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In this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his thoughts on the sudden recall of 12 B-1 bombers from their base in the south of England to the mainland of the United States. He asks what prompted the move and why the Trump administration refuses to learn vital military lessons from Ukraine.
Then, David is joined by Reihan Salam, the president of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, to discuss why American cities cost so much and often deliver so little. They explore how some urban governments waste public money, how cities could provide better services to residents, and why the rise of populism is doing little to solve Americans’ actual problems.
Finally, David ends the episode with a discussion of Every War Must End by Fred Charles Iklé.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Reihan Salam: Well, David, I actually don’t believe that it is Donald Trump who is the only political figure who will have been discredited by this moment. When you’re looking at the Democratic coalition right now, I see a lot of anger and frustration with how people see their leadership class as well. So I think that this is going to be this big generational turnover that could go very badly.
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David Frum: Hello, and welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Reihan Salam, president of the Manhattan Institute, and we’ll discuss how American cities can deliver better government to their residents at more reasonable costs than they now do. This week’s book will be a masterpiece of strategic thinking: Every War Must End by Fred Charles Iklé. But before either the dialogue or the book discussion, some opening thoughts on a news story you may have seen this past weekend: the sudden recall of 12 B-1 bombers from their base in the south of England to the mainland of the United States.
As so often with Trump-administration military stories, there may be less, or there may be more, to this story than meets the eye. The Trump administration is staffed by people who look for any opportunity and any excuse to recall military assets from allies, and especially from European allies, back to the American mainland. This recall may be something that people in the Trump administration wanted to do anyway, for their own reason. And we’ll find out more about that in the days ahead.
But the first reports may also be true—that there was some sudden threat to these bombers that necessitated their removal from England back to the American mainland. What might that threat be? Either a terrorist attack in Britain, or else possibly a drone-and-missile attack like those that have been experienced by American forces in the Persian Gulf. We don’t know.
But what we do know is that through the Persian Gulf, the Iranians have had great success, much greater success than as first reported, pushing back American forces from their perimeters. The American naval base in Bahrain was badly damaged by Iranian drones and missiles.
As we have seen in Ukraine, suddenly individuals far from the battle scene controlling these small, comparatively inexpensive new technologies can inflict tremendous damage anywhere on the enemy’s territory. The Ukrainians have done it to Russia, and the Russians have done it to the Ukrainians.
We may be living through a revolution in military technology as dramatic as when the advent of gunpowder made obsolete the knight on horseback and the castle made of stone. The United States is poorly adapted to this revolution, and especially poorly adapted under the Trump administration. There are deep reasons why the United States is poorly adapted to this revolution. The United States has made an enormous investment in very costly, very sophisticated platforms: bombers, fighters, aircraft carriers, tanks, equipment. Machinery that moves aboveground, on the land, on the ocean, in the air. And it is reluctant to accept that this enormous investment may now be obsolete, and obsolete in ways that empower weaker adversaries who master the new technology of drone warfare first.
The United States is also poorly adapted because of the way America finances and approves its military technology. The congressional system—the iron triangle of lobbyists and administrations and Congress—tends to regard weapons as not just tools of war, but also as tools of economic development back at home, and oftentimes as income-support strategies for retired members of the military. And so the United States invests very deeply in systems that are driven by domestic needs and not by the needs of the battlefield.
In the Trump era, these difficulties are augmented by two special problems. The first is the nation that is the pioneer and leader in drone warfare is Ukraine. And the United States under President Trump is terribly reluctant, brutally reluctant, to learn lessons of war from Ukraine. President Trump, Vice President Vance, and others around them decided early that the Ukrainians were losers, that they were doomed, that they were dependents, they were welfare recipients, they were moochers, they deserved nothing, and they had nothing to offer. Now it turns out they may be the leading military innovator of the modern era, and suddenly it’s very embarrassing to turn around and say, maybe these guys, of whom the Trump administration has so little good to say, maybe they have something to offer that America needs. So the reluctance to learn lessons from Ukraine—and the eagerness to fire the generals and admirals most ready to learn the lessons from Ukraine—that has handicapped the United States.
There’s another handicap in the drone-warfare era, and that is ideological. Secretary Hegseth is a man with a vision of the military as a tool for waging culture war, not real battlefield warfare. He has inveighed against troops who wear beards, against troops who are overweight, against troops who don’t have enough testosterone. He wants to promote troops that look a certain way, that can do certain physical exercises. It is said in a new Rolling Stone profile of just-retired Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll that Hegseth’s vision is of an army that is ready for Instagram, not ready for war. And as he systematically goes through the army, firing those generals who want to learn the lessons of the new, Hegseth has left the United States vulnerable to the lessons of the new.
My wife’s grandfather was the founder of the Canadian [Royal Army] Armoured Corps. He’s contested through his life with the old and outdated proponents of cavalry warfare. And he lamented: There’s something about senior military command that has the effect of transforming brain into bone. Something like that seems to be going on in the higher reaches of the Trump Defense Department. And it’s happened at a time when we desperately need all the brains we can get.
As I said, there may be less or more to this story of B-1 bombers being recalled than first reported, but it is a portent of something ominous in the changing world of national security. Something ominous that this administration and this Department of War, so called, is uniquely unready to meet.
And now my dialogue with Reihan Salam.
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Frum: Reihan Salam grew up in Brooklyn, the son of immigrants, and went through New York City’s public schools. He started out doing research for David Brooks at The New York Times, worked as a producer at NBC News, and became an editor at The Atlantic and National Review. In 2008, he and Ross Douthat co-authored Grand New Party: an argument that the GOP, the Republican Party, should do more to appeal to working-class voters. In 2018, he published Melting Pot or Civil War?, arguing for an immigration system built on skills. In 2019, he became the fifth president of the Manhattan Institute, carrying a warning to all conservatives that a conservatism that does not speak to cities will be marginalized.
Canadian listeners: Be aware that Reihan also possesses an expert knowledge of Canadian politics.
Reihan is an old and dear friend, and it’s a pleasure to welcome him to The David Frum Show. Reihan, welcome.
Reihan Salam: Thank you for having me, David. It’s a pleasure to be with you.
Frum: Well, let’s focus on your day job of city government. Back in the Reagan ’80s, there was a bumper sticker, a good-natured conservative joke: Thank God we don’t get all the government we pay for. I don’t know that New Yorkers or San Franciscans or Angelinos—they pay for a lot of government, a lot. And I think most of the inhabitants of these overwhelmingly Democrat blue cities would like to see more reward for the money they pay. This has been the work of the Manhattan Institute.
It looks like in 2026 the country is going to veer to the left; maybe quite far to the left. State government, local government in these places is already pretty far to the left. Without telling anyone on the left not to be on the left—they wouldn’t listen—but how do people in New York, in Los Angeles, in San Francisco, in similar cities, get more of the government they’re already paying for?
Salam: Well, fundamentally, when I think about a dense, large city, I do believe that it is reasonable to expect that you’re going to have a larger government. Density creates enormous opportunities; it creates enormous productivity. But it also creates demons of density as well, when you’re thinking about the need for more stringent policing, when you’re thinking about the other questions of urban management, public health. When you’re thinking about drainage, when you’re thinking about environmental pollutants. Any number of questions. So my starting point is that it is reasonable to expect that you’re going to have a more energetic government in these places. You need a more energetic government to fully unlock that potential of urban life.
The problem, as you suggest, is that also that wealth that you create in these dynamic, productive cities also becomes a target for extraction. And though you might have the starting point as, Hey, we need to have a capable government to solve problems X, Y, and Z, another thing that can often happen, depending on the political dynamic in the city and whether or not you have meaningful competition and what have you—and we can get more into that—but basically, you have this dynamic where in many cases that wealth is being extracted by interest groups that become really potent and entrenched.
So think about it this way. New York City employs 300,000 city employees. That is in some ways an undercount, because you have a lot of other people who are employed indirectly, who are subsidized by city and state government in various other ways. That is already a very potent political constituency unto itself. People who have a vested interest not only in a city government that is large, but also a city government that is offering very favorable terms of employment to its various employees.
What do I mean by favorable term of employment? Well, let’s say you don’t necessarily want a very high degree of accountability. Let’s say you want very strong tenure rules. Let’s say you want the job to be a more attractive or appealing job according to various metrics, so that the job actually becomes more attractive than the equivalent job in the private sector. So you may well get featherbedding over time. You may well employ more people than you need to, strictly speaking. Or, you know, though, technically, we have civil service hiring and notionally we’re hiring people on a meritocratic basis, but it could be that that’s not quite how it happens. That you’re growing the city-employment rolls because you’re, again, trying to achieve some larger political objective.
In New York City—and I think this applies to many other cities as well—you could think of this as the friction not between Republicans and Democrats, but call it Tammany Hall and reform. Tammany Hall being the politics of patronage, the politics of using public dollars, not necessarily solely to achieve a public purpose, but using public dollars to entrench and grow a given political coalition. And then, the party of reform—that again could come with a Democratic label or a Republican label or whichever label—that comes in to say, Okay, we’re going to take away the punch bowl. You know, We are going to be the ones who are going to refocus city government on what matters, on delivering efficiency. And I think that that is this oscillation of power that has been part of the American urban story. But it’s not unique to dynamics within the city. It also is shaped by dynamics outside of it, and larger cultural and political forces.
Frum: I was in New York this past weekend. At one point in the weekend I was crawling along westward, inch by inch, on a Midtown street and observing: The reason the street was moving so slowly is because it was a three-lane street. One lane was being used for driving, and two lanes were being used for cheap parking. Who made that decision that the city should give two-thirds of the street away as a subsidized parking lot to the people using the street? So that’s a giveaway to somebody, or more or less randomly chosen people, but it’s still a giveaway. And I think everyone who drives along the street must have had the same question that I’ve done. And yet obviously it’s impossible to do anything about it, because there it is: Two-thirds of the street is used for subsidized parking.
Salam: Well, we also know from the great scholar of parking, Donald Shoup, that actually quite a bit of that traffic consists of people who are looking for a parking spot. So, in a way, there’s many levels to this perversity.
But, part of it is a point, it’s an observation that kind of answers itself. So when you become used to the entitlement, the expectation that you’re going to have free parking, moving from one equilibrium—which is a very painful and damaging one, that causes all kinds of waste, all kinds of economic damage—to a new one that may well be much more efficient, but you’re not necessarily going to be thinking, Think about all this time that I’ve saved. I feel so blessed, I feel so fortunate. What you’re going to think about is that: I once had an entitlement to free parking on the street, and now I don’t. Including if you’re not someone who drives especially often. You just could think in the back of your head, Aha, I once had this entitlement.
And in New York City, and in many other cities besides, you also have these bespoke arrangements. You have what you might think of as these hereditary rights that you gain over time. So if you’re looking at many public employees in New York City, in many cases, they will use placards to identify themselves as public employees. And one reason they do that is to ensure that they will not receive tickets. Because the idea is that if you work in parking enforcement, if you are someone who is looking to a fellow public employee, you will treat them differently than you treat other people. Now, that hereditary privilege alone is something that actually has enormous effects on the flow of traffic.
But it’s just one of many ways in which, when you’re thinking about any city, you’re not just thinking about a place that is run through cool rationality. You know, how are we thinking about the technocratic management of this urban landscape? You are thinking about traditions; you are thinking about this deference; you are thinking about this exercise of power in a lot of other ways that don’t actually rise to the level of being covered by the newspaper or even being understood in some data-rich kind of way. These are just the ways that things work that degrade the quality of life, but that people tolerate until they don’t.
Frum: As blue cities and blue jurisdictions swing further to the left after November of 2026, which is what looks likely to happen, they are insisting that the solution is to capture more revenue, and especially to capture it from the very richest people. And so their projects—you see them in Washington state and other places—to impose an extra-heavy level of surtaxes on the very richest people in the jurisdiction, thinking that that’s the way out. That seems an ideological commitment. And it seems like a strange commitment for subnational governments to have, because it’s a country in which it’s very easy to move. It’s a world in which people have less and less reason that they have to be in any particular place. But it seems to be a move that urban governments are determined to make in 2026.
Salam: I am a great believer in the potential of our great cities, and so I do believe that they are very attractive. They have many advantages, particularly when you’re thinking about an aging society. It is not difficult to imagine a world in which younger people in an aging society want to cluster with other younger people. So those are advantages, and I think a lot of people are taking those advantages and saying, Gosh, we can tax much more, we can allow the quality of services to degrade further. And that’s going to be fine; there will still be the stickiness of economic activity. I believe that’s a mistake, even though I do believe in that power of urban concentration, urban agglomeration, urban productivity. Because, as you suggest, I think that there are other forces on the other end. There are other cities that are emerging that are themselves competitive.
But the larger point I would make is this, David. We have been living through a period of fiscal expansion and fiscal incontinence. You know that our deficits are above 6 percent of GDP right now. This is at a time when unemployment is 4.2 percent, quite low by historical standards. And yet, even then, we have this enormous deficit. And that deficit trickles into state and local governments. It trickles in, because you have your city budget funded by city taxes, but then you have your portion of the city budget funded by transfers from state governments. And then you have the proportion of the city and state governments funded by federal dollars as well. And this is really, really important to understand. Now you know as well as anyone, David, that a huge driver of employment in any American city, big or small, is what we affectionately refer to as “eds and meds.” The education system and the health system. These are two systems that are very heavily subsidized. The health system in particular is very heavily subsidized by federal dollars and, might I add, borrowed federal dollars.
New York City might be a somewhat extreme case, but it’s not unique. But in New York City, 52 percent of residents are on either Medicaid or something called the Essential Plan, which is a Medicaid-like publicly subsidized health system. Now we can debate whether or not that’s strictly necessary. I would argue that it’s not. That in fact, if we had a narrower safety net, we would have more effective safety-net programs, and you’d have a lot of other folks who would find private health insurance, let’s say, and then you would have a somewhat lower burden, tax burden, and yada yada. Let’s come back to that for a moment. But fundamentally, you’re looking at a city that is a very dynamic city with a very dynamic private economy.
But if you’re actually looking at employment, if you’re actually looking at the biggest, fastest-growing private-sector job in New York City, but also in many other cities besides, it is home health aids. Now that is a private-sector job in a sense, that you are not literally a public employment, but it is also a publicly subsidized job. And it’s a job in which you, David Frum, or I, Reihan Salam, if I were on a subsidized program and I have a subsidized home health aid, I’m not paying with my own dollars. And so in some cases, you might not actually have someone who is offering a service with value commensurate to what the public sector is paying for that service. That is something you are seeing more and more in American political economy, and particularly in our cities.
Frum: Okay. Now I invite you to imagine a meeting that you are taking with one of the more leftish crop of new urban officials, local officials, in the country after of November of ’26. And the meeting begins with the person you’re talking to saying: Reihan Salam, you are a self-identified conservative. Conservatives are very out of style. A lot of the problems that that our city faces are driven by the Trump administration: its many forms of interference in our lives that were unasked for. Why should anybody listen to you? What can you possibly have to say that’s of value to me as I cope with my problems and my constituents?
Salam: Well, I believe that fundamentally, whatever the partisan label, there are some underlying structural forces that are going to come to bite relatively soon. If you look at the urban-policy revolution that unfolded in the late ’80s, 1990s, 2000s, the big insight was not some grand ideological insight. It was this—it was that when you’re looking at a lot of major cities that had for many decades been begging the federal government for money—Give us more money to solve this problem. My old colleague Fred Siegel called this the riot ideology. If you do not give us money, there are going to be riots. You know, we’re not going to be able to control it; it’s going to be really bad. And therefore, you just kept going and rattled the tin cup, begging for more money from the federal government. The problem is when you have a federal government that starts to tighten its belt by necessity, then suddenly you’re going to have a more discerning federal government that’s going to be thinking about: Where exactly am I going to be applying these subsidy dollars? And it’s not necessarily going to be in a place that is not really politically contested.
During the migrant crisis that unfolded during the Biden presidency, Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, was begging the Democratic president, Joe Biden, to rescue New York City by infusing more federal dollars into the city. And the Biden administration said no. The Biden administration said, You have a right to shelter. You have a ton of other policies that actually have exacerbated this crisis in your city. And by the way, we’re not really concerned about losing the five boroughs of New York City as voters in our upcoming presidential election, so we’re not going to be all that concerned about you. And that’s in a case where they were quite happy, as President Trump is, to run an enormous federal deficit.
So basically what happened is you had an alternative to tin-cup politics. You had a group of mayors who said, We have to solve some of these problems ourselves. So you don’t have to listen to me. All you have to do is look at your bottom line. All you have to do is look at the fact that you’re going to start experiencing, if you haven’t already, very stringent budget constraints, and voters to whom you’ve been making a lot