Dan Driscoll stepped down as Secretary of the Army on Monday after eighteen months in the job, the White House confirmed. No official reason was given.
Driscoll, a friend of Vice President JD Vance, had been in increasing friction with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over the Army’s future. Axios reported Monday that Driscoll had raised concerns about Hegseth’s approach to Army transformation and readiness, and specifically about the firing of the generals who had championed those programs. Two of his close allies were gone before he was. Gen. Randy George, the Army’s top uniformed officer, was ousted by Hegseth in April. Gen. Christopher Donahue, the Army’s commander in Europe and Africa, stepped down in July (Army Times). NPR confirmed Tuesday that Driscoll’s departure is the latest in a pattern that has reshaped the Army’s civilian and uniformed leadership in less than two years. The Army hasn’t named an acting secretary.
The relationship between civilian leadership and the uniformed military has never been frictionless. Robert McNamara’s tenure as Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson is still studied as a case of civilian overreach that contributed to strategic failures in Vietnam. That was too much political control of operational decisions. What Driscoll’s concerns describe is something different: a civilian appointee trying to shield the Army’s institutional reform efforts from his own superior, and losing. These are different kinds of friction. They have different costs.
Today is September 1.
Eighty-seven years ago this morning, at 4:45 a.m., Germany invaded Poland. The Wehrmacht crossed the border at multiple points. The Luftwaffe began bombing Polish cities. A German warship in Danzig harbor opened fire on the Polish garrison at the Westerplatte. Britain and France issued ultimatums. Germany did not respond. On September 3, they declared war.
The Second World War, which killed somewhere between 70 and 85 million people and reshaped every significant political boundary on earth, began on a Friday morning in late summer. The day’s newspapers in London and Paris reported the attack and the pending response. None of what happened was a surprise. It had been building for years, through the Rhineland, through Austria, through the Sudetenland, through Czechoslovakia. September 1, 1939 wasn’t a surprise. It was the morning all the warnings became something you could no longer call a warning.
The lesson isn’t a slogan. It’s a fact about how these things tend to move.
At the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Bishkek on Tuesday, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said that Iran will return to its commitments under the Islamabad memorandum of understanding if the United States does the same, according to AFP. “Reason, logic tell us to avoid war,” Pezeshkian said a day earlier, telling Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the summit’s sidelines that continuing the war was “not in our interest, nor in the interest of the region” (Mehr News).
He also acknowledged the toll of six months of war on Iran’s economy. The dollar has reached 2.1 million rials. Iran’s government attributed this directly to U.S. sanctions. The acknowledgment is notable because the Iranian government has not always been willing to name the damage openly.
The Islamabad MOU was the first formal diplomatic channel opened between Washington and Tehran since U.S. and Israeli strikes began February 28. Whether Pezeshkian’s statement is a genuine opening or a tactical signal is not something a speech at a regional summit can resolve. Both things can be true at once. The statement is made. The channel exists. What happens next isn’t in the speech.
The U.S.-Venezuela oil deal, announced by President Trump last Friday, continued to take shape on Tuesday. Trump called it “the biggest oil deal in world history” and said it would “MORE THAN DOUBLES American Oil Reserves,” according to Al Jazeera. The deal involves a joint venture covering 17 oil fields with a combined proven potential of 65 billion barrels, with the United States taking 55 percent of production. Bloomberg’s key-points explainer, published today, notes the deal is still being structured. NPR reported Monday that the deal is unlikely to lower gas prices for American consumers in the short term.
Venezuela has had the world’s largest proven oil reserves since 2010. The question has never been the oil. It’s always been the infrastructure, the governance, and the political durability of whoever is running the country. Hugo Chávez nationalized Venezuelan oil production in 2007 and spent years in legal disputes with the American and European companies whose assets he expropriated. The current government in Caracas isn’t Chávez’s government. But it’s governing the same country, with the same oil, and the same history of arrangements that changed.
Here is the story that didn’t lead anything this week.
The Mecca Joint Defense Agreement, signed by Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan on August 7, has moved from a declaration into an active implementation phase, with military working groups now meeting on coordination and readiness, according to The Media Line. The pact stipulates that “any armed attack against any one of the three states shall be regarded as an attack against them all” (PBS News). That language mirrors Article 5 of the NATO charter almost exactly.
The three signatories bring different things. Pakistan is the Muslim world’s only nuclear-armed state and has one of the largest standing armies in Asia. Turkey is a NATO member with a large military and an advancing domestic defense industry. Saudi Arabia is the world’s largest oil exporter and holds substantial financial resources and regional reach. None of the three is a small actor.
In 1955, the Baghdad Pact tried to build something similar: a Western-backed regional security arrangement linking Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom. A revolution in Iraq brought it down within four years. The Mecca agreement has different members, different conditions, and different pressures. What it doesn’t have yet is the test of a direct challenge.
And then there is this.
A clinical trial published in late August showed that CAR T-cell therapy, developed as a cancer treatment, produced medication-free remission in three of six patients with severe rheumatoid arthritis that had not responded to any other treatment, according to ScienceDaily. The therapy works by taking a patient’s own immune cells, genetically modifying them to identify and eliminate the B cells that drive the disease, and returning them to the body. All six patients saw substantial reductions in disease activity. Three haven’t taken any rheumatoid arthritis medication in up to a year.
Rheumatoid arthritis affects roughly 1.3 million Americans. It isn’t fatal, but it’s lifelong, and current treatments require ongoing immunosuppression for as long as the patient takes them. Off-drug remission, where the disease quiets without medication, has been rare. The trial was small and much larger studies will follow. For three people who had run out of options, though, this is what the start of something looks like.
