their strategies to deal with fires, architects who are thinking differently about how we’re going to build; scientists who are trying to better understand the consequences of rising greenhouse gas emissions. There’s just this whole range of people who understand that our world is changing really fast, that it’s a very dangerous moment and that there’s a lot that they can do to help.

I really am convinced that the better we understand the sort of scope and scale of what we face, and the better we can begin to reimagine our world and build a better world. I’m not writing about this as an extinction event. I’m not a doomer.

I am a person who really thinks that what Los Angeles is going to look like in 50 years is not at all the way it looks today. And what Miami is going to look like in 50 years is not at all like what Miami looks like today and Phoenix and Austin.

It might be hellishly worse if we’re stupid, and it might be a lot better if we’re smart.

What Can You Expect From President Trump’s Foreign Policy?

Jan 14 2025
Financial Times columnist Ed Luce says President Donald Trump might love trade wars, but he’d rather not engage in military ones. While he acknowledges there’s a lot that’s unpredictable, Luce is cautiously optimistic that with unpredictability there can also be opportunity, including for peace deals. So, what might U.S. foreign policy look like over the next four years?