I’m Black and Jewish. This year, my husband and I are hosting the Passover Seder.

Around our table will be many loved ones — Jews and non-Jews — including members of a Jewish family who have warmly adopted me as one of their own. They’re American-born. But one of them — a son, a brother — has lived in Jerusalem for years. His children are Israeli. And one of them is serving in the Israel Defense Forces.

I spoke with him this week. He called from Jerusalem, where Passover preparations were already underway — the cleaning, the cooking, the particular texture of a holiday that arrives the same way every year, regardless of what the world has done in the intervening twelve months. This year, the world has done quite a lot.

I’ve spent years inside the Pentagon and the State Department — at the elbow of senior officials, advising on decisions most Americans never see made, and working to ensure those decisions serve the country, not just the institutions or the officials appointed to lead them. I write about the mandates, roles, and missions of those institutions — how they work, when they hold, when they don’t — on Reconnecting the Republic, built on the belief that citizens deserve to understand the foreign policy and national security decisions made in their name.

That background shapes how I listened to my brother in Jerusalem. And what I heard was more than what the headlines have been offering Americans in the United States.

Jerusalem, This Week

My brother described the cohesion specific to Israeli Jews — held together not by confidence in their government but by the quiet solidarity of people who share a fate — the sense that, whatever Prime Minister Netanyahu is or isn’t doing, the people around you are still your people. Fear, resolve, numbness, and deep cynicism about the political class coexist somehow with the ordinary functions of daily life. Underneath that cohesion, an older fracture persists — between Israelis who bear the cost of the country’s security and those who, by political arrangement, do not. And, at the heart of it all, children who have grown up through COVID and two years of war treat the whole arrangement as routine as the weather.

He described something else, too — a moral dislocation he carries quietly, because it isn’t welcome at most tables. My brother sees the suffering of civilians in Gaza and Lebanon in ways that his community, by the logic of sustained threat, has largely stopped seeing. He isn’t outside his community — his family has deep military roots; his children serve — but he carries a moral minority view he’s learned to hold carefully, in private.

My brother described to me how he expects to experience Passover this year: “Tony, I’ll sit at a table where the ancient questions are asked. But the questions I most want to ask won’t make it into the room.”

But I listened to him. And what I heard in his story made me more mindful of ours.

The Enduring Wisdom of the Seder

The Haggadah isn’t a triumphalist document. It’s the vehicle we use to tell our liberation story — but we also dip our fingers in wine and name the plagues. Ten times. Not as an afterthought. As an obligation. Our tradition insists: you may not celebrate your freedom without acknowledging the cost borne by those who were not liberated alongside you.

This isn’t political commentary. It is liturgy. It has been for more than two thousand years. The story of liberation was never meant to be comfortable. It was meant to be thorough – like the search for chametz, leaving no corner unexamined.

This Passover, American and Israeli Jews sit with a version of that same accounting. The war that the United States and Israel are waging against Iran and its terror network has produced real strategic results.

The adversaries of the United States and Israel — Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas — are more weakened than at any point in a generation: their “axis of resistance” shattered and their proxy network degraded under years of sustained pressure — hobbled, though not finished. My brother said this plainly, unsentimentally, and without boasting: “For all the darkness of the past two years, the enemies Israel truly dreaded are indisputably weakened. That’s a strategic fact.”

It’s also true that the methods used to achieve this strategic outcome have troubled many of us, both Americans and Israelis. Not as a political position or a pragmatic security judgment. As a moral one.

The Haggadah asks us to hold both. The seder table is where we practice doing exactly that.

The Questions We Owe Ourselves

Is there a pragmatist’s case for what comes next — a potential shift in American and Israeli leadership toward someone who thinks in terms of durable outcomes rather than permanent advantage, a regional architecture that could actually marginalize the extremist networks that have fed on decades of instability, Iranian and Palestinian political figures capable of meeting pragmatism with pragmatism, if ever given the chance?

The pragmatist case is real. So is its fragility. The political forces capable of foreclosing it before it ever becomes available are organized, patient, and currently ascendant.

What American Jews can do — what citizens of our republic can do — is refuse the binary. The choice isn’t between celebrating a strategic outcome and condemning the way it was achieved. Those are not the only options available to us. The harder and more honest option is what the seder has been reckoning with for millennia:

Tell the whole story. Name what has been gained. Name what it costs. Ask what we owe, going forward, to the work of building the regional political conditions this war has not yet created — and that no military campaign, however successful, can create on its own..

When I asked my brother in Jerusalem what he hoped to tell his kids in twenty years about this period, he paused for a long time.

Then he said, with characteristic frankness, “I have no f-ing idea, Tony.”

That honesty felt to me like the beginning of something real.

After all, what will I, as an American Jew, say to my nephews, nieces, and two godsons about this period? I, too, have no idea.

But I do have questions for the here and now.

Questions for the Pesach Seder Table

?מַה־נשתנָּה הַלָּילָה הַזֶּה מִכָּל־הַלֵּילוֹת
Mah nishtanah halailah hazeh mikol haleilot?
How is this night different from all other nights?

The four Passover questions are a reflection ritual. Jewish tradition also invites — requires — us to add our own.

Here are the ones we’ll be asking at my table this year:

Is there someone here carrying a view about this war — about what it achieved, what it costs, or what it’s revealed about us — that they have learned to hold carefully, in private? What would it mean to make room for that voice tonight?

The Haggadah asks us to name the plagues ten times. Not as an afterthought. As an obligation. We have reckoned with the strategic results of this war. Have we reckoned, with equal honesty, what it requires of those who bear its costs?

The exodus didn’t end at the sea. It continued for forty years before a generation was ready to enter what came next. What work are we — as citizens of a republic that was handed this war without a congressional vote, as American Jews — willing to commit to now, so that what comes next — whenever it comes — is something more durable than the next cycle of conflict?

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And the question I hold closest – the most challenging question to emerge from the conversation with my brother in Jerusalem:

Chag Pesach Sameach. May your table be full, your questions be honest, and your seder — however complicated — be worth having.

Be Intrepid — Tony Johnson
April 2026

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Tony Johnson is a Non-Resident Senior Scholar at Georgetown University's Center for Security Studies. He writes about national security and democratic accountability at Reconnecting the Republic — because informed citizens are the republic's best asset. A Republic Reconking with its Fractures | An American Committed to its Repair.

On Tuesday, Senator Elissa Slotkin introduced the AI Guardrails Act—a five-page bill establishing three clear prohibitions on how the Department of War may use artificial intelligence: no AI involvement in nuclear launch decisions, no AI-enabled mass surveillance of Americans, and no autonomous lethal systems operating without a human in the decision chain.

She introduced it the same week a federal judge in California is preparing to hear arguments in Anthropic v. Department of Defense.

That timing is not a coincidence. It’s a diagnosis.

From Ultimatum to Federal Court

When I wrote about this dispute in February, the Pentagon had issued an ultimatum. Since then, there’s been significant movement on the issue.

Let’s get into it.

On March 4, the Department of Defense formally designated Anthropic a supply chain risk—a classification previously reserved for foreign adversaries like Huawei—effectively blacklisting the company across the federal government. Anthropic sued. President Trump ordered all federal agencies off Claude. Microsoft, a coalition of retired military chiefs including former CIA Director Michael Hayden, AI researchers at Google and OpenAI, and civil liberties organizations from the Cato Institute to the Electronic Frontier Foundation have all filed supporting briefs in Anthropic’s defense.

The first court hearing is set for March 24th.

And here is the detail that strips away every abstraction: according to NBC News, the U.S. military is currently using Palantir’s AI systems—which rely in part on Anthropic’s Claude—to help identify potential targets in ongoing airstrikes in Iran.

The “War Department” that designated a company a national security threat is simultaneously dependent on that company’s technology in active combat operations.

That’s not a procurement dispute. It’s a governance failure with real-time operational consequences.

Discipline, Not Hesitation

Senator Slotkin’s bill is deliberately restrained.

• It does not attempt to comprehensively regulate military AI.

• It does not slow the Department’s adoption of the technology or second-guess commanders' operational judgments.

• It picks three lines and draws them clearly—the same three lines that Anthropic tried to hold through contractual terms and that the Pentagon is now fighting in court to erase.

That framing matters. The bill’s premise is not rooted in hesitation. It’s focused and disciplined. It recognizes that some limits are not constraints on military advantage—they are the conditions under which democratic militaries remain distinguishable from the adversaries they oppose.

Slotkin put the argument plainly in a phone call with NBC News:

She’s right. And she’s describing, precisely, the argument I have been making in my writing on governance for the use of AI warfare.

The Loophole the Bill Doesn’t Close

There’s something the bill’s three prohibitions illuminate that deserves more attention than it has received.

At the center of the surveillance dispute is what privacy experts call a “data broker loophole.” According to reporting by Axios and Bloomberg, the Pentagon sought the ability to use Claude not merely to analyze classified intelligence—Anthropic had agreed to that—but to process unclassified commercial bulk data on Americans: geolocation records, web browsing histories, credit card transactions. Data that is legally purchasable. Data that would require a warrant to collect directly. The only thing that has changed is the machine doing the analysis.

That distinction—legal to buy, unconstitutional to collect—sits at the heart of a governance architecture that predates this dispute and will outlast it. The Intelligence Community has its own framework for handling commercially available information, developed over years of difficult internal deliberation. I know that framework well; I worked to align DoD policy with it during my time as the Intelligence Advisor to the Deputy Secretary of Defense. That architecture has real teeth—but it wasn’t designed for AI operating at scale across aggregated datasets. How AI transforms the legal purchase of commercial data into something that, in practice, functions like warrantless surveillance is a structural question this bill does not yet answer. I’ll return to that point later, in a dedicated piece, because it deserves the full treatment.

What I can say here is this:

Senator Slotkin’s bill closes part of the gap, and that’s postive and necessary step in the right direction — good news. But… it doesn’t close the gap. The danger is that a beginning, without a commitment to the rest of the structure, can become an excuse to stop building.

The Cost of Waiting

The operators in the field—the analysts sorting intelligence in real time, the commanders integrating AI outputs into targeting decisions—aren’t waiting for Congress to finish its deliberations. They’re working now, inside a legal and institutional framework that’s being contested simultaneously in a California federal court, a Senate committee room, and the Secretary of War’s office.

Senator Slotkin identified the problem directly in a recent Armed Services Committee hearing:

That observation deserves our attention. We should sit with it and seriously consider the implications.

Human redundancy is not a technical specification. It is a constitutional commitment.

And right now, it rests on the judgment of a single cabinet official operating without statutory guidance.

From First Step to Framework

Congress stepping in changes the dynamic—but only if it goes further. Drawing red lines is necessary. Building the durable oversight architecture that makes those lines enforceable is the work that determines whether governance keeps pace with the technology itself.

Our republic has two converging opportunities this week: a bill that begins to set limits, and a court case that forces the question of institutional authority into public view. Used together, they could generate the kind of statutory momentum that neither litigation nor executive policy alone can sustain.

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Senator Slotkin has drawn three lines. Congress now has to decide whether those lines mark a beginning — or the extent of its ambition.

The Republic Question: If the rules governing AI in warfare are being contested simultaneously in a federal courtroom and a Senate committee room—while those same tools are used in active combat—what does democratic governance of military technology actually require? And who is responsible for building it?

Be Intrepid — Tony Johnson

A Republic aware of its fractures | An American committed to its repair.

#StrategicLiteracy #ReconnectingTheRepublic

The question was never whether Ayatollah Ali Khamenei deserved to die. He led a regime that tortured its own citizens, funded proxy networks across the Middle East, and spent four decades promising death to America. His government gunned down thousands of protesters in the streets of Tehran in January. His fingerprints are on the deaths of hundreds of Americans through Iranian-backed forces across the region. Most people — left, right, and independent — understand that his removal eliminates a genuinely destabilizing actor from the world. The honest position acknowledges that without apology.

I’ve been quiet since the war began, and now I’ll be direct about where I’ve been. For weeks, the patriot in me, and the national security professional in me, have been in genuine tension — waiting for strategic clarity from the administration that would explain what we’re all watching unfold in Iran, keeping my powder dry. That clarity never came.

I have no sympathy for Ali Khamenei or the regime he led. None. But the honest argument was never that the outcome was bad. It's that the path we chose foreclosed better ones. I also have serious concerns about what the near-total elimination of the Iranian regime’s senior-most leadership — killed or incapacitated — means for any efforts to forge a durable peace that eliminates the Iranian nuclear threat and prevents further regional escalation, disruption to energy markets and shipping, and stops the human costs from getting even worse. The most urgent and important strategic question confronting U.S. leaders now is how to end the war.

The question that responsible citizens of our republic must ask — and that almost no one in Washington is asking plainly — is this: What kind of country do we become when we achieve genuinely welcome outcomes through means that are constitutionally suspect, strategically incoherent, and internationally destabilizing?

That’s the Ayatollah Paradox. The very success of the outcome immunizes the method by which success is achieved from scrutiny — and each time the method escapes scrutiny, the republic’s capacity to choose better methods erodes. The Soleimani killing established a precedent that demanded a resolution of that question six years ago. We didn’t answer it then. The Ayatollah Paradox is what happens when the bill for that evasion comes due.

When the Accountability Argument Collapses

The dominant critique of this war from oversight voices in Washington has focused on procedure: Congress was not consulted, the War Powers Resolution was bypassed, and the authorization was constitutionally insufficient. That critique is accurate. It is also, in the current political environment, inert. When the response is “but the Ayatollah is dead,” the procedural argument collapses under the weight of an outcome most Americans find at least partially welcome.

This isn’t a messaging problem. It’s a strategic literacy problem — and it belongs to all of us.

Citizens of our republic are fully capable of holding two evaluations simultaneously.

Americans may appreciate the end result while questioning the means employed. Especially when those means carry deep institutional costs for our democracy.

These aren’t contradictory positions — they’re the mark of a capable citizen engaging a genuinely complex question. The failure to make that distinction is a choice our political discourse keeps making, and it’s proving more expensive than the war itself.

The accountability argument doesn’t live in the outcome. It lives in what the method costs — in constitutional precedent, in strategic coherence, in alliance trust, and in the forward bill now arriving at American doorsteps. When citizens cannot make that distinction, their representatives have less reason to.

Soleimani, Then Khamenei: The Pattern No One Will Name

In January 2020, the United States killed Qasem Soleimani, Iran’s most powerful military commander — architect of the proxy networks responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans, designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist. His removal was, by honest accounting from an American perspective, welcome. It was also constitutionally questionable, conducted without congressional notification, and produced exactly the kind of regional escalation cycle it was supposed to prevent. Six years of heightened tensions, proxy attacks, and compounding strategic uncertainty followed — setting the conditions for precisely where we are today.

Two administrations. Both parties. Six years of the same pattern — and each time we chose the outcome over the method, the next decision became harder to make well.

The republic’s capacity for strategic discipline weakens not in a single decision but in the accumulated habit of not asking the right questions before the trigger is pulled.

I want to be direct about something here, because it matters. For those of us who have served in national security roles — in the Pentagon, in the intelligence community, in the rooms where these decisions land — this paradox is not abstract. The question of means and ends is live in those rooms in ways the political debate rarely captures. You can simultaneously understand why a commander-in-chief makes a targeting decision and carry genuine unease about the institutional damage that accumulates when such decisions bypass the constitutional architecture designed to govern them.

That isn’t weakness or ambivalence. It’s the honest cognitive position of people who have seen the system operate and understand what it was built to protect.

The Tests the Method Fails

National security professionals apply a foundational test to any use of force — taught at every war college and applied in every strategy document produced by the U.S. military. The framework is attributed to military strategist Colonel Arthur Lykke (U.S. Army, ret.), and it asks three questions:

Are the ends — the objectives — clearly defined?

Do the ways — the methods — actually serve them?

Are the means — the resources and instruments — sufficient and sustainable?

When ends, ways, and means align, a strategy is sound. When they don’t, the strategy is unsound — not by political opinion, not by partisan preference, but by the internal logic of the profession itself. Applied to the Iran war, the decisions attending the war fail at every level.

The ends are undefined. The administration’s stated objectives have shifted week to week — from protecting U.S. forces, keeping the Strait open, and collective self-defense of allies to regime change and nuclear disarmament. Senator Murphy (CT) reported after a classified briefing that administration officials and the president were offering contradictory statements about the war’s objectives. When the ends aren’t defined, nothing else can align with them. That isn’t a political critique. It’s a professional one.

The ways work against the ends. The decision to assassinate Iran’s supreme leader during active nuclear negotiations has foreclosed a generation of Iranian diplomatic engagement, regardless of who now governs in Tehran. If the ultimate strategic end is to resolve the Iranian nuclear threat, the assassination of Ali Khamenei has made that end structurally harder to achieve. Mojtaba Khamenei, who succeeded his father as Iran’s new supreme leader, has every rational incentive to accelerate the program rather than negotiate it away — because negotiating with Washington has been demonstrated, at the highest possible level, to carry lethal risk. The administration hasn’t ended the nuclear threat. It has made it harder to resolve through any means other than sustained military force.

The problem is not that the elimination of the Ayatollah was wrong. The problem is that the method — the near total decapitation of the regime — has left no one to negotiate an end to the war.

This isn’t an abstraction. It’s the operational reality the administration now faces as it struggles to find an off-ramp. Any negotiated resolution to this war requires a counterpart on the Iranian side who holds two things simultaneously: the authority to make a deal and the political incentive to honor it. The combined weight of U.S. and Israeli targeting has systematically narrowed that pool — eliminating figures, intimidating successors, and demonstrating to anyone still standing that engaging with Washington carries lethal risk.

The Venezuela contrast is instructive precisely here: a change in leadership created an opening for dialogue because the approach left room for a viable political leader to step forward, who has the authority to negotiate with the United States. In Iran, the U.S. has foreclosed that possibility at the highest level — and we are now discovering, in real time, that you can’t negotiate your way out of a war once you’ve made it suicidal for the other side to negotiate with you. That isn’t a diplomatic problem. It’s a direct structural consequence of the assassination of Ali Khamenei.

The means are insufficient and unsustainable. The constitutional war powers framework isn’t just procedural machinery. It’s the democratic mechanism by which our republic ensures that force is used with deliberation, defined objectives, and public consent — and it’s the institutional means by which our democracy keeps its strategic commitments credible over time. When that mechanism is bypassed — as it was with Soleimani, as it has been with Operation Epic Fury — the executive branch teaches itself that the end justifies the means. That lesson compounds across administrations. It doesn’t stay within party lines.

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The Forward Bill

The human cost is already arriving. Gas prices sit at a 22-month high. More than sixteen ships have been struck in and around the Strait of Hormuz. Thirteen American service members have been killed — among them six Air Force crew members who died when their refueling tanker went down over Iraq. The Pentagon told Congress that the first six days of Operation Epic Fury cost $11.3 billion — roughly $1 billion dollars a day — at a moment when millions of Americans have lost health coverage and domestic priorities go unfunded. That’s the forward bill, denominated in dollars and lives, that the method produced regardless of how welcome the headline outcome felt on day one.

The honest argument isn’t “the Ayatollah’s death was bad.” It’s that the way we went about it systematically foreclosed on the potential for better outcomes — in Iran, in the region, in the constitutional architecture that governs American force, and in the global confidence that American power is bounded by something more durable than a single leader’s preference and political moment.

Democracies that cannot make this distinction don’t just lose messaging wars. They lose the public’s trust and the institutional capacity to make better decisions the next time. And there will be a next time. The Soleimani precedent, reinforced by the catastrophic success of the Ayatollah’s elimination, all but guarantees it.

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Before the Next Trigger Is Pulled

The question we must ask our elected representatives — and that citizens deserve a straight answer to — is this:

Before the next decision like this one is made, what criteria will be required? What objectives must be defined and declared? What constitutional authority must be invoked?

Congress holds the power to demand those answers. It hasn’t. And Congress, in the end, answers to the American people. A republic that can’t insist on those questions before the trigger is pulled will find, sooner than it expects, that it’s run out of better options.

Be Intrepid — Tony Johnson
Reconnecting the Republic
March 2026

The Governance Gap Is Operational

Author’s Note: An earlier version of my previous article, “Who Governs the Machines That Now Shape War?”, indicated that Claude was available on the Department of Defense’s GenAI.mil platform. According to DefenseScoop’s reporting on the December 9, 2025, launch, Google Cloud’s Gemini for Government was the first — and at launch, only — AI product deployed on GenAI.mil. The earlier piece has been corrected. Accuracy matters, especially when the subject is institutional accountability.

This week, the argument I’ve been making in this series stopped being an analysis and became breaking news.

On Tuesday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth gave Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei a Friday deadline: remove the guardrails on the Claude AI system — specifically, the company’s restrictions on mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons — or lose a $200 million Pentagon contract. Hegseth also threatened to invoke the Defense Production Act and designate Anthropic a supply chain risk, a designation that could effectively blacklist the company from work across the federal government. As of this writing, Anthropic has not budged.

If you want to understand why this matters beyond the contract dispute itself, stay with me. Because what’s happening isn’t really about Anthropic versus the Pentagon. It’s about who governs “the machines/AI” that now shape war — and what happens when the institution constitutionally responsible for answering that question has gone largely silent.

Lawful Use Is the Right Starting Point — But It’s Not the Finish Line

Let’s give credit where it’s due. The Pentagon’s core principle — that the military, having purchased a capability with taxpayer dollars, should be free to deploy it for any lawful purpose across its authorized missions — is defensible. It reflects the basic structure of civil-military authority in a constitutional democracy.

When DoD’s own AI Ethics Principles, adopted in 2020, call for AI systems that are lawful, ethical, governable, traceable, reliable, and equitable — the department is right to insist that those principles, not a vendor’s business preferences, govern how its tools are used.

Pentagon CTO Emil Michael said it plainly in a February 19 meeting with reporters: “You can’t have an AI company sell AI to the Department of War and don’t let it do Department of War things.” That’s a reasonable operational frustration. I’ve sat in rooms where that kind of friction is maddening.

But ‘lawful use’ is only as strong as the laws defining it. And here is where my argument must extend well beyond what most commentary has been willing to go.

Congress Hasn't Shown Up

The hard truth is that Congress has not written the rules. Not comprehensively, not durably, and not in time. The Biden administration’s 2024 National Security Memorandum on AI (previously available online but is now suddenly no longer available) and updated DoD directives on autonomous weapons exist, but they are executive instruments — reversible, narrow in scope, and not a substitute for statute.

There is no comprehensive legislative framework governing which AI applications the military can and cannot pursue, what companies must build into — or be forbidden from building into — systems sold to the government, or what transparency and reporting requirements give the public genuine visibility into how these tools are actually used.

That is a legislative gap. And it has consequences that are now playing out in public.

Lawfare published an analysis today making precisely this point: Congress — not the Pentagon, not Anthropic — should set the rules for military AI. As the piece notes, the Pentagon originally agreed to Anthropic’s contractual guardrails on autonomous weapons and mass surveillance. It is now threatening to use a Korean War-era statute — the Defense Production Act — to compel compliance. That is what happens when the institution responsible for writing durable rules declines to do so: the executive branch improvises, and private companies become the last line of accountability.

That is not a system. It is a series of workarounds waiting to fail.

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The Single-Vendor Problem

There is a detail in this dispute that hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves. According to multiple reports, Claude is currently the only frontier AI model authorized for use on DoD’s classified networks. The department has no classified-ready backup. This matters enormously for the governance argument: the Pentagon’s aggressive posture — ultimatums, DPA threats, supply chain risk designations — is at least partly a function of its own failure to avoid single-vendor dependency, a condition it was already warned about in the late Biden administration’s AI directives.

A department that built its classified AI infrastructure around a single provider, accepted that provider’s usage restrictions as contractual terms, and now wants to retroactively rewrite those terms under threat of law is not demonstrating institutional strength. It is demonstrating institutional improvisation. And improvisation under pressure is not governance.

Convenient Vacuums

There is something else worth naming — even if it’s uncomfortable. Governance vacuums are sometimes convenient for those operating within them. Oversight creates friction. Reporting requirements generate work. Legislative mandates constrain operational flexibility. When Congress is not asking hard questions, the day-to-day work of deploying new capabilities can move faster and with fewer interruptions.

I understand that logic. I’ve lived inside institutions where it operates. And I am not suggesting that the career professionals working on military AI are acting in bad faith. Most are not. They are doing serious work under serious pressure, with inadequate guidance from the branch of government constitutionally responsible for providing it.

But ‘Congress isn’t watching’ is not a governance strategy. It is a condition that eventually produces exactly the kind of public rupture we are witnessing — where the absence of clear rules means every friction point becomes a crisis, and every crisis becomes a political confrontation, rather than a policy problem with a policy solution.

The pattern is not unique to AI. Defense contractors working in surveillance and data analytics have faced similar tensions — congressional scrutiny of lawful-use boundaries, civil liberties objections, and pushback from oversight committees. The Anthropic dispute isn’t a novelty in the recurring story about the civil-military-corporate relationship. What’s new is the speed, the stakes, and the absence of any statutory framework designed to handle it.

The Fox guarding the Henhouse

My argument in this series has been consistent: the question of who governs military AI cannot be answered by the Secretary of Defense alone. Not because the department lacks competence or good faith — but because the fox-and-henhouse problem is structural, not personal.

Institutions asked to govern themselves without external accountability tend, over time, to govern in their own interests. That is not a criticism. It is institutional physics.

Congress must act. Not to micromanage operations, but to establish the durable legal architecture that makes legitimate oversight possible: statutory definitions of prohibited AI applications in warfare, transparency and reporting requirements with meaningful enforcement mechanisms, and independent review processes with actual authority. The National Defense Authorization Act is one vehicle. There are others. The point is that the authority must be legislative — not merely executive — and it must be exercised, not merely delegated.

Until that happens, we will keep having the wrong argument — vendors versus the Pentagon, ethics versus operations, Friday deadlines and DPA threats — when the right argument is between the democratic institutions responsible for governing both.

The Republic's Next Move

Strategic literacy means being able to see the architecture beneath the headlines.

This week’s dispute is not, at its core, about Anthropic’s values or the Pentagon’s frustration. It is about whether the republic’s governing institutions are fulfilling their constitutional responsibilities in a domain that is moving faster than their oversight functions and habits.

The answer, for now, is no. But the answer can change — if citizens understand what’s at stake well enough to demand it.

That is why this work matters.

Be Intrepid — Tony
February 2026

A Republic aware of its fractures | An American committed to its repair.

Sources & Further Reading

DefenseScoop, “DOD initiates large-scale rollout of commercial AI models and emerging agentic tools,” Dec. 9, 2025: https://defensescoop.com/2025/12/09/genai-mil-platform-dod-commercial-ai-models-agentic-tools-google-gemini/

DefenseScoop, “Pentagon CTO urges Anthropic to ‘cross the Rubicon’ on military AI use cases amid ethics dispute,” Feb. 19, 2026: https://defensescoop.com/2026/02/19/pentagon-anthropic-dispute-military-ai-hegseth-emil-michael/

CNN, “Pentagon threatens to make Anthropic a pariah if it refuses to drop AI guardrails,” Feb. 24, 2026: https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/24/tech/hegseth-anthropic-ai-military-amodei

TechCrunch, “Anthropic won’t budge as Pentagon escalates AI dispute,” Feb. 24, 2026: https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/24/anthropic-wont-budge-as-pentagon-escalates-ai-dispute/

Lawfare, “What the Defense Production Act Can and Can’t Do to Anthropic,” Feb. 26, 2026: https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/what-the-defense-production-act-can-and-can’t-do-to-anthropic

NBC News, “Tensions between the Pentagon and AI giant Anthropic reach a boiling point,” Feb. 20, 2026: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/anthropic-ai-defense-war-venezuela-maduro-rcna259603

Department of Defense, AI Ethics Principles, Feb. 24, 2020: https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/2091996/dod-adopts-ethical-principles-for-artificial-intelligence/

The “disappeared”

White House, National Security Memorandum on AI, Oct. 24, 2024: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2024/10/24/memorandum-on-advancing-the-united-states-leadership-in-artificial-intelligence/

DoD Directive 3000.09, Autonomy in Weapon Systems (updated 2023): https://www.esd.whs.mil/portals/54/documents/dd/issuances/dodd/300009p.pdf

Congressional Research Service, AI and National Security: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R45178

H.R. 2670, National Defense Authorization Act for FY2024, 118th Congress: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/2670

The call didn’t come from a congressional committee or a federal courtroom. It came through a back channel — one tech executive to another — and it set off a chain of events that now threatens to reshape how the United States governs artificial intelligence in war.

According to The Washington Post, after the January 3rd raid that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro — an operation in which scores of Venezuelan security personnel were killed — an executive from Anthropic, the maker of the Claude AI model, contacted an executive at the defense firm Palantir to ask whether Claude had been used in the operation. Palantir relayed the inquiry to the Pentagon, where officials interpreted it as an expression of disapproval. That moment, quiet as it was, became the fracture line in what is now one of the most consequential technology disputes in American defense policy.

This isn’t a story about a contract negotiation gone sideways. It’s about a structural question the republic has been slow to answer:

When advanced AI shifts from helping write job descriptions to supporting operations in which people die, who holds the authority to set the rules — and who holds them accountable when things go wrong?

What $200 Million Bought — and Didn’t

Until recently, Anthropic occupied an enviable position within the defense establishment. The company held a contract worth up to $200 million, and its Claude model was, by multiple accounts, the only frontier AI system authorized for use on the Pentagon’s classified networks — deployed through a partnership with Palantir’s Maven Smart System, as Brandi Vincent reported for DefenseScoop. Beyond its classified deployment through Palantir's Maven Smart System, Claude was also made available through GenAI.mil, the Pentagon's broader generative AI platform launched in December. According to Undersecretary Emil Michael, the platform drew more than 1.2 million unique users within two months from an eligible workforce of approximately 3 million military members, civilian employees, and contractors.

But the relationship began to fracture after the Maduro raid. Pentagon leaders questioned whether a company that appeared to second-guess the operational use of its technology could be fully relied upon. One administration official told The Washington Post that Anthropic “expressed concern over the Maduro raid, which is a huge problem for the department.” Anthropic has pushed back on that characterization, telling The Post it had not discussed specific operations with the Pentagon or expressed concerns to industry partners beyond routine technical matters. Whatever the precise exchange, the damage was done. Trust — the invisible currency of any defense partnership — was suddenly in question.

Who Sets the Rules?

The dispute runs deeper than any single operation. At its core are two competing conceptions of who should define the boundaries of AI in military settings.

The Pentagon’s position is straightforward: if the government purchases an AI tool with taxpayer dollars, the military should be free to use it for any lawful purpose across the full spectrum of its missions.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has made speed the watchword of his AI agenda. In a January 2026 directive, he ordered the department to move from “campaign planning to kill chain execution” and wrote that the military “must approach risk tradeoffs, ‘equities,’ and other subjective questions as if we were at war,” according to The Washington Post. Emil Michael, the Pentagon’s Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering and chief technology officer, put the matter bluntly to DefenseScoop: “You can’t have an AI company sell AI to the Department of War and then not let it do Department of War things.”

Undersecretary Michael went further, urging Anthropic to make what he called an irreversible choice. “I believe and hope that they will ‘cross the Rubicon,’” he told DefenseScoop — language that carries its own weight. When a senior defense official invokes Caesar’s march on Rome to describe what he expects from a technology partner, the subtext is not subtle: capitulate or be left behind.

Anthropic’s position rests on two explicit red lines embedded in its usage policy: no mass surveillance of Americans, and no fully autonomous weapons systems without meaningful human control.

These aren’t afterthoughts. CEO Dario Amodei laid them out publicly in a January essay — published just two weeks after Hegseth’s directive — in which he warned about the dangers of AI-enabled drone swarms and the risk, as The Washington Post reported, that “democratic governments turning them against their own people to seize power.” Amodei has argued that democracies should use AI for national defense, with one critical caveat: not in ways that would make them indistinguishable from the autocracies they oppose.

The Washington Post reported that other leading AI firms — OpenAI, Google, and Elon Musk’s xAI — have agreed to let the Pentagon use their models for “all lawful purposes” on unclassified networks and are working on agreements for classified systems. That context matters. Anthropic is not being asked to do something unprecedented; it’s being asked to do what its competitors have already accepted. But its refusal — or at least its hesitation — has made it the test case for whether principled guardrails carry a price in the defense marketplace. And the price being discussed is severe.

Punishing the Company That Showed Up

Senior Pentagon officials have signaled they are considering designating Anthropic a “supply chain risk” — a classification normally reserved for foreign adversaries like Huawei and Kaspersky — as Axios first reported. Such a designation wouldn’t just end Anthropic’s Pentagon contract. It would require all defense contractors to certify they don’t use any Anthropic model, effectively blacklisting the company from the entire defense technology base.

As Alan Z. Rozenshtein, a law professor at the University of Minnesota and senior editor at Lawfare, noted in a recent analysis, it’s far from clear that such a designation would be legally sound. The relevant statutes — designed to address foreign sabotage and subversion — were never intended for a domestic company that openly restricts certain uses through a license agreement. The only time a similar order has been issued was against a Swiss cybersecurity firm with reported ties to Russia. Anthropic, whatever one thinks of its policies, is not that.

The move would also be strategically counterproductive. Anthropic was the first frontier AI lab to deploy on classified networks. It showed up when others hadn’t. Punishing the company that leaned in — while rewarding those that simply agreed to fewer constraints — sends a signal that will not be lost on the next generation of technology firms considering defense work.

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A Gap Where Law Should Be

But here’s what troubles me most about this dispute, and what I think should trouble you:

The rules governing how the most powerful technology of this century gets used in war are being set through ad hoc negotiation between an executive branch official and a startup CEO, with no durable statutory framework and no meaningful democratic input.

Professor Rozenshtein put the deeper problem precisely: the issue isn’t who wins this particular negotiation — it’s that the negotiation is happening at all in place of legislation. If Anthropic holds firm, the Pentagon simply gets unconstrained AI from someone else. Only congressional action creates constraints that survive a change of vendor or a change of administration.

Congress already regulates military acquisition extensively. It imposes conditions on weapons systems, intelligence collection, and contractor behavior through standing procurement law and annual defense authorization. It has the tools to specify which AI applications the military can and cannot pursue, what companies must build into — or be forbidden from building into — systems sold to the government, and what transparency and reporting requirements give the public visibility into how these tools are actually used. What it hasn’t done is use them.

Full disclosure: I served in the Biden Administration, so I have a direct stake in what comes next. The 2023 policy requiring human decision-making authority over AI-enabled use of force remains in effect — but The Washington Post reports it “will be reviewed as needed.” That quiet caveat deserves attention. Existing guardrails are under institutional pressure even though they have not been formally repealed.

Who Pays the Cost?

In the policy debate, it’s easy to lose sight of the people at the center of it. Emelia Probasco, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, offered a reminder in her comments to DefenseScoop. She characterized the supply chain risk threat as counterproductive and the dispute as fundamentally a “tussle over control and power,” not a genuine security concern. But her sharpest observation was about who pays the cost of unresolved governance: “Ultimately, the person I worry about is the operators who are being asked to do incredibly dangerous, incredibly complex operations in a world that is adopting AI. We need to figure this out for them.”

Frank Kendall, who served as Air Force Secretary under the Biden administration and oversaw the development of autonomous warplanes, was characteristically direct in his comments to The Washington Post.

“The military’s function is the application of violence,” he said, “and if you’re going to give anything to the Defense Department, it’s likely going to be used to help kill people.”

That candor is clarifying. It strips away the euphemism and forces the question: if that’s the function, shouldn’t the democratic process — not backroom deals — determine the rules that govern how AI serves it?

Building Without Blueprints

This dispute will shape defense procurement for a generation. It will determine whether ethical commitments in military AI are treated as principled positions or competitive liabilities — and whether Congress can muster the urgency to write durable rules before the boundaries of AI in warfare are entirely set by executive edicts and corporate capitulation.

We’re building the infrastructure of future conflict right now, in real time, without blueprints.

The question isn’t which technologies we choose. It’s whether democratic authority governs them — not as an afterthought, but as the architecture.

If the infrastructure of war increasingly resides in private hands, how should a democratic society assert its authority over the technologies that may decide life and death in its name?

That’s a republic-level question. And it’s ours to answer.

Be Intrepid — Tony Johnson
Reconnecting the Republic
February 2026

A Special Kind of American Audacity

The Reverend Jesse Louis Jackson died this morning in Chicago at age 84, surrounded by his family. And with him goes a particular kind of American audacity — the audacity to believe, against all available evidence, that this country could live up to its own promises.

I want to share with you what he meant to me personally, because I think that’s what this moment calls for.

Filing the Claim that Mattered

I’m the product of many teachers and mentors. But some of my earliest and most formative models of what leadership looks like came through a television screen. Jesse Jackson was one of them.

Growing up as a young Black man in California and Nevada, I watched Rev. Jackson with something that I can only describe as recognition. Here was a man who sounded like he meant it. He carried himself with a dignity that was not borrowed from anyone else’s permission. A man who worked closely with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., witnessed his assassination, and, rather than breaking, channeled that grief into decades of relentless work.

When he ran for president in 1984 — and again in 1988, when he actually won primaries and built a movement — he wasn’t just running a campaign. He was filing a claim on behalf of everyone who had been told that the highest corridors of American power weren’t for them. That claim mattered. It still matters. Jackson’s boldness, sincerity, humanity, and leadership inspired me.

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Credibility Starts at Home

From a national security perspective — and I say this as someone who spent three decades in service to this country in the military, the intelligence community, and the policy world — Jesse Jackson’s work was also deeply patriotic in ways that don’t always get recognized.

His negotiations to free American hostages held in Syria, Cuba, Yugoslavia, and Iraq demonstrated that engagement, moral authority, and relational diplomacy could accomplish what coercive power sometimes could not. He understood that America’s strength abroad is inseparable from its credibility at home — and that credibility, he insisted, had to be earned by how we treated our own people.

That’s not a radical idea. It is an elemental truth foundational to our republic.

Respect for a True Servant Leader

Jackson’s family said this morning that he was “a servant leader — not only to our family, but to the oppressed, the voiceless, and the overlooked around the world.”

Servant leadership. It is a phrase that gets thrown around easily but is rarely practiced. I led the Truman National Security Project and the Truman Center for National Policy — national organizations dedicated to producing next-generation leaders our nation needs. That experience was one of the most challenging, rewarding, and transformational missions of my career. But I would never say that it was easy. With that perspective, I have the utmost respect for Jesse Jackson, a pioneering national leader who practiced servant leadership for seven decades, even as his body failed him, even as the political landscape shifted beneath his feet, even as the movements he helped birth moved on without always acknowledging the debt they owed him.

Rev. Jackson kept hope alive. Not as a sentiment — as a discipline.

Keep hope alive. We owe him nothing less. 🕊️

I think about the work ahead: the fractures in our democracy, the retreat from inclusion that we are witnessing in real time, the urgent need for leaders who will stand in the breach without flinching.

Rev. Jackson would not want us to mourn passively. He would want us to organize. To build coalitions. To run for things. To show up.

So that’s what I’ve done and what I’ll keep doing.

Rest in power, sir. You gave us more than you knew.

Be Intrepid — Tony Johnson
Reconnecting the Republic
February 2026

Having read this far, you now know what I think about Minneapolis and why I believe ICE operations there have triggered a national security crisis. I don’t have a ten-point plan for how to fix this. I wish I did. But after sitting with my grief and the outrage — and after walking through the national security implications in Part 2 — I’ve come to see this final installment not as an answer, but as an invitation.

What happened in Minneapolis is not just a policy failure or a tragic overreach. It is a rupture in the trust that allows a republic to function. And ruptures are not repaired by wishful thinking or by anger alone. They are repaired by citizens who discipline themselves to insist that power be accountable, that government be worthy of its authority, and that the bonds between us — frayed as they are — remain stronger than the forces pulling them apart.

If there is anything I can offer right now, it’s not a program. It’s a set of commitments — five of them — that I believe we must take seriously if we intend to rebuild what has been broken. They aren’t abstract principles. Each one emerged from watching what unfolded in Minneapolis and asking: What will it take to make sure this cannot happen again?

The Work Ahead: Five Commitments for a Republic Under Strain

1. Rebuild Constitutional Guardrails Around Coercive Power

I keep returning to the killing of Alex Pretti. A Minneapolis ICU nurse. A U.S. citizen whose legally owned firearm had already been confiscated before nine ICE agents opened fire. That was not only a tragedy — it was a case study in how quickly trust evaporates when armed agents of the state act without regard for constitutional norms.

Power without legitimacy is not strength. It’s a threat. And once a government normalizes the unchecked use of force, deterrence no longer flows from law — it flows from intimidation. In a democracy, that’s untenable.

To repair this rupture, we must insist on transparency, reassert public oversight, and make clear that state power must never outrun the consent that grants it. This is not an anti-enforcement position. I’ve said throughout this series that we need border enforcement. What we don’t need — what no republic can survive — is an enforcement apparatus that operates beyond the reach of the Constitution it was created to uphold and the people it’s meant to serve and protect.

2. Re-anchor Public Trust Through Transparency and Accountability

In the days after Pretti’s death, residents of Minneapolis struggled to understand who was acting under legitimate authority and who wasn’t. Local police were sidelined. City officials were kept in the dark. Rumors metastasized into panic.

No constitutional democracy can tolerate a security posture where citizens cannot distinguish lawful operations from rogue ones. When the government acts in shadow and then defends its actions with demonstrable falsehoods, it doesn’t just fail the test of transparency. It poisons the well of public trust — the same well it will need to draw from the next time it asks citizens to cooperate, comply, or sacrifice.

Accountability — public hearings and briefings, documented authorities, and independent review — is not a burden on security agencies. It is a stabilizer. Agencies that resist accountability are not protecting national security. They are undermining it.

3. Reaffirm That Domestic Security Is a Human-Centered Enterprise

Security professionals understand something that too often gets lost in the politics of enforcement: once you label a community an “operational zone,” you’ve already lost the very terrain — human trust — that makes security possible.

Minneapolis residents didn’t experience ICE’s operations as a precision enforcement action. They experienced it as an intrusion — heavily armed agents moving through their streets with no apparent connection to the community or accountability to it. A “targeted enforcement operation” became a citywide trauma because it treated neighborhoods as battlefields and neighbors as collateral damage.

Rebuilding begins with this recognition: strategy cannot be divorced from humanity. Security decisions must begin with people, not procedures. The mother calculating whether it’s safe to walk her child to school, the small business owner watching revenues plummet, the healthcare worker wondering if showing up to a protest could make her a target — these are not secondary considerations. They are the primary data points any legitimate security framework must account for.

4. Reestablish Shared Civic Literacy About Power, Rights, and Responsibility

Here’s something that troubled me deeply as I followed the Minneapolis crisis: Americans didn’t know what federal agencies were authorized to do. They didn’t know where federal jurisdiction ended and municipal authority began. They didn’t know what rights they retained when the government itself became the threat.

That confusion wasn’t incidental. It was a force multiplier for panic. And it’s not a failure of the public. It’s a failure of the civic infrastructure that’s supposed to equip citizens to navigate exactly these moments.

This is why I built Reconnecting the Republic around the idea of strategic literacy — the capacity to understand how decisions about power, security, and governance connect to consequences. Strategic literacy is not optional civic enrichment. It is the civic technology of democratic resilience. A republic is only as secure as the citizens who understand how power is meant to work — and who can recognize when it isn’t working as intended.

5. Recommit to Strategic Citizenship as a Long-Term Practice

The most hopeful thing I witnessed in Minneapolis was not what state and local government did. It was what people did. Neighbors checked on each other. Journalists refused to look away. Local leaders demanded answers. Community organizations documented federal activity in real time because they understood that when official accountability fails, citizens must create their own.

These acts were democratic muscle memory — the instinct of people raised in a republic who understand, even under duress, that citizenship carries obligations.

But muscle memory alone is not enough. What emerged in Minneapolis was scattered and reactive — a reflex, not a strategy. For this republic to survive what is being done to it, civic courage must become an intentional, long-term practice. Not the kind of citizenship that shows up only for elections or erupts only in crisis, but the steady, disciplined work of people who refuse to surrender their republic to intimidation or despair.

Political analyst John Heilemann is right: this fight will take years. The civil rights movement took years. Vietnam War protests took years. And this struggle — to reclaim constitutional governance from those who are systematically dismantling it — will take years, too. We are at the beginning, not the end. And citizenship, in this context, is not a moment. It is a commitment.

How We Carry This Forward

When I try to understand what this moment demands of us, I keep returning to two insights from people who have studied our fractures and our capacity for repair.

David Brooks, in How to Know a Person, draws on the work of psychologist Stephen Joseph to make a distinction that has stayed with me. He argues that people who face trauma respond in one of two ways. Some “assimilate” — they absorb what happened and try to keep chugging, fitting the experience into their existing understanding of the world. Others “accommodate” — they allow the experience to change them, to reshape their models of who they are and what matters.

The difference is between someone who says, “I survived this, and I’m going back to normal,” and someone who says, “No. This changes who I am. This changes how I want to spend my days.”

I think that distinction applies to America right now. Minneapolis is not something we can assimilate — not if we’re honest. We cannot absorb what happened and return to the assumptions we held before. The assumption that federal agents would not kill citizens on camera and lie about it. The assumption that constitutional protections would hold under pressure. The assumption that someone else — some institution, some leader, some court — would step in before things went too far.

Those assumptions are broken. And the question Brooks poses — “In what ways is the world safe and unsafe? Who am I? What is my place in the world? What’s my story? Where do I really want to go?” — is now a question for all of us. Not as individuals processing private grief, but as citizens of a republic confronting a collective trauma that demands we remake our understanding of what this country is and what it requires of us.

Brooks also invokes the 16th-century philosopher Michel de Montaigne, who observed that “you can be knowledgeable with other men’s knowledge, but you can’t be wise with other men’s wisdom.” We’ve all watched Minneapolis unfold — angry, horrified, heartbroken. But watching is not enough. Standing in solidarity is not enough. Our rage, however justified, is not enough.

We must accompany our fellow Americans through what comes next, and that accompaniment demands more than sympathy. It demands action. It demands showing up — not just when cameras are rolling, but in the long, unglamorous stretches of democratic work that follow.

This is where Michelle Obama’s redefinition of “going high” becomes essential. In a recent conversation with Stephen Colbert, she pushed back against the notion that “going high” means suppressing anger or retreating into saintly calm. “Going high,” she said, “is not losing the urgency or the passion or the rage, especially when you are justified in it. Going high means finding the purpose in your rage.”

That hit home for me — hard. Because I’ve spent weeks navigating the tension between rage and strategic patience. I wrote about it in Part 1. I felt it pulling at me as I wrote Part 2. And Michelle Obama names the resolution I’ve been searching for: the problem is not rage. The problem is rage without direction. “Rage without reason, without a plan, without direction is just more rage,” she said. And we’ve been living in a lot of rage.

She’s right. The impulse to go low — to lash out and react, to throw your hurt out there — is what she calls “emotional junk food.” It feels good in the moment, but it doesn’t fix anything over the long term. Hurt people, hurt people. That way of being, she argues, is unsustainable.

Both ideas land squarely in Minneapolis. This crisis showed us what happens when a government forgets to respect its people — and what happens when citizens, in their fury, nevertheless insist on moral clarity over chaos, only to be deeply disappointed.

The task ahead is not to extinguish our anger. It is to refine it — into purpose, into discipline, into stamina for the long fight.

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We rebuild by insisting on truth, by choosing accountability over apathy, and by practicing a citizenship anchored in steadiness rather than spectacle. A republic reconnects itself not through hope alone, but through a people who refuse to look away, refuse to be intimidated, and refuse to surrender their agency.

Yes. We are tired. We are grieving. We are furious. But we are not powerless. But if we commit — truly commit — to the work of strategic citizenship, then what was broken in Minneapolis does not have to be the story of our nation.

A Closing Reflection

When I began writing this series, I expressed serious doubt that it’s even possible to reconnect the republic — the animating idea behind this platform. My doubt wasn’t performative flexing. I felt it in my bones, and I suspect many of you did too.

But by sharing with you how I’ve struggled to process this crisis — by writing through the grief, the fury, and the fear — I’ve come to a place I didn’t expect. Not optimism, exactly. Not resolution. Something more like conviction. The American republic can still be reconnected. The fracture is real, but so is our capacity for repair.

What happened in Minneapolis has changed me. It should change all of us. And that change — if we have the courage to accommodate it rather than assimilate it, to let it remake our models rather than retreat to the old ones — is where the rebuilding begins.

So, I’ll ask the question David Brooks poses, and I’ll make it ours: Where do we really want to go? And what can we do together to see us through this time of troubles? What will you do?

Be Intrepid — Tony Johnson
Reconnecting the Republic
February 2026

Author’s Note:

This three-part series represents my honest attempt to bear witness to what is happening on American streets in early 2026, to connect those events to the strategic stakes that Reconnecting the Republic is built to illuminate, and to chart a path forward grounded in conviction rather than wishful thinking. I have navigated the same tension many of you feel — between moral clarity and strategic patience, between rage and hope. If this series has resonated — whether you agree with me or hold another point of view — I invite you to continue the conversation. Strategic citizenship is not a solo endeavor. It is the work we do together.

A note on sources: In the closing section, I reference David Brooks’ How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen (Random House, 2023) and Michelle Obama’s conversation with Stephen Colbert, February 2026. Brooks draws on the work of psychologist Stephen Joseph (What Doesn’t Kill Us: The New Psychology of Posttraumatic Growth) and the philosophy of Michel de Montaigne.

What Does Minneapolis Have to Do with National Security?

In Part 1, I shared the tension I’m navigating—between rage and strategic patience, between the urgency of this moment and the discipline required for the long fight ahead. As I sat with the question of what to write next, I kept coming back to an argument I’ve made throughout my career and, more recently, here on Reconnecting the Republic: legitimacy is a strategic asset. What is unfolding in Minneapolis is not merely an immigration enforcement tragedy—it’s an assault on the foundations of that asset.

Let me explain in simple terms why this is a national security crisis, not despite its domestic character, but precisely because of it.

Legitimacy is a Strategic Asset

Security is not only about military capacity or border enforcement. It’s about securing consent—the belief among citizens that their government acts lawfully, respects rights, and operates in the public interest. When federal enforcement actions are perceived as arbitrary, abusive, or dishonest, that consent erodes.

Legitimacy is what allows governments to mobilize resources, sustain public support during crises, and project credible commitments abroad. When legitimacy fractures at home, everything else becomes harder.

For a mother in South Minneapolis right now, that erosion is not abstract. It shows up in the calculation she makes before leaving the house each morning: Is today the day armed strangers decide my family looks like a target? That question—once unthinkable—is now part of daily life for thousands of Americans.

The daily business of earning a living, caring for loved ones, getting kids to school, a quick run to the grocery, a night out on the town, and moving freely from place to place—all of it becomes fraught. Our sense of personal safety has become a question. Am I safe? If trouble finds me, who can be trusted to help?

Constitutional Norms Are the Foundation of Stability

Due process. The right to protest. Protections against unreasonable searches and the use of excessive force. These are not peripheral to national security—they are its foundation. They create predictability. They restrain the arbitrary exercise of power. They signal to citizens and allies alike that the United States operates within a framework of law, not raw assertion of authority.

When those norms are compromised, the boundary between security and coercion blurs. And once that boundary is blurred, it becomes nearly impossible to restore without deliberate, sustained effort.

When enforcement agencies act without published guidelines, and senior officials defend actions that video evidence contradicts, ordinary citizens lose the ability to predict what behavior is safe. That unpredictability is not chaos by accident—it’s chaos by design, and it corrodes the very idea of lawful society.

Our Internal Fractures Signal Vulnerability to Our Enemies.

Against the backdrop of our current civil unrest, foreign adversaries do not need to breach American borders to weaken U.S. influence. They watch how this country manages internal disputes. When the rule of law can be willfully and casually set aside, when federal agents use lethal force against civilians under dubious pretenses and senior officials defend it with demonstrable falsehoods, the spectacle itself becomes a tool.

When, hypothetically, Russian state media broadcasts footage of American citizens shot by federal agents on American streets—and our own officials lie about what happened—Moscow and Beijing don’t need to manufacture propaganda. We’re providing it ourselves, in real time, with an official imprimatur.

Adversaries point to it. Allies question it. And the moral authority the United States has historically wielded—however imperfectly—diminishes in real time.

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Our Strategic Vulnerability Mirrors Our Domestic Break

The same dynamic applies domestically. Many Americans now actively wonder whether our Constitutional guarantees mean what they once did. When enforcement agencies act without clear accountability, and senior officials defend abuses rather than investigate them, citizens hedge as well. They lose trust. They organize outside formal channels because they no longer believe those channels will protect them.

For the small business owner in Minneapolis who has watched revenues plummet, for the parent who now walks their child to school instead of letting them go alone, for the healthcare worker who wonders if showing up to a protest could make them a target—the strategic question is simple: Can I trust this government to respect my rights? Increasingly, the answer is no.

Both internationally and domestically, the United States is burning through its reserves of legitimacy. And legitimacy, once lost, is extraordinarily difficult to rebuild.

What Next?

Legitimacy is a reservoir. It fills slowly, through consistent action aligned with principles. It drains quickly, through actions that betray those principles in full public view. What we are witnessing in Minneapolis—and in cities across the country—is a government draining that reservoir faster than most of us imagined possible.

But reservoirs can be refilled. Norms can be restored. Trust can be rebuilt—not easily, not quickly, but deliberately. In Part 3, I’ll explore what that rebuilding requires: not wishful thinking, but the disciplined, sustained work of strategic citizenship. Because the alternative—letting the republic fracture beyond repair while we wait for someone else to fix it—is not something I’m willing to accept. I don’t think you are either.

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Author’s Note

This essay is my reflection on the collision between national security, civil liberties, and public trust in the United States at a moment when those tensions are no longer theoretical. As federal enforcement actions spark outrage across American cities, the stakes for our constitutional order — and our shared future as a republic — have become impossible to ignore. This piece is part of Reconnecting the Republic’s ongoing effort to bring clarity, context, and strategic literacy to a nation wrestling with itself.

— Tony Johnson
Reconnecting the Republic
February 2026

Bearing Witness

February is Black History Month—a time to remember how Americans have wrestled with our republic’s foundational promise and contradictions since its birth. But in 2026, the struggle isn’t a historical artifact to be studied from a safe distance. It’s a live question and challenge for our democracy on the streets of Minneapolis and in cities across the nation.

Governor Tim Walz has openly warned that he fears a “Fort Sumter moment in Minneapolis.” The governor’s warning is an alarming reflection on the urgency of the moment. We all feel his anxiety, whether we want to admit it or not.

Meanwhile, aggressive ICE operations continue in Democrat-governed cities across the country, including Minneapolis, Boston, Chicago, and Denver. Families separated. Children traumatized. Communities are forming “ICE watcher” networks to document federal activity in real time because they no longer trust that accountability will come from within the system.

Struggle in Real Time

I’ve spent several weeks wrestling with the tragedy unfolding in Minneapolis and cities across the nation. I’ve drafted and deleted a dozen reflections, trying to make sense of what my eyes and ears are telling me—trying to come to grips with how it makes me feel. Each time I tried to start with a strategic framework, the words felt like evasion. Each time I started with rage, the words felt like a performance. I could not bring my head and heart into alignment because what we are witnessing is not a policy debate about immigration enforcement—a legitimate and complex issue. I could not come to terms (on any level) with the use of lethal federal force against American citizens under “disputed circumstances,” followed by immediate efforts to justify those actions with demonstrable falsehoods that collapse under scrutiny.

I find myself incredulous—caught between righteous outrage at what is happening and the discipline required to think strategically about what should and can be done about it. Between the moral clarity that says this is wrong and the recognition that outrage alone will not build the coalitions, craft the policies, or secure the remedies required to repair what is breaking.

Some might ask why I’m using my platform, focused on strategic literacy and national security, to address domestic immigration enforcement. My answer is straightforward: legitimacy is a strategic asset. When federal agents, shielded by dubious authorities, kill American citizens and senior officials defend their actions with callous indifference, the United States burns through the very credibility that underpins both domestic governance and our international legitimacy as a democracy. What happens on the streets of Minneapolis doesn’t stay in Minneapolis—allies watch, adversaries watch, and both draw conclusions about America’s reliability and commitment to the principles we claim to champion.

I need to acknowledge my anxiety, disbelief, and fury honestly, because I suspect many of you feel the tension too. What is happening to our country?

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Mission [Im]possible…?

I launched Reconnecting the Republic because I believe that strategic literacy—the capacity to understand and engage with one another about how and why choices regarding U.S. national and domestic security, governance, and democracy are made—can help Americans hold leaders accountable and participate meaningfully in self-government.

But right now, I’m struggling with whether the work of “reconnecting” is even possible when so much is actively, recklessly, and willfully—it seems, almost “gleefully”—being broken.

We are not in a period of simple policy adjustment about immigration. We passed that Rubicon.

Now, the world was watching as federal agents killed American citizens who were lawfully engaged in their Constitutional right to protest peacefully. The world is watching now as our government inflicts authoritarian-style violence on Americans – behavior that the United States has justly condemned when other governments have attacked their own citizens.

Senior Administration officials make matters worse by gaslighting the American public and justifying the killings with false narratives that denigrate victims and disrespect American laws and values. Americans are not “stupid people.” We have eyes and ears. We can see clearly the wrongs being done in our name, and we don’t buy the lies being told to us. This tragedy is evident to every American – or, in my opinion, it should be.

The Administration has so far refused to set clear legal boundaries on ICE operations. It has rejected legitimate calls from Congress to implement accountability mechanisms to curb the agency’s abuses of power. It is increasingly difficult for many Americans to distinguish between safety and threat when both wear uniforms.

It’s appalling, heartbreaking, and infuriating!

I’m sure that I’m not the only one who holds his breath, hoping desperately for some kind of deus ex machina-like event to deliver us and serve actual justice. But no, that’s a Hollywood fantasy, and I know it.

No one is coming to save us. We need to save ourselves.

Looking to History for Answers

So, I look to the past for answers. Specifically, I reach for the examples that shaped my understanding of what resistance requires—Dr. King’s strategic patience, the discipline of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and my uncle Phillip, who, in his youth, led desegregation sit-ins at Woolworth-style counters in his small Oklahoma town. Their examples burn in my mind like a challenge: they faced armed resistance, legal persecution, and physical violence of a kind I could not imagine until now, with nonviolent persistence. They understood and played the long game with their very lives.

Their courage is inspirational. But I have serious doubts. Will those same strategies work now that the antagonists already have our playbook? When they’ve studied our tactics and built counters into the system itself? When the machinery of resistance has been catalogued, analyzed, and prepared for?

I imagine conversations with those who came before—not as a romantic fever dream but as an honest reckoning. What would they say about this moment? What would my uncle Phillip (z”l) –who risked everything in a small town where everyone knew his name – make of federal agents killing citizens on camera while senior officials immediately spin false narratives to justify it?

I think he’d say: the tools change, but the principles don’t. You bear witness. You organize. You demand accountability. You build coalitions. You play the long game even when every fiber of your being tells you to wait it out…let it pass over you and yours. You’ll be fine. Or, even when your racing heart says run! You plant your feet and fight.

And then I think he’d ask, “So, what are you going to do about it?”

Honestly, I’m still working on that answer. But I know it starts with refusing to look away.

Stand and Fight!

Senator Rev. Raphael Warnock invoked one of the lessons from the civil rights era in a recent interview with Mika Brzezinski and the Reverend Al Sharpton on Morning Joe: after President Lyndon Johnson told Dr. King he lacked the power to push through voting rights legislation, King told his staff, “We’re going to have to go and find the president some power.” Selma was the answer—a campaign of nonviolent agitation that created the political context for the Voting Rights Act.

Senator Warnock, who also serves as pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.‘s church—has called ICE abuses nationwide: a “spiritual crisis,” and announced his intent to block funding for ICE, potentially triggering a government shutdown. “When you build a beast,” he said, “it’s gotta eat. And we’re witnessing it eat and consume the bodies of ordinary citizens.”

He’s not wrong. But here’s where I’m struggling again: I don’t know if Americans today are prepared for the kind of long, disciplined, strategic fight the senator’s analogy implies.

Political analyst John Heilemann, who writes about American democracy and political polarization, has observed that the civil rights movement took years, the Vietnam War protests took years, and this fight will likely take years too. And he’s right. We are at the beginning, not the end—in the first quarter with three more to go... The everyday craziness of it all has been too much, and I’m not sure we’ve fully reckoned with what that means.

The Administration’s “One Big Beautiful Bill”—authorized and allocated roughly $74.85 billion to ICE over a four-year period. If the agency spends it evenly, that averages to about $18.7 billion per year, in addition to the base appropriations. That means ICE operating funds rival what the United States Marine Corps spends to modernize, arm, and equip itself to fight U.S. adversaries, and match or exceed the budget of U.S. Special Operations Command—the elite joint command responsible for counterterrorism, hostage rescue, and global special operations.

That’s insane!

Hitting ICE with a gut-punch to its budget, as Senator Warnock proposes, is a sound tactic and a good start, but it will not deliver the knock-out blow that stops the agency from wreaking havoc in American cities. And for the record, I do not agree with calls to abolish ICE. We need border enforcement. We don’t need an out-of-control, poorly trained, mask-wearing private army that tramples on the Constitutional rights of U.S. citizens and those seeking a better life in America to do it.

ICE is only one of many issues Americans must confront. The real challenge is three more years of damage being done right now—to constitutional norms, to trust in institutions, to communities and families, to America’s international standing—that will take even longer to repair.

So, I’m pulled in opposite directions: wanting to offer a strategic way forward and wanting to “throw hands” because what ICE is doing is wrong and it must stop it now. Wanting to believe that reconciliation is possible, while recognizing that reconciliation requires truth, accountability, and repair—none of which are currently on offer.

This is not despair. It’s just honesty about where we are. And honesty is where strategic citizenship begins.

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Author’s Note:

This post is my honest attempt to bear witness to what is happening on American streets in early 2026 while maintaining the strategic analysis that Reconnecting the Republic is built to provide. I’m navigating the same tension many of you feel—between moral clarity and strategic patience, between rage and hope.

In Part 2, I’ll examine why this domestic crisis is inseparable from America’s national security posture—how legitimacy at home connects to credibility abroad, and why the erosion of constitutional norms on American streets signals vulnerability that allies and adversaries alike are watching closely.

In Part 3, I’ll propose a path forward that acknowledges both the urgency of this moment and the discipline required for the long fight ahead. Because strategic citizenship is not a solo endeavor. It is the work we do together.

If this resonates—whether you agree with me or hold another point of view—I invite you to join the conversation. You cannot reconnect what you refuse to see clearly.

— Tony Johnson
Reconnecting the Republic
February 2026

On this Martin Luther King Day, I find myself thinking less about the monuments and more about the marching.

We are living through a season when many Americans are rightly angry and afraid. We see government power used in ways that feel punitive rather than protective. We watch reckless rhetoric and escalatory military moves that treat war as a talking point instead of a last resort. We feel institutions that were supposed to serve and protect us are drifting further away, insulated from accountability and indifferent to us — the people they represent.

Fear and confusion in a moment like this is understandable. But paralyzing despair is not our only option.

Dr. King knew something about living under abusive power and constant threat. He did not answer those abuses by withdrawing. He answered them with disciplined, courageous engagement — the hard, unglamorous work of organizing, educating, marching, negotiating, and, when necessary, sitting in a jail cell rather than surrendering his conscience.

King’s moral genius was not abstract. He showed people how to push back against injustice, stand up to tyranny, and turn private conviction into public courage. He reminded us that “the time is always right to do what is right,” not when it is easy or safe, but when justice is on the line.

Our democracy is not held together by hashtags or press conferences. It is held together by the connective tissue between citizens and institutions — the habits of participation, the practice of holding power to account, the willingness to insist that national security and national dignity belong to all of us, not to a frightened few behind closed doors.

Reconnecting our republic means living in community with empathy, integrity, and responsibility. Taking actions that honor and strengthen our connection to each other.

Today, following King’s example means at least three things.

First, refuse to remain silent. When we see abuses of power at home or reckless saber-rattling abroad, we do not shrug and change the channel. We ask hard questions. Like our fellow Americans in Minneapolis, we demand lawful, constitutional conduct from those who wield the instruments of surveillance, force, and coercion. We insist that the policies made and actions taken in our name be worthy of the people they affect.

Second, choose responsible and disciplined civic action over performative outrage. Dr. King did not confuse moral clarity with online fury. He built coalitions, testified, marched, organized economic pressure, and forced the country to look in the mirror. In our time, that may look like running for school boards and city councils, serving on oversight bodies, protecting election systems, or working inside institutions to bend them back toward law and justice. These methods may seem quaint against the backdrop of real trauma being visited on Americans now. Yet our history shows them as proven tools for action and the minimum starting point for enduring change.

Third, widen the circle. Inclusivity is the “strength in numbers” we most need now. The fight for our democracy is not just for some Americans, or my identity versus your identity. It’s for all of us. King’s dream was not a narrow one; it insisted that America’s promise must belong to all peoples, or it will ultimately belong to none.

In an age of cheap division, recommitting to that vision means defending the equal worth and safety of our neighbors — across race, faith, party, and place — even when we disagree on policy. That is not sentimentalism; it’s strategic. A republic in which citizens and neighbors cannot see each other’s humanity will not hold together under pressure.

King often spoke of the “arc of the moral universe” bending toward justice, but he never suggested it bent by itself. It bends when ordinary people decide to pull — again and again — toward courage, truth, and shared dignity.

On this day, in these extraordinarily challenging times for our nation and communities, holding on to America’s living mosaic is not about weaponized nostalgia or torching the shared stories that made ‘we the people’ imaginable. It is about recognizing that our history is complex and messy, and our democracy imperfect and evolving.

It is about citizens who refuse to be spectators to their own history, who choose civic engagement over escape, and who take up Dr. King’s example as a moral champion for a just America — not as a story from our past, but as an assignment for the present struggle to protect and perfect our democracy.

The work of reconnecting the republic is ours. The moment is now. Dr. King would not hesitate. Neither should we.