Update, March 20, 2026: The conflict I wrote about below has expanded. The U.S. and Israel are now 21 days into a military campaign against Iran. Iranian drones hit a Kuwaiti oil refinery this morning. Israel is striking Tehran. Lebanon reports over 1,000 dead. The Iranian Red Crescent says 18,000 civilians have been injured. Oil is at $115 a barrel. Gas is at $3.91 nationally.
Everything I said below still holds — the principles haven't changed. But the scale has. The U.S. is not a bystander; it is a combatant. The decision log I called for is more urgent now, not less. Americans deserve to know why their country is at war, what the objectives are, and what the exit looks like. Right now, they don't.
I'll write more when I've read more. But silence while this is happening isn't an option.
I owe you an honest answer, which means I owe you an incomplete one.
There is a war in Gaza. There are people dying — Palestinian civilians in numbers that the international community has called catastrophic, and Israeli civilians who were murdered on October 7th in an attack that was unambiguously terrorism. Both of those things are true at the same time. Anyone who can only hold one of them is not being serious.
The killing of civilians is wrong regardless of who does it. This is not a both-sides dodge. It is the minimum moral floor. A Palestinian child and an Israeli child have equal claim to being alive tomorrow. Any framework that requires you to rank them is broken.
The U.S. is not a bystander. American weapons, American money, American vetoes at the UN. The U.S. has leverage it is choosing not to use, and that choice has consequences measured in bodies. A president — any president — who pretends the U.S. is neutral is lying.
I don't have a peace plan. People who have spent their careers on this conflict don't have one either. What I have is a principle: the decision log would be public. Every arms shipment, every diplomatic conversation, every veto — documented and explained. The American public deserves to know exactly what is being done in their name and why.
I won't perform certainty I don't have. This conflict has layers of history, trauma, and geopolitics that I could summarize but not resolve. I'd rather be the candidate who says "this is what I know, this is what I don't, and this is the principle I won't compromise" than the one who gives you a clean soundbite that dissolves on contact with reality.