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Supporters of a new package of tech bills in the Michigan Senate claim the legislation will protect children from online predation.

Supporters of a new package of tech bills in the Michigan Senate claim the legislation will protect children from online predation.

“We introduced Senate Bills 757–760 to better protect Michigan kids from the well-documented dangers of unfettered social media and AI usage,” Michigan Senate Democrats say on their Kids Over Clicks website. “Crafted in tandem with industry experts, advocates, and parents, this bill package holds Big Tech accountable for unethical practices, empowers Michigan parents with more control and transparency, and addresses emerging risks associated with AI and social media use.”

Unfortunately, these bills raise serious constitutional concerns, are unlikely to be effective, and threaten to create new problems on top of the problems the bills fail to address.

The Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation for Kids Act, Senate Bill 757 would prohibit social media platforms from recommending content to anyone via an algorithm unless they verify that the internet user is over 18 years of age or obtain verifiable parental consent. Social media addiction is a real problem, for adults and for children. But the SAFE for Kids bill would do little to address it.

The proposed law and other bills in the package raise significant constitutional problems. The U.S. Supreme Court has struck down such laws in the cases Reno vs. ACLU and Ashcroft vs. ACLU ruling that these laws place too great a burden on First Amendment speech rights. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth District recently upheld part of California’s Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act, but the constitutional history of this type of law is not strong.

Even if the SAFE law could pass legal scrutiny, it likely would do more to endanger children online than protect them. The SAFE Act would put children’s sensitive data at greater privacy and security risks, because a social media company would be forced to verify that each user is not a minor. This means the platform would have to require that users turn over birthdays and other sensitive personally identifiable information, likely by demanding government-issued documents.

Large-scale mandatory collection of highly sensitive government identification data increases the risks that it will be captured and misused. Forcing people to provide personal information in order to get access to a website often makes them more unsafe in a world where data breaches hit an all-time record in 2025.

A particular risk with any age verification provision is that many children will still access social media, whether through workarounds, shared devices, or turning to less regulated platforms. If so, having these bills enacted could ultimately make it harder to protect them.

Similarly, Senate Bills 758 and 759 would mandate automatic data privacy and safety settings for minors on digital platforms. Kids Over Clicks claims that these requirements are “giving parents more control over their children’s online accounts.” 
Even if these bills are found constitutional, such mandates actually give parents much less control. Instead, they give the government, and specifically the Michigan Attorney General, the power to make these decisions through how the law is enforced. Every child has different needs and different levels of preparation for viewing such materials online. Parents and guardians are in the best position to make these decisions, not government lawyers.

Finally, the proposed Leading Ethical AI Development for Kids Act, Senate Bill 760, would regulate operators of companion chatbots and how they are made available to children. While this bill attempts to address a legitimate concern, what the bill would ban is extremely overbroad. The proposed law defines a chatbot as a “generative artificial intelligence system with natural language interface that simulates a sustained humanlike relationship with a user.” That appears to include natural language processing applications like voice assistants, customer service chatbots and educational tutors, which can be beneficial to minors.

Moreover, the LEAD bill would give courts unprecedented power to order how companies develop and train AI applications. Judges without technical expertise will dictate private research and development processes. This is government overreach into private innovation and risk which will undermine development of artificial intelligence.

While the sponsors of these bills may have good intentions, pursuing these policies would distract from solutions that are constitutional and will actually make a difference. Much better options are available. They could include government initiatives to educate parents on parental controls already in place.

Rather than empower prosecutors to make website design decisions they are not qualified to make, lawmakers should give them the resources to lock up more predators and cybercriminals?who target children. New laws could be helpful, but they must be narrowly tailored to punish bad actors while respecting the protected rights of Americans and empowering parents to make better decisions.

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Ted Bolema is a senior fellow with the Mackinac Center and an antitrust and competition fellow with the Innovators Network Foundation.

Hostile acts don’t always arrive with a clear signature.

(THE CONVERSATION) — Hostile acts don’t always arrive with a clear signature.

Nefarious actors shape elections without leaving irrefutable evidence of ballot manipulation. Rogue states interfere with infrastructure through actions that resist clean attribution. State-backed hackers can warp information environments while avoiding immediate blame.

Ambiguity does much of the work, deniability reinforces it, and legal contestability slows responses further. Accumulated over time, such incidents impose economic cost and political strain on targeted nations. They can also create paralysis in terms of how a targeted nation should respond. Governments find it harder to respond when responsibility cannot be firmly established and when the incident falls below the threshold associated with armed retaliation.

Such actions thus sit in the space between routine peacetime activity and open warfare, an area that has come to be known as the “gray zone.”

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Where is the ‘gray zone’?

Policy and military communities began using the term “gray zone” in the early 2010s to describe environments in which states pursue an advantage against a rival without crossing a line that would justify the use of overt force in response.

This kind of activity can be sustained and strategically meaningful even when it doesn’t resemble conventional conflict. Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election offers a widely cited case. U.S. intelligence assessments concluded that hacked material was paired with timed disclosure and online amplification, with the aim of eroding confidence in the democratic process.

Cyber operations provide another illustration. The 2015 and 2016 attacks on Ukraine’s power grid – attributed to Russian-linked actors – temporarily disrupted electricity distribution for large civilian populations.

The operations demonstrated Russia’s ability to penetrate critical infrastructure, but stopped short of permanent destruction.

In recent years, maritime infrastructure has entered the same arena. Investigations into damage affecting undersea cables and pipelines in the Baltic Sea following the Nord Stream explosions of Sept. 26, 2022, underscored how difficult attribution can be.

The defining feature of gray zone action lies in its relationship to escalation rather than magnitude. Attacks don’t have to cause immediate, large-scale damage. Rather, each measure is calibrated for deniability and applied episodically.

Meanwhile, legal ambiguity slows retaliation, allowing pressure to build as thresholds are approached, often through areas not traditionally treated as military domains.

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Who operates in the gray zone?

Russia has become particularly associated with gray zone tactics. Its campaign against Ukraine did not begin in 2022 but unfolded gradually over years with disinformation campaigns and with cyber intrusions probing institutional resilience. This then developed into Russia using proxy forces in eastern Ukrainian regions and then unmarked Russian personnel appearing during the seizure of Crimea in 2014.

Each move complicated Ukraine’s response, and over time the cumulative effect reshaped the strategic environment before open warfare actually began in February 2022.

China has employed similar methods, especially at sea. In the South China Sea, fishing vessels that are part of China’s maritime militia operate alongside the country’s coast guard to shadow foreign ships, block access to disputed reefs and pressure rival claimants such as the Philippines and Vietnam. These confrontations rarely escalate into naval battles, yet over time they alter control and presence in contested waters without a formal outbreak of war.

Iran’s regional posture reflects another pattern in gray zone tactics. Cyber activity has targeted the infrastructure of Gulf rivals. Meanwhile, commercial shipping has faced harassment through Iran’s proxy actors. Drone and missile strikes by Iran-aligned militias apply added calibrated pressure while insulating Tehran from direct responsibility.

The United States and its allies also operate within this competitive space, relying on tools that remain below the threshold of declared conflict. American cyber units have reportedly penetrated segments of Iran’s military command systems, and covert U.S. assistance to partner forces in places such as eastern Syria has also unfolded without crossing into open interstate war.

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Countering gray zone attacks?

Each year brings thousands of state-linked gray zone incidents. Indeed, within NATO and the European Union, this kind of hybrid pressure is now treated less as an anomaly and more as part of the normal landscape of strategic rivalry.

Responses exist, but none of them resolve the problem cleanly.

After the Ukraine grid attacks of the mid 2010s, several European states accelerated cybersecurity investment, improving network segmentation, expanding backup capacity and deepening information sharing with private infrastructure operators.

Collective attribution offers another tool. NATO and the European Union have developed mechanisms for joint public attribution, which increases the probability of diplomatic and economic measures being imposed, even when military response remains inappropriate.

Sanctions imposed on front companies and individual operatives involved in gray zone attacks can manage exposure, but they can’t eliminate vulnerability.

That’s because gray zone competition takes shape inside the systems that sustain modern economic life. Advanced economies depend on infrastructure designed not for defense but efficiency – transnational data networks, integrated energy markets, real-time financial platforms.

These systems move information and capital at extraordinary speed. But they also create openings for interference that can be calibrated to remain below the threshold of armed attack.

Mitigating that exposure is possible, but it comes with economic trade-offs.

That tension helps explain the persistence of gray zone tactics. When direct conflict carries unacceptable escalation risk, sustained pressure below the threshold of force offers states a way to bend the will of a rival nation without triggering open war.

The fragile peace in Lebanon was already showing serious strains in the first months of 2026 – and then came the U.S.-Israeli strikes in Iran.

(THE CONVERSATION) — The fragile peace in Lebanon was already showing serious strains in the first months of 2026 – and then came the U.S.-Israeli strikes in Iran.

After the killing of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Hezbollah – a Shiite paramilitary group and Iranian proxy operating from Lebanon – retaliated by launching rockets into the north of Israel. Israel responded with fresh strikes on Hezbollah targets in south Lebanon, Beirut and the Bekaa Valley in the east.

Hezbollah is not the force in Lebanon it once was. Yet as an expert in Hezbollah affairs, I believe the group still maintains the potential to drag Lebanon into conflict and chaos.

Hezbollah is in no position to play an effective role as an ally to Iran in its war with the U.S. and Israel. But the threat of its actions destabilizing Lebanon is real – as is the fear of Israel and Syria using the pretext of Hezbollah’s response now to launch ground invasions and occupy parts of Lebanon.

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A failed ceasefire

Hezbollah’s decision to support Iran is in line with the core tenets of the group.

Inspired by the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Hezbollah came into existence in 1985 with the publication of a manifesto that detailed its aims for the region. It pledged allegiance to the supreme leader of the Iranian Revolution, Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini, and vowed to fight the Israeli occupation of Lebanon and the Palestinian territories.

Having dominated internal politics and dictated foreign policy for the best part of 40 years, it has been seriously degraded since October 2023, with Israeli strikes taking out much of its leadership. Many in Lebanon hoped that the grip Hezbollah held would soon be a thing of the past.

On Nov. 27, 2024, Israel and Hezbollah agreed to a ceasefire following almost a year of Hezbollah attacks, in solidarity with Hamas, and heavy Israeli shelling in response.

As part of the plan, Hezbollah would withdraw north of the Litani River and Israeli troops would withdraw from southern Lebanon within a 60-day period.

Brokered by the U.S., the agreement was never fully implemented. In fact, Israel kept bombing Lebanon almost on a daily basis while claiming that the Lebanese army is not working fast enough to disarm Hezbollah.

The laying down of Hezbollah’s arms was another term in the ceasefire plan but has been difficult to implement. The Lebanese army recently announced entering an “advanced stage” of the disarmament plan and is currently focused on expanding its presence in the south of Lebanon. But Israel expressed dissatisfaction with the pace of disarmament and claimed that Hezbollah is rearming faster than it was being disarmed.

Meanwhile, Hezbollah’s secretary general, Naim Qassem, has repeatedly said that the group will not agree to a full disarmament and withdrawal north of the Litani River while Israel continues striking Lebanon.

In fact, since November 2024, Israel Defense Forces targeted Lebanon with 855 strikes. February 2026 alone was marked by 44 strikes – and this was before the current war began.

Earlier this year, speaking in a televised address, Qassem declared that the group would not remain neutral if Israel goes to war against Iran. True to his word, Hezbollah started shelling Israel right after the killing of Khamenei.

But that move has been heavily criticized by other voices in Lebanon who accuse the group of putting Iran’s interests ahead of Lebanon’s and, in effect, killing off a peace process that was already under massive strain.

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Dragging a nation into conflict

This is not the first time that Hezbollah has dragged Lebanon into an armed conflict, nor the first time it has rejected the state’s call to disarm.

In July 2006, demanding the release of Lebanese prisoners in Israel, Hezbollah fighters entered Israeli territory, kidnapping two Israeli soldiers and killing three. This led to a 34-day war, the loss of 1,000 civilian lives, the weakening of Lebanon’s economy and significant damages to its infrastructure.

Then, after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks by Hamas – and despite the Lebanese state’s numerous calls to remain neutral – Hezbollah vowed solidarity with the Palestinian militants and joined its fight against Israel. What followed was months of tit-for-tat attacks with Israel that escalated into a full-blown war in September 2024.

The Lebanese government has been keen to distance itself from Hezbollah’s actions in the current conflict.

In response to Hezbollah’s shelling of northern Israel, the Lebanese cabinet on March 2 outlawed Hezbollah’s military activities.

This is a first for Lebanon. Almost half a century ago, Lebanon implicitly legalized Hezbollah and agreed to share security responsibilities – which is almost always exclusively within the hands of the state – with Hezbollah, a nominally nonstate entity.

What impact the ban will have, if any, remains to be seen. It certainly did not seem to make an immediate difference, as Hezbollah continued with its military activities in support of Iran.

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Sectarian violence

While intended as a step toward isolating Hezbollah and building a stronger state of Lebanon, the recent ban on Hezbollah’s military activities risks exacerbating Lebanon’s sectarian divide.

It comes at a time when Lebanon and the wider region is going through serious challenges that have left Shiite communities outside Iran feeling vulnerable.

The rise of sectarian violence against Alawites – an offshoot of Shiite Islam – in neighboring Syria is a source of concern to many.

And in Lebanon, the Shiites, who make up a third of Lebanon’s population, suffered the most from both Israel’s 40-year occupation of the south and the 2024 war.

As ayatollah, Khamenei was seen as one of the leading spiritual leaders of all Shiites, not just in Iran. His killing and the fact that most Shiites in Lebanon live in the areas that have been heavily targeted by Israel in recent days – south Lebanon, southern Beirut and the Bekaa Valley – will further lead into the narrative that they are a community under threat.

My concern is that tasked with disarming the group, the Lebanese army could be drawn into confrontation with Hezbollah fighters.

Lebanon has a history of such clashes. A serious sectarian confrontation occurred in May 2008 when the Lebanese government attempted to dismantle Hezbollah’s private telecommunications network and remove key security officials from Beirut airport.

Hezbollah responded with a swift and violent takeover of West Beirut, which is predominantly Sunni Muslim. Fighters clashed and killed about 110 civilians.

Lebanon was then on the brink, but the Lebanese army’s decision not to get involved in street battles prevented a turn toward civil war.

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Ground invasions

But sectarian violence has long dogged Lebanon – and anything that risks the country’s fracturing is to the detriment of all Lebanese people, not just the Shiites. The country is already suffering from a severe economic crisis and only recently came out of a prolonged period of political paralysis, during which Hezbollah blocked successive attempts to install a president.

Having made steps toward putting in place a functioning government after the 2024 ceasefire, the other fear, alongside civil strife, is invasion from the north and the south.

The Syrian military has significantly reinforced its presence along the northern border with Lebanon. Thousands of Syrian troops were deployed to supposedly secure the border and prevent the infiltration of Hezbollah militants in Syria. 
However, many Lebanese fear that Syria may want to invade and occupy parts of Lebanon, like it did during the Lebanese civil war.

As for Israel, it is already bombing Lebanon. And Israeli military spokesman Brig. Gen. Effie Defrin said in a public address that it is keeping “all options on the table,” including a potential ground invasion of Lebanon.

It follows growing interest in Israel of an expansionist policy toward lands around the current state. In February, Israeli extremists illegally entered south Lebanon and called for its occupation. This also occurred back in December 2024. And in a recent interview, Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, seemed to express support for Israel’s expansionist agenda, suggesting that “it would be fine” for Israel to take chunks of Middle East “land.”

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Hezbollah’s violent death throes?

The U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran have again shone a light on how much of Lebanon’s future is premised on regional shifts and developments that exacerbate internal divides.

Hezbollah has for the past 40 years been a focus of this dynamic. For months, observers have – for good reason – suggested the Iran-backed group was on its last leg. Instead, it looks like the group might again bring Lebanon to its knees.

Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war, not the president. But most modern presidents and their legal counsel have asserted that Article 2 of the Constitution allows the president to use the military in certain situations without prior congressional approval – and have acted on that, sending troops into conflicts from Panama to Libya, with no regard for Congress’ will.

Sarah Burns, 
Rochester Institute of Technology; 
Institute for Humane Studies

(THE CONVERSATION) — Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war, not the president. But most modern presidents and their legal counsel have asserted that Article 2 of the Constitution allows the president to use the military in certain situations without prior congressional approval – and have acted on that, sending troops into conflicts from Panama to Libya, with no regard for Congress’ will.

Congress has for the most part registered only feeble and ineffective opposition to such executive action. The current move in Congress to deny President Donald Trump the ability to continue the war with Iran – led by Democrats, but with some Republican support – will likely fail, as have previous efforts during other conflicts.

But there was a time when Americans saw Congress stand up to a president who unilaterally took the country to war.

It was at the tail end of the Vietnam War, when Congress passed the War Powers Resolution of 1973, asserting that it was legislators – not the president – who had the power to declare war.

Once it passed both houses, President Richard Nixon vetoed it, claiming it was unconstitutional.

In response, the legislative branch overturned the veto with the two-thirds majority vote needed to prevail.

Compared to Congress’ limp response to Trump’s actions in Iran, and its similar failure to assert itself during Trump’s military action in Venezuela, it was a breathtaking act of legislative assertion.

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Congress asserts itself

When they debated the War Powers Resolution, members of Congress were seeing the erosion of their control over the decision to engage in military operations large and small. With a strong bipartisan consensus, they determined they had to collectively use their powers, including the power of the purse, to thwart executive overreach.

Congress’ actions came in response to the growing protests against the Vietnam War in general and Nixon’s decision to expand the war by sending U.S. troops to invade the neutral country of Cambodia to disrupt the supply lines of the Viet Cong, the communist guerrilla force that accounted for a large number of the 58,000 Americans killed in the war.

Nixon had begun covert carpet bombing of Cambodia in 1969, and then announced in 1970 that he would send ground troops into the country the next year.

Congress – and the country– reacted extremely negatively. Members of Congress collaborated across party lines to draft legislation in an attempt to assert their power. It was a slow process, however, involving long periods of deliberation.

They used many different methods to attempt to constrain the president. Within months of the introduction of troops to Cambodia, Congress attempted to pass amendments that would restrict his ability to invade neighboring countries. 
Prompted by protesting and the illegal actions in Cambodia, Congress began crafting legislation that would draw down troops in Vietnam.

With these moves, lawmakers placed immense pressure on the president. This eventually led to the drafting and eventual signing of the peace agreement ending the Vietnam war in 1973.

This was not enough for Congress, however.

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Congress wanted to create a document ensuring presidents could not unilaterally make war. They wanted legislative consultation.

They intended the War Powers Resolution to act as a permanent constraint. So, in the resolution they spelled out the specific actions in which presidents can start a conflict:

• First, if there is an invasion of the United States, the president can respond. In this instance, the president can act prior to congressional authorization.

• Second, if Congress provides an “Authorization for the Use of Military Force,” the president can assume he has authorization – but only as long as it is in effect.

• Finally, if Congress declares war, the president can act.

Lawmakers did, however, provide some flexibility. In the War Powers Resolution, they said a president can initiate and carry out hostilities for 60 days and has a further 30 days to draw down the troops. Once the executive has initiated hostilities, Congress must receive information about that action within 48 hours.

This opens the door for presidents to engage in smaller-scale or short operations without stepping outside the lines set in the law.

Presidents from both parties have availed themselves of this flexibility. As far back as 1975, when President Gerald Ford rescued the SS Mayaguez, the merchant ship captured by Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, presidents have acknowledged the law and dutifully reported their military actions to Congress.

Like his predecessors, Trump sent a letter to Congress after his June 2025 missile attacks against Iran, as well as at the start of the currently open-ended conflict.

Presidents since the passage of the War Powers Resolution have not, however, acknowledged that they have to get congressional approval of their actions, with few exceptions. Predominantly, without congressional approval, they limit their actions to the 60-to-90-day window.

President Barack Obama, however, attempted to circumvent the window when his bombing campaign in Libya in 2011 dragged on, as well as when he bombed the Islamic State group in 2014. In the first instance, he claimed the War Powers Resolution did not apply. In the second, he claimed each bombing campaign was discrete, rather than part of a larger campaign.

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Exploiting authorizations

The balance of power between the legislative and executive branches changed considerably with the passage of the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force related to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force that gave legislative permission for President George W. Bush to invade Iraq.

Because Congress did not put sunset dates into these authorizations, subsequent presidents Obama, Trump and Joe Biden used those same authorizations for a host of later military actions in the Middle East and elsewhere.

And legislators are deeply divided in the current discussions about demanding the cessation of hostilities against Iran.

Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson says that limiting the president at this time is “dangerous.” Former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene – who has fallen out of favor with Trump’s MAGA base and the president himself – took the opposing view, posted on social media, “Now, America is going to be force fed and gas lighted all the ‘noble’ reasons the American ‘Peace’ President and Pro-Peace administration had to go to war once again this year, after being in power for only a year.”

Has the U.S. entered a moment when members of Congress reassert themselves the way they did at the tail end of the Vietnam war?

It is possible that they will follow James Madison’s advice about the power relationship between Congress and the president. Writing in the Federalist Papers, Madison said that “ambition” has “to counter ambition.” He continued, “The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government.”

As I explain in my book about congressional war powers, the constitutional system creates an invitation to struggle. Now, as the U.S. wages war on Iran, Congress must decide whether it wants to struggle, as it did during the Vietnam War, or remain compliant and in the president’s shadow.

“People can assess me, interview me, incarcerate me, observe me, and they can think they know what I need,” said Shawn, a man in his early 50s who spent 15 years in and out of prison. “And that can be an educated assessment, but at the end of the day, I live inside of this body, inside of this head. I know what I need.”

By Helena Addison
Yale University

(THE CONVERSATION) — “People can assess me, interview me, incarcerate me, observe me, and they can think they know what I need,” said Shawn, a man in his early 50s who spent 15 years in and out of prison. “And that can be an educated assessment, but at the end of the day, I live inside of this body, inside of this head. I know what I need.”

Shawn is one of 29 formerly incarcerated Black men living in Philadelphia I interviewed as part of my research on coping with the mental health effects of imprisonment. His name and the names of other people quoted in this article are pseudonyms chosen to protect their privacy.

I study incarceration, mental health and access to health care. I’ve previously written about how confinement in jails and prisons leaves a lasting impact on mental health. But I also wanted to understand how the men I interviewed recognized and addressed their own mental health needs — through coping strategies, conversations with friends and family, and seeking mental health treatment.

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Depressed but ‘doing OK’

Both research and clinical practice often fail to accurately capture how formerly incarcerated Black men identify their own mental health needs. That’s in part because implicit bias and anti-Black racism shape how mental health is assessed and treated in both correctional and community facilities.

Most of the men I spoke with said the mental health evaluations they received while incarcerated were designed only to “check the boxes” and conveyed a sense that no one really cared.

“They’d listen. They’d ask the pertinent questions,” Malcolm, 62, explained. “Then they’d talk down to you. And then they forget all about you.”

A few of the men received diagnoses they didn’t understand or believe. John, 29, described how a judge ordered him to have a mental health evaluation and that he was diagnosed as having post-traumatic stress disorder.

“I didn’t take it serious,” he said. “I didn’t start understanding mental health and believing it until I was locked up for a long period of time. I started reading up on it and studying it. …That’s how I started understanding therapy was important.”

Comparing the way participants described their mental health in their own words during the interviews with standardized screening tools revealed an important pattern. Most described themselves as “good,” “blessed,” “at peace” or “doing OK.” Yet nearly all reported symptoms of depression, anxiety or PTSD.

More than half reported three or more PTSD symptoms, such as trauma-related nightmares or feeling constantly on guard and easily startled.

These findings underscore that what appears to be resilience or well-being on the surface may mask underlying mental health needs, and the way those needs are expressed is shaped by culture and life experiences.

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Coping mechanisms

Participants described self-reliance as essential to coping with incarceration and life after release. Physical separation from family and community, along with strained relationships and limited resources after release, left many feeling like they had to manage mental distress on their own.

“When you’re in prison, you learn to depend on yourself,” Ken, 56, said.

Some said incarceration reinforced existing coping strategies they’d had, such as exercising, praying, journaling, reading and meditation.

“I was always into being active,” said Tay, 31, who took part in a military-style bootcamp while incarcerated. “I learned how to use [exercise] to cope with my emotions.”

Others were introduced to new coping skills through educational, vocational and recreational programs inside their correctional facilities. Men spoke about how earning GEDs, taking college courses, learning trades and participating in other structured programs helped them manage stress and connect with others.

Unfortunately, the availability of such programs is limited.

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Bottled-up feelings

Many of my study’s participants described wanting to “do things differently” after incarceration by expressing their emotions rather than suppressing them.

Some directly connected bottling up feelings to behaviors that had led to their incarceration.

“[You’ve] let a lot of stuff build up and then [you’ll] go outside and lash out on the first person you see,” David, 30, explained. “I’m getting more comfortable with expressing myself, whether it’s to my mom or if it’s to a friend.”

But finding the right people to confide in could be difficult.

“I try to express myself every day. People laugh and make a joke out of it,” Shakur, 21, said. “If I had somebody sitting one-on-one, talking to me about my problems, I’d feel better.”

Navigating romantic relationships was also difficult.

“We come back to them broken. And they trying to fix us, but they don’t know how to fix us. They’re broken too,” said Thomas, 44.

Mass incarceration doesn’t just fracture individuals – it erodes romantic relationships, as those left behind often navigate their own economic strain, limited resources and emotional distress.

Participants emphasized that speaking with people who shared similar experiences made it easier to express themselves and helped them navigate moments of distress.

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Deep distrust of institutions

Many participants expressed deep distrust of mental health treatment within correctional facilities.

“Being a Black man living to 62 years old, I don’t trust the government from the Tuskegee experiment to the thing they had going on in Holmesburg prison,” said Carl. “How can you put your trust in that?”

The Tuskegee study was a research study conducted by the U.S. federal government from 1932 to 1972. It followed Black men with syphilis but withheld effective treatment, even after the cure was made widely available in the 1940s. This caused preventable suffering and deaths.

During the Holmesburg Prison experiments, conducted at a Philadelphia prison from the 1950s through the 1970s, University of Pennsylvania researchers tested pharmaceuticals and chemicals on incarcerated men, many of them Black, without adequate informed consent.

Some of the men I interviewed also reported experiencing or witnessing mistreatment after reporting mental health concerns, and they expressed fears that seeking help while incarcerated would lead to punishment rather than support.

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Stigma and seeking help

After release, participants shared concerns that they would be seen as “weak” by their peers for talking about their problems. This mental health stigma served as a barrier to seeking treatment.

“It’s not normal for guys like us, as far as being Black, African American, to reach out to a therapist,” said David.

Some men, like Antonio, who described feeling “like walls was closing in on me,” were motivated to seek treatment due to significant mental distress. Others were driven by a desire to improve their relationships with their wives or children.

Nearly 70% of participants had used formal mental health services at some point. Some were mandated to receive treatment, while others sought help voluntarily – sometimes at local walk-in clinics and behavioral health centers such as Wedge Recovery Centers, a Philadelphia staple that was mentioned by several participants but closed in May 2025 due to financial losses.

Communities can work together to reduce stigma around seeking mental health support and formal treatment, take expressions of mental distress from formerly incarcerated men seriously, and create spaces where they feel safe being vulnerable.

Participants named visible, neighborhood clinics with walk-in behavioral health services as places they felt able to go in moments of need. Increasing the visibility of these services, conducting outreach and integrating formerly incarcerated men as peer navigators can help build trust.

Shortly after the opening salvo of U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iranon Feb. 28, 2026 – with missiles targeting cities across the country, some of which killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – President Donald Trump declared the objective was to destroy Iran’s military capabilities and give rise to a change in government.

(THE CONVERSATION) — Shortly after the opening salvo of U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iranon Feb. 28, 2026 – with missiles targeting cities across the country, some of which killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – President Donald Trump declared the objective was to destroy Iran’s military capabilities and give rise to a change in government.

Framing the operation as a war of liberation, Trump called on Iranians to “take over your government.”

In the first days alone, Israel dropped over 2,000 bombs on Iranian targets, equal to half the tonnage of the 12-day Israel-Iran conflict in June 2025. Heavy U.S. bombing, meanwhile, has targeted Iran’s Revolutionary Guard as well as ballistic missile and aerial defense sites.

The destruction is real. But, as an international relations scholar, I know that destruction is not the same as political success. And the historical record of U.S. bombing campaigns aimed at regime change shows that the gap between the two – the point at which Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya campaigns all stalled – is where wars go to die.

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Destruction is not strategy

Decades of scholarship dating back to World War I on using air power to force political change has established a consistent finding: Bombing can degrade military capacity and destroy infrastructure, but it does not produce governments more cooperative with the attacker.

Political outcomes require political processes – negotiation, institution-building, legitimate transitions of power.

Bombs cannot create any of these. Instead, what they reliably create is destruction, and destruction generates its own dynamics: rallying among the population, power vacuums, radicalization and cycles of retaliation.

The American record confirms this. In 2003, the George W. Bush administration launched “Shock and Awe” in Iraq with the explicit aim of regime change. The military objective was achieved in weeks. The political objective was never achieved at all.

The U.S. decision to disband the Iraqi army created a vacuum filled not by democratic reformers but by sectarian militias and eventually ISIS. The regime that eventually emerged was not friendly to American interests. It was deeply influenced by Iran.

In 2011, the Obama administration led a NATO air campaign in Libya that quickly expanded from civilian protection into regime change. Dictator Moammar Gadhafi was overthrown and killed.

But there was no plan for political transition. Chaos and political instability have endured since. Asked what his “worst mistake” was as president, Barack Obama said, “Probably failing to plan for the day after, what I think was the right thing to do, in intervening in Libya.” Libya remains a failed state today.

The intervention also sent a powerful signal to countries pursuing nuclear weapons: Gaddhafi had dismantled his nuclear program in 2003. Eight years later, NATO destroyed his regime.

Even Kosovo, often cited as the success story of coercive air power, undermines the case. Seventy-eight days of NATO bombing did not, by themselves, compel Slobodan Milosevic, president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, to withdraw.

What changed was the credible threat of a ground invasion combined with Russia’s withdrawal of diplomatic support. The political outcome – contested statehood, ongoing ethnic tensions – is hardly the stable governance that air power advocates promise.

The pattern is consistent: The United States repeatedly confuses its unmatched capacity to destroy from the air with the ability to dictate political outcomes.

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Why this war?

The recent U.S. attacks on Iran raise a fundamental question: Why is the United States fighting this war at all?

The administration has declared regime change as its objective, justifying the campaign on the grounds of Iran’s nuclear program and missile capabilities.

But that nuclear program was being actively negotiated in Geneva days before the strikes. And Iran’s foreign minister told NBC the two sides were close to a deal. Then the bombs fell.

Iran did not attack America. And it currently does not have the capability to threaten the American homeland. What Iran challenges is Israel’s regional military dominance, and I believe it is Israel’s objective of neutralizing a rival that is driving this operation.

Israel targeted 30 senior Iranian leaders in the opening strikes. Israeli officials described it as a preemptive attack to “remove threats to the State of Israel.” I see the strategic logic for these killings as Israel’s, and Americans are absorbing the costs.

U.S. military bases in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia have taken Iranian missile fire. American service members are in harm’s way – three have already been killed – not because Iran attacked them, but I believe because their president committed them to someone else’s war without a clear endgame.

Each coercive step in this conflict – from the 2018 withdrawal from the nuclear deal, to the 2020 assassination of Qasem Soleimani, Iran’s most powerful military commander, to the June 2025 strikes – was framed as restoring leverage.

Each produced the opposite, eliminating diplomatic off-ramps, accelerating the very threats it aimed to contain.

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The regime is not one man

Decapitation strikes assume that removing a leader removes the obstacle to political change. But Iran’s political system is institutional — the Guardian Council, the Assembly of Experts and the Revolutionary Guard have survived for four decades.

The system has succession mechanisms, but they were designed for orderly transitions, not for active bombardment. The group most likely to fill the vacuum is the Revolutionary Guard, whose institutional interest lies in escalation, not accommodation.

There is a deeper irony. The largest protests since 1979 swept Iran just weeks ago. A genuine domestic opposition was growing. The strikes have almost certainly destroyed that movement’s prospects.

Decades of research on rally-around-the-flag effects – the tendency of populations to unite behind their government when attacked by a foreign power – confirms that external attacks fuse regime and nation, even when citizens despise their leaders.

Iranians who were chanting “death to the dictator” are now watching foreign bombs fall on their cities during Ramadan, hearing reports of over 100 children killed in a strike on a girls school in Minab.

Trump’s call for Iranians to “seize control of your destiny” echoes a familiar pattern. In 1953, the CIA overthrew Iran’s democratically elected prime minister in the name of freedom.

That produced the Shah, the Shah’s brutal reign led to the Iranian Revolution in 1979, and the revolution produced the Islamic Republic now being bombed.

What comes next? And what guarantee is there that whatever emerges will be any friendlier to Israel or the United States?

What does success look like?

This is the question no one in Washington has answered. If the objective is regime change, who governs 92 million people after?

If the objective is stability, why are American bases across the Middle East absorbing missile fire?

There is no American theory of political endgame in Iran — only a theory of destruction. That theory has been tested in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya – and Iran itself over the preceding eight months. It has failed every time, not because of poor execution, but because the premise is flawed.

Air power can raze a government’s infrastructure. It cannot build the political order that must replace it. Iran, with its sophisticated military, near-nuclear capability, proxy networks spanning the region and a regime now martyred by foreign attack, will likely not be the exception.

U.S. law prohibits the assassination of foreign leaders, and instead Israel killed Iran’s supreme leader while American warplanes filled the skies overhead. Washington has called the result freedom at hand, but it has not answered the only question that matters: What comes next?