June 25, 2025: The Bezos-Sánchez Wedding and the Triumph of Tacky

 

Opinion

Guest Essay

The Bezos-Sánchez Wedding and the Triumph of Tacky

 

June 25, 2025

By Amy Odell

Ms. Odell is the author of “Anna: The Biography.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/25/opinion/jeff-bezos-lauren-sanchez-wedding.html?searchResultPosition=5

 

Some of the world’s richest people are gathering for the wedding of Jeff Bezos, the world’s third-richest man, in one of the world’s most touristy cities, Venice, and it’s easy to ask: What happened to understatement and restraint? In the run-up to the wedding, Mr. Bezos was photographed by paparazzi on the deck of his yacht with his intended, Lauren Sánchez, both in their swimsuits, frolicking in foam like a couple of college kids on spring break. Meanwhile, missiles and bombs have been falling just a few time zones away.

 

Not so long ago, members of high society were fixated on trying to low-key their way out of the perils of income inequality. Minimalism and quiet luxury were in vogue. But in the wake of President Trump’s second election, it’s the luxe life at full volume. He gilded the White House, turning it into a rococo Liberace lair. Swaggy and braggy have replaced stealth wealth. Flaunting it is in. For women, that means sequins, diamonds, tight silhouettes and big hair. TikTok’s latest star, Becca Bloom, has drawn millions of fans by regularly sharing videos of her lavish jewelry and Hermès shopping hauls. Even the bandage dress is trending again. The breast implant business just keeps getting bigger and is expected to reach $4.6 billion by 2030, up from nearly $3 billion in 2024.

 

For men, it means a hypermasculine look: muscles and slicked-back hair; tight, tailored suits with big Windsor knots.

 

And now there are the Bezos-Sánchez nuptials, the most internationally notable ruling-class wedding since the Ambani-Merchant union last year in India. It’s already drawn protesters determined to make Venice the city “that did not bend to oligarchs.” (The couple had to move their main reception to a new location to avoid activists who threatened to fill the canals with inflatable crocodiles.) Since news of Mr. Bezos and Ms. Sánchez’s relationship broke in a tabloid scandal in early 2019, Ms. Sánchez has become an object of public fascination, her every movement parsed by tabloids and gossipmongers. With this much attention, she’s become one of the most visible women on (or off, as it may be) the planet, and therefore a significant fashion influencer.

 

Her fiancé, who shed his nerdy image and baggy office clothes for a personal-trained body, tight polo shirts and aviators, has already been anointed an unlikely style icon. Like the MAGA bros who favor traditional suiting and clean-shaven faces, his athleisure emphasizes his power, not cutting-edge fashion sense.

 

Ms. Sánchez, too, dresses to emphasize her clout. She’s long preferred belts with noticeable-from-a-distance hardware, embellished dresses, stiletto heels, low-cut necklines, high-cut hemlines and big jewelry. Her engagement ring is thought to be in the vicinity of 30 carats and to have cost somewhere between $3 million and $5 million, but it was easily dwarfed by the diamond-encrusted choker she wore to a gala in Cannes recently, with a stone that looked to be the size of a bike reflector. There was nothing low-key about her recent flaunty Paris bachelorette party, which was attended by stars such as Kim Kardashian and Kris Jenner, and included a visit to the Hermès store with executives from the brand.

 

The luxury industry — which faces its first slowdown in 15 years, according to a recent study — has economic interest in embracing Ms. Sánchez, who represents the wealthy Very Important Clients who make up 2 percent of luxury customers and 40 percent of sales. “The customer driving global luxury is quite tacky in a lot of cases, and no one really admits it,” an unnamed fashion investor told The Cut for a 2024 article about this crucial group of shoppers. V.I.C.s are always looking for a reason to get decked out in their designer finest, social norms and sensitivities be damned, and Ms. Sánchez seems to embody the idea that if you’re rich enough, you may as well.

 

What has fascinated the public about Ms. Sánchez, like any number of women who personify a certain period, is how she puts herself together. Seemingly unafraid to flout sartorial norms, she attended a state dinner at the White House in 2024 wearing a gown with a sheer lace corseted bodice, causing People to wonder if the dress broke “White House protocol.” She later attended Mr. Trump’s inauguration with what looked like lingerie peeking out of her white blazer, leaving a Vogue headline to note that she “forgoes inauguration style codes.” She never conformed to the look of oversize minimalism popularized in the 2010s by the designer Phoebe Philo for Céline, still revered by elite crowds who live in places like Manhattan and Montecito, Calif., and fancy themselves practitioners of good taste.

 

Ms. Sánchez’s journey from the tabloids to the pages of Vogue, which did a splashy feature on her in its December 2023 issue, has fascinated and repelled onlookers, the same way Ms. Kardashian’s entree to the magazine — and therefore to the fashion world — did when she landed on its cover for the first time in April 2014, pegged to her marriage to Kanye West. Ms. Kardashian had been a tabloid star for many years, but until that point, Vogue hadn’t been featuring her much.

 

After the cover dropped, people threatened to cancel their subscriptions. But it was a provocation worth making, Vogue’s editor in chief, Anna Wintour, later said. “I was told that it was trashy, that it was beneath us, what was Vogue coming to?” she recalled. “We were trying to respond to what we saw — a couple being [an] undeniable force in our culture, and they were part of the conversation at that time.” The same could be said about Ms. Sánchez and Mr. Bezos now. Unsurprisingly, Vogue has reportedly been talking with the couple about an exclusive.

 

Ms. Sánchez brings to mind another unlikely Vogue subject: Ivana Trump. Ms. Wintour gave her a cover in 1990, shortly before her divorce from Mr. Trump, after worrying, as I reported in a biography of Ms. Wintour, that she was “too tacky.” Around the time the cover came out, Ms. Trump was criticized for “dressing like a Christmas tree.” The issue’s newsstand sales of 750,000 copies easily justified Ms. Wintour’s decision.

 

As much as those with more understated taste might turn up their noses at the crassness of the Bezos-Sánchez wedding’s display, tacky is very clearly carrying the day. Maybe hating on tacky oligarchs is itself just elitist. It’s doubtful anyone attending the wedding cares very much what those of us who weren’t invited think, anyway.

Rich People Didn’t Look Like This Before

 

Opinion

Guest Essay

Rich People Didn’t Look Like This Before

 

April 30, 2026

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/30/opinion/plastic-surgery-rich-face.html?searchResultPosition=1

By Amy Odell

Ms. Odell is the author of the Back Row newsletter and “Anna: The Biography.”

 

If you spend enough time around the very rich these days, it’s clear. People didn’t look like this before because people naturally can’t look like this.

 

Models in a Paris Fashion Week show for the luxury brand Matières Fécales last month caricatured the 1 percent by wearing prosthetics that resembled post-op faces, including grotesque under-eye bulges, skin pulled up from their temples and lips that appeared unnaturally inflated and stitched at the edges. “South Park” depicted Kristi Noem with a face so Botoxed, it melts off and scurries away. From the Met Gala to the Oscars and every red carpet in between, these rich faces are everywhere.

 

A “rich face” is stretched taut, often incapable of varied expressions and plumped with filler or implants or a person’s own grafted fat. Once, this face belonged to a villainous class of elites in sci-fi depictions of a dystopian future. In “The Hunger Games,” residents of the capital city who revel in luxury and excess at the expense of other impoverished districts often wear sculpted, altered faces. In “Doctor Who,” a wealthy socialite from the distant future has gone through so many face-lifts that she becomes little more than a stretched face on a thin sheet of skin mounted on a frame, maintained with constant moisturizer.

 

The ultrawealthy seem less and less concerned with hiding their excesses. They’re richer than ever, and figures like Lauren Sánchez Bezos and President Trump give them permission to flaunt their neo-Gilded Age spoils. After all, the unspoken appeal of cosmetic work is that it’s not just about looking “better” or “fixing” something or trying to remain competitive in ageist workplaces. It’s about indulging in a particular kind of experiential self-care that is infinitely customizable and accessible to only a select group. It signifies extreme wealth and belonging to an elite, all-powerful clique that gets to operate under a different set of societal norms and rules.

 

Status signaling used to be the purview of the $18,000 cocktail dress or the $50,000 designer bag. Now, the small number of Very Important Clients who account for 40 percent of luxury sales seem to be shifting more of their highly desired dollars to their faces. Today’s cleverly marketed aesthetic treatments include “global facial micro-optimization,” which involves numerous procedures to tweak everything from eye tilt to the way light reflects off the jaw, and costs between $150,000 and $300,000. There are also “forever 35,” “Diamond mini” and “weekend” face-lifts. Plastic surgeons in Washington are navigating a surge in requests for “Mar-a-Lago face.”

 

The masses want in. Millennials who say they cannot afford homes are spending on their faces instead. Magazines such as Vogue and Allure are no longer just advising readers on nail polish colors and designer sandals for spring, but also when — not if — they should get face-lifts. Rhinoplasties, face-lifts and blepharoplasties (eyelid surgeries) were the three most popular facial procedures of 2025, and the number of facial procedures overall increased by around 19 percent. The luxury sector, meanwhile, contracted by 2 percent last year.

 

Designer fashion seems to be viewed as more cringe than cosmetic procedures — a feeling that the journalist Sujata Assomull calls the “luxury ick.” Many designer brands raised prices significantly in recent years, at around twice the rate of inflation, without any apparent improvement in quality. (A Chanel flap bag can now cost upward of $11,000 — almost double what it did in 2016.) And some have been caught up in sweatshop scandals. The Row’s sample sale in New York City inspired a slew of viral parody videos. The thriving market for secondhand goods, dupes and counterfeits dim the glamour of it all. And when brands like Celine and Chloé are reissuing old handbag designs, why bother shopping for something new?

 

In earlier decades, the roles were reversed: Plastic surgery was a punchline. “I’ve had so much plastic surgery, when I die they will donate my body to Tupperware,” Joan Rivers once joked. Now Ms. Rivers seems ahead of her time. Procedures are a sign of making it in the most Kardashian-coded way — get rich, then buy a face. Stars such as Kris Jenner go viral for their cosmetic work. Asked if she’d had “the seemingly ubiquitous new style of face-lift,” Jennifer Lawrence told The New Yorker, “No. But, believe me, I’m gonna!”

 

Social media has turbocharged the normalization of cosmetic work. One plastic surgeon said that his Gen Z patients take selfies at their appointments “as if it’s a concert or a ‘get ready with me’ video. They want everyone to know.” Like haul vlogs, it’s a way to say, “Look what I just bought.”

 

Of course, rich face has regional variations. Bravo’s “Real Housewives” from the Upper East Side and the Hamptons have a subtler look than their counterparts on Netflix’s “Members Only: Palm Beach,” who dream of access to Mar-a-Lago. Whether stars admit to their work or not, endless internet speculation provides valuable P.R. to both them and the surgeons who treat them. Many of these doctors — such as Steven Levine, who lifted Ms. Jenner’s face — are celebrities themselves. All of this media hooks viewers by inviting them to wonder when lips were last injected and if jawlines look more “snatched” than they did the previous week.

 

Sometimes, of course, procedures can go wrong. Sharon Osbourne once called a face-lift “the worst thing that I ever did,” and said that she “looked like Cyclops.” Khloe Kardashian has said that filler made her look “crazy.”

 

Designer bags may be silly, overpriced and quite often unethically made. But at least there’s little to no chance they will disfigure you. Perhaps the risk of a grisly outcome is part of the appeal for the ultrawealthy, who have the ability to pay for the best care, along with more treatments if things go wrong. The luxury of viewing your face-lift less as a major, potentially ruinous surgery and more as a routine to-do list item is the ultimate status symbol.

Fashion’s Faustian pact: the high cost of Jeff Bezos’s Met Gala patronage

 

Fashion’s Faustian pact: the high cost of Jeff Bezos’s Met Gala patronage

 

Billionaire’s role as honorary chair and main source of funding has led to boycotts and criticism event has lost its cachet

 

Morwenna Ferrier

Sun 3 May 2026 15.22 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2026/may/03/met-gala-jeff-bezos-art-fashion-new-york

 

The Met Gala in New York is the grandest and ritziest event in the fashion calendar, and an indicator of the growing ties between designers, celebrity and power. But with tech billionaires now joining the cohort, this year’s party may be its most controversial yet.

 

All eyes are on the guest list – and their outfits – to launch the fashion exhibition Costume Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. Beyoncé, Venus Williams and Nicole Kidman are chairing the event with Vogue’s Anna Wintour, and tickets cost about $100,000 (£73,500). But in a plot twist worthy of the new Devil Wears Prada film, Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos, the Met Gala’s new honorary chairs, will be joining the 450 guests on the museum steps on Monday.

 

The billionaires’ involvement as the main source of funding for the exhibition and the party has set tongues wagging, reviving rumours that the Amazon founder will buy Condé Nast, the parent company of Vogue, which oversees the gala. Last year there was speculation that Bezos would snap up the company as a wedding gift – it is thought the couple missed the 2025 gala only because of their starry wedding in Venice, although Sánchez Bezos appeared on Vogue’s digital cover in a Dolce & Gabbana wedding gown.

 

Skipping the event is Zohran Mamdani, breaking a decades-long tradition of New York mayors attending the gala. Parts of New York have been papered with posters criticising the Bezos’s involvement in the fundraiser, mounted by Everyone Hates Elon, a British activist group, which raised £15,000 in a week and is expected to be present on the night. “I love celebrity culture and fashion as much as anyone, but [Bezos’s involvement] makes Vogue seem irrelevant,” a spokesperson said. “Don’t tell me Bezos has been involved because of his fashion sense?”

 

Even before the politics, the gala dress code had become a hot topic. Titled “fashion is art”, it takes its cue from the exhibition’s theme, which argues that fashion and art are intertwined, “with bodies wearing clothes the common thread”, according to Andrew Bolton, the curator of the Met’s Costume Institute.

 

Split into 13 “thematic” body types, from pregnant and ageing to disabled and variations on nudity, the exhibition pairs about 200 sculptures and artworks alongside 200 garments and accessories. “The focus is on bodies marginalised in fashion, and ones that haven’t been valorised in either fashion or western culture,” said Bolton.

 

Highlights include a contorted corset by Michaela Stark paired with Niki de Saint Phalle’s Nana and Serpent sculpture, and a Sarah Lucas work next to wearable art made out of “Nora Batty-like stockings” by the British designer Harry Pontefract.

 

A late Roman Venus Pudica sculpture is paired with a dress that uses strategically placed human hair by the British-Turkish designer Dilara Findikoglu. A Burberry trench belonging to the disability activist Sinéad Burke and Batsheva Hay’s Hag jumper also feature, as do Rei Kawakubo gowns and Vivienne Westwood’s Martyr to Love jacket, which resembles a man’s upper body.

 

As ever, the link between the gala’s dress code and what materialises on the museum steps is tangential. “I’m sure there will be some nakedness,” said Bolton. “I also think we’ll get a lot of goddess gowns. But I do worry people might take the theme literally and come as a painting. Or at least Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup can.”

 

Still, he thinks the theme has never been more essential. “A lot of the developments fashion has made over the last few years have really eroded,” he said. “I don’t feel as if we’re seeing as much diversity on the runway as you did [then].”

 

While the theme will no doubt elicit some more literal translations, including Yves Saint Laurent’s Mondrian-inspired dresses, Cally Blackman, an associate lecturer of fashion history and theory at Central St Martins, hopes it will serve as a riposte to criticism about the value of fashion.

 

“It is the most powerful form of non-verbal communication that exists, yet we’re always fighting the battle [to prove its worth],” she said. “It’s only in the last 10 years that museums like the Met or the V&A have realised it gets more people over their thresholds.”

 

Bolton, who is preparing to reveal the Costume Institute’s new permanent home, the Condé M Nast Galleries, agrees. “For an art museum to position fashion in the centre of the building is symbolic,” he said. “I think people are realising not just the aesthetic value of fashion, but the social, cultural and personal ones.”

 

The gala is one of the most-watched red carpet events of the year, typically attracting 1bn global video views on Vogue’s site alone, and is fast outgrowing its philanthropic purpose, which is to raise funds for the New York museum. Blackman said: “The problem with the gala is that it’s … self-defeating. It’s not about fashion, it’s about publicity. I think a lot of the cachet has gone because it’s funded by Jeff Bezos.”

The metaphor of a "Faustian pact" has become a central theme in critiques of the 2026 Met Gala, which is being held today, May 4, 2026.

 

Fashion’s Faustian pact: the high cost of Jeff Bezos’s Met Gala patronage

The metaphor of a "Faustian pact" has become a central theme in critiques of the 2026 Met Gala, which is being held today, May 4, 2026. While the event has historically relied on wealthy patrons, the decision by Anna Wintour and the Metropolitan Museum of Art to name Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos as lead sponsors and honorary chairs has sparked unprecedented backlash across the fashion and political landscapes.

Critics argue that by accepting this sponsorship—reportedly worth at least $10 million—the Met has traded its cultural soul for billionaire funding, leading to concerns that the event has lost its artistic "cachet" and transformed into a "billionaire circus".

The "High Cost" of Patronage

The controversy centers on several points of tension that observers call the "high cost" of this partnership:

• Public Boycotts and Protests: Activist groups like Everyone Hates Elon have papered New York City with posters labeling the event the "Bezos Met Gala" and highlighting allegations of worker exploitation and Amazon’s ties to controversial government agencies like ICE.
• Celebrity and Political Absences: Prominent figures, including Zendaya and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, have notably skipped the event. Reports even suggested some actors were urged by labor advocates to boycott due to Amazon's anti-worker practices.
• Declining Cultural Cachet: Some industry insiders feel the gala is no longer an "aspirational" showcase for fashion as art, but rather a platform for "conspicuous consumption" and the laundering of billionaire reputations.
• Economic Dissonance: With tickets now costing roughly $100,000, the event is increasingly viewed as out of touch with the public's economic struggles, especially as it follows significant layoffs within the media industry, including at Vogue’s own parent company, Condé Nast.

Strategic Shift Amid Economic Uncertainty

Despite the outrage, the museum’s leadership views the partnership as a necessary financial move. Max Hollein, the Met’s CEO, defended the sponsorship as part of the "history of American philanthropy," where private funding is essential for cultural preservation.

Experts suggest that as traditional luxury brands pull back on spending, the Gala has pivoted toward tech billionaires to maintain its massive fundraising scale—last year’s event raised a record $31 million. Anna Wintour has also publicly defended Sánchez as a "wonderful asset" who "loves costumes and fashion".

 

Lauren Sánchez Bezos and the Fashion End Times of ‘The Devil Wears Prada 2’

Opinion

Guest Essay

Lauren Sánchez Bezos and the Fashion End Times of ‘The Devil Wears Prada 2’

 

May 3, 2026

By Robin Givhan

Ms. Givhan is a contributing Opinion writer.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/03/opinion/devil-wears-prada-lauren-sanchez-bezos-met-gala.html

 

When I look at photographs of Lauren Sánchez Bezos I see someone who loves fashion, although not at all in the way I do. My affection for it is rooted in respect for its beauty and creativity and in a fair amount of skepticism because of its stumbling acceptance of its social responsibilities. Her version of fashion exudes personal indulgence and broad disregard.

 

A plutocrat by marriage, she represents the industry’s ultimate customer, with its ever-rising prices and shrinking sales. Fashion is pricing all but the most astoundingly wealthy out of the market.

 

In the just-opened film “The Devil Wears Prada 2” Justin Theroux plays a dastardly acquisitive tech titan named Benji Barnes, with clear echoes of her husband, the billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The Barnes character happens to have a girlfriend who might remind you of Mrs. Sánchez Bezos. Their thirst for clout helps drive the film’s plot.

 

On Monday, Mr. Bezos’ real-life hundreds of billions of dollars will propel Mrs. Sánchez Bezos up the grand Fifth Avenue staircase of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, past a gantlet of photographers and into the Costume Institute Benefit, better known as the Met Gala, over which she and he will preside as honorary co-chairs. The institute’s exhibition this year, “Costume Art,” is made possible by the Bezos largess. But the couple is so broadly unpopular in the fashion world and beyond that there were calls for a boycott of the gala.

 

Beyoncé is also supposed to be there, serving as an official co-chair, along with Nicole Kidman, Venus Williams and Condé Nast’s chief content officer, Anna Wintour. But Mrs. Sánchez Bezos is the star of the Met Gala because she represents what fashion, buffeted by social and technological change, has surrendered to: economic inequality in human form, with pink, glossy lips, cinched up in a couture corset.

 

Taste is one more part of the culture for ruthless tech titans to attempt to optimize for their benefit. With Ms. Wintour’s determined gatekeeping and the Costume Institute’s intellectual concerns about human creativity, the Met Gala is the perfect laundromat for soulless tech money.

 

Both “The Devil Wears Prada” and its sequel stage fictional versions of the Met Gala for the cameras and star Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestly, a fictional version of Ms. Wintour. The first film captured the fabulousness of the fashion world. It also worked to give viewers the sense that its haughty, judgmental inhabitants were hard at work helping to make small lives feel bigger by the decisions they made huddled in a room going through “a pile of stuff.”

 

I think about how the sharp-tongued Miranda might view Mrs. Sánchez Bezos: A corset? In an evening gown? Groundbreaking. The sequel depicts Miranda with her power and influence slipping. She’s confronting the same tidal wave of financial challenges that the real-life fashion ecosystem is navigating.

 

Onscreen, the upheaval comes by way of data-driven technology, an awkward tycoon with no sense of style and the fashion-loving woman he aims to please. As Stanley Tucci’s character, Nigel, says, he’s reduced to creating “content that people scroll past as they pee.” In real life, fashion magazines — and publications in general — are in trouble, and they’re hoping the right billionaire will bail them out. (The Bezoses have been rumored to be considering buying Condé Nast, Vogue’s parent company; when asked about it, Mrs. Sánchez Bezos told the writer Amy Chozick in The Times, “I wish!” and then, “No.”)

 

With her donations, scholarships and grants, Mrs. Sánchez Bezos offers the industry some support beyond her expensive shopping habit. The Bezos Earth Fund awarded $34 million in grants to institutions developing environmentally neutral fabrics, and she directed $6.25 million from the Earth Fund to the Council of Fashion Designers of America to support innovation and education in sustainability. The industry readily grabs on. Some people are betting that she’s the right billionaire.

 

According to Ms. Chozick’s recent profile of her, Mrs. Sánchez Bezos just wants to be happy. And whenever she steps in front of cameras, dressed in a remarkable array of finery, she looks delighted. In an era of extreme economic inequality and financial instability, when California is looking to institute a billionaire tax and a tax on second homes in New York City is under consideration, Mrs. Sánchez Bezos moves about with ostentatious pleasure. She counts her 10-figure blessings, and wears her windfall on her back for all to see.

 

Her taste veers outside a palette of beige and gray cashmere — the approved sensibility of well-mannered, quiet money. She is willing to flash a wide smile or offer a pouty stare for the cameras rather than stare them down with an expression of bashful reserve or detached ennui, which is what serious women are supposed to do. She does not have the body of a 6-foot-tall 12-year-old boy, which is how high fashion still insists on defining an elegant female physique.

 

She defies these expectations — something that could be lauded. But she simply embraces a different cliché, an extreme version of femininity that’s defined by a snatched waist and a cantilevered bosom.

 

She laments how little the public really knows about her. But provided the opportunity to tell her critics more, she refrains.

 

“I am not talking politics,” she told The Times. “No, no, no, no, no. No way.”

 

It’s reasonable to believe that since she sat in a place of honor behind President Trump during his inauguration, she might have a few thoughts about the current administration. Mrs. Sánchez Bezos, who once worked in broadcast news, acknowledged the importance of journalism but offered no thoughts on her husband’s drastic staff cuts at The Washington Post, which he owns (and where I used to work).

 

But she is willing to express her exasperation that the white lace bra readily visible under the Alexander McQueen suit she wore to Mr. Trump’s swearing-in caused an online kerfuffle. She defines the problem as a scandal about lace, not her disregard for the dignity of an official function.

 

To draw the cameras, it helps that she has hired one of the best stylists money can buy, Law Roach, and collected an impressive array of very expensive stuff. She’s done so from a feast of options. Costume not as art, but as merchandise. Perhaps she even scrolled past some of it while she was indisposed. As Miranda deftly shivved a would-be white knight, “You’re not a visionary; you’re a vendor.”

 

Mrs. Sánchez Bezos’ clothes don’t demand that the public pay attention to her story. Or even the stories of the designers she wears. Or really, even fashion.

 

She has assembled a tote board of Bezos wealth. And if it tells any story at all, it’s his.

Operation Epic Fury, Meet Operation Colossal Blunder

 

Opinion

Guest Essay

Operation Epic Fury, Meet Operation Colossal Blunder

 

May 4, 2026, 1:00 a.m. ET

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/04/opinion/iran-us-israel-war-drones-strait-of-hormuz.html

Scott Anderson

By Scott Anderson

Mr. Anderson is the author of “King of Kings,” an account of the Iranian revolution.

 

America’s war with Iran has entered a calmer phase: diplomatic posturing, on-and-off-again negotiations and endless wrangling of a settlement. This, of course, is far preferable to the annihilation of Iranian civilization that President Trump was threatening just a few weeks ago. But it raises the question of just what has spurred this turnabout.

 

The answer is rather straightforward. The American and Israeli bombing of Iran failed to provoke either a popular uprising against the regime in Tehran or its capitulation, however painfully slow Mr. Trump and his advisers have been to acknowledge that. Instead, Iran discovered its ability to shut down the vital passageway of the Strait of Hormuz and send the global economy into chaos.

 

There are now only two outcomes to the conflict: either the kind of wholesale destruction of Iran that Mr. Trump posited, or a settlement that will leave the government intact and empowered, and a blustering American president humiliated.

 

The first option is increasingly remote. By publicly threatening the commission of war crimes on an enormous scale, Mr. Trump has given both his domestic and foreign opponents time to marshal resistance. As for the latter and more likely outcome, this was predictable, if only the president and his administration had bothered to take note of a new feature of modern warfare, a feature that can be boiled down to a single word: drones.

 

The weaponized drone has utterly transformed today’s battlefield. It is the modern-day equivalent of the machine gun of World War I. Because of the drone, the vastly outnumbered Ukrainian military has been able to withstand the Russian Army of Vladimir Putin for the past four years, not only inflicting far greater casualties on the invaders than expected, but doing so at a cost of pennies to the dollar. As the Ukrainians have shown time and again, a $1,000 drone can destroy a roughly $4.5 million T-90 tank. While the Russians have recently made significant strides in drone warfare, this simple weapon has ensured that they’ve grievously paid for their war both on the battlefield and in the pocketbook.

 

Much of this same dynamic has played out in Iran for the past two months, although without the staggering cost in human lives. Certainly, American and Israeli warplanes can bomb Iran’s military infrastructure at will — and they have, tens of thousands of times — but no amount of bombing can remove the primary retaliatory weapon at its disposal.

 

On the contrary, Iran can continue to mass-produce drones at a fraction of the cost of the weapons being produced by the other side. What Mr. Trump calls his “excursion” in Iran has already cost the United States at least $25 billion, according to the Pentagon, and significantly depleted its stockpile of sophisticated missiles. That depletion is already causing shortages in other strategic arenas and could take years to replenish. All the while, with their cheap and plentiful drones — assembling a top-of-the-line Shahed-136 drone costs Iran an estimated $35,000 — Iran continues to dictate the terms in the Strait of Hormuz choke point.

 

But what about continuing the American naval blockade of the strait or launching a ground assault on Iran’s shores, as Trump has also periodically proposed? Granted, matters might get ugly, but surely this will lead to American victory and an end to the impasse, right? Wrong. Build out an ironclad blockade or put 50,000 American troops on Persian Gulf beachheads, and the Iranians will still retain the ability to fire a drone over their heads to hit an oil-laden tanker and paralyze the global economy anew.

 

The future security of the Persian Gulf now depends on the Trump administration cutting a deal with the regime in Tehran. Despite the president’s assertion that “We have all the cards,” almost the exact opposite is true. It is Mr. Trump, rather, who is increasingly motivated to cut a deal and stanch the growing pain to the U.S. economy — and his collapsing approval ratings — at home. As a result, Iran is likely to try to drag out negotiations and extract greater concessions from Mr. Trump in the process, knowing that time is on its side.

 

Those concessions might involve a lifting of the onerous “maximum pressure” sanctions that Mr. Trump imposed on Iran during his first term and restored early in his second, or reparations for the destruction that the American and Israeli bombing campaign has inflicted. While a chief point of contention will be the stores of enriched uranium that remain, any final settlement will almost certainly leave Iran as the de facto gatekeeper of the Persian Gulf — or, in other words, in a far stronger position than before Mr. Trump started this war.

 

The standoff in the Persian Gulf underscores both a lasting and frightening shift on the modern battlefield. While specific, critically important sites can undoubtedly be made drone-proof — the White House, for example — defensive shielding on a large scale is impossible, as Israel has now discovered with its much-vaunted and much-punctured Iron Dome.

 

Given the simplicity and cost of the weaponized drone, every one of the world’s geographically strategic choke points — the Panama and Suez Canals, the Strait of Gibraltar and the airspace over New York — is now vulnerable to attack by a hostile force that has the ability to build such a weapon and a willingness to suffer the consequences. Alarmist? Think of some of the apocalyptic regimes or murderous guerrilla groups of the recent past — the Baader-Meinhof Gang in West Germany, or the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, or bin Laden’s Al Qaeda — and imagine what they might have done with a $2,000 weaponized drone.

 

When the American attack on Iran was launched in late February, the name chosen for the operation, Epic Fury, seemed an unusually apt description of the temperament of the man ordering it. In pondering where that military misadventure leaves both the United States and the future security of the world, a more fitting name might be Operation Colossal Blunder.

America Is Officially an Empire in Decline

 

Opinion

Guest Essay

America Is Officially an Empire in Decline

 

May 3, 2026

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/03/opinion/iran-us-empire.html

Christopher Caldwell

By Christopher Caldwell

Mr. Caldwell is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties.”

 

The American-Israeli attack on Iran was more than a bad idea; it has turned into a watershed in the decline of the American empire. Some might prefer the word “hegemony” to describe the world order the United States leads, since its flag does not generally fly over the lands it protects or exploits. But the rules are the same: Imperial systems, whatever you call them, last only as long as their means are adequate to their ends. And with the Iran war, President Trump has overextended the empire dangerously.

 

A Middle Eastern military misadventure is one of the last ways a casual observer would have expected Mr. Trump’s presidency to go wrong. The problems he alluded to in all three of his presidential campaigns had mostly resulted from our leaders’ governing beyond their means. At home, proponents of wokeness underestimated the costs and difficulties of micromanaging interactions between groups. Abroad, the mighty American armed forces proved to have no particular talent for democracy promotion, and there was the recent debacle in Iraq to prove it. Overextension was a danger that President Joe Biden contemptuously dismissed. “We’re the United States of America,” he used to say, “and there’s nothing we can’t do.”

 

Mr. Trump, people thought, would be different. For all the grandiosity of the expression “Make America great again,” Trump voters did not expect him to take on new problems. The greatness would be mostly atmospheric — braggadocio, not adventurism. The United States could become greater even if it withdrew to a less expansive sphere of influence. When he proclaimed an updated Monroe Doctrine, refocusing American attention on the Western Hemisphere, retrenchment was what most people thought they were getting. In last November’s National Security Strategy, he added, “The days in which the Middle East dominated American foreign policy in both long-term planning and day-to-day execution are thankfully over.”

 

This was a logical, even an admirable, foreign policy plan. Just as important, history showed it to be workable. Britain had to surrender its far-flung system of colonies and protectorates after World War II. Letting go was often awkward and sometimes left violence in its wake. But except for its ill-fated attempt to join France and Israel in seizing the Suez Canal from Egypt in 1956, Britain did not try to hold territories it could no longer afford. It wound up on reasonably good terms with its former colonial possessions. Its disengagement was a success, though this can be hard to see because what was being managed was decline. Mr. Trump had a chance of pulling off something similar.

 

The assumption in Washington over the past decade has been that the world is engaged in a game of geostrategic musical chairs and the music is about to stop. China may soon overmatch us not just in military-industrial capacity but also in information technology. The world will harden into a new, less favorable geostrategic configuration. This is the last moment to reshape it in America’s favor.

 

At first, Mr. Trump moved to oust China from its strongholds in the Western Hemisphere. Almost as soon as he returned to office, the United States pressured CK Hutchison, a Hong Kong-based multinational conglomerate with connections to China, to sell two ports in the Panama Canal Zone. Venezuela, dependent on China as a market for 80 percent of its oil exports, saw American troops abduct its leader Nicolás Maduro last winter. And Mr. Trump has warned that Cuba, a destination for Chinese investment, “is next.” It will also be better, the thinking goes, if the United States has a more secure foothold near the North Pole (a foothold such as Greenland) when the time comes to divvy up the energy and mineral resources that global warming unlocks there. Whether or not this hemispheric policy is defensible, there is a coherence to it.

 

The attack on Iran was different. It was not a defensive consolidation; it was the assumption of a dangerous, open-ended responsibility. Yes, it might be better if the mullahs fell. But for the United States, an energy-independent country withdrawing to its own hemisphere, this is not a vital interest. War with Iran was not on the radar screen of anyone in the administration just a few months ago.

 

That is because the United States lacks the military means to impose its will on Iran in a long conflict. In 1991 a million soldiers from more than 40 countries were needed to reverse the invasion of Kuwait carried out by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, a country less sophisticated than Iran and a fraction of its size. When Iran and Iraq fought each other to a standstill in the 1980s, deaths ran into the hundreds of thousands on each side. The United States would have to send a significant portion of its armed forces — which total only 1.3 million troops — to stand a chance of subduing Iran, and that force, if successful, would have to stay for a long time.

 

The argument can be made that the United States no longer depends on mustering huge armies: It has sophisticated missiles and other standoff weapons. But those weapons are needed to defend allies and interests in other theaters, and the United States is depleting them. According to reporting in The Times, it has already used 1,100 of its long-range stealth cruise missiles, earmarked for potential conflicts in Asia, leaving just 1,500 in the stockpile, and fired an additional 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles, about 10 times as many as the military buys in an average year. American leaders have been scolding their European allies for years about the inadequacy of their fighting forces. But if one measures America’s military might against our pretensions rather than our G.D.P., it is just as inadequate.

 

It would be wrong to say the United States is trapped in the war it started. It has options. But it is now going to pay a very steep price, no matter which of them it chooses. It can desist in Iran — having demonstrated, for no good reason, that its military is far less dominant than the world had assumed. Or it can draw resources from theaters that are of vital national interest, such as Europe and East Asia, to fund what the president refers to as his Iranian “excursion.” Or it can resort to the extreme military options Mr. Trump darkly alluded to in social media posts starting in early April, which will redound to the everlasting shame of the country he leads. The United States stands to lose its reputation, its friends or its soul.

 

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel urged this war on Mr. Trump because he, too, recognized the musical-chairs logic of the moment. Once the music stops, the United States may lack the firepower to protect Israel from its neighbors in the traditional manner and will probably lack the inclination. Ironically, the war’s catastrophic outcome shows Mr. Netanyahu’s basic understanding to have been sound: Israel’s prospects for enlisting the United States in such anachronistic adventures were dwindling. Mr. Trump’s gullibility provided Mr. Netanyahu with a last chance.

 

It is tempting to ask where in the process of imperial decline the United States now finds itself. It certainly has elements in common with Britain a century ago: deindustrializing, overcommitted, complacent. On the eve of World War I, Britain was dependent on Germany for industrial and even military technology — and unwilling to re-examine the free-trade system on which German supremacy had been built. By the eve of World War II, Britain was essentially bankrupt. There are parallels in America’s dependence on China today.

 

The skepticism about American hegemony that led Americans to turn to Mr. Trump was a healthy one. If a globalist system built on free trade, democracy promotion and mass migration is so great, Trump voters asked, then why have we had to borrow $35 trillion since we took it up? That’s a genuinely good question. Mr. Trump was the perfect candidate for Americans who suspected something had gone wrong with their elites. His argument, basically, was that American-led globalism was so beneficial to politicians that once in power, they would defend it even against their voters, no matter what they said while campaigning. Events, alas, have proved him right.