Weekly Groundings are published every Friday to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I investigated during the past week. They are designed to ground your thinking in the midst of media overload and contribute to Handful of Earth’s broader framework. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.
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“Trump vs MAGA”
At The Financial Times, Jonathan Derbyshire reflects on the “battle raging inside the Republican party—and, one assumes, the administration itself—between the ‘restrainers,’ who believe the US shouldn’t be lured into trying to complete a job that Israel started but couldn’t finish, and born-again neoconservatives who are spoiling for war.”
“On Saturday night, Americans went to bed digesting the news that the US had struck three nuclear sites in Iran, thereby joining Israel’s attacks on the Islamic Republic and potentially embarking on just the kind of foreign entanglement that President Donald Trump, in his inaugural address in January, had insisted would be a thing of the past. Trump said back then that ‘we will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end—and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.’ And he declared that his ‘proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier.’”
Derbyshire asks fellow FT journalist, Edward Luce, “how worried should Trump be about growing dissent inside the Maga camp over war with Iran?” Luce responds: “It has become fashionable to say that the Maga base believes whatever Trump tells it to believe and that he alone gets to define the meaning of ‘America First.’ I think that’s too simple. Bannon has also been complaining about Trump’s ‘big, beautiful (budget) bill,’ because its steep Medicaid cuts will hurt the base to pay for tax cuts that will further enrich plutocrats like Elon Musk. Trump has been almost as consistent in his pledge to protect entitlements for blue-collar Americans as he has in his vow to end the forever wars. To break one foundational pledge is unfortunate. Two would amount to a degree of carelessness that might just trigger a rebellion.”
“MAGA Split Over Iran Strikes Could be Permanent”
On the same topic, Emily Jashinsky writes at Unherd that “There is no question that MAGA is deeply divided over Donald Trump’s…support for an escalated military conflict with Iran. There is, however, a question of whether that divide is permanent, and how significantly it will damage the President’s coalition.”
She contends that “It is because of Trump that prominent supporters started to aggressively reconsider decades of conservative foreign policy—to the point where anti-interventionism became not just another plank in their worldviews but a load-bearing column. The President’s successful defenestration of every Republican candidate in 2016 was heavily dependent on his criticism of post-9/11 interventionism. This resonated deeply with average Americans, some of whom were similarly moved by Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008, as expensive foreign entanglements began to feel like part of the same agenda which pushed open borders and financialisation. Opposition to adventures in the Middle East are not an optional part of ‘America First’ for those voters, and certainly not for MAGA thought leaders such as [Tucker] Carlson and [Steve] Bannon.”
Jashinsky concludes: “It’s generally been true that the President could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and maintain the support of his loyal base. But that loyalty has always been built in no small part on their trust in his strong disdain for elite interventionism. Trump risks losing more than Carlson, [Candace] Owens, and Theo Von if he can’t make a persuasive case that a strike fits his own definition of ‘America First.’ This time, his credibility with MAGA is actually on the line.”
“Nuclear Options”
At the New Left Review, Tariq Ali writes on the history of Iran, Israel, and America in relation to nuclear weapons: “Totally forgotten in the West is the fact that the nuclear programme was an initiative first taken by the Shah in the 1970s with US support. One of the companies involved was a fiefdom of Dick Cheney, Bush’s sleazy Vice President. Khomeini halted the project when he came to power, considering it un-Islamic. But he later relented and operations restarted. As the programme ramped up in the mid-2000s, Iran and its supreme leader found that their attempts to placate Washington had come to nothing. They were still in the West’s crosshairs.
“The Bush White House gave the impression that either a direct US strike against Iran, or an attack via its tried-and-tested regional relay, Israel, might soon be on the cards. The Israelis, for their part, were virulently opposed to anyone challenging their nuclear monopoly in the Middle East. Iran’s leader was described by the Israeli government and its loyal media networks as a ‘psychopath’ and a ‘new Hitler.’ It was a hurriedly manufactured crisis, of the sort in which the West has become a specialist. The hypocrisy was breathtaking. The US had nuclear weapons, as did the UK, France and Israel; yet Iran’s search for the technology required for the lowest grade of nuclear self-defence provoked moral panic.”
Ali argues that “As always, Western double-standards are at work when Israel is involved. Israel has not joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, has not signed the Biological Weapons Convention and the Ottawa Convention, has not ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention and has disregarded international law and UN resolutions for decades, with ICJ arrest warrants now issued against Netanyahu and Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity, plus an ongoing genocide investigation…This is what a rogue state looks like.”
“Israel Bombed an Iraqi Nuclear Reactor in 1981—It Pushed Program Underground and Spurred Saddam Hussein’s Desire for Nukes”
At The Conversation, Jeffrey Fields revisits one episode in Israel’s longstanding belligerence in the Middle East carried out in the name of retaining its nuclear monopoly in the region: “Israel, with the assistance of U.S. military hardware, bombs an adversary’s nuclear facility to set back the perceived pursuit of the ultimate weapon. We have been here before, about 44 years ago. In 1981, Israeli fighter jets supplied by Washington attacked an Iraqi nuclear research reactor being built near Baghdad by the French government.”
“So what happened after the strike? Many analysts have argued that the Israeli attack, rather than diminish Iraqi desire for a nuclear weapon, actually catalyzed it. Nuclear proliferation expert Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer…concluded that the Israeli attack ‘triggered a nuclear weapons program where one did not previously exist.’” Fields concludes that, “In the case of Iraq, military action on its nascent nuclear program merely pushed it underground—to Saddam, the Israeli strikes made acquiring the ultimate weapon more rather than less attractive as a deterrent. Almost a half-century on, some analysts and observers are warning the same about Iran.”
“AI is Transforming Indian Call Centers. What Does it Mean for Workers?”
The Washington Post reports on artificial intelligence’s impact on India’s business process outsourcing sector: “For three years, Kartikeya Kumar hesitated before picking up the phone, anticipating another difficult conversation with another frustrated customer. The call center agent, now 29, had tried everything to eliminate what a colleague called the ‘Indian-ism’ in his accent. He mimicked the dialogue from Marvel movies and belted out songs by Metallica and Pink Floyd. Relief finally arrived in the form of artificial intelligence. In 2023, Kumar’s employer, the Paris-based outsourcing giant Teleperformance, rolled out an accent-altering software at his office in Gurgaon, on the outskirts of New Delhi. In real time, the AI smooths out Kumar’s accent—and those of at least 42,000 other Indian call center agents—making their speech more understandable to American clients on the other end of the line.”
“Those who use the software are engaging in ‘digital whitewashing,’ critics say, which helps explain why the industry prefers the term ‘accent translation’ over ‘accent neutralization.’” Meanwhile, “There is no shortage of ominous predictions about the implications [of AI] for India’s labor force. Within a year, there will only be a ‘minimal’ need for call centers, K Krithivasan, CEO of Indian IT company Tata Consultancy Services, recently told the Financial Times. The Brookings Institution found 86 percent of customer service tasks have ‘high automation potential.’ More than a quarter of jobs in India have ‘high exposure’ to AI, the International Monetary Fund has warned.”
The report notes that “when callers hear, ‘this call may be monitored,’ that now usually refers to an AI system, not a human. Teleperformance says such systems now review all calls for compliance and tone—tasks that workers could previously perform for only a small fraction of calls. ‘AI is going to crush entry-level white-collar hiring over the next 24 to 36 months,’ said Mark Serdar, who has spent his career helping Fortune 500 companies expand their global workforce. ‘And it’s happening faster than most people realize.’”
“OpenAI Warns Models with Higher Bioweapons Risk Are Imminent”
Axios reports on OpenAI’s warning that its “upcoming models will head into a higher level of risk when it comes to the creation of biological weapons—especially by those who don't really understand what they're doing…OpenAI executives told Axios the company expects forthcoming models will reach a high level of risk under the company's preparedness framework.” The article notes that “OpenAI is not the only company warning of models reaching new levels of potentially harmful capability. When it released Claude 4 last month, Anthropic said it was activating fresh precautions due to the potential risk of that model aiding in the spread of biological and nuclear threats.”
Whether these threats are as serious as OpenAI and Anthropic claim is hard to verify given the way these companies develop their models and how little they themselves understand about how their models work. What is clear is that the AI companies want to push AI as the solution to all problems, including those created by AI. OpenAI policy chief Chris Lehane states that “We're going to explore some additional type of work that we can do in terms of how we potentially use the technology itself to be really effective at being able to combat others who may be trying to misuse it.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Share in the comments.