I just read a very encouraging post about the protests in Iran by Iranian journalist Roohola Ramezani at Persuasion. Here’s a telling snippet, its conclusion:

Iranians want neither a better version of the Islamic Republic nor a utopian revolution. They want the extraordinary era of Iranian history to end. They want to return to being a normal nation state that prioritizes its borders over ideological “frontiers,” its citizens over “martyrs,” and its future over seventh-century grievances.

A fierce, secular realism is emerging. The protest movement is redefining Iranian identity not through the lens of a “Global South” struggle against the West, but as a struggle to rejoin the West’s political and economic orbit. It’s a movement that does not fit neatly into the categories of anti-imperialism or identity politics; but it is, nevertheless, perhaps the most authentic democratic project of our time.

My problem with it is that I don’t see an evidentiary basis for that level of specificity. Quite to the contrary another alternative is that Iranians are reacting to the incompetence of the mullahocracy. What Iranians want in aggregate or whether they have common goals other than escape from their present misery I have no idea.

I have little doubt that some Iranians want precisely what the author suggests. Whether that’s all Iranians, a majority, or just a few I have no idea and I see no indication that anyone has the data required to make that determination. Shared opposition to a regime does not, by itself, imply shared agreement on what should replace it. The historical record suggests that one faction will succeed in applying its own preferred solution and that faction will not necessarily be the most numerous or even the most popular one.

Here’s my question. How would we arrive at an empirically-based understanding of what Iranians want right now? That’s not a rhetorical question. I genuinely want to know because I think that policies should be based on facts not wishful thinking, however heartfelt.

I’ll trust claims about national political aims only when they’re supported by (1) survey evidence with methods described, plus (2) at least one independent corroborating stream. That could be behavioral indicators, slogan analysis, turnout or legitimacy signals, or multiple polling efforts. Otherwise, I will treat them as hopeful interpretation.

In an op-ed in the New York Times Elizabeth Dickinson describes the situation on Venezuela’s border. The Chavista Maduro regime had delegated control of the border to the Colombian National Liberation Army (ELN), a guerrilla group founded to mount a leftist insurgency. Here’s the meat of the op-ed:

Now the E.L.N. stands emboldened to challenge the authority of the Colombian state — and U.S. ambitions in Venezuela. The borderlands are webbed with lucrative corridors where the E.L.N. and other armed groups move seamlessly and often exercise more control than the government. With profits flowing from illegal mining, drug trafficking and human smuggling, both the Colombian guerrillas and complicit members of Venezuela’s security forces have deep interests in maintaining the status quo in Caracas and resisting attempts to bring rule of law to these territories.

In advance of Mr. Maduro’s capture, the E.L.N. was taking steps to ensure its interests in the borderlands were safe, regardless of what happened in Caracas. Since mid-December, it has gone on the offensive in the Colombian region of Catatumbo, displacing thousands of civilians in the process. It has also clashed with a local criminal group known as the 33rd Front, a dissident faction of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, which has repeatedly angered the E.L.N. with attempts to control key rivers used for trafficking in and out of Venezuela. President Gustavo Petro’s announced deployment of some 30,000 troops to the border has done little to stop the fighting.

But rather than anchoring the region with America’s longtime partner in Bogotá, President Trump turned on Mr. Petro, threatening direct attacks on Colombia the day after Mr. Maduro’s capture on Jan. 3. Although a phone call last Wednesday between the leaders lowered tensions, the détente is fragile.

Removing (literally) Maduro from Venezuela may have the unforeseen effect of destabilizing not just Venezuela but Colombia as well.

Aristotle said it more than two millennia ago: nature abhors a vacuum. Already, clashes between armed groups have forced thousands of civilians from their homes, and a vacuum on the Venezuelan side could intensify competition among criminal and insurgent networks. If the Chavista regime, having never established effective control of the border, does not stabilize the situation, and the United States which lacks both capacity and strategy does not either, the ELN, FARC dissidents, cartels, paramilitaries, or others will. The U.S. lacks a coherent stabilization strategy, and its recent actions risk exacerbating instability unless paired with a credible regional security plan. Failing that neither the Venezuelan people, the Colombian people, or we may like the result.

At Reuters David Lawder reports:

WASHINGTON, Jan 13 (Reuters) – The U.S. government posted a $145 billion budget deficit for December, up 67% or $58 billion from a year earlier due to record outlays that were inflated by calendar shifts in benefit payments and receipts, the Treasury Department said on Tuesday.

The report showed that revenue growth from President Donald Trump’s tariffs may have plateaued, as December net customs receipts totaled $27.9 billion, down from the low $30 billion range in recent months but far above ?the $6.8 billion recorded in December 2024.

Net customs receipts for the first three months of fiscal ?2026, which started October 1, totaled $90 billion compared to $20.8 billion in the prior-year period.
The Trump administration implemented some tariff-cutting trade deals in November, including 10 percentage-point reductions in duties on imports from China and South Korea. The Supreme Court also ?could soon rule on legal challenges to Trump’s tariffs under an emergency sanctions law. A ruling against those duties would further cut customs receipts.

The Treasury said that after making adjustments to December budget results in both 2024 and 2025, the December deficit would have been $112 ?billion, a decrease of $14 billion or 11% from the December 2024 budget gap.

Not to belabor the point but large deficits are a foreseeable consequence of cutting taxes without politically or structurally credible mechanisms for trimming expenditures. With entitlements on demographic autopilot, interest expense rising, and defense spending politically insulated, the notion that tax cuts would be offset by spending restraint was always fanciful. The pre-existing debt overhang already impedes economic growth by crowding out private investment and increasing the sensitivity of the budget to interest-rate shocks so you can’t expect to grow your way out of the issue. That is an empirical finding by economists that remains robust in mainstream literature.

These fiscal realities are not an abstraction. They are directly related to what Democrats frame as their “killer issue” in the 2026 and, possibly, 2028 elections: affordability.

When deficits are effectively monetized, i.e. financed through central bank balance sheet expansion rather than real resource growth, the result is inflation. When goods and services inflation outpaces wage inflation you have an affordability problem. It is always regressive: it hits renters, younger households, and fixed-income retirees first and hardest.

This is not a pathology unique to one party; it is the product of decades of bipartisan normalization of deficit finance in the service of short-term political objectives.

It has been a week since Maduro was apprehended and taken to the U. S. for trial. President Trump said the U. S. would “run Venezuela”.

Who’s running Venezuela? It appears to be the same regime that did a week ago with all of the same problems and failures.

I have seen some reports that some political prisoners have been released.

Everything seems to be proceeding much as I predicted.

If David Ignatius, the Washington Post columnist, still represents the voice of conventional Washington wisdom, they severely misunderstand what is happening in Iran. In that light his most recent column, considering Iran, reflects that misunderstanding sharply. He opens with a reflection on the Iranian regime and continues by characterizing it:

The Iranian regime is on a one-way street to disaster. A senior European diplomat in Tehran shared that assessment with me several years ago, and it remains true. Iran has powerful security tools, but they’re getting rusty. The regime couldn’t protect its proxies Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. And most important, Iran couldn’t shield itself from Israel’s systematic assault in June. The regime is on a losing streak.

“The Islamic Republic is today a zombie regime,” argues Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Its legitimacy, ideology, economy and leader are dead or dying. What keeps it alive is lethal force. It kills to live and lives to kill. Brutality can delay the regime’s funeral, but it can’t restore the pulse.”

concluding:

The wild card this year is whether the regime’s hard-liners have lost their edge. Like the Soviet Union during its last years, the security agencies may have lost their ideological commitment and discipline. They’ve watched helplessly as their proxy forces were crushed in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria. And they’ve suffered the same scourge of inflation and economic stagnation as the rest of the nation. They’re not broken, but they appear more fragile than in the past.

Let’s think again about what’s going through the heads of those 12 members of the Supreme National Security Council. They know Iran is stagnant. Their budget for the next fiscal year will likely raise taxes and cut subsidies to fund defense spending. They’re waiting for the political transition that will come when Khamenei dies, but for the moment they are lurching forward as a wounded dispirited nation.

As the council members look south across the Gulf to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, they see their neighbors racing to embrace artificial intelligence and a dynamic economic future. Meanwhile, they cling to a repressive, retrograde regime that can barely feed its people. Revolutions are impossible to predict. But when you look at Iran, it’s obvious that eventually something is going to crack wide open.

The highlight is mine. I’m afraid he has several misconceptions. The Iranian regime is theocratic. It bases its authority on religious beliefs not popular support. In their own light they are not decaying institutions; they are custodians of divine mandate. As long as Iran is governed by True Believers, they will hold onto power by whatever means necessary. They must. Secular Westerners find that very difficult to understand.

Also, the analogy he considers in the body of the column, to the last days of the Soviet Union in the passage highlighted above, is correct but he does not take it far enough. A Marxist regime can drift into cynicism. A theocracy cannot. When belief dies, so does authority. Until then, repression is not a policy choice it is a theological obligation. The Soviet Union persisted until it was no longer governed by anyone who remembered the revolution. When that happened it collapsed rapidly.

The Soviet gerontocracy governed out of habit. The Iranian leadership governs out of covenant.

Sadly, Iran is still governed by actual religious revolutionaries. The question is not whether they will suppress unrest but whether they can.

I was composing a longer post on the situation in Iran but I just wanted to quickly make a few points.

There is a growing tendency to claim that “Iranians are not Muslims.” That strikes me as analytically sloppy. Opposition to the clerical regime is not the same thing as abandonment of Islam. One can plausibly argue that most Iranians are not Khomeinists; it is far less plausible that they are not Muslims. A few online polls don’t tell us much. Those notoriously oversample people who are young, educated, urban, and tech-savvy. That does not describe anything like the majority of Iranians.

Second, I don’t think we really know what’s going on in Iran right now. If the violent protests are large enough, they’re probably visible from orbit. Western human intelligence in Iran has been degraded over the period of years and much of what we know is inference layered on social media noise.

Third and this didn’t occur to me until recently, one factor that may matter more than is being discussed is the effect of Israel’s war with Hamas and Hezbollah on the Basij militia. The regime’s internal security apparatus does not exist in a vacuum; it draws legitimacy, manpower, and ideological energy from the same ecosystem that has been mobilized externally. Whether that has strengthened the Basij through mobilization or weakened it through distraction and attrition is an open question but it is unlikely to be neutral.

Megan McArdle lays out a very good case in her column in the Washington Post on the killing of a woman in Minneapolis by an ICE agent and the subsequent feces-flinging contest. She opens with a warning about police states and follows that with this anecdote:

In 2012, a group of law professors published the results of an experiment they had run on 202 adults who were shown a video of protesters. Participants were given the text of a law regarding protests at sensitive facilities and asked to determine whether the police had been justified in shutting down the protest.

Half were told that the video showed pro-life demonstrators at an abortion clinic. The other half were told the protest occurred outside a college career-placement office where military recruiters were conducting interviews, and that the protesters were rallying against the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy for gay and lesbian service members. The results were depressing, if not entirely surprising.

People disposed to support abortion rights and oppose “don’t ask, don’t tell” thought the police were justified in clearing protesters away from the abortion clinic but not the recruitment office. Those whose views went the other way reached the opposite conclusion from the same facts.

She then contradicts her own point by trying to analyze the various videos of the events.

The only pertinent question under the law is what was the state of mind of the ICE officer who fired the shots? The killing was unmerciful and unjust but was it illegal? That is entirely dependent on the state of mind of the ICE officer and the only evidence we have of that is his own testimony. It cannot be inferred from videos.

That is why I have taken the position that I have: that the officer should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, that he is likely to be convicted because the jury is composed of people who will behave just as the “202 adults” did, viewing the events through their own peculiar prisms rather than as “reasonable persons”, and that the conviction is likely to be overturned on appeal.

We have built a legal system that depends on rational actors, and a political culture that ensures they do not exist.

At his Substack Tomas Pueyo has a lengthy and interesting analysis of Venezuela’s economic plight. Here’s the opening paragraphs:

The world is in shock after the US took Venezuela’s leader Maduro, and the takes keep piling up, but they each focus on a tree rather than the forest. Why? What does it all mean? What will happen with Venezuela and the Venezuelans? Was this a legal or legitimate action? How does that affect the US, Russia, and China? How does it rewrite the rules of the world?

At the heart of all these questions is one thing: oil. So today, we’re going to look at Venezuela’s economy, why it’s mostly centered around oil, and why it has caused the situation we’re in. In the next article, we’re going to look at the ramifications.

I’m looking forward to his next installment. Regardless of what President Trump implies, I don’t think there’s a quick and easy solution to Venezuela’s economic problems.

I found a letter to the editor from biotech executive Mark Warner in the Wall Street Journal thought-provoking:

Your report “Boston’s Biotech Engine Is Sputtering” (U.S. News, Dec. 30) rightly notes that highly trained Ph.D.s are struggling to find work as Boston’s biotech sector contracts. But the problem isn’t an oversupply of scientists or a temporary venture-capital cycle. It’s a deeper structural failure in how the country builds industries.

The U.S. excels at funding discovery and celebrating breakthroughs, then neglects the hard work of manufacturing them at scale. When commercialization stalls, capital retreats, companies collapse and top talent is left without a place to apply its skills. We have seen this before in semiconductors, solar energy and nuclear power. Research leadership remained but manufacturing—and economic strength—moved elsewhere.

Biotechnology faces the same risk. The real bottleneck isn’t the lab; it is the lack of domestic biomanufacturing capacity to carry innovations across the “valley of death” from proof-of-concept to commercial reality. That gap is where today’s job losses are felt most acutely.

Warner correctly identifies a structural failure, but his causal chain is backwards. There is a practical, organic progression. When production moves elsewhere so does production engineering. Production engineering follows production. Design engineering follows production engineering. Research follows design engineering. What remains behind is not an innovation ecosystem but an academic one, unmoored from economic realities. There is always a lag, because engineering capability takes time to migrate. But it always migrates to where production actually occurs. As Mr. Warner himself notes, this pattern has already played out in semiconductors, solar energy, and nuclear power.

For some time we have been operating under the fantasy that the United States economy can thrive as a service economy on the basis of services, tertiary production, and retail alone, leaving the messy and energy-intensive production to other countries, preferably countries far, far away. That is a pleasant fantasy but it is a fantasy. The reality is that is the path to poverty which Mr. Warner’s letter highlights. You can export production for a while and still pretend to be an industrial power. You cannot do it indefinitely and remain one.