The following argument is not about socialism, Israel, or a general appraisal of Mamdani’s agenda. It simply tests a definition against facts and evidence.

In November 2024, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Mamdani has called him a war criminal, based in part on that ICC ruling. You can debate its merits all you like. That is not at issue here. The problem is what Mamdani promised to do about it.

The following month during the initial stages of his mayoral run, Mamdani was asked if he would act on the warrant if elected. Mamdani did not hedge. He said, “As mayor, New York City would arrest Benjamin Netanyahu.” This was not stated as an aspiration. He repeated it throughout the campaign, again and again. And as mayor-elect, he doubled down.

He made these assertions even though the power to act simply does not exist. The United States is not a party to the International Criminal Court, and American law gives neither a mayor, nor any other American official, local, state or federal any authority whatsoever to execute its warrants. Additionally, a mayor can no more arrest a visiting head of government than he can declare war on one. This was not a campaign promise that was overtaken by events or blocked by the governor or city council. It was a promise to exercise a power the mayoralty has never held. Either he knew that, or he did not understand the powers of the office he was asking to hold. Neither is a defense.

On July 21, with the UN General Assembly due to convene in September, Mamdani conceded that, “it is clear that we do not have the independent legal authority to enforce this warrant,” and asked the federal government to do it instead.

Consider what a sober case on this subject would have sounded like. A mayoral candidate who wanted to speak to his political coalition’s desire to see Netanyahu stand trial could have made the case for what the office can actually do: press Washington, use the bully pulpit, and little else. But that is a true argument, and for a political base fixated on the issue, it is thin and unsatisfying. So, Mamdani instead, offered a cathartic but impossible route. He appealed to his voters’ emotions, instead of the reasoned argument, the one that would have told his supporters what was actually within the power of the office. Textbook demagoguery.

Take his signature campaign promise next. Affordability was the heart of Mamdani’s mayoral run, and “freeze the rent” was one of the main promises he ran on. He has also pressed to widen rent regulation further, toward what he calls universal rent control. He sold all of it, in his own phrase, as the road to “a more affordable New York.”

He delivered it. The Rent Guidelines Board, whose members he appoints, voted for a two-year freeze covering roughly one million rent-stabilized apartments. In all fairness, the freeze is real relief, and immediate, for the households living in those apartments. But the claim was larger: that this moves the city toward affordability, and on that, the evidence sprints in the other direction. There are few propositions in economics on which the profession is in such lockstep. A survey of leading economists by the University of Chicago found almost none willing to say rent control had improved affordability. A major modern study of the question, Diamond, McQuade, and Qian’s work on San Francisco, found that rent control shrank the housing supply and drove up rents across the rest of the rental housing stock. Quality erodes as well, since buildings under a permanent cap get less maintenance than they need. Mamdani took a real and sympathetic yearning for affordability, and answered it with a policy the evidence contradicts. Desire, in the place of reasoned argument. Demagoguery.

Finally, Mamdani says, plainly and often, that Israel is committing genocide. During the October 2025 mayoral debate, he said it three times in a matter of minutes. He said it again in the Oval Office, seated beside the President of the United States. He has called Netanyahu “the architect of a horrific genocide.” He uses the phrase freely, without hesitation, as if it is an established fact.

Now, whether Israel committed or did not commit genocide is not at issue here. What is, is that the question is not settled. Genocide is not a synonym for substantial civilian casualties during a war. It is a claim about intent, with the specific purpose to destroy a people in whole or in part; and whether that intent exists within the Israeli government is one of the most bitterly disputed questions in the world today. Israel and other governments, including our own, reject the charge. No international court has issued a final judgment on the merits. A three-member commission of inquiry created by the U.N. Human Rights Council, did rule that genocide occurred, but a single non-binding conclusion does not close a question this contested, any more than Israel’s denial categorically refutes it. The matter is open. Mamdani treats it as closed. He repeats the accusation as an undisputed truth, and lets the moral weight of the word substitute for the case he would otherwise have to make. Emotion, in the place of reasoned argument. Demagoguery.

Some will say this is simply how politics works now, that everyone appeals to emotion and everyone overpromises. Often that is true. But common is not the same as defensible, and you do not retire a standard because it is frequently violated. Appealing to emotion is not by itself demagoguery. The line is crossed when emotion is put in the place of what is true and what is achievable, and that matters because a demagogue is not merely dishonest. He is dangerous. His methods cannot govern well. False remedies get enacted and fail. Impossible promises go unkept. Each failure sharpens the grievance that produced it, and the next claim, angrier than the last, meets a more radicalized electorate. Emotion crowds out the reasoned argument that self-government actually depends on, and the ground shifts, a little at a time, toward the people who shout the loudest, with the boldest promises and the worst solutions.

There are really only two ways to stop it. The first is to actually deliver, to solve the real problems the demagogue feeds on. The second is to hold every leader to the same standard, whatever his party, and to refuse the convenient idea that it is only demagoguery when the other side does it.

That is the uncomfortable part, and the reason this is worth saying now. For all the alarm Democrats raise about Trump’s demagoguery, a Democrat, their own nominee and now the mayor of the largest city in the country, employs the very same method. A standard worth anything spares neither side. Apply that standard evenly, and Mamdani is a demagogue.

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But his day isn’t done. He has a friend he needs to call: the soon-to-be congresswoman from New York’s 13th Congressional District. They have been debating policing and prison policy, trying to determine the best position for the DSA. She answers immediately. She cannot keep her comrade waiting. Following a brief back-and-forth, they agree to defer their decision; they need to see how the wanted level is handled in the upcoming Grand Theft Auto. After a bit more friendly banter, they wish each other well. They would talk longer, but the mayor’s jaw still hurts, and his father will be furious if he exceeds his monthly data limit again.

Just as he sets the phone down and turns on the TV, it rings again. He lets out a long sigh: it’s The New York Times. It’s the forty-sixth time this week. They cannot get enough of him. He assumes it’s his good looks and managerial excellence, but it’s neither. Every time they mention his name, their online engagement quadruples. Which is, in large part, how a man one city elected became a fixation for the whole country, representing a movement that would lose in a landslide anywhere but a few dozen urban zip codes, sold to the rest of us as the future.

Strip away the ice pack, the phone calls, the video game; none of that’s the point. What’s under the surface is that Zohran Mamdani and the Democratic Socialists of America believe all of it. Not just the grocery stores — the whole program: the government controlling the means of production, the abolition of the Senate, and the police phased slowly out of existence.

So the rest of the country, the vast majority that would never vote for any of it, has to sit here and take these people and their ideas seriously. We have to read the glowing profiles, learn their names, and relitigate from scratch what we spent a century deciding against.

We should not have to be doing this. But we do.

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And why is this? You can probably guess. Well over half of the world’s proven oil reserves—and roughly a fifth of the oil the world burns each day—sit in the region, and oil remains the commodity the global economy runs on.

Hegemony does not require physical ownership. A hostile power does not need to own a single well in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, or any other Gulf country. It simply needs those governments to be afraid enough to raise production, cut it, or take whatever other positions it dictates. And it must be able to assert that influence without being easily deterred.

Prior to the war, most Americans assumed our status as the world’s largest oil producer made the Gulf less important. We do pump more than anyone else, but oil is a fungible commodity, traded on a global market. When the supply is cut from the Gulf, prices rise everywhere, for everyone. A man filling up his F-150 at a Buc-ee’s in Ohio, supplied by a refinery in Toledo, running crude from a Texas well, pays more. This we have seen.

Our anti-hegemon policy has stood across every post-war administration, Democrat and Republican alike. It held against the Soviets. It held against Saddam. The actors changed, but the commitment did not.

Today, Iran is the current claimant. For over four decades Iran has worked towards a position where the Gulf producers bend to it and where its actions cannot be easily deterred. It has built specific operational tools to achieve its strategic objectives: proxies across the region, a large arsenal of missiles and drones, a nuclear program, and the ability to threaten shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. While their policies and tactics have adapted to changing conditions, their drive for hegemony is not an intent the Islamic Republic developed over time. It is foundational to the revolution itself, and the regime is determined to see it through.

In the winter of 2026, the Trump administration set out to end this bid by force. The case for war rested on a clock. The problem was never whether America could strike Iran; it can do that at a time and place of its choosing. It was what Iran could do in response. The administration argued that Iran’s stockpile of missiles and drones was fast approaching a point, where if we decided to strike at a later date, our defenses would not be able to absorb the inevitable retaliation, and Tel Aviv, Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi would pay dearly for our decision.

This is what North Korean artillery has done on the Korean peninsula for seventy years. It never made an American attack impossible; it made the cost unbearable. And behind that shield, they produced a nuclear weapon. With enough missiles and drones, Iran can do the same thing.

Iran was also weaker in February of 2026 than it had been in years. Israel had done enormous damage to Hezbollah and Hamas since October 7, 2023. The twelve-day war of June 2025 had also gutted parts of its nuclear program and diminished its inventory of ballistic missile launchers. Then in late December 2025, protests broke out across the country. The regime put them down by killing its own citizens by the thousands, and by some accounts, the tens of thousands. A government that fires on its own people at that scale is not a government that feels secure. To the administration, this was a narrow opening, a moment to strike while Tehran was least able to absorb it.

The ensuing campaign was massive. CENTCOM has reported striking well over 10,000 targets.

Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan were reduced to rubble. Eighty-five percent of the factories that build its missiles and drones were damaged or destroyed. Ninety percent of the regular navy now sits on the bottom of the Gulf, including every major surface combatant.

The leadership fared no better. The supreme leader was killed. Dozens of senior officials died with him, and the IRGC command structure was hollowed out.

Whatever else this war has been, it was not a token effort.

But despite the achievements of the United States military, the strategy behind the war plan had a serious flaw in its logic.

It appears the administration proceeded on the belief that a regime hit this hard would come to terms. Those terms were by no means modest. At the outset, the President demanded that Iran dismantle its nuclear program in full, halt all enrichment, hand over its stockpile of enriched uranium, adhere to limits on its missiles and drones, and end support for its regional proxies. It was not a call for a negotiated settlement. It was a demand for surrender that the Iranian leadership simply would not oblige.

Consider what capitulation would actually cost it. A population that already despises the government, and was willing to brave machine gun fire in the streets, would watch that same government accept dictated terms from Washington. The men who run Iran understand what happens to a diminished authoritarian state whose people have stopped being afraid of it.

The terms asked for something further still. Dismantling its remaining power projection capabilities, agreeing never to rebuild them, ending its bid for regional hegemony; these are not just policy concessions. The regime’s entire claim to power rests on exporting its revolution and asserting its dominance over the region. Abandon that cause and what is left is a government that murders and oppresses its own citizens and has nothing to offer them in return.

The American war plan was supposed to produce an Iranian government willing to concede. It was never going to. The regime simply cannot admit defeat.

Cornered, it looked for a way to hit back, and found its operational tools indecisive. Its missiles and drones could still reach Israel and the Gulf, but regional defenses had been built to counter them, and for the most part, they did. What got through could do damage, but not enough to break the will of the United States or Israel to keep fighting. What Iran had left was geography, and it reached for the one lever we could not easily take away. It attacked shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.

It is highly unlikely that the administration did not understand the importance and vulnerability of the Strait of Hormuz. US Central Command has studied that waterway for decades and knows better than anyone how hard it is to keep open. And after seeing how effective our defenses were during the twelve-day war, the administration should have known Tehran’s logical response.

Leaving the strait out of the war plan was not an oversight. It was a choice to run a risk with no quick or cheap answer, on the bet that Iran would fold in a matter of weeks, making the Strait of Hormuz a footnote. Whatever Tehran did to shipping would be brief, absorbed, and finished before the effects were widely felt. On that bet, they did not prepare contingencies to keep the strait open.

That was the blunder.

The shipping lanes run about two miles wide in each direction, against a long and mountainous Iranian coast broken by islands and coves, with high ground looking down on every ship that passes. The weapons Iran can hide there are cheap and mobile: sea mines, truck-mounted anti-ship missiles, fast boats, drones and drone-boats packed with explosives. They fire and move. Destroy a battery today, and another takes its place next week.

The problem is one of brutal asymmetry. To keep the strait open, the United States must guarantee that nearly every transit is safe. Iran only needs to make a handful of them deadly. A few mined or burning tankers are enough to achieve Tehran’s goal, because the strait does not only close by physical blockade. It also closes through the insurance market. War-risk premiums and hazard pay climb until owners and crews decide the passage is a gamble they won’t take, and the ships stop sailing on their own.

None of this puts the problem completely beyond the American military. We can degrade the threat. What we cannot do is end it quickly or cheaply. Rooting out a dispersed enemy that reconstitutes along its own coast is the work of a prolonged campaign with no fixed end: quite possibly one that puts troops on the ground.

With all this in mind, the decision to open this conflict should have turned on a single question. Could we fight for the strait and win, not in principle, but within a realistic time frame and at a cost worth paying.

If the answer was yes, the fight for the strait belonged in the plan from the first day, resourced and prepared for. If the answer was no, the better course was not to strike at all. After the twelve-day war of June 2025, our strategic position was favorable. The regime had been badly weakened. Their enriched uranium was believed to be buried in the tunnels at Isfahan, hard to reach. Much of the nuclear program had already been hit. We could have held our position and kept pressing by means short of war.

The administration chose neither. They struck on a theory that required Iran to capitulate, and made no provision for the far likelier case in which it would not.

Set against its stated aims, the war inflicted enormous damage. The nuclear program was ravaged, the missile industry devastated, the navy sunk, the leadership decapitated. By the measure of destruction, it was a rout. This is indisputable.

But destruction is not the right barometer. The war was ultimately fought to deny Iran the power to set the terms in the Gulf: to deny it hegemony. And hegemony is not only about weapons. The centrifuges, the missiles, the drones, the proxies are operational tools, each a road toward the same end, and each can be rebuilt. Iran is already rebuilding them. Even the nuclear program, in reality, was only set back, not ended. The sites were destroyed, but the knowledge remains.

Our power did not reach the lever Iran actually reached for. The strait is not hardware to be destroyed; it is Iran’s own coast and Iran’s own geography. Iran closed one of the world’s most important chokepoints, and we could not, or would not, stop them. Holding that power is itself a form of hegemony: the power to decide whose oil reaches the world. That is the very thing we have stood in the Gulf for eighty years to deny.

So the ledger does not read the way the briefing slides do. While Iran lost a great deal it can build back, it gained one thing it may never have to give up: the proven power to put the world’s oil at risk for a price it is willing to pay, and to make opening the strait cost us more than we will bear. If that stands, if the strait is not wrested back, or if Iran is not made to fear the closing of it more than it wants the leverage, then Iran ends this war stronger than it began, with everything it lost still ahead of it to rebuild.

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Chapters:

0:00 - The Terms

6:10 - Phase One: Locking It In

10:30 - Phase Two: The Reckoning

15:12 - Phase Three: The Exchange

19:17 - What Can Go Wrong

25:06 - It Comes Down to Will

Chapters:

0:00 - Setting the Stage

2:23- The Two Parties

7:30 - The Coalition

13:19 - The Co-optable Holdouts

21:11 - The Spoilers

Chapters:

0:00 - Why the United States is There

1:46 - Hegemony, Not Conquest

6:00 - Iran, and Pulling Back

11:02 - Does Israel Set American Policy

15:10 - The Prize

21:18 - The Two Costs, and the Four Options

Chapters:

0:00 - What This Is, and What It Isn’t

2:34 - Why the Moral Argument Fails

4:41 - Reality, Not Justice

8:14 - The Two Hinges

15:30 - Every Alternative Is a Dead End

19:15 - The Cost of Staying Stuck

Chapters:

0:00 - What Made Us Great

1:48 - Our Own Doing

4:07 - A Commitment and a Method

5:28 - Whether We Will

Chapters:

00:00 - The Principle

2:48 - Drug Pricing

6:19 - Hospital Antitrust

8:25 - Expanding Supply

9:33 - The Middlemen and the Paperwork

12:09 - What about the Insurance Companies

14:25 - What This Saves

22:16 - Who Fights For It

Chapters:

0:00 - The $25,000 Family

3:07 - Three Times, Three Defeats

7:40 - Cost is the Master Variable

14:26 - Why It’s Expensive: A Regulated Cartel

22:15 - Why Consumer-Choice Fails

25:02 - Why Single-Payer Won’t Pass

Chapters:

0:00 - Two Truths on a Collision Course

1:18 - The Integrated Response

5:29 - Japan and Korea

6:42 - The Broken System

8:56 - The Conditions-Based Alternative

14:24 - The Existing Population and Enforcement

17:27 - Family Formation

22:21 - Housing and the Closed Loop

Chapters:

00:00 - The $39 Trillion Trap: Debt vs. Defense

02:01 - How the Debt Spiral Actually Works

03:37 - Why the Next Crisis Will Be Worse

06:00 - The Two Endgames: Inflation or Default

08:08 - History’s Warning: Empires That Went Bust

11:02 - The Reserve Currency Counterargument

15:20 - The 2% Solution

17:23 - The Fraud Problem

19:00 - Hard Choices & “AI Will Save Us”

Chapters:

0:00 - Why We Cannot Retreat

3:06 - Strategic, Operational, Tactical

4:51 - Realism and Democratic Morality

7:03 - The Four Regions and the Balance of Power

10:44 - The Commons, Democracy, and the Tradition

Chapters:

00:00 — The Destruction of the Center

02:13 — The Anchor and The Method

04:52 — Washington: The Architect

06:31 — Lincoln: The Anchor Under Pressure

08:14 — Eisenhower: Practical Governance

09:13 — This Tradition is Losing

12:20 — Stepping Onto the Field

0:00 - The Trap

2:05 - How We Got Here

16:42 - The Right’s Dead End

19:48 - The Left’s Dead End

23:42 - The Machine

26:22 - The Path Forward