Category: New York Times

WASHINGTON — For more than a year, the Pentagon has deployed about 9,000 active-duty troops along nearly 2,000 miles of the southwest border to confront migrants, smugglers, and drug cartels.

The troops are still there — at a cost of tens of millions of dollars each week — even though the Trump administration months ago largely achieved its goal of slashing illegal crossings.

The military patrols, working closely with Customs and Border Protection as well as the Mexican military, have pushed Mexican cartels and smugglers into more remote mountainous areas to evade detection.

But threats to U.S. troops are on the rise, U.S. officials say.

Some members of Congress have questioned whether the patrols are the best use of active-duty troops who would otherwise be training for deployments to Eastern Europe, the Middle East, or the Indo-Pacific. Lawmakers and independent analysts have voiced concerns that the border missions will distract from training, drain resources, and undermine readiness.

The mission marked a milestone late last month when its third commander, Maj. Gen. Curtis D. Taylor of the Army’s 1st Armored Division, took control of one of the centerpieces of the Trump administration’s Western Hemisphere security policy.

Challenges abound for the troops involved in the mission, which the military calls Ardent Vanguard.

Cartel activity increased along the border in February after Mexican forces, aided by the CIA, killed a notorious Mexican cartel leader known as El Mencho. Soon after, U.S. service members discovered that their phones had been hacked, and they began receiving threatening messages, congressional officials said.

“I’m very concerned about this operation and the safety of our Marines,” Rep. Sara Jacobs (D., Calif.), who sits on the Armed Services Committee, said at a hearing in March. “Our service members did not sign up for immigration enforcement, and this political stunt is putting their lives at risk.”

While U.S. forces deployed to the southern border use several counterdrone systems, the general in charge of helping defend U.S. territory said that many troops lacked adequate technology for patrols.

“It presents us a different challenge,” Gen. Gregory M. Guillot, head of the military’s Northern Command, said at a security conference in Tampa, Fla., last month. He noted the overall increase in anti-drone technology.

Unlike the drone wars on the battlefields of Ukraine or Iran, there have been no drone attacks on either side of this border conflict and no U.S. casualties, military officials say.

The mission to detect and interdict illegal activity across hundreds of miles of desert and mountainous frontier has also become a high-stakes proving ground for emerging technology, including counter-drone devices, remotely guided sea vessels, and advanced sensors.

Guillot said at a change-of-command ceremony in Arizona last month that the military had for the first time conducted joint patrols with Mexican soldiers using encrypted radios and high-energy lasers to knock down potentially hostile cartel-operated drones.

“My mission is to control the border,” Maj. Gen. David W. Gardner, commander of the 101st Airborne Division, said in a phone interview from Fort Huachuca, Ariz., before handing off the operation to Taylor. “We remain focused on the mission of sealing the border.”

Asked about confronting the drones and other security threats posed by Mexican cartels, Gardner said that U.S. forces had disabled or knocked down drones that the cartels use to find new smuggling routes around the U.S. patrols.

“The illicit actors are finding it more and more difficult to accomplish their objectives,” Gardner said.

Sen. Jack Reed (D., R.I.), the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, expressed concern at a hearing last month that the border mission was siphoning money from important training missions. He said the Army faced a nearly $2 billion budget shortfall largely because the Department of Homeland Security had not reimbursed it for border-support missions.

“I have received concerning reports about the potential for canceling training rotations, grounded flight hours, and reduced Guard and Reserve training resources,” Reed said, referring to the National Guard and Army Reserve. “These are real costs for real units.”

But several commanders and some troops stationed along the border said in interviews — some of them recent — that serving in one of Trump’s highest-priority missions gave them purpose. They are using many of their skills — route planning, mission rehearsals, patrols, and surveillance flights — in the real world against criminal smuggling gangs and Mexican drug cartels, instead of just practicing at their home bases or in exercises, they said.

There is no end in sight for the military mission on the border. The Pentagon said last May that the first four months of the operation cost $525 million. But the department declined to say what the total cost was now.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is abandoning its plan to dismantle a $368 million ocean monitoring system critical to understanding climate change and marine ecosystems, bowing to a bipartisan backlash on Capitol Hill.

The National Science Foundation had said in May that it would begin this month to remove hundreds of underwater instruments that collect data on coastal flooding, marine heat waves, and other climate and weather events.

But the agency announced Thursday that it will pause efforts to take apart the system, known as the Ocean Observatories Initiative, while convening an expert panel to determine its future.

“Effective immediately, NSF will not proceed with further removal or descoping of equipment,” the agency said in a statement.

The Senate passed a measure Wednesday that would block the government from dismantling the system, with lawmakers in both parties warning that the action would be illegal and would threaten the safety of coastal communities. The Trump administration had also tried to cut the program’s funds the last two years, but Congress restored the money both times.

In May, the science foundation had said it would send ships to start pulling up instruments anchored to the seafloor off the coasts of Oregon, Washington state, Alaska, North Carolina, and an area between Greenland and Iceland known as the Irminger Sea.

For the past decade, scientists have used data from these instruments to understand how the ocean is absorbing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, how marine heat waves could affect fisheries, and how soon a vital ocean current could collapse.

Fishermen have also checked the real-time, publicly available data on wind and wave conditions before heading to sea. And meteorologists have used these observations to improve forecasts of disasters like hurricanes and tsunamis.

The National Science Foundation said Thursday that it already had pulled some buoys, sensors, and other instruments from the water off the coasts of Oregon and Washington state, but it was “developing plans to redeploy the equipment after servicing.”

Edward Dever, a professor of oceanography at Oregon State University who helps manage the instruments off Oregon and Washington, said the agency had removed six of the area’s seven moorings, or deep-sea platforms equipped with sensors. He said finding boats to replace the moorings could take several months.

“I believe we could have one mooring ready to go before the end of the summer and 1-2 others ready by fall,” Dever said in an email, adding, “Ships are generally scheduled about a year in advance. Scheduling cruises on short notice can sometimes be done, but it is a challenge.”

The Senate on Wednesday passed the measure to preserve the system by unanimous consent, essentially an agreement by all senators to bypass debate. Though the measure faced an uncertain fate in the House, it was the latest moment when Congress flexed its power of the purse to thwart the Trump administration’s attempts to cut climate and environmental programs.

The measure was sponsored by Sens. Jeff Merkley (D., Ore.) and Lisa Murkowski (R., Alaska). In an interview Thursday, Murkowski criticized the Trump administration for failing to consult Congress before beginning to remove some monitoring equipment.

“NSF moved forward on their own, not only unilaterally, but really with no warning, no heads-up,” she said. “They didn’t even bother to check in,” she added, “and that’s where the real foul was.”

Murkowski said fisheries in Alaska relied on the ocean data to determine how increasing temperatures were threatening certain species. She said other data was crucial to understanding El Niño, the powerful weather pattern that formed this month in the tropical Pacific and could supercharge extreme weather events around the globe.

The National Science Foundation had said in May that dismantling the monitoring system would save $48 million in operating costs each year. But lawmakers had accused the administration of wasting the $368 million in taxpayer dollars that had funded the installation of the instruments in 2016. And the operating costs represent a tiny fraction of overall government spending.

“Dismantling the OOI was supreme stupidity,” Merkley said in a statement Thursday.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California, the top Democrat on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, welcomed the administration’s reversal but said she would continue fighting to save the system.

“This pathetic scheme was illegal,” Lofgren said in a statement Thursday, adding: “My oversight team and I will be following closely what NSF does next. NSF’s next steps must be nothing short of replacing any of the instruments that have already been removed and ceasing all activities to descale until legitimate expert advice has been sought.”

Backlash had also come from overseas. After the Trump administration announced the plan to dismantle the system, the European Union said it would bolster its own observation of the world’s oceans with an investment of 92 million euros ($107 million).

Though that move had been planned long before the U.S. retreat, officials in Brussels emphasized the contrast.

“Extremely worrying signals are coming from the other side of the Atlantic,” Costas Kadis, the EU’s commissioner for fisheries and oceans, said at the time.

A spokesperson for Kadis did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

WASHINGTON — It was less than 15 weeks ago when President Donald Trump, at the height of his bravado about how the war with Iran would end, declared “there will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER.”

When the text of the deal intended to wind down the conflict was finally released Wednesday, read aloud paragraph by paragraph by a senior administration official who stopped to defend each section, it read nothing like a surrender document. Instead, the Iranians emerged from a confrontation with the world’s most powerful military having not only survived, but with much to celebrate.

It starts with the resumption of Iran’s ability to reap billions of dollars in oil sales, lifting pressure on the struggling regime even as negotiators prepare to begin haggling over a far more lengthy and critical document: the one Trump insisted in an interview Sunday will arrest Iran’s nuclear program for the next 15 or 20 years.

For a president who prizes leverage above all else, that decision is just another mystery of the war. But the wording of the “Memorandum of Understanding” also suggests that, over time, Iran may negotiate some permanent way to exercise sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz. That seems in contradiction to Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s declarations just a few weeks ago that anything other than the kind of free passage through the strait that the world knew before the war was “not acceptable” and “cannot happen.”

And the memorandum, signed Wednesday evening by Iran’s president and Trump, describes a pathway in which Iran could begin receiving billions of dollars in assets that have been frozen for years. Trump insists the money will only be released in return for “good behavior.” But it is essentially the same concession that Barack Obama made 11 years ago, and that Trump has savaged ever since.

As Trump reminds reporters — often angrily — the United States did have many accomplishments on the battlefield: It sank Iran’s less-than-impressive navy, wiped out its small air force, destroyed much of Iran’s defense industrial base and demolished some of its missile emplacements and mobile launchers. But that was not Trump’s goal. As he said at the opening of the campaign, he sought the total destruction of the nuclear and missile programs, the fall of the regime and, as he suggested later on, U.S. control of the country’s oil industry.

In the next few days, the details of this agreement will be picked apart. Hard-liners in Trump’s party have already been expressing objections. So have the Israelis, frozen out of the negotiations and fearful they are being forced by Trump into a ceasefire with Hezbollah that will interfere with their ability to rip apart the terror group. Historians will grapple for years about the lessons of a conflict in which the United States spent tens of billions of dollars, with 13 Americans and more than 3,000 Iranians reported to have been killed.

But it was Trump himself who offered what may be the most clear-eyed answer about why he needed to end this war so fast. He didn’t want comparisons to Herbert Hoover, he told reporters Wednesday at the Hotel Royal in Évian-les-Bains, on the shores of Lake Geneva.

“He was always the one I didn’t want to be,” Trump said of the 31st president, who presided over the market crash that ushered in the Great Depression. “I didn’t want to see economic catastrophe.” Later he noted that if the war continued, the world would have begun to run out of oil stockpiles.

That combination — economic chaos and disrupted oil markets — is exactly what the Iranians viewed from the opening days of the war as their most potent weapon. They executed on that vision with precision, closing the strait and blowing up petrochemical facilities, desalination plants, hotels and air bases across the Persian Gulf. And by the president’s own testimony, it worked.

If that was Phase 1 of Iran’s strategy, history suggests Phase 2 may be one of delay and more delay. In past negotiations, the Iranians refined the art of arguing over every paragraph, throwing in new obstacles to inspections or reinterpreting the meaning of “nuclear research” to embrace continued uranium enrichment. Few were more skilled at this process, former U.S. negotiators say, than Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister, and a veteran of past talks.

And Trump, eager to move on, seems to be paving the way for a long, slow process. On Tuesday, he said he wasn’t especially concerned with getting Iran’s nuclear fuel — now buried under the rubble of last year’s U.S. air attacks — out of the country. On Wednesday, he acknowledged the talks would probably go beyond 60 days.

It is too early to say whether Trump will ultimately be able to claim more accomplishments. If, in the next stage of negotiations, he manages to get the Iranians to ship their stockpiles of nuclear fuel out of the country (as President Barack Obama did in 2015) and cease all enrichment activity for nearly two decades (which Obama failed to accomplish), then he may be able claim some long-term victory.

If the war turns out to have destabilized the Iranian leadership and triggered protests and an uprising, as Trump called for at the beginning of the conflict, he could well claim credit.

But for now it looks like the opposite is taking place. If anything, Trump has propped up the new leadership, ostensibly run by the new supreme leader, the injured and out-of-sight Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in the opening strike of the war.

The Revolutionary Guard, which has overseen the nuclear program for years, seems firmly in control, though a senior administration official argued to reporters several days ago that by bringing about a peace, Trump is now forcing the elite military unit to face the travails of governing.

Senior members of the Obama administration, having absorbed years of critiques from Trump about the shortcomings and loopholes in the agreement struck in 2015, saw their moment to exact a measure of retribution.

“The only ‘achievement’ of the ceasefire is the likely reopening the Strait of Hormuz — which was open before the war started,” former Secretary of State Antony Blinken wrote online Wednesday. “And we will apparently pay Iran to do so, in the form of waivers for the export of Iranian crude oil. Iran has now demonstrated the capacity to stop or slow the passage of oil, natural gas, fertilizer and other critical products upon which so much of the world depend.”

Blinken, an architect of the 2015 accord, concluded: “Going forward, it will almost certainly find ways to collect ‘fees’ for safe passage that will help entrench the regime.”

While some Republicans expressed cautious optimism that Trump’s peace-through-negotiation strategy may yet work, a good number of Iran hard-liners and America First adherents could not bring themselves to repeat the talking points in support of the accord that were being e-mailed by members of the administration. Among the most outspoken were those protected by impending retirement.

“Reagan is rolling over in his grave,” Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., who lost a primary last month after Trump targeted him for defeat, wrote on social media. He said that Iran’s nuclear ambitions “were not curbed” and that the war had taught the Iranians that they had more leverage over the Strait of Hormuz and the world economy than they knew. Cassidy termed the war “the worst foreign policy blunder in decades.”

But the bigger risk may be this one: When Iran’s leaders begin to clear the rubble left by 40 days of bombing, and think about how to spend the billions in oil revenue that will soon resume, they may well question whether they had the right nuclear strategy.

For more than two decades Iran walked right up to the edge of building a nuclear bomb, but never stepped over the line, figuring that a “threshold” capability was all it needed to deter the United States and Israel from attacking. That enabled it to stay in the nonproliferation treaty, and insist that it had only peaceful intentions, with the security of knowing that in months it could produce a weapon. The result was that it was bombed in June 2025 and attacked again in February 2026.

North Korea, in contrast, raced for the bomb, setting off its first successful nuclear test in 2006, and now has an arsenal of 60 or more weapons, according to U.S. intelligence agencies. It has escaped no nuclear strategist that these days, Trump isn’t issuing threats to North Korea.

On Sunday, when Trump called the Times, this reporter asked him whether Iran might now follow the North Korean model. “He’s got serious nuclear weapons,” Trump said of Kim Jong Un, whom he threatened with annihilation during the first Trump term, then met three times in a fruitless effort to convince him to disarm. “But that should not have been allowed,” he said, asking whether North Korea got the bomb under President Clinton or President Obama. (It made its first test under President George W. Bush.)

But Trump evaded the question of whether his decision to attack Iran could ultimately drive it to follow North Korea’s model. And he insisted his deal would stop Iran, saying Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should thank him for keeping Israel from nuclear annihilation.

“Whatever it takes,” he said. “Forty-seven years,” he said, referring to the 1979 Iranian Revolution, “nobody was able to do it. And we did it. We did it the right way.”

History may prove him right, but it is far too premature to make that claim. Maybe even he knows that, based on his statements Wednesday morning. If the accord didn’t stick, he had a plan, he insisted. He would “go back to bombing.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

NAIROBI, Kenya — As spiking ocean temperatures are devastating reefs around the world, a handful of scientists have found a reason for cautious optimism. They’ve used artificial intelligence to detect sheltered pockets where cool currents, reduced exposure to sunlight, and locations outside cyclone paths mean corals are more likely to survive.

The study, led by the Wildlife Conservation Society and presented on Tuesday at the Our Ocean Conference in Mombasa, Kenya, is currently undergoing peer review for publication in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

Five scientists identified 42 factors that create the conditions for the coral havens, called refugia, and then ran those through a program with nearly 38,000 human observations of coral cover and composition gathered over 65 years. The program identified more than 5,800 square miles of climate-resilient ocean in 72 countries.

The work found three times as many refugia as a landmark 2018 assessment known as the 50 Reefs Study, the first paper to systematically identify areas around the globe where coral might still be saved. Scientists and environmentalists said the new assessment offered a more nuanced picture of the state of the world’s reefs and could help fine tune conservation priorities.

“This study sharpens decades of work on reef resilience to climate change,” said David Obura, a former chairperson of IPBES, the global intergovernmental scientific panel on biodiversity, who was not involved in the new research. “It focuses attention on the critical question: Will climate refuges comprise 10%, 1%, or even less of the former extent of coral reefs?”

Coral reefs are crucial ecosystems. They nurture an estimated quarter of ocean species at some point during their life cycles, supporting fish that provide protein for millions of people and protecting coastlines from storms.

They are also vulnerable to bleaching, which occurs when heat causes corals to lose the algae they need to survive. Bleached corals can recover, but if the water they live in stays too hot for too long, they die.

“Every tenth of a degree warming drives reefs to the limit,” Obura said.

According to Australian researchers who study ocean heat, the demise of the Great Barrier Reef could occur within a generation unless humanity acts with far more urgency to rein in climate change. A study published in 2025 found that virtually all the corals in the Atlantic Ocean will stop growing and could succumb to erosion by the end of the century if global temperatures continue to rise.

The newly identified refugia are not evenly spread around the world. More than half are in five countries: the Bahamas, Cuba, Australia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Others cluster around small islands in places like Vanuatu, American Samoa, Christmas Island, and the Chagos Archipelago.

These havens can protect coral from the effects of warming, but their concentration makes them vulnerable to other threats like overfishing and pollution. Although most are found in nominally protected zones, lack of funding means many of those areas are only “paper parks” lacking practical protections.

The research is expected to fuel a central conservation debate: How much funding should go to protect refugia, some of which may eventually fail as the oceans heat further; how much into restoration work; and how much into halting greenhouse emissions and pollution?

Despite warnings from scientists and pledges from world leaders, countries are burning more fossil fuels than ever and greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise.

Traditionally, reef research has focused on areas that have avoided the worst overheating. Such reefs are usually dominated by large branching corals like Acropora, an expansive genus incorporating species like the staghorn and the flamethrower; or plating corals like Montipora, whose delicate whorls spiral out from a central stem. Globally, their numbers are crashing.

But the new research broadened the focus to corals that could also resist and recover: the helmet-shaped towers of the Porites lutea or the luminous ridges and bumps of Echinopora. Coral communities dominated by fast-growing weedy varieties, such as the lime and flamingo pink Pocillopora, are also often more resilient.

They will need to be. Subsurface conditions across the tropical Pacific are already significantly warmer than average, according to the World Meteorological Organization. And, an El Nino weather pattern that recently formed in the Pacific could exacerbate those hot conditions.

“It’s not to say the maps are perfect, but they are better than starting with nothing,” said Joseph Maina, an associate professor at Macquarie University in Sydney, who helped coordinate the data analysis. “Governments shouldn’t use the maps blindly, but get their own experts to look here first.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.