Where is our Tiananmen square ‘Tank Man' who can stand up to Trump?

Everyone's waiting for that one person to stand up to Donald Trump. Not just that one person. There are a lot of such people. You can read about them in every newspaper. But that one person with real power who's willing to risk something costly in defiance. That one university president who'll say, fuck you and your money. That one Democrat who'll say, fuck you and your threat to my re-election or that of my party. Everyone's looking for our Tank Man, staring down a column of tanks, all by himself, in Tiananmen Square.
Why don't we see that person? Where is our Tank Man? (And, no, I don't think Cory Booker doing a marathon-length filibuster counts.)
The reason we don't see that person is that we're asking the wrong question. There's a reason there are so few lonely individuals willing to stand up to the machine. It's not just simple cowardice or craven self-interest, though that might explain some of it. There's something deeper at work.
It's hard to take a risk, but it's especially hard when you feel like there's no point, that you'll fail, or worse, that you'll be the only one out there doing it. When you're the only one doing it, you run a risk much worse than failure. You run the risk of doing something pointless. Everything in our nature cuts against the grain of pointlessness. Yes, history might remember you, but what is history? To risk pointlessness is to risk foolishness, frivolousness, fatuity, inanity. It can even feel like moral slovenliness.
Take Roy Huggins, one of my favorite villain-heroes of the blacklist era. You've probably never heard of him. In his time, he was a screenwriter, producer and director of some note. He was responsible for The Fugitive and The Rockford Files. He also named names, after initially refusing to cooperate with the government.
Why did he do it? He had a lot of reasons. But this one has always stayed with me:
When you're thinking of becoming a hero, you feel like a slob. You feel, do you really have a right to do that?
It's a perplexing question: do I have the right to become a hero? One doesn't usually think of heroism as a right. Why does Huggins frame the question that way? Because he thinks of heroism as some sort of extravagance, some sort of selfishness, a kind of grandstanding that comes awfully close to vanity.
The philosopher Thomas Hobbes had some thoughts on this matter, how easily the quest for glory, which had traditionally been considered a virtue, could slide into vaingloriousness. And the philosopher Max Weber had a similar intuition: how easily the tragic hero becomes a kind of narcissist, preening in front of the mirror.
I think Huggins is getting at something like that slide, from glory to vainglory, from heroism to vanity and narcissism. It's why he immediately follows up his question on the right to heroism with the question: do I have the right to be a slob?
That's what made him afraid. He could imagine taking on a heroic act if he thought it might achieve something, even in failure. But to think that the act would be completely extinguished by failure, by its pointlessness, that was too much.
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I find myself thinking about this fear a lot. I've done a fair amount of political stuff over the years, some of it at some cost and risk. But it was always collective and it was always meant to work, to be successful, in some way, to achieve something, even in failure. That's what made it worth the risk.
I've always hated the romance of heroism, the futile gesture of protest and defiance, particularly of the individual. It reeks of what Lenin hated about intellectuals, who 'undertake everything under the sun without finishing anything'. He called that a kind of 'slovenliness', incidentally.
But I can see the underside of my dislike. It can make you leery of being that only person out there, and sometimes that may be what other people desperately need: just to see you, anyone, out there.
Corey Robin is the author of The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump and a contributing editor at Jacobin. This piece originally appeared on coreyrobin.com.

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'Trump let Iran make nukes he's mad about - he's at war for a Nobel Peace Prize'

If there is one disease which lies behind the constant spasms of horror with which our days our currently blighted, it is the human race's inability to remember what happened five minutes ago. Once upon a time, journalists would go to the pub, and then bed. Sometimes they'd go to bed with each other, because they'd been to the pub. But they'd wake up in the morning and go "blimey, an earthquake in Japan. I had better find a good story of my own about this". And they would have to go deeper into a story and its origins. Today they don't drink, barely know their colleagues, and wake up to emails from a 24-rolling news ecosystem that demands constant feeding. Journalists think "blimey, everyone else is ahead of me" and scramble to catch up. No-one has time to think, which is why no-one has told you that Donald Trump just bombed Iran for making nuclear weapons that Donald Trump let them make. I wish I was making this stuff up, but no-one's got time for that. It's imperative people start remembering how we got to the cliff edge, because we did it by skipping about blindfold and if we don't stop soon we're going to go right over. America gave Iran nuclear technology in 1957. The aim was 'atoms for peace', to create wealth, and allies in the Middle East. After years of the world's greatest democracy propping up a cruel monarchy, the shah fell, the mullahs arose, and Iran was in less-friendly hands. The 1980s was taken up with a war against Iraq, but in the 1990s two Gulf Wars and continued US tinkering led the mullahs to the not-entirely-mad opinion that a nuclear weapon was the best way of keeping the Great Satan at bay. Israel, quite reasonably, was less than chuffed. And as technology sped up it became imperative to find ways of stopping Iran getting a weapon that apocalyptic fundamentalists would see very little reason not to detonate, slap-bang in the middle of a resource-rich, conflict-heavy trade route. And so in 2015, six countries signed a deal with Iran. In return for checks that it wasn't building The Bomb, everyone was open for business. And for three years the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action worked. Germany, China, Russia, France, the UK, China and the US lifted economic sanctions, and every 90 days would ratify everything was non-nuclear and tickety-boo. But such a vague agreement could not withstand the arrival of Donald Trump, whose tiny hands happily dismantled everything that made Barack Obama look good. In 2018 when Benjamin Netanyahu - yes it really is all the same people - gave a speech claiming his spy agency Mossad had stolen 100,000 documents showing Iran had lied and was enriching uranium, Trump saw a 30-second clip and decided it must be true. It might have been. The other nations in the deal didn't think so. But rather than renegotiate, send in inspectors, react as any sane human might, Trump just went "nah", and pulled out of the deal. The other countries tried to keep it going. The International Atomic Energy Authority said there was no enrichment. But the US whacked the regime with sanctions, and Iran said it too would pull out unless they were lifted. They were not. In 2020 the IAEA said Iran had tripled its uranium stockpile, a year later it blocked access to inspectors, and by 2023 it had weapons-grade material. Over the same period, Iran's population suffered. A third were ground into poverty. The economic woes weakened the regime just enough to make it lash out. Iran was behind terror attacks worldwide, former Republican Guards were linked to planned assassinations of ex-Trump officials, and it faced internal protests too. Then Iran funded the October 7 massacre by Hamas. Cue Netanyahu, who was leading a rickety coalition and facing jail the moment it fell, cue the war in Gaza, cue pro-Palestine protests, and cue a lot of blaming Iran. This isn't hard to figure out or remember. It's just that the constant churn of new things to hold our attention never scrolls back to the start of the liveblog, or delves into the third page of search results. Iran is definitely run by a bunch of rotten eggs who could well have been pulling the radioactive wool over the world's eyes in return for a financial boost to stabilise their rule. But the best way of fixing that wasn't walking away from the only half-arsed deal anyone had. It was making a better deal, and if Trump had actually written his own biography rather than paying someone else to make him look good, he might have known how to do it. Trump's withdrawal was supported by Israel and Saudi Arabia, with 63% of US voters, most of the planet and his own advisers screaming at him not to. It was "a horrible one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made", he insisted. "It didn't bring peace and it never will." 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The Sun

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Putin will exploit Middle East chaos to hit Europe with never-seen-before attack, Ukraine warns as tyrant meets Iranians

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A Ukrainian source told The Sun: "The West should be prepared that the Spiderweb operation may be reconfigured and deployed by Russia as a hybrid attack on any Nato Eastern flank nation. "That would be the major Article 5 test that the Alliance has not experienced yet." Humiliated Putin was left reeling after Ukraine's spectacular raid that - after 18 months of planning - inflicted billions of pounds worth of damage, leaving his bomber fleet in tatters. Daring agents smuggled drones and explosives deep inside the sprawling country before unleashing a coordinated assault on June 1. More than 100 drones were hidden in trucks across Russia before being deployed to five air bases - thousands of kilometres from the Ukrainian border. At least 41 of Putin's prized aircraft were wrecked in the attack - including Tu-95, Tu-22M3, and Tu-160 bombers and A-50 spy planes. Delivering such a decisive blow has left Ukraine's enemy scrambling. 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He told the Table Today podcast: "We are very certain, and we have intelligence evidence for this, that Ukraine is just a step on the path to the West. "They want to catapult Nato back to the state it was in at the end of the 1990s. They want to kick America out of Europe, and they'll use any means to achieve that." It comes as Nato heads of state are set to meet at a crunch two-day summit this week in The Hague - with setting a new target for allied defence spending the primary issue up for discussion. Allied nations are expected to agree a new defence investment pledge and pour billions of dollars into elevating security-related spending. 6

Daily Mail​

an hour ago

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Americans think Trump backs Russia over Ukraine as he heads to NATO

By President Donald Trump will head to a NATO summit this week - as a poll found that more Americans think his administration is siding with Russia over Ukraine. A Ronald Reagan Institute survey of U.S. adults, conducted from late May to early June, showed 37 percent of respondents believe the Trump administration is favoring Russia when it comes to negotiating an end to the conflict. Just 14 percent said the Trump White House was favoring Ukraine. Another 36 percent said the Trump administration was taking a neutral approach - despite Ukraine being a longtime U.S. ally and Russian President Vladimir Putin launching the invasion in February 2022. The numbers, which were released Sunday, come after Newsweek reported that the U.S. was pressuring European allies to limit references to Ukraine in the final communique of the NATO summit, which will take place Tuesday and Wednesday in The Hague, Netherlands . A White House spokesperson wouldn't confirm Newsweek's reporting to the Daily Mail. If the U.S. is successful at containing a focus on Ukraine , it would be a departure from previous NATO summits during the tenure of former President Joe Biden that showed strong support for the besieged country, which is not a NATO member. Ahead of the summit, a senior U.S. official's statement didn't mention the Ukraine war - instead focusing on one of Trump's longtime goals for NATO. 'The president intends to secure a historic 5 percent defense spending pledge from NATO allies, which will strengthen the Alliance's combined military capabilities and ensure greater stability in Europe and the world,' the senior official said. 'This effort builds on the hundreds of billions of dollars in spending increases already achieved across the Alliance since 2017 thanks to President Trump's diplomacy in his first term,' the source added. The Reagan Institute Survey found that a majority of Americans still support defending a NATO ally even if they weren't spending enough on defense. Fifty-three percent expressed this view, while 30 percent said the U.S. should not come to that country's defense. A majority of Americans also opposed the U.S. pulling out of NATO - 55 percent to 33 percent - with respondents feeling more strongly about the U.S. staying in. Breaking down the numbers, 38 percent strongly opposed the U.S. pulling out of NATO - which was formed to deter the former Soviet Union - while just 15 percent supported the U.S. withdrawing from the compact. On several occasions, Trump has mulled pulling the U.S. out of NATO or threatened not to come to a country's aid if they don't pay up. During the 2024 campaign, Trump sparked controversy by recounting a conversation with a world leader in which he suggested he might not defend a NATO country that was 'delinquent' in its payments. 'I would encourage them [Russia] to do whatever the hell they want. You got to pay. You got to pay your bills,' the then-candidate said. Seventy-one percent of U.S. adults said they supported the U.S. defending a NATO country if there was an attack. Just 17 percent weren't in favor of helping a NATO ally. A majority of Americans, 59 percent, also said they were in favor of increasing the U.S.'s military presence in Europe to counter Russian aggression. Trump said last Saturday that Putin called him on his birthday - but their discussion mainly focused on the war between Israel and Iran, rather than Russia's own conflict. 'Much less time was spent talking about Russia/Ukraine, but that will be for next week,' the president said in a Truth Social post. That was ahead of Trump's trip to Canada for the G7 - which he cut a day short - saying he needed to be back in Washington to tend to the war in the Middle East.