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At The American Prospect, David Dayen [ [link removed] ]reports [ [link removed] ] that Spirit Airlines shut down on May 2, stranding passengers across the country and eliminating 17,000 jobs, and that the airline’s collapse could be traced directly to jet fuel prices that had more than doubled since the war in Iran began. The war has cost an estimated $25 billion so far, roughly 50 times what a government rescue of Spirit would have required.
Spirit’s own bankruptcy filing cited fuel price spikes that proved too much for its available liquidity to absorb, and Dayen noted that jet fuel accounts for between 25% and 35% of airline expenses, making budget carriers with an identity tied to low fares particularly exposed.
A $500 million government rescue fell apart after major shareholders including Citadel, Ares Management, and PIMCO concluded that liquidation would return more of their investment than the terms on offer, while the major airlines quietly opposed any rescue that might preserve a competitor.
Dayen documents how a faction of corporate Democrats and financiers responded by blaming Biden-era antitrust enforcement, an argument he methodically dismantled, noting that the Justice Department, not the FTC, handled the JetBlue-Spirit case, that Spirit never claimed financial distress as grounds for the merger, and that a successful JetBlue merger would itself have ended Spirit two years earlier.
He warns that without breaking up the Big Four’s dominance of gates and routes, Spirit will be the first in a cascade of airline bankruptcies
If You Read One More Thing: Second Circuit Rejects ICE’s Mandatory Detention Policy
At Politico, Kyle Cheney [ [link removed] ]covers [ [link removed] ] the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruling against the Trump administration’s mandatory detention policy, the first appellate court to reject an approach that has generated tens of thousands of emergency lawsuits across the country.
In a 3-0 decision, the panel found that ICE’s policy rested on a flawed and unprecedented reading of decades-old immigration law, and warned that the administration’s interpretation would amount to the broadest mass detention-without-bond mandate in the nation’s history for millions of noncitizens.
The mandatory detention policy stems from a memo signed in July 2025 by ICE Director Todd Lyons. It reinterprets a 1996 immigration law to declare that any noncitizen who entered the US without lawful admission is an “applicant for admission” and therefore subject to mandatory detention, with no right to a bond hearing, while their deportation case proceeds.
The opinion was written by Judge Joseph Bianco, a Trump appointee, who was joined by a Clinton appointee and a Biden appointee, and it places the Second Circuit in direct conflict with the Fifth and Eighth Circuits, which have sided with the administration, a split widely expected to send the dispute to the Supreme Court.
Despite the lopsided national count, the Second Circuit’s own district courts had until this ruling been among the most favorable to the administration on mandatory detention, with seven New York-based judges, including the only Biden appointee in the country to do so, having previously ruled in the government’s favor.
NATO’s AI Intelligence Gap
At Military Times, Nikki Wentling [ [link removed] ]looks [ [link removed] ] at a senior NATO official’s warning that the alliance lacks the policy frameworks needed to share AI-generated intelligence across its 32 member states, leaving military decision-makers dependent on exceptions and workarounds.
“This past year has made one thing crystal clear: The security environment remains contested, and the advantage belongs to those who combine unity of purpose with the speed of action,” said Maj. Gen. Paul Lynch, NATO deputy assistant secretary general for intelligence, at the annual GEOINT Symposium in Aurora, Colorado.
Lynch said the challenge grows significantly more complex when intelligence is processed by AI, because sharing it requires determining whose model to use, on what training data, with what documented assumptions, and at what confidence threshold in what context.
He has called for a single, common AI model and interface to be used by commercial and national partners across the alliance, and warned that investing in defense capability without matching investment in intelligence amounts to capability without awareness.
Lynch noted that all NATO members have for the first time met the 2% GDP defense spending target in 2025, a 20% increase in overall spending, and that allies have pledged at The Hague summit to reach 5% by 2035, a figure he said seemed like science fiction just three years earlier.
Deep Dive: What Mali’s Collapse Tells the United States About the Sahel
A new analysis by Oge Onubogu, director and senior fellow of the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, [ [link removed] ]argues [ [link removed] ] that the security crisis in Africa’s western Sahel has entered a dangerous new phase with unprecedented and coordinated attacks in military-controlled areas and urban centers of Mali by al Qaeda-linked militant groups and Tuareg separatist forces.
The Sahel already accounted for more than half of all terrorism-related deaths globally in 2024 and continued to dominate the following year among the 10 countries most affected by terrorism. Even against that grim backdrop, the scale and coordination of what followed is striking.
The attacks on April 25 and 26 were the largest joint insurgent-separatist offensive in the country since 2012, killing Mali’s defense minister and forcing the withdrawal of Russia’s Africa Corps from key territory, including the major northern city of Kidal, which Wagner Group mercenaries only captured in November 2023. The speed of that reversal underscores a deeper truth: Tactical military wins have been masking years of structural deterioration. The Sahel’s governing military juntas, which seized power across Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger between 2020 and 2023, have promised improved security and delivered the opposite.
Those coups were not simply power grabs. They emerged from genuine public frustration with escalating violence, pervasive corruption, and a surge of anticolonial sentiment directed largely at France, which was the region’s primary security partner and had visibly failed to contain the crisis. Russia moved quickly to fill the vacuum, positioning itself as a champion of the juntas’ nationalist posturing on sovereignty while offering what Onubogu describes as purely transactional security arrangements. The junta gained regime protection and counterinsurgency support in return for Russian access to strategic resources and geopolitical leverage across the Sahel.
That model has produced isolated tactical victories. Wagner Group mercenaries, operating alongside Malian forces, did capture Kidal in 2023. But the gains could not be sustained, and the reasons why matter enormously for any outside power now looking to engage. The heavy-handedness of Russia’s military operations and the Malian junta’s repression, including banning political parties and delaying political transitions, alienated important segments of the population and eroded the junta’s legitimacy, allowing insurgents to present themselves as an alternative to a failing state. Onubogu notes that Russia’s broader geopolitical commitments, particularly the war in Ukraine, have also limited its ability to commit resources to the Sahel, a constraint the United States should consider carefully given its own ongoing war with Iran.
The adversaries the Malian state now faces are not a single terrorist insurgency but a layered network of armed groups whose coordination has grown more sophisticated. The most prominent include JNIM, an amalgam of militant groups aligned with al Qaeda, and the separatist Tuareg-led Azawad Liberation Front. These groups had increasingly synchronized their operations, combining jihadist ideology with local grievances and separatist aspirations in ways that purely military approaches had consistently failed to address.
The Trump administration’s early moves in the region tracked the Russian error closely. It lifted sanctions on Wagner-linked junta officials, has been nearing a deal to resume intelligence surveillance flights over Mali, and sent a senior State Department official to Bamako in February. Senior Bureau Official Nick Checker told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the administration would pursue “a disciplined, interest-driven strategy rooted in flexible realism” and would prioritize “enabling and cooperating with African nations with demonstrated commitment and capacity to take the lead in addressing their security gaps while advancing core US national interests.”
Onubogu acknowledges that Checker has gestured toward deeper structural factors, noting his testimony cited regional and cultural dynamics, weak governance, lack of economic opportunity, and unresolved regional disputes as conditions fueling conflict, before immediately characterizing them as challenges the United States cannot unilaterally address. Onubogu pushes back on that framing directly, arguing that in conjunction with legitimate local representatives, those challenges could be surmountable, and that declining to engage with them is not pragmatism. Rather, it is a recipe for repeating Russia’s failures.
The geographic scope of the recent attacks in Mali, the direct targeting of senior regime officials, and the coordination between jihadist and separatist forces reflects a change in the operational capability of the insurgents that have been building for years and spreading across the western Sahel. American policymakers have been caught off guard, Onubogu writes, but the window to shape outcomes has not yet closed. Doing so, however, would require the United States to pursue a genuinely multidimensional strategy, one that struck a balance between engaging with the region’s military regimes and insisting on democratic values, and that honestly confronts anti-Western sentiments rather than simply recycling the same sovereignty talking points that Russia has already discredited.
Show Us the Receipts
At Inkstick, Jeffrey E. Stern [ [link removed] ]has published [ [link removed] ] an excerpt from his new book The Warhead, tracing the origins of the Reagan administration’s preemptive strike doctrine. Through the signing of National Security Decision Directive 138, the Reagan-era White House created a legal framework authorizing military action against states that sponsored terrorist proxies, even before those states have directly attacked the United States. Stern traced the directive’s contested development through heated debates among Reagan’s advisors, then followed its application through a series of Libyan-backed attacks across Europe, including the 1985 Rome and Vienna airport massacres, building toward the 1986 bombing of Libya.
Anna-Christina Schmidl [ [link removed] ]reports [ [link removed] ] on the collapse of medical evacuation systems in Gaza, where patients requiring specialized care have been largely cut off from treatment abroad. Only 11,124 patients have been evacuated since the start of hostilities, against a pre-war rate of 50 to 100 daily departures. In the first two weeks of April alone, only 85 patients were evacuated. The WHO suspended operations entirely after an Israeli strike killed a contractor, and human rights organizations including Gisha and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel are still pressing Israel’s Supreme Court to restore access for the more than 18,500 patients awaiting transfer.
At The World, Jamie Fullerton covers [ [link removed] ] Mawlynnong, a village of about 600 people in India’s Meghalaya state that has earned the title of Asia’s cleanest village and attracts up to 1,000 tourists a day during peak periods. The Indian press bestowed the title in 2003, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi amplified it in a 2015 radio address. In January, the village committee voted to ban tourists on Sundays so residents could attend church and reclaim quiet rural life. Fullerton has found that the decision has drawn attention as a model of sustainable tourism management, even as the village continues to profit from its long-standing reputation for cleanliness.
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Critical State is written by Inkstick Media in collaboration with The World.
The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news, and insights from PRX and GBH.
Inkstick Media reports on how security decisions shape everyday life, following the money, power, and consequences of war.
Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

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