Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled that “Father Bob” got elected. The more I read about his background in New Orleans and Chicago and Peru and his career as a global diplomat, the more he seems to be the inspired choice that his fellow cardinals were praying for.

What does worry me, however, is how many people—disheartened and frightened by the rising tide of anti-democratic forces all over the planet—want to see the new Pope as a man on a white horse, using his diplomatic savvy and Papal power to become a political counterweight to the Donald Trumps of this world.

That’s not his job. His power to affect change will not come from his political skills—which apparently he has in abundance—but from his role as a spiritual leader.

That doesn’t mean that Pope Leo can’t have a profound impact on world events.

War, poverty, inequality, migration, climate change— are all issues that are intensely political. Pope Leo’s job is to bring a message into individual minds and hearts around the world that every political, social or economic issue should be seen through a lens of compassion and morality.

Of course, autocrats and their acolytes will view any such analysis as lightweight and inconsequential. “How many divisions has the pope?” as Joseph Stalin famously asked.

I’m betting you’re overwhelmed by the torrent of news coming at you, so much of it awful. I know the feeling, but I still want to talk to you about the closed-to-the-world nation of Iran and its place in the global rising tide of autocracy. An Iranian contact of mine has been sending me his observations, an extremely smart, well-educated and reflective man who’s given me permission to share his unedited words with you.

I see in them a fearful comparison between the loss of freedoms and the isolationism of today's Iran and the world Donald Trump and his MAGA acolytes would take us to if we let them. Soon I’ll send you what my contact has written about the US, in hopes his analyses help us learn from the Iranian resistance.

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Iran: The Haunted Renaissance

It’s the Time: A Global Reckoning of Identity, Trauma, and the Human Spirit

“History does not repeat itself. But it does rhyme.”

In the spring of 2025, the rhyme is deafening.

From the resilient echoes in Tehran’s digital underground to the haunted landscapes of Gaza and Israel, from the fractured identity politics of the United States to the quiet, internal shifts across the Arab world, our era is defined by more than conflict. We are witnessing a profound global identity crisis, interwoven with unprocessed historical trauma, the performance of ego, and a deep, often unacknowledged, hunger for authentic belonging and meaning.

Have you ever had to take away an aging parent’s car keys? I have.

I remember how hard it was when my family, seeing that my dad’s declining mental and physical abilities made him a danger on the road to himself and others, took away his car keys. It wasn’t pretty— the family had underestimated how important driving a car was to Dad’s sense of self as vigorous and competent.

Now the Democratic Party needs to take away Joe Biden’s car keys and the risks of inaction are a lot higher than somebody getting hurt by a disoriented driver.

Biden’s recent days of trying to explain away his debate performance has not moved the needle in his direction. None of his post-debate presentations have been nearly good enough to relieve the doubts created by those disastrous 90 minutes watched by 50 million people.

The core problem I see—being almost exactly his age—is that Joe Biden refuses to accept the seriousness of his own decline, a reality that we saw with our own eyes, which will not be wiped away (see my commentary on the debate).

The most chilling statement from Biden’s ABC interview last Friday came in his answer to a question about how he would feel next January if Trump won the election. He said that what was important would be knowing that he had given it his all and had done his best—

By now you’ve read opinions and analyses of Joe Biden’s debate performance. I add my views from the perspective of being almost exactly Biden’s age and having been a competent platform speaker for half a century.

Of this there’s no doubt: Biden tanked. He looked and sounded frail and uncertain. Where he should have countered Trump’s blasts of lies and invective with a clever mix of humor, anger and facts, he mumbled statistics. There was an appalling lack of energy and conviction in his voice. The debate was not a debate; it was a Sound and Light show in which style, posture, and tone were far more important than facts, and Biden either did not understand that or could not cope with it.

We’re now told that he had a bad cold. What BS! We’ve all had to play hurt from time to time. In perhaps the most important presentation of his life, Biden should’ve popped an Advil, sucked it up, and soldiered on. Laryngitis? Well, the next day he sounded just fine.

Poor debate prep? He and his staff had weeks to prepare. They knew Trump would direct a firehose of lies and insults at Biden with the hope of throwing him on the defensive and undermining his responses. As expected, Trump’s lies were so obvious that most of them should’ve been home run balls that Biden could knock out of the park with a mix of facts and nasty jabs, wrapped in Biden’s inimitable humor.

There’s no doubt that Henry Kissinger was a complicated man, as shown by the torrent of fierce opinions published since his death.

I worked for the man and Vietnam was where I first began to hate him. A young US diplomat, I was a civilian adviser to the Mayor of Hué, one of the most dangerous places in the country during the last years of the war, at a time when any American there still in control of his senses knew we’d lost the war.

Kissinger and Nixon knew this too, and had begun to rapidly withdraw US troops soon after I arrived there in January, 1971. But the two men also knew they could not admit defeat. Both were concerned about America’s image—Nixon mindful of his own political fortunes and Kissinger more concerned that America’s global rivals would see a US defeat in Vietnam as proof of America’s weakness.

So the two launched a strategy called “Vietnamization” to promote the fiction that the South Vietnam could win the war without American boots on the ground. It was never more than a PR ploy to divert attention from the fact that the US has just gotten its butt kicked by a small, poor nation few Americans had even heard of when we began fighting there.

As you may know, Gordon Lightfoot recently died. You may have memories of the Canadian singer/songwriter’s work. My memory is that he changed my life.

In 1971-72, as a US Foreign Service Officer, I was Advisor to the city of Hué, South Vietnam. I’d volunteered for Vietnam because being in a shooting war was one adventure I’d not yet had.

I was an adrenaline addict, drawn to war zones and high, dangerous mountains. I’d asked the State Department for the most dangerous job they had in Vietnam and they had definitely obliged. Hué, the site of the infamous Tet Offensive of 1968, was just south of the Demilitarized Zone between the two Vietnams and a constant target for North Vietnamese troops and Viet Cong guerillas. Some of my work involved dealing with Viet Cong undercover agents in the city. I was an easy target for snipers and car bombs. At first I loved it—the hair rising on the back of my neck, the shadows in the night… It was all fuel for a self-absorbed and shallow life.

But my most significant battle in Vietnam was an inner one. The war became more than just the source of the next biggest thrill—a killing field where my actions endangered more lives than my own, in a war which I soon came to regard as stupid and unwinnable. I was in Vietnam as a mercenary, paid in adrenaline instead of gold.

The Iran Hostage Crisis Re-visited

In November of 1979 the staff of the US Embassy in Teheran was taken prisoner by mobs controlled by the Ayatollah Khomeini. Two months of diplomatic pressures and direct threats hadn’t freed them.

But in early 1980, I came close.

I thought I knew then why I’d failed, but I didn’t know the half of it. Decades of investigative reports have now revealed the truth. Any efforts to free those hostages before the U.S. Presidential election that next November would have been undermined by powerful operatives in Ronald Reagan’s election campaign who saw that keeping the hostage crisis on the front burner would be a fatal blow to the chances of Jimmy Carter winning a second term.

I was at the time an American diplomat at the US Mission to the United Nations in New York. I’d been ordered not to talk to members of the Cuban delegation, our sworn enemies since Castro’s Communist takeover there. I thought that was stupid, so I talked often with the Castro Cubans, usually in bars well off the UN campus. They were baseball nuts as was I, so baseball became a vehicle for establishing respect and friendships with these people on the US hate list. It also led to an exchange that could have freed the American hostages in Tehran a year before they were finally released. Here's the section of my memoir, Quest, that gives you that story:

375 people have now been arrested, charged and intensively interviewed about their participation in the attack on the US Capitol January 6. A reliable picture is emerging of who they are and what motivated them.

It’s no surprise that they were overwhelmingly white and male and strongly influenced by Donald Trump’s campaign to overturn the November election

But it came as a bit of a surprise, at least to some, that only about 10% were members of known far right groups like the Proud Boys. And that the attackers as a whole we’re not under-educated know-nothings, as assumed by the initial media coverage, but in fact socially, educationally, and economically middle class.

The one unifying motivation, in both the white-collar and blue-collar rioters, was their fury at seeing white people in this country displaced by people of color in so many sectors of daily life.

It’s a change they perceive as leaving whites a threatened and beleaguered minority.

According to the interviews, it was this anger and fear of replacement, across social classes, and more than any other factor, that drove them to attack the government they’d been pledging allegiance to since they were children.