Why American Cities Cost So Much And Deliver So Little

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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.

[Music]

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 of promises that are going to be very hard to fulfill given this new fiscal landscape.

Frum: Can we talk about schools for a moment? I mean, you in your own life owe so much to the schools as ways to identify and promote talent. And so much of your rise to your eminence was achieved because of the talent scouting that occurred in the New York public-school system. New York and other cities seem to be less interested in doing that. In fact, they seem to want to break a lot of the mechanisms for finding talent and helping talent forward. Why does that happen? Is there anything that can be done to change the cities? Or maybe the cities aren’t even wrong. Maybe the talent-scouting mechanism is too exclusionary and unfair.

Salam: There’s so many things going on that are making our cities today really different than they were 30 years ago. So, narrowly on the education point, you know this as well as I do, David, in many big, urban public-school systems, it increasingly feels as though the system is being run for the benefit of the system’s employees than for its notional beneficiary students. That’s not because anyone is sinister. It’s because you’re seeing declining enrollment. That’s kind of one thing that is going on across jurisdictions. But also, you have the system that employs an enormous number of people who are themselves people who might feel economically fragile. These are people where some of them absolutely could find more remunerative employment outside of these public systems, but some of them are people who might not be able to find more remunerative employment outside of these systems. What we’ve been doing in the United States as a whole since the 1970s is, we’ve been increasing the amount of staff in our school systems. That is: We’re hiring more teachers, but we’re hiring more paraprofessionals as well. So if you’re looking at the staffing ratios, how many students do you have relative to the number of adult employees of the school system? You’ve seen a really dramatic change over this time.

And so if you’re looking to people who are employed in public education, they will often say that, well: Look, education is part of our mission. But we also are providing meals. We are providing counseling. We have students in some cases who are homeless, who are suffering from various other maladies. And so we are essentially social-service bureaucracies in miniature that are serving this troubled population.

Now, you know, we can get into that specifically, whether or not that’s a sound argument. But also think about a middle-class parent who, as you were suggesting before, has options. They don’t necessarily have to enroll their children in that school system. They can move elsewhere and what have you. That system that is leading with the idea that, well, Look, education schmeducation. Yes, this or that might be true—but how dare you not appreciate this incredibly profound social mission that we have? And by the way, gosh, you’re right, maybe we’re not doing as well as we might on the educational front, but that’s because of segregation and inequality and various other problems of cosmic injustice that we, of course, in our small little school system, can’t possibly solve on our own. So it becomes this incredible buck-passing to help cement the political coalition that allows for these failures to unfold.

And again, there are some great people in these systems. There are some excellent schools within these systems. But the underlying logic is one that leads you to more excuse-making and away from accountability.

Frum: Tell me what is wrong with the argument I’m about to present. A historic idea in the New York system—long ago, a generation ago and more—was, students in the school system are going to be disproportionately poor. Some of them are going to be very talented people who might not have on their own, from their own family resources, the opportunities that their talent could use, could benefit from, and could benefit all of us. So we’re going to do talent-sifting. We’re going to look for those talented 30 percent, and we’re going to promote them and fast-track them and help them to get to college and to discover things in themselves that the people in their lives, who they grow up with, may not recognize for them. That’s been a view in the past. It’s increasingly challenged. And we’ve all been reading with fascination the recent eruption between a famous New York Times writer and her daughter. The New York Times writer said to the daughter, You’re going to go to the same school as everybody else. And the daughter said, You have the ability to get me into a better school. Why won’t you help me? And the mother said, It’s a point of principle. What is wrong with what the mother is saying? And what is potentially right about the old way of doing it, or vice versa?

Salam: Well, I believe the mother in that case was right to say that: My daughter has been failed by these schools, and there is something broken. Where she goes wrong is with her view as to what the right structural solution would be.

So this is my answer to any number of dilemmas facing American cities, and it’s this: When you are an American city that has people who want to solve problems for you at very low fiscal cost to you, you should let them do it. What do we mean by that? So, one thing we hear again and again—you hear this in Los Angeles, New York City, Boston, San Francisco, of course, any number of cities—we have an acute housing crisis. And that’s true. We have an acute housing crisis in many American communities. But what you also have is a crisis that could present its own solution.

In New York City, asking rents are so high for the tiny number of units that are available that there are people crazy enough that they will come along and say, I will build private rental housing, if you let me do it and if you allow me to charge what the market will bear. You might think they’re mad. I might think they’re mad, because there’s so many other barriers that you have to overcome, so many political obstacles. But if you let them do it, they would do that.

In a similar vein, there are people who run school systems in New York City, in the five boroughs of New York City, but also in many other urban jurisdictions besides, who will say: Hey, I’m running a charter network. Give me a fraction. And by the way, they’d rather have more money, but they’ll say, Hey, give me 80 percent of what you’re giving to your public district schools for my public charter school, where I don’t have the same collective-bargaining rules and I have greater flexibility. And I can educate those students much more effectively. There are people who will solve that problem for you if you just let them solve it for you. So, to my friends on the left, what I would say is that, you have bigger fish to fry. You know, maybe you want to address the Middle East. You know, you want to address kind of various other problems. Why don’t you allow these other people to educate young people? And do it competitively and at reasonable cost. Why don’t you let these other people address this acute housing crisis, and you can focus, you know, much like the Queen of England, and now the King of England, is able to serve as defender of the faith and do other things, the magic and mysticism of kind of any any form of government. Why don’t you focus on those things and then allow these other people to solve the problem?

Frum: I’m smiling at your joke. The new mayor of New York should focus on solving the problems of the Middle East and let volunteers deliver schools and build housing for him.

Salam: Because they will do it. They will come along and do it if you actually just create a system.

Frum: And because, well, he’s got a lot to say about the Middle East, of course, and everyone there wants to hear from him.

Salam: And that seems to be, you know, kind of a burning passion for him and for many other people. And again, I might disagree with where he lands in the Middle East, but we’ll leave that aside.

Frum: But he’s probably pretty harmlessly occupied talking about it.

Salam: He might actually do less damage if he simply said, I’m going to actually serve as an ambassador for—I’m going to serve as a mascot for this or that political cause. But why don’t you create the systems that allow other actors, including in some cases public actors, to do good work.

Frum: Well, you mentioned housing, and that was where I wanted to go next.

You and I come from a tradition where we believe if you let private builders build tens of thousands of new units per year, even if all of those units are aimed at the top of the market, simply the presence of those tens of thousands a year of new units all aimed at the top of the market is going to push down prices all the way through the market. But that seems to be, at least in the city of New York, a discarded, rejected idea. And they say that if you build lots of units at the top of market, they will only serve the top of the market, and everything else will remain unchanged by the arrival of all of these new units. Can you speak up on behalf of what we used to think of as the basic economics of housing, against the new idea that no matter how many units you build at the top, it won’t change anything else for anybody else?

Salam: It’s very simple. If you—right now, the way that we are approaching housing in many of our cities is, you’re saying that the desire to build private rental housing is suspect. It is something that is very questionable. We will allow you to do it if you do 15 other things to prove to us that you’re not actually doing something sinister or dubious or questionable or whatever else. So one thing we’ll say is that we’ll allow you to build private rental housing if you set aside some number of those new units to represent permanently affordable housing stock. That is to say—if you set it aside so that people with incomes below a certain threshold can afford these units, and then if you’ll do that on a kind of ongoing basis, then we’ll allow you to build some other private housing.

But the funny thing there is that what you’re effectively doing is that these people who want to build more housing supply, you’re taxing them. You’re saying that: We’re actually going to limit the number of new market-rate units you can build, so that you can set aside this number of units that are mandatory below-market, affordable. So actually, you make it even harder to solve the bigger problem, which is that demand is outstripping supply.

Then you could say, Well, we’ll allow you to build it, but you need to offer very high wages to the people building it. Because actually somehow this work, relative to all forms of work otherwise, needs to be put in some separate bucket. And we don’t trust those workers to be able to come to some arrangement with you, because you exert power—any number of, there are all of these other side deals that are imposed so that you actually see to it that the amount of new housing is a trickle.

Now, actually, how it really works, when it works, is this: You allow a bunch of speculators to build, and indeed to overbuild, so that actually they eventually come to a point where they lose their shirts. And they, as investors, lose their shirts. It’s not the city government that loses its shirt through a subsidy; it’s the investors build and build and build until you’ve satiated the demand. And then, okay, lo and behold, we built a little bit too much. That’s what happened in Austin, Texas. Austin, Texas, built an enormous amount of housing, rents went down, and then developers stopped building new housing, because then they’re waiting for that amount of new supply to be absorbed by the marketplace. So I’m not of the view that if you allow private developers to build a lot of new housing, they’re going to build so much that New York City is going to become as inexpensive to rent an apartment as in Dubuque. That’s not going to happen.

But you will mitigate this acute problem we have right now, number one. And number two, you’ll have a bigger tax base. You will actually have a more prosperous, thriving city, which is a good thing unto itself. And I think that there are some folks on the left who recognize that you need to build more, but I call this immaculate-conception progressivism. They say that, well, you can build more—provided you do it in exactly the right way, in exquisitely moral ways. By my exquisite moral standards. I’m not going to let you do it in some laissez-faire fashion, where the idea is that you build it to the point where you lose your shirt. I’m going to do it with you as a partner. Side by side, we will do this together, and I will essentially dictate to you exactly what it ought to look like.

And I understand that there’s some subtleties here. There’s some complexities; there’s a question of getting from here to there. I get all of that. But I think that, fundamentally, if there are people who are willing, through their animal spirits, to address the problem, let them do it.

Frum: How much new housing does New York need, in your opinion? How many units per year would put the city on the path to escaping from the crisis of affordability it’s in?

Salam: I would say something like 50,000-plus new units a year, so that we would get something like half a million over the course of a decade. If you were to do that, then I believe housing would be much more abundant and more affordable than it is today. There are many other things that I would do too, David, but I think that that would go a long way.

Frum: And how many is New York building now? Do you happen to remember?

Salam: It’s more like in the kind of in the twenty thousands. You know, kind of maybe the high twenty thousands. But that is a little bit of an artifact of the fact that we just had a big rezoning, and also there are some units that are being built because of a tax credit that is about to expire. So people were rushing to kind of collect that tax credit. So those numbers I would expect to go down somewhat. But we’ll see.

I think that our current mayor recognizes that this is an acute challenge, and he does want to build more. He, however, is not always mindful of the various other regulations that he’s imposing that make this a less attractive place to invest. So we’ll see. But we’re not anywhere near where we need to be.

Frum: Now, urban politics, as you said, is inherently very complicated. People are close together; there are a lot of interests; there are lots of points of view. But one of the things that used to guide good decision-making was a few basic rules. And say, you know, I’m not going to master every complex detail. I just know if you build more housing, the prices go down. If you arrest more criminals, the streets are safer. If you sweep the streets, you’ll have less disease.

And those basic notions, which are not a hundred percent true, but good enough—we seem to have a harder and harder time holding on to them. And maybe that’s because of something that I talk about a lot, and I know you think about a lot, which is the implosion of conservatism as a workable philosophy. It used to be the conservatives’ jobs to say: Build more housing; the price will go down. And as conservatives give up their ancient views and chase after new ideas—new and often quite sinister ideas—who’s speaking for these old truths? Build more housing; put the criminals in jail; sweep the streets; have schools locate kids with less economic opportunity and more talent and find a way forward for them. Who’s to speak for that?

Salam: Well, first I’ll note that there have always been many conservatives who are small-C conservative, in the sense they want to protect their neighborhood, they want to protect its character. So some of that resistance to new building has always come from people who are small-C conservatives, who do not want the composition of their neighborhood to change and what have you.

But the larger point is well taken. And you wrote an essay many years ago, David, that left a very deep impression on me. About how what you and I call conservatism reflected arguably an historical moment. When you think about the progressivism of the early 20th century, this was a moment; this was a sensibility that was a response to the challenge of urbanization, an enormous immigrant influx, and a pattern of industrialism that demanded new forms of state capacity. And then you had a progressive movement that was actually a part of both major political parties. In a similar vein, you’ve observed, there was what you could call a supply-side movement, a conservative movement, that actually did shape both major parties as well. And now that movement appears to be in abeyance. And what you have now instead is new forms of populist politics. You have a left-wing flavor of it; you have a right-wing flavor of it. And instead, the partisans of what you might call pluralism or classical liberalism or something that resembles the conservatism of that earlier era—they still exist. These ideas are still there; these ideas are still very compelling and relevant. But you could argue that they represent a minority faction in both of the major-party coalitions.

And so what I would argue, David, is that I think that you need political innovation as well. You have a ton of new challenges right now that are markedly different from the challenges of even 15 years ago, when you and I were having that conversation about what had happened to the conservatism of that era of the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. And I think that those challenges demand new forms of left and right politics. And I think that’s a big part of what we focus on at Manhattan Institute.

Frum: Well, let me ask you, since you’re kind enough to allude to my work. I’m basically at the end of my career, but you’re in the middle and peak of your career. You are going to have to ride your way through whatever’s happening next in American politics, which probably is a kind of collapse and discrediting of the ideas associated with President Trump. How do you find your personal way forward through this new landscape, in which it’s 2029, it’s 2030, the Trump era is left behind? Maybe the Republican Party is chased off under Vice President Vance toward evermore protectionism, evermore chauvinism, evermore xenophobia. How do you—and you have always stood for the opposite of those things—how do you find your way forward as a thinker and as an institution, in a landscape where so much will have changed?

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. It could also go pretty well. When you’re thinking about the fact that we’ve had, I believe, it’s three American presidents who are all born in 1946, who presided over a period that many see as discredited. If you think about neo-socialism, this new movement, why is the term that had been so anathematized in American political life, why has it reemerged? One reason is because of that larger discrediting. And I think that in the case of Trump and Trumpism, what was fascinating about Donald Trump—and I’m talking about him in the past tense, but when he first emerged in 2015-2016—is that he served as a new coordinating device. There were many people on the right who felt as though they were burdened by backward compatibility. Ronald Reagan was still the figure that people could rally around. George W. Bush was a figure that many people felt they couldn’t rally around. And Donald Trump said some things, not entirely true, about how he had always opposed the Iraq War. It was a stupid war. And so he allowed himself to emerge as a new coordinating device.

However, I think that that Trump era right now, in 2024, that campaign, I think, showed the outlines of what could be a new coalition. The problem is that the Trump presidency and how it’s unfolded did not represent the cementing of that coalition, that multiethnic coalition, a coalition that was—call it a back-to-basics coalition.

If in 2025 you had a right-of-center presidency that said, We’re going to focus on inflation; we’re going to focus on getting the basics right; we are going to focus on having state capacity when it comes to managing immigrant inflows, managing law and order, this kind of thing. And we’re otherwise going to let the private economy roar—I think we’d be in a very different place right now.

But President Trump, like many of his opponents, he’s someone who is very fixed on past rivalries. He is someone who is very fixed—you know, he has deep self-interest, he’s very self-motivated. That’s certainly true. And I think that basically you are going to have a very different politics in a few years’ time. It’s very unpredictable, what it’s going to look like. But I do think that some of these core ideas you were talking about, these kind of core pragmatic ideas you’re talking about, I think that they’re going to have a place in the other side. And I think that that’s something that everyone is going to have to be thinking about. It’s a reckoning that it’s not going to apply just to the right, but also to the left.

Frum: Well, if we are turning the page, what writing will you put on that page? I mean, you’ve written two books about the way forward for conservatism at an interval of a decade. If you were to return to this at another 10-year interval, what would you say? What would you advise?

Salam: Well, I’m fortunate in running a nonpartisan organization. We pride ourselves on our independence. We certainly have a point of view, but a lot of what I’m thinking about is identifying talent. Thinking about people who have a thoughtful, smart perspective on where things are heading and advancing a certain vision of American life.

My view is that we have a multiethnic society. That’s just a reality that will be true one way or another, regardless of who’s in power. And how will we go about making that multiethnic society a success? And how will we ensure that that multiethnic society is in tune with core American values, and with core virtues that I see as good and valuable? When I came to identify with the political right, a lot of it was out of an appreciation for what Margaret Thatcher called the vigorous virtues: the virtues of independence, self-reliance, loyalty. These are just things that matter. They’re not the only virtues, but they’re virtues that matter, and they’re virtues that a system—a kind of government, a society, a culture—can either cultivate and celebrate or diminish and demean. And I just really believe that in our multiethnic society, there is a potential majority that embraces those ideals, that embraces the best aspects of our American, of our Western inheritance. And that’s what I’m really focused on. Just the idea of ensuring that these values survive into the future.

So some of that is looking at policy issues through this lens. You know, trying to find what are novel issues that we ought to be paying more attention to that we haven’t. If you believe, as I do, that building new housing is a good and valuable thing to do, and that will address some of these acute challenges, how do you make that argument? And also, how do you structure the bargain to make it work? So it’s not to bang my head against the wall and say that all is lost, all is doomed. It is to recognize: What do we have? What is the population that we have? What is the electorate that we have? What are the challenges we’re facing? And how can we make the best of it, and how can we draw people into our way of thinking? That is what I’m really passionate about and want to do more of.

Frum: Well, let’s finish by talking about this challenge of the multiethnic society. You and I have been talking about this for a long time, about how we make immigration a source of renewal and strength for American society and not a source of trouble. How do you think the United States of 2026 and future is doing on building itself as a multiethnic society? And what advice would you have? How would you recommend that it do better than it is doing now?

Salam: One of the biggest challenges we face is a challenge that we can’t avoid, we can’t work our way around. It’s the fact that birth rates are shrinking, the population is aging markedly—and, by the way, healthy lifespan is increasing as well. I mean, there are many things to look forward to, things that are good and positive. But they will have very unpredictable effects on our political culture. If you are in your 50s for 30 years—which sounds ridiculous, but I think that that could be something we’re looking at when you’re looking at the pace of biomedical innovation. What effect does that have on people in their teens and 20s? When you’re looking at how our information environment is changing at a time when you have increasingly intelligent machines. These are very deep questions about what it means to work and be a purposeful individual.

It could be that we could have challenges of affluence that are even greater and graver than the challenges of affluence we already face. So we’re going through these incredible ructions at the same time that we’re going through these multiple, reverberating identity crises.

When I think about the manias of our politics right now, I think often of the 1920s and 1930s. When you had the popular front, when you had a group of people who were themselves second-generation Americans—who are both included in a sense, but very alienated in another sense. I look at the fact that the populations right now that feel very alienated and out of sorts are not just minorities; it’s also majorities. I see this incredible psychic breakdown that’s happening in our society that goes above and beyond discrete policy questions.

And so, part of me thinks: Stick to your knitting; focus on the basics. How do we make public systems work? How do we address questions of integrity and corruption and competence? That’s something we can wrap our arms around.

But then I do think that these spiritual questions, which are not my bailiwick as someone who is in the business of policy research. But I do think that those questions matter an enormous amount, and they stem from an abdication of responsibility. You have a generation of people who are taking over as leaders of different institutions, who don’t think of themselves as the establishment. They think of themselves as fighting an establishment, but that establishment is hollow.

And actually, what we need is to have a group of people from different ethnic backgrounds, different kind of educational backgrounds and what have you, who take responsibility. Who say that rather than complain about the ways in which they’ve been victimized or aggrieved—and you see this very much on the right as well as on the left—how do you instead have a group of people who say that I am going to take responsibility? And therefore inspire other people by virtue of having taken that responsibility? That’s something I think about a lot, David. And part of that is about an ethic, a cultural ethic of inhabiting that role of adult. But instead, what’s incredibly attractive to everyone is to imagine themselves as victims of this or that catastrophe, as people who are damaged and therefore can’t take responsibility.

Frum: Well, give some affirmative advice to how to achieve this end you care about.

One of the things I think we’ve seen in the 2020s is that the ethnic groups of America are voting less differently one from another, while the sexes of America vote more differently one from another. And that’s true within ethnic groups and across ethnic groups. There seems to be, part of the alienation is an alienation between young men and young women. Which expresses itself in family formation, among other things.

Meanwhile, you’re getting these strange kinds of cross-cultural coalitions, which can be kind of reactionary sometimes. How do we make it better? What is your advice? This is something you think about a lot. Give us just something we can hold on to as a solution, as something to carry forward into the new era you’re talking [about].

Salam: In everyone’s life—as an individual, as a citizen, as a neighbor—to think about, in a more purposeful way, about what it is that you can do. Because I think that there’s a tendency to think about these problems—and I certainly am guilty of this myself—in purely abstract, broad terms. But when I see the people I admire the most, I see people who are raised in families where there wasn’t a ton of religious observance and who are becoming more observant themselves. Or people who are finding institutions in their own lives that they can breathe life into in a more deliberate way.

You know, we were talking about political parties in our major cities that are just moribund, when you have these incredible political monocultures. Well, you can complain about the problem, or you can get actually involved in a local political party that is moribund. And it can actually be very distasteful, because what you’ll find is that there are not necessarily a lot of other people who are very thoughtful. Or maybe that’s what you’ll find. But actually doing that patient work.

One thing that I find very striking is that—and again, I don’t run a political organization—but when I talk to people in politics, one thing that is very powerful for them is when you actually talk to or interact with people outside of your own narrow world, and you’re trying to persuade them. And you recognize they don’t agree with you on everything, but you want to bring them along in your direction. That is a very powerful civic habit that we’ve lost.

So I think that you and I are both very fortunate to live among neighbors, to have many friends who don’t agree with us on a great many things. And I think that’s a really valuable discipline, and that’s something that all of us can find in small ways. How do you have different kinds of conversation? How do you engage with people where you’re trying to solve a problem together with them as opposed to retreating? I think that that’s something that we can all do more of.

Frum: Reihan Salam, thank you so much for joining me today.

Salam: Thank you very much, David.

Frum: Bye-bye.

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Frum: Thanks so much to Reihan Salam for joining me today on The David Frum Show.

This week’s book is a classic of American strategic thinking: Every War Must End by Fred Charles Iklé. Originally published in 1971, the book gained great fame when Colin Powell urged it on all of his officers during the planning for the Gulf War of 1990 and ’91. But it remains burningly relevant today as the United States contemplates an exit from the war with Iran.

The author, Fred Iklé, was born in 1924 in Switzerland. He emigrated to the United States after World War II and became one of the leading thinkers in the new area of nuclear strategy and nuclear deterrence. He directed the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency under Presidents Nixon and Ford, and he was promoted to undersecretary of defense by Ronald Reagan.

I got to know him toward the end of his life, and he was as incisive and original at the end as he was all the way through.

Let me start my discussion of his book, Every War Must End, by quoting the opening paragraph:

“Fighting a war can cost more in blood and money than any other undertaking in which nations engage. And to wage war, governments develop more detailed plans, establish a more rigid organization, and institute tighter discipline than for any other national effort. Yet, despite all this elaborate and intense dedication, the grand design is often woefully incomplete. Usually, in fact, it is not grand enough. Most of the exertion is devoted to the means, perfecting the military instruments and deciding on their use in battles and campaigns. And far too little is left for relating these means to their ends.”

As we discussed at the opening of the program, this advice applies so pointedly to the troubles in which the United States finds itself today.

Military planning focuses on the work that soldiers do; it focuses on developing plans to actually wage the war.

How fighting will shape the political outcome, however, falls between the work of soldiers and the work of civilians. And because it’s in that in-between zone, it can often be neglected until it becomes too late, until the choices have narrowed.

That’s where the United States is today in Iran. What exactly are we trying to achieve? That was a question that was not asked hard enough back in February when the war began. And now the options don’t look so good as the United States tries to find a way out.

Leaders enter wars expecting battlefield success to produce its own reward. Win on the battlefield, and you’ll get something good without having to think very much about what it is you want. And they also don’t think very hard about if they don’t achieve total victory—Japanese surrender on the deck of the USS Missouri, Lee surrendering a sword to Grant—if they don’t get total victory, how do they arrive at terms that the defeated but not hopeless enemy will accept?

Through the war, both sides overrate their own prospects and assume the enemy is near breaking when the enemy may not be near breaking. And sunk costs—the money that has been spent, the lives that have been lost—make compromise feel like a betrayal of earlier sacrifices.

In the discussions of how to end the war, the advocates of peace risk charges of defeatism. And the hawks, too, often promise too easily that just one more big push can deliver the results that everybody wants.

In Iran, as in Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan before that, the United States has had terrible trouble defining an achievable end state that is worth the effort of the military undertaking in the first place.

So here we are, in the throes of this war, trying to make sense of what has been done. Why was it done, where is it going, what are we trying to do? And Fred Iklé in 1971 predicted it all. If you don’t think at the beginning about how the war will end, you’re unlikely to have a successful arrival at that destination point. That’s the question to start with. What are you trying to do? How likely is it that you can do it? And if you don’t achieve total victory, what is the means you’re going to use to ensure that the defeated but not hopeless enemy complies with the victors’, but not total victors’, requirements? That’s where the United States is today. It’s a book that repays rereading. I’ve been thinking about it a lot in these past days. Thank you for thinking about it with me.

See you next week on The David Frum Show. Remember, as always, if you’re minded to support the work of this program, the best way to do it is by subscribing to The Atlantic. And please share the work of this program on whatever social-media platform you use. Thanks for watching or listening. See you next week. Bye-bye.

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