Nahal Toosi
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nahaltoosi.bsky.social
Nahal Toosi
@nahaltoosi.bsky.social
9.1K followers 590 following 1.2K posts
Senior foreign affairs correspondent and columnist at POLITICO
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nahaltoosi.bsky.social
No SNL this week, huh?
November 22, 2025 at 1:05 AM
nahaltoosi.bsky.social
Interesting wording.
November 21, 2025 at 3:31 PM
nahaltoosi.bsky.social
Why “intends to”*? Why not do it & announce you already have? That’s the standard process. Unless you’re trying to pressure Nicolas Maduro to negotiate something before then?

*In his full statement, Rubio says it takes effect Nov. 24.
November 16, 2025 at 11:22 PM
nahaltoosi.bsky.social
Surely both left and right can rally around this:
Washington, D.C. - Today, U.S. Senators Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) introduced > the bipartisan No Coffee Tax Act to repeal President Donald Trump's tariffs on coffee and lower costs for consumers. More than 99 percent of all coffee in the United States is imported
October 29, 2025 at 11:42 AM
nahaltoosi.bsky.social
BREAKING: US sanctions Colombia’s president
October 24, 2025 at 7:24 PM
nahaltoosi.bsky.social
October 8, 2025 at 11:08 PM
nahaltoosi.bsky.social
Things have definitely changed at the Washington Post …
September 5, 2025 at 10:36 PM
nahaltoosi.bsky.social
3/
September 3, 2025 at 7:08 PM
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2/
September 3, 2025 at 7:07 PM
nahaltoosi.bsky.social
1/The new edition of the Foreign Service Journal has a piece by Maren Brooks about why it’s so hard to reform the State Department and it includes these delicious paragraphs:
September 3, 2025 at 7:06 PM
nahaltoosi.bsky.social
(whispers) North Carolina is a women’s soccer school…
September 1, 2025 at 3:19 PM
nahaltoosi.bsky.social
Pretty interesting (and elaborate!) display of resistance in Washington, DC’s Capitol Hill neighborhood:
September 1, 2025 at 2:51 PM
nahaltoosi.bsky.social
With due respect to Biden admin officials, it did not take a genius to see how this would unfold. We are talking about people and food. reader.foreignaffairs.com/2025/08/14/h...
August 14, 2025 at 9:12 PM
nahaltoosi.bsky.social
Did Biden admin officials not realize more than 500 trucks of aid entered Gaza daily BEFORE the war? And yet during the war — a WAR — they would have been happy with fewer than that? news.un.org/en/story/202...

reader.foreignaffairs.com/2025/08/14/h...
August 14, 2025 at 9:07 PM
nahaltoosi.bsky.social
Interesting admission on Gaza dynamics by Biden admin officials. Timely? Of course not. But interesting. reader.foreignaffairs.com/2025/08/14/h...
To be clear, Hamas did find ways to tax, extort, and to some extent divert aid, including assistance from Egypt handled by the Palestine Red Crescent Society. But until January 20, 2025, neither the IDF nor the UN ever shared evidence with us—or asserted to us privately—that Hamas was physically diverting U.S.-funded goods provided by the World Food Program or international nongovernmental organizations. Furthermore, there was no evidence of substantial Hamas diversion of any major assistance funded by the UN or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).
August 14, 2025 at 9:02 PM
nahaltoosi.bsky.social
‘We prevented *mass* starvation,’ is how some Biden administration officials are now characterizing their efforts. reader.foreignaffairs.com/2025/08/14/h...
There was still too much scarcity and precarity, and for months following the October 2023 attacks on Israel, some commentators labeled the situation in Gaza a famine. But although the results of our work never satisfied us, much less our critics, in reality the efforts we led in the Biden administration to keep Gaza open for humanitarian relief prevented famine. The fact remains that through the first year and a half of relentless war, Gazans did not face mass starvation because humanitarian assistance was reaching them.
August 14, 2025 at 8:40 PM
nahaltoosi.bsky.social
Hey everyone, the White House has read my latest column. You should, too! www.politico.com/news/magazin...
August 14, 2025 at 1:18 PM
nahaltoosi.bsky.social
😬 www.nytimes.com/2025/07/31/o...
Finally, there is the stock market, which is unfazed and setting records. I do not have a particularly tidy explanation except to note that the stock market reflects many factors other than the economy, including rational ones like the potential for A.I. and irrational ones like bubbles. I long ago gave up trying to understand the daily ups and downs of the market and just buy and hold, no matter how turbulent the events around me.
July 31, 2025 at 10:22 AM
nahaltoosi.bsky.social
July 27, 2025 at 5:22 PM
nahaltoosi.bsky.social
💔
The Associated Press, AFP, BBC News and Reuters on Thursday issued this joint statement about journalists in Gaza: We are desperately concerned for our journalists in Gaza, who are increasingly unable to feed themselves and their families. For many months, these independent journalists have been the world’s eyes and ears on the ground in Gaza. They are now facing the same dire circumstances as those they are covering.   Journalists endure many deprivations and hardships in warzones. We are deeply alarmed that the threat of starvation is now one of them. We once again urge the Israeli authorities to allow journalists in and out of Gaza. It is essential that adequate food supplies reach the people there.
July 25, 2025 at 2:38 AM
nahaltoosi.bsky.social
This is another flier that’s gone up at the State Department on this crazy day:
July 11, 2025 at 6:39 PM
nahaltoosi.bsky.social
ICYMI, I had this startling little SCOOP in our newsletter yesterday:
FIRST IN NATSEC DAILY — ‘RIGHTS’ AND WRONGS: State Department officials are wrestling with how to publicly present Rubio’s vision for human rights programs now that he’s downsizing the bureau that focuses on that topic. Nahal obtained one set of draft talking points circulating on the topic. It is a bundle of contradictions. For example, the draft states that Rubio believes in “a vision of universal human rights that puts the flourishing of human persons and the myriad communities we form at the center of our foreign, trade and national security policies.” But that doesn’t appear to include the transgender community. The draft trashes previous Democratic presidents for allegedly trying to “bully countries into accepting so-called transgender rights and suppressing dissent by parents, religious groups, professionals and political parties.” The document contains several errors of fact and omits key context on everything from how the U.S. has financed humanitarian aid to what is covered by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document it says the Trump administration supports. It also promotes the much-debated notion of “ordered liberty.” The draft talking points say: “The progressive left conflates the concept of ‘freedom’ with the unfettered ability of individuals to accomplish any act of the will, including things that clearly demolish freedom like legalized recreational drugs, abortion, the mutilation of the genitals of children who express any form of gender confusion and more. To the contrary: We live in a nation where the concept of ‘ordered liberty’ means that in ‘order to form a more perfect union,’ we must establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” In response to a request for comment from the State Department, a senior department official replied: “Thousands of documents pass through the State Department for a cle…
July 11, 2025 at 11:18 AM
nahaltoosi.bsky.social
This … doesn’t really answer the question of how much time Iran will now need to achieve “breakout” & then build a nuclear weapon.
June 25, 2025 at 10:54 PM
nahaltoosi.bsky.social
This will always be amazing:
June 24, 2025 at 12:24 PM
nahaltoosi.bsky.social
🤷🏽‍♀️
June 23, 2025 at 10:09 PM