Why Trump might finally fire Pete Hegseth

“The Pentagon would have to rebuild expertise, trust and stability if the secretary is forced out.

Theodore R. Johnson

September 30, 2026 at 6:45 a.m. EDTYesterday at 6:45 a.m. EDT

When Republican presidents take a beating in the midterms, Cabinet changes can come the next day.

In 2006, as Americans tired of President George W. Bush and a miscalculated war, Democrats swept control of Congress. The morning after the election, Bush forced out Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld: “The timing is right for new leadership at the Pentagon,” Bush said, adding, “Iraq is not working well enough, fast enough.” Twelve years later, Democrats flipped the U.S. House on the night of President Donald Trump’s first midterm. By morning, he forced Attorney General Jeff Sessions to resign for being insufficiently loyal, later saying the appointment was his “greatest mistake.”

This year, signs point to another potential blue wave, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seems the prime candidate for a pink slip. At the Pentagon, senior military and civilian officials have resigned or retired rather than continue working for him. On Capitol Hill, lawmakers from both parties have introduced impeachment resolutions this year, and Democrats have promised a flood of public hearings and investigations should they retake the House. A recent Economist-YouGov poll found that a majority of registered voters — and nearly one-quarter of Trump voters — support impeaching him.

When the midterm dust settles, Hegseth’s low approval ratings, drumbeat of negative press and status as a bipartisan liability could give the White House reason to cut its losses. But while letting Hegseth go may rid Trump of a political headache, it would not erase the consequences of the defense secretary’s tenure that will outlast him: the mismanagement of the Iran war, the politicization of the military, the culture war inside the Pentagon and the purge of senior leaders. For Trump, changing defense secretaries could be a useful political reset ahead of his lame-duck years. For the military, though, the morning after would be the first day on a long road to normalcy — or confirmation of new norms in an institution with a long memory.

Midterm elections are often treated as a referendum on the incumbent president, so changes to the Cabinet aren’t unusual. Such moves are usually undertaken to shift blame or accountability, signal a course correction or reassert executive authority. But Trump’s turnover of Cabinet officials occurs faster and more often than any president in a century. His rationale for doing so has rarely been consistent — sometimes it’s a matter of loyalty, sometimes personal conduct or poor performance, and sometimes because the official had become an unwelcome distraction. These firings further insulate Trump from congressional oversight. And they help clear his immediate political problem while the departments that the ousted officials leave behind are forced to endure the fallout.

Whenever Hegseth leaves the Pentagon, the military will have to address three institutional crises of his making. First and most immediate will be rectifying wartime missteps and restoring readiness. Military leaders have warned that prolonged war with Iran, depleted weapons stockpiles, and a lack of focus on innovation and transformation have created a “window of vulnerability,” placing other security priorities at risk. Fixing these issues will require strategic reassessments of the military’s global posture and force structure — and lots of funding for a Pentagon running low on cash.

The second is the urgent need to rebalance civil-military relations. Hegseth has overseen an era in which meritocracy at the highest levels of leadership has been supplanted by favoritism and ideological loyalty. Senior officers lament the sidelining of military lawyers and inspectors general who ensure orders and operations are lawful. And while civilian control of the military is a bedrock constitutional principle, Hegseth’s micromanagement of promotions and grooming standards, restrictions on press access and lack of transparency have contributed to the public’s faltering confidence in the military. 

The third crisis relates to the management of the talent gaps created by the forced leadership exodus. Senior officials and experts note the loss of expertise, institutional knowledge and years of investment that come with each dismissal. Those human capital deficits cannot be closed by simply giving the job to someone else.

Though Hegseth seems to remain in Trump’s good graces, one needn’t look far for a model of how the defense secretary could be let go: see former Homeland Security secretary Kristi L. Noem. Her uncritical loyalty and telegenic appearance fit Trump’s preference for high-profile appointments. But bad press over deportation operations, killings of American citizens by immigration agents, mismanagement of money and personnel, and poor performance in congressional hearings proved too much to ignore. Her ouster was dressed up as a promotion to special envoy. The White House might similarly provide Hegseth with a soft landing. In both instances, Trump could admit no policy missteps, implicitly pin the blame on the outgoing secretary and gift his soldier a somewhat face-saving exit.

Making a bold Cabinet move following the midterms would offer Trump some relief from a self-inflicted headache and make it someone else’s job to clean up the mess. But while he can move on by the afternoon, the morning after in the Pentagon will last a generation.“

US supreme court allows Trump officials to resume deportations to third countries | US supreme court | The Guardian

US supreme court allows Trump officials to resume deportations to third countries

"Conservative majority temporarily lifts lower-court decision as liberal justices dissent from ruling

Ariana Baio and Maanvi Singh

People at an immigration hearing in New York in August. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

The Trump administration can resume quickly deporting immigrants to “third countries”, or countries other than those immigrants’ homeland, without giving them any opportunity to contest their removals, the supreme court ruled on Tuesday.

The six-justice conservative majority of the high court temporarily lifted a lower-court decision that required the administration to provide immigrants sufficient notice and the opportunity to claim fear of torture or persecution in the countries where they are being sent. The Trump administration had claimed this stipulation had prevented it from “efficiently removing aliens” from the US.

As is typical in emergency orders, the justices did not explain why it granted the administration’s request.

The three liberal justices of the court, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented from the order.

Tuesday’s ruling will take effect while the supreme court considers the larger question in the case. Justices said they would hear oral arguments in December.

It is the second time the supreme court has sided with the Trump administration over “third-country” deportations.

Todd Blanche, the attorney general, called the administration’s policies “entirely lawful and a critical tool for immigration enforcement” in a social media post following the supreme court’s order.

“Unlike the lower court, SCOTUS waited to hear from both sides before making the decision,” Blanche wrote.

The supreme court’s intervention comes days after the administration filed an emergency request to the justices, hoping to continue deporting immigrants to third countries – including those that the US state department considers dangerous.

The Trump administration has entered into a series of agreements with other countries that have allowed it to deport more than 25,000 immigrants to at least 29 countries, according to Third Country Deportation ​Watch, a project run by Refugees International and Human Rights First.

Countries that have received US deportees include the Central African Republic, which is grappling with unrest and terrorism due to political and militia instability, and South Sudan, where a humanitarian crisis has been unfolding because of political and economic collapse.

On Monday, two dozen UN human rights experts warned that the deportation of thousands of migrants from the US to third countries has set off a “cascade of human rights violations” that could have “deadly” consequences.

Many third-country deportees have faced dire conditions and violence after they ended up in countries without any legal status. Earlier this month, two men that the Trump administration expelled to Equatorial Guinea were bound, fitted with bags over their heads, beaten and pushed down a flight of stairs, all in plain view of other US deportees, according to witnesses and human rights lawyers. Detainees said the men were facing retaliation for speaking to journalists and human rights experts about the poor conditions they faced.

“This cruel and inhumane policy is a black eye on Lady Liberty,” said Adelita Grijalva, a Democratic representative from Arizona. “We are a nation that promises to welcome the ‘poor’ and ‘huddled masses’ yearning for freedom. Instead, we are sending vulnerable people into harm’s way – and, in some cases, potentially to their deaths.”

One of the men who was beaten in Equatorial Guinea was her constituent, Ahmed Soliman – a gay man from Egypt who had fled discrimination in his home country and spent most of his life in Phoenix.

Lawyers for the immigrants have challenged the “third country” deportation policy, arguing that they had not been given “notice and a meaningful opportunity to present fear-based claims”.

Lawyers for the administration have said there’s no need for individual fear-based claims because countries willing to accept immigrants have already agreed not to persecute or torture anyone. Solicitor general D John Sauer, the government’s attorney, wrote to the supreme court that the lower-court orders “created substantial logistical problems with ongoing removal operations – including the cancellation of flights – and led to added expense, potential diplomatic issues, and the inability to remove dangerous criminals”.

Prior to the supreme court’s order on Tuesday, two lower courts had separately sided with the immigrants."

US supreme court allows Trump officials to resume deportations to third countries | US supreme court | The Guardian

How Meta Uses A.I. Data Centers to Avoid Billions in Federal Taxes - The New York Times

How Meta Uses A.I. Data Centers to Avoid Billions in Federal Taxes

"Meta is exploiting a lucrative tax break intended to support research and experimentation. Its own accountants say the gambit is risky.

Sept. 30, 2026

Illustration by Joan Wong; Photographs by Jason Henry for The New York Times, Mike Stewart/Associated Press, Getty Images

Illustration by Joan Wong; Photographs by Jason Henry for The New York Times, Mike Stewart/Associated Press, Getty Images

Mark Zuckerberg says Meta’s A.I. push is a tremendous success. “Our investments in A.I. are accelerating every major part of our core business,” he has told investors. “Every sign that we’re seeing in our own work and across the industry gives us confidence in this investment.”

But when Meta files its taxes, it tells the Internal Revenue Service a different story. It claims that its A.I. data centers are a giant experiment that could fail, according to four people with knowledge of the company’s operations.

It does this so it can tap into a tax credit intended for research and experimentation. It’s an aggressive interpretation of the tax break, which Meta embraced to claim billions of dollars in tax credits for data center expansion.

Characterizing its A.I. data centers as experimental is “kind of wild and out there,” said Andre Shevchuck, a partner at the advisory firm BPM who specializes in the research and experimentation tax credit.

Indeed, Meta’s own accountants recognize that the strategy is on shaky legal ground. In disclosures buried in securities filings, the tech giant warns that billions in tax savings are vulnerable to being overturned by the I.R.S., in large part because of “uncertainties with our research tax credits.”

Here’s what Meta is doing: For tax purposes, the company classifies its enormous, multibillion-dollar data centers as “pilot models.” Under a tax credit created in the 1980s to spur innovation, companies can get a rebate for supplies, but only if they are being tested in an experimental effort, not standard business operations. Meta is claiming that the costly A.I. computer chips it buys from companies, including Nvidia, are entitled to a taxpayer-provided discount as part of the experiment.

The move caused some unease within Meta’s finance department. The I.R.S. in the past has challenged companies that claimed the credit for basic supplies. While thousands of companies, including other tech giants, get huge benefits from the research tax credit, they do so overwhelmingly for salaries paid to researchers and engineers — the people carrying out innovation.

How Meta’s research tax credits have exploded in recent years

Meta’s use of the tax break for the data centers has not been previously reported. The New York Times reviewed securities filings and conducted multiple interviews, including with the people familiar with Meta’s operations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss proprietary matters.

The company started claiming the credit for the data centers two years ago. Since then, Meta’s savings from the credit have soared, trimming almost $4 billion off its tax bill last year, filings show. Meta is now the biggest beneficiary of the tax credit among publicly traded companies, a Times review of securities filings found.

Aggressive bets like these often pan out for big companies: Even if the I.R.S. balks, companies can settle disputes and still wind up ahead.

Meta is already in one sizable dispute with the I.R.S. over this tax break, for using it to subsidize its chief executive’s multibillion-dollar pay package. In 2013, Meta claimed that $4.1 billion of stock options exercised by Mr. Zuckerberg counted as a research expense because he helped invent new software, such as Facebook’s News Feed. The I.R.S. is trying to claw back the company’s resulting $355 million in tax savings, court filings show.

The social media company’s stock is soaring, and it is now worth nearly $2 trillion thanks in part to how its A.I. efforts have improved Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook. This month, Meta released Muse, a personal A.I. agent that immediately became the most downloaded app for iPhone and Android users. Meta and other tech giants’ A.I. efforts have also been helped by an accelerated write-off for research and development expenses that stemmed from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed in 2025.

“Meta is one of the largest investors in research and development in the United States,” said Andy Stone, a company spokesman. “Over the last five years, Meta invested $200 billion in R&D — $57 billion in the last year alone, advancing frontier research, building new technology and supporting American jobs. Like other companies that invest at this scale, we use the tax incentives Congress established decades ago to encourage this type of domestic investment.”

A Very Favorable Tax Credit

The tax break dates to the first year of the Reagan administration, when Japan was a global leader in technological innovation. Business lobbyists and legislators were worried that America’s fledgling tech sector would fall behind, so Congress created the Research & Experimentation Tax Credit as an incentive to take risks and invest in inventions that might not pan out commercially. A few years after the credit was created, a government report said it had been used to develop, among other things, electronic banking equipment and drugs to treat cancer.

Tax rules already permitted tech companies to write off research expenses from their taxable income. The new credit was even more generous and could be taken on top of the deduction. But it was harder to qualify for. Companies have to meet a complex four-part test to prove they are running an experiment, not just rolling out a new product.

In the summer of 2024, Meta was ramping up its efforts to compete in the Silicon Valley A.I. race, breaking ground on tens of thousands of acres of data centers across the country. This was an expensive endeavor. One of the biggest expenses of any A.I. data center was computer chips, which are made by companies like Nvidia and cost thousands of dollars each. A Meta employee overseeing the build-out had a creative idea to offset the costs: Tap the credit.

Chips, like these from Nvidia, are the backbone of A.I. data centers.Christie Hemm Klok for The New York Times

The credit is meant to spur innovation by encouraging companies to tackle unsolved problems and technical challenges. While Meta is testing different physical layouts for server racks and looking for the best way to network thousands of chips for A.I. training, the chips themselves are known to work. They have been at the center of A.I.’s progress for the last decade and turned Nvidia into the world’s most valuable company.

Some in Meta’s finance department questioned whether this tactic would pass muster with the I.R.S., according to a person familiar with the matter. The I.R.S. has rejectedother companies’ efforts to claim the credit for “proven and commercially available equipment and technology.”

The company sought advice from lawyers at multiple firms, who pointed to a relevant case from 2021, in which a federal judge denied the research tax break to an Indiana shipbuilder for the cost of building new types of vessels. Simply creating a new product wasn’t enough; a company must pinpoint the specific components of a project that were technically uncertain and prove it used scientific experiments to overcome that uncertainty.

One of the lawyers Meta consulted was Jeffrey Moeller at Ivins, Phillips and Barker, people familiar with the conversations said. Mr. Moeller represented the pharmaceutical maker Bayer in a $200 million dispute with the I.R.S. over research tax credits. In an interview, he would not comment specifically on Meta. But he did say the rules could permit claiming the credit on commercially available, proven products — if they were supplies required to resolve the uncertainty of a project.

Another lawyer consulted by Meta, those people said, was Alex Sadler, a former Department of Justice tax lawyer and now a partner at Morgan Lewis, which declined a request to interview him. But when he spoke at a tax conference in Virginia this month, Mr. Sadler said that pilot models were an “area of controversy” and that the I.R.S. “doesn’t like” when companies characterize commercial production as research to claim the credit. The I.R.S. takes issue with the use of the research tax credit for “big things,” he said.

“What if we have a $10 billion data center that does cool stuff that hasn’t really been done?” he said. “Is all the cost a research expenditure?”

After a few months of deliberation, Meta took the plunge. It started labeling chips bound for A.I. data centers differently for tax purposes from those sent to standard data centers, two people with knowledge of the matter said.

Risky Business

The strategy has been lucrative. Meta said the research tax credit shaved $2 billion off its taxes in 2024, and then $3.9 billion in 2025.

That is a significant increase from the $700 million the company reported in 2023, the year before it embarked on its data center strategy.

At the very top of the company, Meta executives kept the tax strategy close to the vest, two people with knowledge of the discussions said.

But because the I.R.S. was likely to challenge this new and untested accounting magic, the company had to acknowledge the risk in a securities disclosure called “unrecognized tax benefits.” That is essentially the gap between what Meta paid to the I.R.S. and how much it might owe if tax authorities challenge its maneuvers. It’s a warning to investors that Meta made a bet, and the amount of the gap reflects the odds of losing, as determined by a company’s tax advisers.

Since Meta began its research credit A.I. strategy, the amount set aside to cover those tax bets increased 45 percent — to $18.74 billion today from $12.9 billion two years ago. The contributing factor listed first in its annual financial filing is “uncertainties with our research tax credits.”

Other major tech companies, including Apple, Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft, also report research tax credits of more than $1 billion a year. But none of them have flagged the research tax credit as a risk in their financial reports to investors or disclosed whether they have used it for A.I. data centers.

“Meta is claiming billions of dollars in tax benefits that its own accountants are telling investors are at risk of being overturned by the I.R.S.,” said Lisa De Simone, a former tax adviser at EY who teaches accounting at the University of Texas business school.

Mr. Stone, the Meta spokesman, said that “unrecognized tax benefits are simply a mandated accounting measure of uncertainty.” He called them a “snapshot in time reflecting the status of unresolved issues and reflect many different types of uncertainties.”

Another of Meta’s unresolved issues concerns one of the biggest U.S. Tax Court disputes in the country’s history: The I.R.S. is seeking nearly $16 billion in taxes and penalties on profits it says the company shifted to the Cayman Islands from the United States.

Tax credit experts said Meta was again entering choppy waters by taking this huge tax break on data centers. Shawn Marchant, who runs the credit and incentives practice at Tanner and advised on the research incentive for more than a decade at EY, said he would be “skeptical” of claiming it for all the computer chips in all the data centers. Mr. Shevchuck, the tax adviser at BPM, proposed one way it might work: “If you had a data center that you’re building out to cure cancer.”

Meta declined to answer questions about what made its A.I. data centers experimental, and why tens of billions of dollars of chips and computing equipment qualified for the research tax credit.

Meta’s auditor, EY, had to sign off on the plan. The global tax and accounting firm was among the firms that Meta consulted on using the tax credit in the first place. EY has since pitched other companies on using the research credit to buy computer chips for A.I. training.

Innovation or Creative Accounting?

James Shannon, a former U.S. representative from Massachusetts who sponsored the research tax credit in 1981, said it had been intended to support “people power, knowledge, information,” and not “making things.” He was surprised to hear that a technology company would use the credit for supplying A.I. data centers.

“This has gone way, way beyond what anybody could have imagined,” Mr. Shannon said.

Whether the tax break inspires the innovation that he and other lawmakers sought is a matter of debate. Some companies appear to use the credit for spending they would do anyway, according to a study last year by economists at the University of Southern California. If companies “simply reclassify existing spending as R&D,” the researchers wrote, they are getting the tax breaks “without meaningfully financing innovation.”

The credit has become the second-most expensive federal corporate tax break, behind only the reduced rate applied to offshore profits. In its most recent estimate, the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation projected the credit would cost the government $32.1 billion in 2025. Meta alone would be responsible for more than a tenth of that.

Dylan Freedman and Kitty Bennett contributed research.

Kashmir Hill writes about technology and how it is changing people’s everyday lives with a particular focus on privacy. She has been covering technology for more than a decade.

Jesse Drucker is an investigative reporter for the Business section and has written extensively on the world of high end tax avoidance.

Eli Tan covers the technology industry for The Times from San Francisco.

Mike Isaac is The Times’s Silicon Valley correspondent, based in San Francisco. He covers the world’s most consequential tech companies, and how they shape culture both online and offline."

How Meta Uses A.I. Data Centers to Avoid Billions in Federal Taxes - The New York Times

After Two Decades, U.S. Forces Leave Iraq to an Uncertain Future - The New York Times

After Two Decades, U.S. Forces Leave Iraq to an Uncertain Future

"Some Iraqis are celebrating the end of an American military presence that unleashed waves of bloodshed. Others fear what happens next for their country, trapped between Washington and Tehran.

Sept. 30, 2026Updated 8:29 a.m. ET

A giant Iraqi flag hung from the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul’s old city on Tuesday. With the end of Operation Inherent Resolve, the last of the 2,500 U.S. forces stationed in Iraq this year are now gone.Zaid Al-Obeidi/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

A giant Iraqi flag hung from the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul’s old city on Tuesday. With the end of Operation Inherent Resolve, the last of the 2,500 U.S. forces stationed in Iraq this year are now gone.Zaid Al-Obeidi/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

U.S. forces formally withdrew from Iraq on Wednesday, ending a two-decade military presence that stoked years of devastating bloodshed, and leaves behind a battered nation struggling to unshackle itself from its two most powerful, and now warring, allies.

After toppling Saddam Hussein in 2003, the brutal dictator who ruled Iraq for nearly 24 years, American forces are making their second withdrawal from the country.

The U.S. invasion and subsequent occupation, which ended in 2011, left a country reeling from sectarian bloodletting and militant insurgencies that cost nearly 4,500 U.S. lives and killed more than 115,000 Iraqis, according to the most modest counts.

American forces ultimately returned three years later — this time to lead the international coalition fighting the Islamic State, the jihadist force that once seized swaths of Iraq and Syria and became notorious for its slaughter of Shiite Muslim Iraqis, public killings of hostages, and torture and enslavement of women from Iraq’s Yazidi minority.

With the end of Operation Inherent Resolve — the U.S. military’s official name for the multinational campaign against the Islamic State — the last of the 2,500 U.S. forces stationed in Iraq this year are now gone.

“The coalition successfully completed its organized withdrawal operation from Erbil,” Rear Adm. Liam M. Hulin, head of the joint task force for Operation Inherent Resolve, announced during a ceremony held by U.S. and Iraqi officials in Baghdad. Erbil, capital of Iraq’s semiautonomous Kurdistan region, hosted the last coalition base in Iraq.

“I stand before you at this historic moment, when a nation reclaims its destiny,” Admiral Hulin said, in a speech given in Arabic.

Promising that U.S. and Iraqi forces would forge new security partnerships, Admiral Hulin urged Iraq to remain vigilant, citing an Arabic proverb, “Gird yourself for the jackal with the belt of a lion.”

Physical reminders of decades of war are being erased every day. The blast walls that once snaked through Baghdad have come down. Malls, restaurants and construction sites are buzzing in a country determined to reclaim the rhythms of normal life stolen by years of car bombs.

Erbil, Iraq, on Tuesday. Malls, restaurants and construction sites are buzzing as the country looks to reclaim the rhythms of normal life.Khalid Al-Mousily/Reuters

Iraqis’ hard-won gains look more precarious in a region convulsing from the turmoil of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. Iraq is struggling to navigate its critical relationships with Iran, its powerful neighbor, and with its most important ally, Washington, wary of letting the exit of American troops in the country embolden Tehran.

The U.S. withdrawal agreement was struck between the Baghdad government and the Biden administration in 2024. That President Trump’s administration followed through with the Sept. 30 deadline — despite the war with Iran — reflects broader U.S. determination to step back from the region.

For years, there has been widespread American fatigue with so-called forever wars, as the conflicts in Iraq and in Afghanistan came to be known.

Even as Iraq commemorates the U.S. withdrawal this week with a three-day “celebration of sovereignty,” the country is under huge pressure from the Trump administration to disarm Iran-backed Shiite Muslim militias, many of which are defying state efforts to bring them under control.

The last U.S. forces leave a troubled American legacy. Iraq suffered huge numbers of civilian casualties and a cycle of sectarian violence between Iraq’s Shiite Muslim majority, empowered after years of repression by the Hussein government, and the Sunni minority, stripped of privileges it once held under his rule.

U.S. forces also committed many abuses themselves — including the torture of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib and the use of private defense contractors like Blackwater, whose extrajudicial killings of civilians fueled deep resentments over American impunity.

Despite these grievances, Iraqis have been watching the U.S. departure with a sense of trepidation.

“My wife lost her eyesight from the shrapnel of an American bullet,” said Omar al-Husseini, a photographer from Mosul, the city at the heart of the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate. “My uncle was killed by ISIS, after being paralyzed by an American bullet. But today, when we speak about the Americans’ departure, our happiness is mixed with fear.”

Under the leadership of the novice prime minister, Ali al-Zaidi, Iraq faces the daunting task of reining in the vast array of militias.

First established with Iranian support to fight the U.S. occupation, the militias killed hundreds of American soldiers, and the sectarian bloodshed they helped foment killed tens of thousands of Iraqis. In 2014, when Iraqi Shiites mobilized to fight the Islamic State, the militias multiplied. In the years since, the thousands-strong militias have grown in power — not only through military might but also by forming political parties that deeply embed them in the state.

Mr. al-Zaidi has pledged to bring the militias under state control by mid-2027. But it is far from clear that he can deliver. The stakes are high: Through Iraq’s U.S.-based bank account for oil payments, Washington controls the physical shipment of dollars Iraq earns and has shown itself willing to use that power after temporarily halting the flow this year.

Iran is determined to preserve the militias, which have proved to be valuable partners in launching strikes during the war, in sowing regional chaos and in inflicting drastic costs on the global economy.

In a recent New York Times interview, Mr. al-Zaidi said, “Every Iraqi today wants his country to have complete sovereignty; they want power to be exclusively in the hands of the state,” and he pledged to end “the law of the jungle.”

The unforeseen consequences of withdrawal

Many Iraqis worry how their country will fare in this struggle.

“We fear Iraq could be swallowed up,” said Ahmad al-Shammari, an employee at the ministry of education in Falluja, a city that came to symbolize the fragile victories of the first American military presence in Iraq.

Falluja suffered the deadliest and most destructive battles to crush insurgents during the U.S. occupation, only to become the first city to be seized as Islamic State militants swept the country in 2014.

When the U.S. forces returned to spearhead a multinational coalition to defeat the jihadist force, the struggle to rout the Islamic State reduced huge parts of Iraqi cities to rubble.

It left an untold number of dead, displaced millions from Iraq’s Sunni minority and brought many more years of sectarian strife.

The question for many ordinary Iraqis today is what unforeseen consequences this latest U.S. departure may have on their lives, whether that is a jihadist resurgence or the state’s imminent confrontation with Iran-backed militias.

“I remember what happened after the withdrawal in 2011,” said Sarkawt Ahmad, a 26-year-old shopkeeper in northwestern Sulaymaniyah, in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. “Imagine what these pro-Iranian groups will do to us in the absence of the international coalition.”

Some regional security experts argue that it was the continued U.S. presence in Iraq that allowed Iran-backed militias to justify their existence, and their arms.

“We can’t just shape-shift these missions from one raison d’être to another, which is what we’ve done for 25 years,” said Adam Weinstein, a longtime proponent of U.S. forces’ ending their mission in Iraq who is the deputy director of the Middle East Program at the Quincy Institute, a research group.

At the ceremony marking the U.S. withdrawal on Wednesday, Mr. al-Zaidi expressed Iraq’s thanks to the United States and to all other countries who supported the fight against ISIS for more than a decade.

“The conclusion of the international coalition’s mission does not mean the end of our battle against terrorism,” he said. “It marks Iraq’s transition to a phase in which it assumes full responsibility for its security and stability.”

Kurds are vulnerable under a new security order

Though both countries have pledged to maintain robust collaboration, the United States and Iraq have still not finalized plans for their security relationship moving forward. In a statement, the Defense Department said it would continue to provide “targeted training and intelligence support” to Iraq.

The last time American forces left Iraq, the United States maintained one of its largest embassies in the world there. Today, the American diplomatic presence is a small fraction of that, said Renad Mansour, an Iraq analyst at Chatham House, a research institute based in London.

He said the shift reflected Washington’s desire to extricate itself from the Middle East: “In the bigger picture, this shows the U.S. is no longer what it used to be — but, also, its priorities are no longer what they used to be.”

This situation has particularly unnerved Iraq’s semiautonomous Kurdistan region in the north, which saw how the Trump administration’s withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria’s Kurdish-controlled northeast forced the region to come under central government control.

Iraqi Kurds, who began establishing sovereignty in their region through U.S. air support in the 1990s, feel the most vulnerable under Iraq’s new security order. As one of the closest U.S. security partners in the region, Iraqi Kurdistan has come under repeated attacks by Iran and its allied Iraqi militias this year.

Kurdish officials argue this reflects a serious problem for Iraqi security more broadly. “There is no air defense system neither in the Kurdistan region, nor in Iraq as a whole,” said Kifah Mahmoud, an adviser to Masoud Barzani, the first president of Iraqi Kurdistan. “This creates a sense of anxiety and uncertainty.”

Baghdad’s efforts to assert its sovereignty have been repeatedly undermined in recent months by multiple incidents showing its lack of control over its sky and borders.

Most recently, Saudi Arabia accused Iraq of being the origin site of the strike that temporarily shut down its east-west pipeline, which provides 4 percent of global oil supplies. Iraqi officials suspect Iraqi militias facilitated an attack by Iranian operatives.

At the same time, Iraqi militias point to the fact that Israel set up covert bases in the Iraqi desert during the war with Iran. And for years, Turkish forces have controlled territory in northern Iraq, though Iraqi and Turkish officials recently announced plans for a phased withdrawal.

Such gaps in Iraqi sovereignty may become the biggest vulnerability in the government’s campaign to control the militias.

Days before the formal end of the U.S. military presence, Abu Mujahid al-Assaf, a leader from Kataib Hezbollah, one of Iraq’s most powerful Iran-backed militias, issued an ominous warning to the government if it kept complying with new U.S. sanctions against Tehran.

“Let Mr. al-Zaidi and those standing behind him know: A government that does not work for the benefit of the people will be brought down through various means,” he wrote in a statement.

The militias are trumpeting the official U.S. withdrawal day not as a success of the anti-Islamic State campaign, but of their own. They announced an afternoon celebration on the streets of Baghdad on Wednesday under the slogan: “We won’t keep you.” They called the withdrawal an “occasion made possible by the blessed blood of the martyrs and the patience of the fighters in the Iraqi Islamic Resistance.”

Many Iraqis who reject the militias have painful memories of the U.S. presence in Iraq. Among them is Awatif al-Azawi, a 57-year-old who blames the United States for the death of her son, who she says was killed in the crossfire between militants and American forces in their hometown, Falluja.

“I used to love the Americans because they delivered us from the oppression of Saddam Hussein,” she said. “We unfortunately later discovered that the U.S. military’s oppression and cruelty were worse than Saddam.”

On the first night that U.S. forces no longer maintain a presence in Iraq, she said, “I will bake a cake at home, light candles and blow them out to celebrate.”

Kamil Kakol contributed reporting."

After Two Decades, U.S. Forces Leave Iraq to an Uncertain Future - The New York Times