Don’t Give Up on Global Order

By Philip H. Gordon

Tuesday, June 09, 2026

  

Americans these days agree on very little about politics and international relations. But there is a growing consensus around two fundamental points. One is that the long-standing liberal world order—founded after World War II and based on a system of U.S.-led alliances, multilateral institutions, relatively open trade, and the defense of rules and norms such as state sovereignty, nonaggression, and freedom of navigation—is now dead and buried. It had been waning for some time, the logic goes, but the second Trump administration is proving to be the final nail in the coffin. The second point of emerging consensus is that a fundamental remaking of that order has become essential. The American role in preserving the old order had become counterproductive and unsustainable, and it is long past time that Americans shed the burdens required to try to maintain it.

 

The problem with this line of thinking is that neither assertion is true, and assuming otherwise could create a dangerous, self-fulfilling prophecy. U.S. President Donald Trump certainly doesn’t believe in a liberal, rules-based, U.S.-led order, and there is no guarantee that order will survive four years of the damage his administration is inflicting on it. At the same time, it would be premature to succumb to the fatalistic conclusion that there is no hope for more principled and reliable U.S. leadership after Trump, whose policies are now reminding many Americans what they lose when such leadership is abandoned. It would be even more misguided to presume that if the U.S.-led world order really is dying, it won’t be sorely missed when it is gone. To paraphrase what British Prime Minister Winston Churchill once said about democracy, a U.S.-led world order is probably the worst of all possible orders—except for all the others that have ever been tried.

 

Cynics (or frankly any honest observer) might question the degree to which a liberal rules-based order ever actually existed; it would be easy to make a long list of examples of how rules have been bent, broken, or ignored, not least by the United States itself. As Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney acknowledged in his landmark address to the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2026, the notion of a rules-based order was always “partially false.” The world’s strongest powers would consistently “exempt themselves when convenient,” trade rules were “enforced asymmetrically,” and international law was “applied with varying rigor depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.” At the same time, as Carney also acknowledged, the liberal international order was also partially true, and for eight decades, American hegemony “helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.” The United States during that period adopted and maintained a broad, enlightened view—historically unprecedented among great powers—that it had a national self-interest in making other countries secure, prosperous, and free. That view in turn gave other countries an interest in supporting U.S. leadership and the order that came with it.

 

The U.S.-led international system that has been in place since just after World War II has been marred by wars, injustices, inequalities, and other horrors. But it has also underpinned the most stable, secure, and prosperous 80-year period in world history. Much of that is because every U.S. president before Trump believed in it, defended it, and had the necessary public support to do so. Rather than complacently accepting its demise—let alone celebrating or contributing to it—the American president who comes after Trump should set out to update, improve, and sell the idea of an enlightened and U.S.-led world where leadership, rules, values, institutions, and norms still matter.

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SILVER LININGS

 

In the 1979 film Monty Python’s Life of Brian, set in AD 33, the character Reg (played by the comedian John Cleese) famously asks fellow members of his Judean resistance group, “What have the Romans ever done for us?,” only for them to mention aqueducts, sanitation, roads, irrigation, medicine, education, public order, and even wine. Reg is reduced to responding, “Apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, . . . what have the Romans ever done for us?” A similar joke could be made about American critics who dismiss the benefits of U.S. global leadership over the past 80 years: apart from avoiding great-power war (for the first time in history), keeping sea-lanes open, curbing nuclear proliferation, fostering unparalleled prosperity, advancing democracy, and granting the United States the unique benefits of global preeminence, what did the U.S.-led order ever do for Americans?

 

To say this is not to ignore the conflicts, injustices, and hypocrisies of the past eight decades but to note how favorably that period compares with any previous one in world history. Consider, for example, the prevention of wars between major powers. In the 80 years that preceded 1945 or any similar period before that, the world’s strongest countries fought regularly and repeatedly, wreaking havoc on humanity. World War I and World War II alone killed roughly 100 million people. By this standard, the last 80 years compare rather favorably. To be sure, what the historian John Lewis Gaddis has called “the long peace” that followed World War II was due in part to the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons, whose invention coincided with the dawn of the U.S.-led world order. As the political scientist John Mueller has pointed out, it was also due to the simple reality that modern military technology, even beyond nuclear weapons, makes war so catastrophic that major powers are largely deterred from waging it against each other. But much of the long peace also had to do with the presence and power of American military forces, alliances, and defense agreements all over the world, which have deterred the sort of territorial aggression and great-power wars that used to be commonplace.

 

Nuclear weapons nonproliferation provides another case in point. U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s famous 1963 warning that the world could see some 15 to 25 nuclear states by the 1970s—a thought that “haunted” him—was hardly implausible. Many experts and intelligence services concurred. But it didn’t happen, not because nuclear know-how, material, or technology was not available to states but because the United States gave credible security guarantees to many of the states that might have considered that option and set up multilateral institutions to deny access to adversarial potential proliferators. The system was far from perfect—five countries developed nuclear weapons after Kennedy’s warning—but others were deterred from or incentivized against doing so. More nuclear weapons proliferation will not necessarily lead to nuclear weapons use, accidents, or terrorist threats, but it does not seem to be a gamble worth taking.

 

The liberal international order—anchored by American security guarantees that provided stability for large parts of Europe and Asia, open sea-lanes for the entire world, and U.S.-led institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization—also helped to foster the largest expansion of global prosperity in history. Critics may claim that the U.S.-led order benefited only the United States and other advanced industrial countries, and that economic growth was unevenly distributed among and within countries. But from 1945 to today, global GDP increased more than tenfold, thanks in no small part to rising levels of wealth in so-called developing countries. Average incomes tripled, and the share of humanity living in extreme poverty fell from nearly 60 percent in 1950 to around ten percent in 2025. The rise in global income lifted over a billion people out of poverty altogether, and the global middle class grew to include more than half the world’s population. Life expectancy rose from 46 years in 1950 to 73 years in 2024. This economic growth cannot be solely attributed to the U.S.-led world order. But that order did provide unusually propitious conditions for it to take place.

 

American global leadership also helped promote the greatest expansion of individual freedom and democracy the world has ever seen. In 1945, most of the world lived under authoritarian rule. By the 1990s, more than half of all states were democracies; by 2016 it was six out of ten. Even with the democratic recession of the past decade, the world remains far more democratic than in any previous era. The United States often wielded its great power selfishly, but it nonetheless provided a model and the space for promoting open societies, rule of law, and human rights far beyond anything before.

 

NOT DEAD YET

 

Some critics of the U.S.-led order might grant that it has been great for the world. But they believe it has been an unsustainable drain on American resources. Trump, for example, framed his campaign for president in 2024 on a narrative of U.S. weakness and global decline, and many voters seemed to believe him. According to a February 2024 Gallup poll, just 33 percent of Americans were satisfied with the position of the United States in the world—a decrease of 20 percentage points from just four years prior. Many Americans feel the United States has not been well served by the international system that preceded Trump and have become convinced that the country is no longer capable of playing a global leadership role.

 

But neither of these assumptions hold up to scrutiny. U.S. economic growth over the past two decades has dwarfed that of other wealthy countries, and the economy that Trump inherited was what The Economist in October 2024 called “the envy of the world.” Whereas in 2008 the European Union’s economy was larger than that of the United States, U.S. GDP is now more than 40 percent higher than that of the EU and more than seven times that of Japan. Once common predictions that China would soon surpass the United States economically have largely ceased as Beijing’s decades-long trend of double-digit growth has ended and its economy faces demographic challenges, weak consumption, and a bloated property market. Russia’s already much weaker economy has been devastated by sanctions, export controls, and over four years of war—to the point that the U.S. defense budget alone is now half the size of Russia’s entire GDP. The United States obviously faces real economic problems—particularly growing inequality and rising debt—but it still accounts for 26 percent of global GDP, the highest share in nearly two decades and about where it stood at the end of the Reagan administration.

 

Other measures of relative power underscore Washington’s global strength. U.S. military power eclipses that of any other country, with a defense budget more than three times China’s and larger than the top ten other biggest spenders’ combined. U.S. energy production has reached a record high: Washington leads global production of both oil and natural gas, at 20 percent and 25 percent, respectively. American technology companies dominate global markets and far outcompete rivals in the field of artificial intelligence. The U.S. dollar is used in nearly 90 percent of foreign exchange transactions and makes up 60 percent of foreign exchange reserves, which gives Washington broad power to impose sanctions, freeze assets, and run deficits.

 

The United States still faces considerable domestic and international challenges, and Trump’s policies—not least his inflationary tariffs, cuts to top research institutions, indiscriminate restrictions on immigration, and weakening of democratic norms and the rule of law—are doing serious damage to the sources of its strength. But the notion that the United States is no longer capable of playing a global leadership role or that its exercise of such a role for the past 80 years has not served it well is not backed up by the facts.

 

WORTH THE RISK?

 

As Americans have grown tired of their global role, the track record and consequences of the U.S.-led order have been harshly and increasingly criticized from both sides of the political spectrum. The right, once internationalist but now dominated by Trump loyalists and “America first” proponents, believes that American foreign policy elites have squandered vast amounts of blood and treasure in search of “permanent American domination of the entire world,” as the 2025 National Security Strategy put it. In contrast to postwar American leaders such as President Harry Truman or Secretaries of State Dean Acheson and George Marshall, Trump sees the world in zero-sum terms. He has little appreciation for concepts such as public goods or the global commons. He sees alliances not as force multipliers but as mechanisms for allies to exploit the United States, and he harbors nothing but disdain for multilateral institutions, rules, laws, or norms.

 

On the left is a different but overlapping critique: that the history of the U.S.-led world order has been one of an unnecessary quest for domination, excessive defense spending, failed military interventions, hypocrisy, and the neglect of human rights. Many progressives recognize the challenges posed by various U.S. adversaries but often blame American policies and provocations as much as the adversaries themselves. They note that high U.S. defense expenditures incentivized allies’ free-riding and came at the expense of American workers, and that U.S. bases abroad provided targets for Washington’s enemies as much as they deterred them. These critics question the United States’ capacity for responsible global leadership and oppose the defense spending that leadership requires.

 

There are of course huge differences between (and within) these two schools of thought. But what they have in common is that neither believes the U.S.-led liberal order is in the United States’ continued interest. They also tend to take the benefits of U.S. leadership for granted and fail to recognize the dangers that would loom if Americans gave up on it.

 

The biggest risk in a world without a strong United States committed to allies, rules, and norms would be a lower cost of aggression and a higher risk of major conflict as a result. As Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine showed, outright territorial conquest is hardly extinct, and it would be naive to conclude that ambitious or insecure states would not seek to take advantage of a withering of American military power and security commitments. Trump likes to brag about (and overstate) how he persuaded NATO allies to spend more on defense. But if the U.S. defense commitment is made conditional and U.S. forces deployed in Europe are reduced, the continent as a whole will be less secure, and Russia could be tempted to think it could get away with further aggression beyond Ukraine. If U.S. security commitments in the Indo-Pacific are no longer backed by credible military forces, deterrence for Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan could fail. Trump’s war of choice in Iran was reckless and irresponsible, but if the United States withdrew its forces from the Middle East and left its rivals to their own devices, nothing in history suggests these states would just get along peacefully or that the United States would be immune to the consequences if they didn’t.

 

Also at risk would be critical public goods such as open sea-lanes, which have been taken for granted since the United States embraced the principle of freedom of navigation after World War II and built up its navy to enforce it. Skeptics of that role were given a sharp reminder of its importance when Iran responded to U.S. attacks in February 2026 by closing the Strait of Hormuz, sending fuel and other commodity prices skyrocketing. For more than 40 years, U.S. forces in the region had successfully deterred an Iranian closure of the strait—even in periods of conflict—until Trump launched a war that left the regime with little to lose. In a matter of weeks, American gas prices rose by 50 percent, some Asian countries had to move to four-day workweeks because of lack of fuel, farmers in Africa and other regions didn’t have fertilizer for spring planting, and rising inflation and interest rates put the entire global economy at risk. If the United States were now to give up on the principle of freedom of navigation or the means to enforce it, other key waterways—including the Strait of Malacca, the South China Sea, and the Suez Canal—would be vulnerable either to adversarial domination or conflict among competing powers. To the argument that such a role is too costly for the United States to maintain, consider that a one percent reduction in U.S. GDP, which could easily result from the closure of any of these key waterways, would cost Americans over $300 billion in a year. A similar blow to the global economy would cost over $10 trillion.

 

Nor can it be assumed that Kennedy’s nightmare of further nuclear proliferation could be avoided. Indeed, mounting questions about continued U.S. security commitments may have already set the stage for such an expansion. Over 75 percent of South Koreans now support the development of an independent arsenal. Polish President Karol Nawrocki has suggested that his country develop its own nuclear weapons, and Germany is pursuing nuclear cooperation with France and the United Kingdom. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whose country signed a comprehensive defense agreement with nuclear-armed Pakistan in September 2025, has said since 2018 that his country would develop its own nuclear weapons “as soon as possible” if Iran did so, and the Turkish foreign minister said in February of this year that Turkey and others in the region would consider doing so as well. Even Japan—the world’s only victim of nuclear weapons use so far—is starting to debate the need for an independent nuclear deterrent. The Trump administration’s mishandling of its war in Iran does not negate the reality that without the U.S. capacity to prevent it from doing so, the Islamic Republic might have produced nuclear weapons a long time ago.

 

Critics of the U.S.-led order tend to downplay or wish away all these risks, hoping that if Washington reduced its role, others would step up to fill the gap. Some think that countries would start recognizing great powers’ spheres of influence and, in doing so, avoid conflict. But in truth, there is no replacement for what the United States provides. By taking relative peace, prosperity, and stability for granted and focusing solely on the costs of U.S. leadership rather than the benefits, these critics are setting aside many of the lessons of the past century and proposing an extraordinary gamble that those lessons no longer apply.

 

DON’T NIX IT, FIX IT

 

There is no guarantee that the U.S.-led order will survive Trump, who is taking a sledgehammer to almost all its core pillars and comprehensively destroying the institutions, principles, and the trust in the United States on which it depends. Trump reflects American attitudes as much as he drives them, and after seeing him elected twice, no one can claim that Trumpism is a passing phenomenon. As Mara Karlin and I wrote in Foreign Affairs earlier this year, Washington’s allies would be irresponsible not to start urgently preparing for a world in which responsible U.S. leadership never returns, and Americans who believe in such global leadership are in no position to promise it ever will.

 

But Americans do not have to take that future as a given. Instead of fatalistically accepting the premise that the U.S.-led order is dead and cannot be revived, the next president should remind Americans of its value, acknowledge its shortcomings, and offer a new vision for American leadership. The United States after Trump should seek to reform the U.S.-led world order, not retreat from the responsibilities of maintaining it.

 

The first step in this process would be to propose a new bargain with allies. To address legitimate concerns that the old alliance system placed unfair burdens on the United States, a new arrangement will have to include greater contributions from allies, both to deal with growing threats and to make alliances politically sustainable in Washington. Fortunately, the process of greater burden sharing is already underway and likely to continue. Even if the next U.S. administration believes strongly in the value of the United States’ partnerships, American allies will know that a potential return to a Trumpist foreign policy is just one election away. That, after all, is what American officials warned their allies for years as they pressed for greater burden sharing. Now, these countries have all too much reason to believe it.

 

A renewed U.S. alliance system will also have to be updated to reflect the most likely global challenges of the second quarter of the twenty-first century. These include great-power competition with China and Russia, growing cooperation among those powers and other adversaries such as Iran and North Korea, the emergence of artificial general intelligence, the need to create more resilience in supply chains and the U.S. defense industrial base, and the impacts of climate change. To do that, and to increase linkages between U.S. allies in different regions, the G-7 could be expanded to include partners such as Australia and South Korea and given a mandate to include national security–related export controls, outbound investment restrictions, and collective responses to economic coercion. A new American president who recommits the United States to the ironclad security guarantees that have helped deter aggression for decades, and who once again treats allies with trust and respect, would likely be welcomed enthusiastically as the leader of this modernized alliance.

 

The next U.S. president will also have to demonstrate respect for the rules, norms, and institutions that Trump is destroying. The notion that previous American leaders abided by such rules may well have been partially false, but no previous president came anywhere close to the degree of domestic or international lawlessness Trump is displaying. All great powers will be inclined to use the international system to their advantage, and no multilateral system will ever be robust enough to ensure comprehensive respect for all international rules and laws. But comprehensively eschewing institutions, rules, international law, and norms altogether in a world of “might makes right” is a recipe for injustice and renewed conflict among great powers.

 

A renewed U.S.-led world order will have to address the global economic imbalances and inequities that contributed so much to the fading support for the old one. It will not be possible to go back to a world where globalization and free trade agreements were touted as the path to prosperity for all without recognition of their downsides—such as trade imbalances with China and the decline in American manufacturing jobs in certain communities. But it will also be necessary to pull back from the overcorrection that has taken place over the past decade—and especially during the second Trump term—in which the very word “trade” became a sort of taboo and huge increases in U.S. tariffs interfered with trade flows, raised prices for consumers, failed to restore manufacturing jobs, reduced farmers’ incomes, and created enormous economic uncertainty while leaving the country’s overall trade deficit virtually unchanged. The next president will have to be honest with the American people, explaining that tariffs are a mostly regressive tax on Americans; productivity gains and technology advances are far more responsible than trade for the decades-long decline in the U.S. manufacturing sector; the greatest beneficiaries of lower-cost imports are lower-income families; reducing barriers to trade and opening up new markets can create good, high-paying jobs for Americans; and protectionism and tit-for-tat tariff wars are more likely to be a path to 1930s-style economic stagnation than to the massive expansion of U.S. and global prosperity seen during the post–World War II era.

 

To the extent that reform of the World Trade Organization and other institutions proves impossible, the next president should look to develop new, flexible, and overlapping partnerships among like-minded states. Such groupings could agree to use their collective leverage (the current G-7 countries alone represent some 750 million people and $55 trillion in GDP) to deal with issues such as global supply chain vulnerabilities, China’s predatory trade practices, and economic coercion in general. Such an approach would make a lot more sense than putting up trade barriers within such groupings and allowing China to play their members off one another. The United States should also be prepared to explore bilateral and regional trade agreements that would not only lower trade and investment barriers but also include enforceable standards on labor rights, state subsidies, and environmental protection. By boosting exports and making imports cheaper, such agreements would both contribute to an overall rise in U.S. living standards and generate revenues that could be used for worker transition assistance, training and “upskilling,” and investments in local communities negatively affected by trade. Indeed, formally linking commitments to make such investments to the trade deals themselves would boost domestic political support for these types of agreements.

 

The next administration must also recognize the American public’s frustration with the burdens of global leadership and forever wars by exercising greater humility and discretion in the wielding of American military power—and allowing Congress to play its constitutional role. Most of the problems with the past order were not about global military engagement or presence but excess and overreach. The United States does need to deter China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia; it did not need to spend $4 trillion over 20 years and sacrifice countless lives to try to turn Afghanistan and Iraq into pro-American democracies. The United States did need to build and maintain a global coalition to help save Ukraine from occupation and reinforce the principle of nonaggression; it did not need to launch a unilateral war of choice to try to accomplish regime change in Iran when diplomatic alternatives were available. Of course, no administration can always exercise appropriate wisdom in the face of hard foreign policy challenges, but forgoing the capability to defend the international order is a recipe for disaster that Americans would come to regret.

 

STILL AT THE READY

 

Americans who are worried about the domestic political consequences of defending U.S. global leadership might admit that U.S. leadership makes sense substantively but is not politically viable because they are tired of the burdens it requires of them and the perceived lack of results. This is what Trump’s second election was widely understood to suggest. Less than two years into his term, however, the results of his unilateral, transactional, and values-free policies are backfiring. He is the least popular president ever at this point in his tenure, and polls now show American support for alliances and international engagement at an all-time high. According to a Gallup poll conducted in early February 2026, 64 percent of Americans think the United States should play a major or leading role in solving international problems, and the same percentage believes it’s important for the United States to be the world’s leading military superpower. An NPR/Ipsos poll from January 2026 found that 61 percent of Americans believe the United States should be the moral leader of the world (though only 39 percent believe it actually is). And a July 2025 Chicago Council on Global Affairs survey found that eight in ten Americans believe that international trade benefits the United States and free trade agreements effectively advance U.S. foreign policy goals. By the time Trump’s presidency ends, in 2029, the case for supporting an updated vision of an American-led world order may be more compelling than it has been in years.

 

Critics might argue that too much damage will have been done for the United States’ allies—having been “fooled twice”—to believe any new American commitments to global engagement, deterrence, institutions, or rules. In fact, even after all that has transpired since January 2025, or perhaps because of it, allies around the world would likely embrace a new form of U.S. leadership with open arms. It is Washington’s adversaries who would not.

 

After World War II, American leaders also faced doubts about the country’s role in the world, and the system they created in that war’s aftermath was not preordained. After the Vietnam War and the 1970s Watergate scandal, many observers concluded that the United States no longer had the strength, will, or moral authority to play a healthy role on the world stage. In both cases, however, U.S. leaders understood that global peace, prosperity, and security required a powerful and active United States, committed to institutions, rules, and norms, and persuaded their compatriots to support it, with historically unprecedented results. As Americans consider their future role in the world, even as they focus on the need for change, they should keep that record in mind.

The Left-Wing Case Against Anti-Zionism

By Adam Louis-Klein

Thursday, June 18, 2026

 

In September 1948, a prosperous Jewish businessman in Iraq was publicly hanged in front of a cheering crowd of 12,000. The following day, close-up images of Shafiq Ades’s broken body ran on the front page of Iraqi newspapers in a triumphant and gruesome spectacle that celebrated the punishment of a “Zionist traitor.” Iraq was losing the war that would create the state of Israel, a humiliation that challenged fantasies of Arab unity and conquest. A military tribunal accused Ades of selling arms to Israel, and he was convicted within days. The state determined that the execution would take place outside his own mansion in a public act of humiliation. Regardless of whether it was true that Ades was a Zionist, his murder was an act of anti-Zionist violence—driven by a violent hatred of Israel and anyone associated with it.

 

The flight or expulsion of 850,000 Jews from countries across the Middle East is a story that still too often rests in silence, but even when it is told, the ideology that caused it is seldom named. The displacement of so many Jews from their ancient home becomes a kind of tit for tat—a balancing act of victimhood against the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees who fled or were expelled during Israel’s war of independence. The fact that accusations of “Zionism” were what legitimized anti-Jewish violence—whether during the Tripoli pogroms of 1945, 1948, and 1967; the 1947 pogrom in Aleppo, Syria, and synagogue bombings in Damascus and Aleppo in 1949; or the expulsion of Egyptian Jews in 1956 by Gamal Abdel Nasser—drops out of the calculus.

 

How can it be that an ideology that has produced repeated acts of discrimination, dispossession, and violence now bears the mantle of progressivism in the West and has been normalized within the Democratic Party? Like Stalinism or the Khmer Rouge, anti-Zionism represents a wrong turn for the left. Anti-Zionism claims to be concerned with rights of minorities, opposition to racism, and universal justice. In truth, though, it has appropriated the language of anti-colonial liberation to justify oppression, transformed anti-racism into a racist accusation, and turned hatred of Israel into a global ritual.

 

Anti-Zionism has hijacked the left, and it did so through exploiting the left’s tendency toward internationalism and its skepticism of nation-states. It transformed Jewish peoplehood into a crime and charged that Jewish difference amounted to a claim of supremacy, even as it demanded that a persecuted minority submit to the dominance of the majority. Yet the public reckoning with anti-Zionism still awaits its moment.

 

I am a Jew who supports women’s rights, gay rights, and trans rights, and who believes that climate change will pose a major challenge to human society. Opposing anti-Zionism is, similarly, a natural extension of my concern for truth and equality. If the Democratic Party wants to maintain an authentic commitment to human rights, it must oppose the movement that seeks the elimination of Israel and the purging from civil society of those marked as Zionists.

 

***

 

Decades before the creation of the state of Israel, Vladimir Lenin laid the groundwork for anti-Zionism. In his early-20th-century polemics, Lenin cast Zionism, the movement to found a Jewish state, as a form of “bourgeois nationalism,” a scheme by privileged Jews to divide the working class. Either Jews should dissolve into the universal proletarian movement, he argued, or expect to be marked as class enemies. “Jewish national culture is the slogan of the rabbis and the bourgeoisie, the slogan of our enemies,” he wrote. After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the Jewish section of the Communist Party, or Yevsektsiya, would systematically dismantle Jewish life, as synagogues and the Hebrew language itself were branded as Zionist.

 

Once Israel was created, the Marxist-Leninist ideology that cast Zionism as bourgeois nationalism flowed into a more developed propaganda apparatus, which coded Israel as the center of Western imperialism while elevating other nationalisms as virtuous expressions of opposition to capitalist power. A new definition of Jews emerged, inverting the classical anti-Semitic claim that Jews were non-European race polluters to charge instead that Zionists were “European colonizers.” As the 1956 Suez Crisis helped crystallize an alliance between Arab nationalists and the Soviet Union, this anti-Zionist ideology took root in the Middle East.

 

In 1965, Fayez Sayegh published Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, an ahistorical argument that Jews are not truly from the Land of Israel, but an alien people. Jewish indigeneity is but a settler fabrication, he charged, a 19th-century construct in which biblical fundamentalists invented the notion that Jews see the Land of Israel as their origin and destiny. In Sayegh’s work, and in that of his followers, Jewish history and belonging were erased, the truth of Jewish life made to dissolve in the face of a political project that cast elimination as justice.

 

Sayegh and other Arab nationalists believed that Zionism dismembered Arab unity and violated the universal norms of the post–World War II international order. These writers transformed theological polemics against the “chosen people” and accusations of “Jewish superiority” into the claim that “Zionism is racism.” Jewish nationhood was inherently “exclusivist,” whereas Arab nationalism could be framed as emancipatory, part of a global struggle against oppression.

 

Anti-Zionism recoded the left’s concern with abuses of state power and the rights of minorities into a hatred of the Jewish state, just as the classical anti-Semitism of the 19th century recoded right-wing concern with the integrity of the nation and foreign influence into a hatred of Jews as a dispersed, stateless minority. But the internationalism that transformed Israel into a beacon of “ultranationalism” and “fascism”—the Soviets reveled in Holocaust inversion and in the depiction of Israelis as Nazis—would itself become a global system of oppression, subjecting one small state to an endless trial of elimination.

 

Discussions of whether anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism obscure the fact that anti-Zionism, as it actually exists, remains genocidal in intent, demanding the erasure of a national group that is protected under international law. The Genocide Convention protects all national groups, including those based on shared citizenship. Discrimination against Israelis qua Israelis—and the “Zionists” who appear as their proxies—is a moral wrong.

 

The left’s internationalism—once the calling card of progress—has hardened into hostility to Israel, across academia, NGOs, mainstream-media outlets, and the United Nations. The constant accusations that circulate across these networks of authority are not normal critiques of a state, but claims that cast Israel as the exemplar of the three great sins of the postwar international order—colonialism, apartheid, and genocide—a “rogue state” said to violate the very fabric of the world.

 

The progressive case against anti-Zionism recognizes the freedom of Israelis to choose the nature of the society they want to live under. It recognizes that Israel may be becoming more like other Middle Eastern countries—that its increased religiosity in recent years is partially driven by the Mizrahi segment of its population, those who were expelled from other countries in the region. And it seeks to extend to Israel the same allowance that progressives extend to other nations in the region, an acknowledgment that societies can differ from secular Western ideals.

 

Since the Six-Day War in 1967, which resulted in the emergence of the messianic Gush Emunim movement and the planting of settlements in the West Bank, changes within Israeli society have alienated many American Jews, as well as secular, left-wing Israelis. Religiosity and nationalism have fused, displacing cosmopolitanism. The language of leftist universalism now seems ever more remote from Israel’s reality.

 

But the left must adhere to its own standards, irrespective of changes within Israel. It needs to acknowledge the harms caused by anti-Zionism—the forced exodus of Mizrahi Jews across the Middle East, the cultural erasure of Jews under the Soviet Union, and the anti-Jewish violence and purging happening in the West today. And it needs to address them.

 

The brokenness that anti-Zionism sees in the world, as a vast oppressive conspiracy that sustains the existence of Israel—the system that Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, claimed is “the enemy of humanity”—is a brokenness that anti-Zionism brings into the world. The oppressive system is anti-Zionism itself. It’s a brokenness that, it just so happens, Jewish tradition tasks the Jewish people—and all of humanity—to repair.

 

 

In California, the Damage of the ‘Billionaire Tax’ Has Already Been Done

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, June 18, 2026

 

“A proposal to tax the wealth of billionaires in California,” the New York Times reports, “has officially gathered enough signatures to appear on the November ballot.” And yet: “It isn’t yet certain that the tax initiative will actually be voted on.” Why? Because “several prominent Californians, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, have vowed to defeat the measure, and they could strike a last-minute deal to remove it from voter consideration.”

 

Yeah, maybe. But, at this point, who cares? This one is already over. Maybe the referendum will pass. Maybe it’ll be struck from the ballot. Maybe it’ll be nixed in exchange for some other venal priority of the SEIU. Maybe half of the state’s voters will be abducted by extraterrestrials. It doesn’t especially matter. At this stage, there remains no outcome that isn’t bad for California and for the Democrats that run it. The damage has been done.

 

Merely by talking about a wealth tax, California prompted an exodus. Prophylactically, a series of entrepreneurs, worth between $700 billion and $1 trillion, summarily left the state. What happens next remains to be seen, but none of it is salutary. Back of the envelope, the options appear to me to be as follows:

 

1.      The measure is removed from the ballot at the behest of Gavin Newsom—who, in his characteristically egotistical way, has said, “I’ll do what I have to do to protect the state”—and an internecine fight breaks out within the Democratic Party, which further emboldens the anti-establishment wing that has recent brought us such luminaries as Zohran Mamdani, Graham Platner, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

 

2.      The measure is removed from the ballot as part of a grand bargain that further solidifies union control of California, and thereby guarantees that the state is treated to even more of the anti-growth policies that have been bleeding the state dry for decades.

 

3.      The tax remains on the ballot and passes, at which point those who have already fled will be joined by a good number of others who will now be leaving to avoid a real, rather than a theoretical, confiscation of their assets. In all likelihood, those people will go to Austin, Texas, or to Miami, Florida, or perhaps even to New York City.

 

4.      The tax remains on the ballot but doesn’t pass, at which point the institutional Left in California will have to acknowledge that it chased out up to a trillion dollars of wealth — and the existing activity and tax revenues that it generates — in pursuit of an idea that was so unpopular that it was rejected by one of the most progressive electorates in the nation.

 

Pick your outcome. It doesn’t matter. In every scenario, California gets hosed.

 

Why has this happened? There are many reasons, but one of them is that the state’s residents have become all too comfortable having it both ways. Californians want to rely upon the rich to pay almost all of the taxes in the state and to vilify those rich people and to suggest that they shouldn’t exist. By design, California’s budget is heavily reliant upon the wealthy. This is why California collects far more revenue than usual during tech booms and periods of impressive market gains, while during busts and downturns it faces drastic budget deficits. Under the current system, the top one percent of Californians pay around half of all personal income taxes in the state, while the top five percent pay around 70 percent. And unlike in the federal tax code, capital gains are treated as ordinary income in California, which means that when a founder sells his company or an investor realizes his gains, he is taxed at the full rate. The Democrats who run the state insist that this is “fair,” which is their prerogative. But when combined with their open hostility toward those who are paying the bills, it is unsustainable.

 

A few years ago, the head of the California Federation of Labor Unions, Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, tweeted “F*ck Elon Musk.” In response, Musk wrote “Message received” and relocated Tesla to Texas. While less profane, the “billionaire tax” has sent the same message, and, whatever its fate, it is now guaranteed to have had the same results.

The Spokesman

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, June 18, 2026

 

There’s an infamous tweet from October 2016 that still recirculates from time to time. It was posted by sports business analyst Darren Rovell in a moment of reflection about the antics of that year’s presidential campaign. “I feel bad for our country,” he wrote. “But this is tremendous content.”

 

It’s memorable because it’s efficient. In 11 words, Rovell glibly channeled the fatuity of the American people on the eve of the Donald Trump era. Voters found the clown on the ballot entertaining, so they chose to turn the United States into a circus.

 

I thought of Rovell’s tweet yesterday as I watched that clown perform at the G7 summit in France. It really was tremendous content. And I did—almost—feel bad for our country.

 

“The president’s vanity will … align him psychologically with the Iranians,” I predicted on Monday. “He’ll end up behaving like an Iranian ally, making excuses for their transgressions.” Disposed as he is to view the world in primitive terms of “friends” and “enemies,” he would inevitably begin to think of his new partners in peace as friends and would end up rationalizing concessions made to them as a matter of treating them fairly.

 

Trump would, I thought, turn himself into a kind of spokesman for Iran.

 

What happened yesterday exceeded my expectations.

 

Iranian missiles have been a key security concern for hawks for decades. The president himself cited the missiles as a problem in 2017, months before he withdrew the United States from the JCPOA, and he justified his decision to go to war earlier this year partly in terms of neutralizing the supposedly urgent threat from Iran’s arsenal.

 

Fast-forward to Wednesday, when he found himself arguing that it would be unfair to deprive the Iranians of a missile deterrent.

 

“What am I gonna do? We’re going to let Saudi Arabia have missiles, but they can’t have them?” Trump wondered. “It doesn’t work that way. Missiles aren’t the problem. Missiles, they hurt a little location, but they don’t blow up the planet.” No wonder some Israelis are calling the U.S. bargain with Iran a “diplomatic October 7.”

 

The president was just getting started, though. Asked about the possibility of Iran maintaining a nuclear energy program, something that the hated Obama deal had permitted, he again suggested that it wouldn’t be fair to deprive Iranians of something their neighbors are allowed to have. (Does that logic also apply to nuclear weapons?) Ditto for returning billions in “frozen” funds: It’s their money, Trump reminded his audience, before alleging that no one would invest in the U.S. dollar if those assets weren’t eventually returned.

 

Is that so? Those assets have been frozen for a long time, and the dollar’s holding up okay.

 

Later, he all but admitted defeat in the war by acknowledging that Iran’s strategy of holding oil markets hostage had worked. “I didn’t want to see economic catastrophe,” the president said. Unable or unwilling to reopen the Strait of Hormuz using military force, he concluded that the risk of being remembered as a new Herbert Hoover was too high to justify prolonging the conflict.

 

Oh, and then, for good measure, he told the global press that America’s elections are rigged.

 

It was tremendous content, a Helsinki-tier tour de force of national humiliation that I’m sure his new “friends” appreciated. I almost felt bad for the country, and specifically the right-wing hawks, that elected him. Almost. But not quite.

 

“The Iran Peace Deal Is What Trumpism Looks Like,” Jonah Goldberg observed in yesterday’s G-File. That’s correct. The hawkish suckers who agreed to turn America into a circus in the belief that the clown would deliver for them bought this ticket. Now let them take the ride.

 

Three-legged stool.

 

The story of the conservative movement since 2016 is its various factions learning the hard way that the president doesn’t give a rip about their priorities. He’s delivered meaningful “wins” for each, but only immigration matters enough to him that he’s willing to plow endless political capital into it in the name of achieving some lasting, paradigm-changing victory.

 

He’ll continue his long-term project of purifying America’s “blood” by removing undesirables from the population for as long as he’s in charge. All other right-wing agendas are subject to being abandoned as his political needs require.

 

Fiscal conservatives, the first leg of the so-called “three-legged stool” in Ronald Reagan’s coalition, found that out early on. Trump handed them a quick win in his first term when he signed new tax cuts into law, then came close to handing them another when his push to repeal Obamacare fell just short in the Senate.

 

But it’s been all downhill since. Deficit hawks spent the last 16 months suffering through the stupidest trade war in history, the mainstreaming of right-wing state capitalism, and profligacy that’s brought the national debt to the brink of $40 trillion with no sign of slowing down. The president likes tax cuts because he can never have enough stimulus, but everything else that conservatives value as prudent economic policy matters as much to him as a fart in the wind.

 

The second leg of the stool is social conservatives. No faction of the right scored a bigger win than they did when Trump kept his promise to stock the Supreme Court with justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade. With states suddenly free to ban abortion, a tectonic cultural shift seemed in the offing.

 

It wasn’t. Spooked by the electoral backlash to the Dobbs ruling in the 2022 midterms, the president has done next to nothing in his second term to advance the pro-life cause. He’s urged Republican lawmakers to be “flexible” on abortion and has proved so reluctant to use federal power to restrict abortifacient drugs that activists have taken to attacking him in the press over it. “Trump is the problem. The president is the problem,” one starkly told the Wall Street Journal last month.

 

Because those drugs remain widely available in blue states and accessible by mail in red ones, abortions in America have actually risen since the Dobbs ruling. Trump delivered a “win” to pro-lifers but seems completely uninterested in delivering victory.

 

Which brings us to foreign policy hawks, the third leg in the proverbial stool.

 

Their relationship with the president has always been more fraught than the other two factions’. He criticized the Iraq war in 2016, made a Tucker Carlson acolyte his running mate in 2024, and got reelected by accusing Democrats of warmongering in Ukraine and beyond. He’s always seemed more excited to shake hands with Vladimir Putin than to attend the annual NATO summit. He’s not a natural ally.

 

But he’s given them some wins, too. Trump bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities last year and assassinated Qassem Suleimani, the head of Iran’s Quds Force, in 2020. He knocked a communist dictator out of power in Venezuela without a U.S. casualty when he captured Nicolás Maduro. He plainly intends to depose Cuba’s Castro-ist regime, a thorn in Reaganites’ side for decades, sooner rather than later. And of course he’s been an outspoken champion of Israel, a rare thing for a world leader to be in 2026.

 

Add to that the fact that the president is obsessed with “strength” and plainly relishes the U.S. military’s ability to impose its will by violent force, and you can see why so many right-wing hawks convinced themselves he was worth supporting.

 

Now they’ve discovered that Trump cared about Iran’s threat to the U.S. and Israel only insofar as he believed ending it could gain him glory on the cheap, as the man who achieved in a few short days of war what no president since Jimmy Carter had dared to try. Once the regime showed that it wouldn’t surrender quickly and prostrate itself before him and instead undertook to inflict political pain on him, he was done. There was nothing left in it for him.

 

Like fiscal and social conservatives, foreign policy hawks who chose to support the president backed a loathsome coup-plotting caudillo because they valued their pet policy issues more highly than they did the constitutional order. He’s now delivered a strategic catastrophe for their cause, a world in which America’s “allies will have less confidence in its capabilities; its public will be less willing to bear the costs of even productive engagement; and its rivals will be likelier to challenge Washington’s will.”

 

Their reward as enablers for having sold out their country and the men who founded it is getting to watch Caesar celebrate a peace deal that would embarrass the weakest peacenik Democrat. Don’t tell me they don’t deserve it.

 

Humiliation.

 

Don’t tell me Marco Rubio doesn’t deserve it. The secretary of state suffered the well-earned indignity yesterday of standing a few feet behind Trump, in frame for the cameras, as the president performed his new duties as an unofficial spokesman for Iran’s regime. I encourage you to watch the clips I linked above and pay attention to Rubio’s face. He knew better than to betray the horror he was plainly feeling in the moment, but it’s clear enough when a man’s soul leaves his body.

 

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh.

 

Don’t tell me Senate Republicans don’t deserve it. One of the grim delights of the endless next phase of “negotiations” with Iran will be watching members of Trump’s party in Congress forced to choke down the sh-t sandwich he’s fed them. Lindsey Graham has already taken a bite. Ted Cruz, who abetted Trump’s coup plot in January 2021, has also had a nibble. Last night Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall was reduced to telling CNN that, while he’d prefer that Iran not have missiles, the country needs to be able to defend itself.

 

Soon enough the entire Republican establishment will be unofficial spokesmen for the Iranians, especially after most of the right-wing base decides that criticizing the deal is treason against the president. When Trump eventually tells Congress that he intends to fund Iranian terrorism by waiving sanctions on their oil exports, regardless of whether that happens to violate federal law, the only noisy objections will come from lawmakers whose careers are already over.

 

And in a few months, when he decides that keeping Cuba under miserable Castro-ist rule is fine by him so long as the regime there takes orders from the White House, Republican lawmakers will be fine with that, too. (They’re fine with persistent oppression in Venezuela, aren’t they?) The term “Cuba libre” as a GOP rallying cry will have a short shelf life, I promise.

 

Don’t tell me that hawkish Trump-supporting right-wing commentators don’t deserve it either. For a decade, they’ve endorsed, excused, or tolerated every form of demagogic scumbaggery imaginable in the belief that a demented authoritarian who wants to run America like a third-world country is the least bad option available because he’s more likely to bomb demented third-world authoritarian regimes like Iran’s than Democrats are.

 

In the end, those commentators were gifted a new regional status quo in which the U.S. has abandoned virtually all of its “red lines” and endorsed a sort of Marshall Plan for Iran’s reconstruction without demanding anything like surrender first. The terms of this week’s deal have so horrified Israel that the president has become instantly politically radioactive there. It’s astounding that, to this day, every faction of the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party remains convinced that its own faces won’t be eaten right up until the moment they are.

 

Trump’s response to the disappointment among his hawkish fans was perfect, however. “There are some people, some writers, that I thought were friends of mine, but I don’t want them as friends anymore,” he said yesterday at the G7. He sounded like an 8-year-old, reducing principled strategic differences in matters of war to petulant personal grievances about being a bad friend—but as I said earlier, “friends” and “enemies” are the childish terms by which he understands the world. That stupidity is what his Reaganite supporters have cynically enabled for 10 years, believing they could leverage it for their own policy ends.

 

Now they’re finding that they’ve gone from “friends” to “enemies” themselves in a blink, a bad thing to be in a movement as dumb and tribal as the modern right.

 

Our former colleague Andrew Egger drew a clever analogy at The Bulwark yesterday between the president’s war in Iran and his quixotic attempt to rid the Lincoln Memorial’s reflecting pool of algae. The two cases reflect the same fallacy, he wrote—the belief that all national problems have been caused by the stupidity and lethargy of the expert class and can be solved with aggressive direct action, without considering the logistical challenges that made them problems in the first place. I’ve made the same point myself about Trumpism’s faith in ruthlessness as a cure for all policy ailments: Supposedly, with sufficient will, any impediment to beneficial change can be overcome.

 

It’s the dimwit populist antithesis of Chesterton’s fence, the conservative maxim that before you knock down a fence you should make sure you understand why it was put up. Maybe the fence is still standing only because no one until now had the brains and the balls to try to knock it down.

 

It’s embarrassing that conservative foreign policy hawks ever aligned themselves with a political movement as foolhardy as that, especially after Iraq. And it’s more embarrassing that Donald Trump seems to have—very belatedly—learned to appreciate the wisdom of Chesterton’s fence with respect to Iran before those hawks did. It wasn’t cowardice or idiocy that caused his predecessors to avoid attacking the Iranians, it turns out. It was the low likelihood of success and high cost of failure.

 

The fence was there for a reason. Meanwhile, hawks continue to holler at the president to “finish the job,” whatever that means, of knocking it over.

 

Decline.

 

In a just world, Republicans’ deathless image as the party of strength abroad would never recover from this debacle.

 

Trump started a dumb conflict that “warmongering” Democrats wouldn’t have pursued and finished it with a feeble one-sided peace that even Democrats wouldn’t have endorsed. But that’s not how American politics works: In the same way that the GOP is forever the party of smaller government in the public imagination, no matter how much evidence accumulates to the contrary, it will remain the choice on balance for those who prize “toughness” on foreign policy.

 

Certainly, it will remain that way for most of the right.

 

Republican voters spent four years aghast at the “weaponization of government” by Joe Biden’s Justice Department and the personal corruption of the “Biden crime family,” then turned around and reelected a convicted criminal whom any imbecile could see would put Democrats to shame on both counts if he regained power. The modern partisan brain is incapable of perceiving the sins of its own side—particularly the right-wing brain. It will never face the reality that the electoral success of Trump and his brand of politics are flames-in-the-sky omens of American decline.

 

Independents might, though. I don’t feel bad for a country that chose—twice—to turn itself into a circus, but it’s possible that this week’s deal will humiliate swing voters into delivering the beating this fall that Republicans deserve. Ten years of “tremendous content” is enough.

The Vice President Is Playing With Fire (and Brimstone)

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, June 19, 2026

 

J.D. Vance’s conversion story is bulls–t.

 

No surprise there: His last conversion story was bulls–t, too.

 

The only halfway interesting part is that both stories turn out to be the same bulls–t: Vance’s story—once again—is that he put his faith in the wrong people and institutions and discovered the error of his ways at precisely the moment when doing so would do the most to advance his career.

 

Saul had his great convulsion on the road to Damascus, but Vance, that knee-walking sycophant, had his somewhere in the Cincinnati suburbs on his way to Washington, where he decided to take up the cause of Donald Trump, a man he had once described—accurately—as unfit for office, bag-of-hammers dumb, and an aspiring American Hitler, further insisting that at least some of Trump’s followers belonged in prison after the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, a view of which he has lately repented. One could almost—almost—understand those who saw something in Trump back in 2016, but Vance saw the light only after the attempted coup d’état that crowned Trump’s four years of incompetence, cruelty, stupidity, venality, corruption, cowardice, laziness, pettiness, and dishonesty the first time around. One could imagine Vance concluding, circa A.D. 33, “You know, I didn’t think much of that Pontius Pilate guy at first, but he really showed me something with the way he crucified that troublemaker from Galilee while pretending to wash his hands of the matter—real shrewd politics, there.”

 

Vance would later insist that he had been misled about Trump by “some of the media stories that turned out to be dishonest fabrications of his record,” as though the actual, plain, undisputed facts of Trump’s record in office were insufficient to speak for themselves, and as if Vance had for those critical years had nothing but Salon and MSNBC to inform him about the world. Vance sliced the baloney pretty thin, but it didn’t matter: If there is one thing we have learned from his public life, it is that J.D. Vance is very, very good at telling people who can give him what he wants whatever they want to hear, whether that’s Peter Thiel or Chamber of Commerce-type Republicans or, in turn, right-wing conspiracy-kook podcast jabroneys and Donald Trump.

 

(Which raises an issue: When I was an editor at National Review, Vance was very much part of our little world. We had friends—and interests—in common, and I made excuses for him for a lot longer than I should have. I should have known better. Hell, I did know better, and I had self-interested reasons for wanting to see Vance succeed and for wanting to believe that he was a better kind of man than he is. Mea most maxima culpa, etc.)

 

Hillbilly Elegy is a pretty good book, but it is not an entirely honest one. It sometimes pretends to be a book about white poverty in rural Appalachia, but Vance has only secondhand connections to that: He grew up in the outskirts of greater Cincinnati in a household with an income that exceeded $100,000 a year at times—back in the 20^th century, when six figures meant something—though he visited eastern Kentucky from time to time as a child. Vance’s troubles—and they were genuinely horrifying at times—were more Midwestern and exurban in character than hillbilly stuff: the junkie mother, the deadbeat father, the belligerent and ignorant grandmother who raised him when his mother couldn’t and his father wouldn’t. Vance rose through the great American meritocracy and landed in the Ivy League elite at precisely the wrong moment for his aspirations—right as the class into which he had clawed his way was losing its credibility and its prestige as the digitally amplified waves of 21^st-century populism rolled over the cultural and political worlds, democratizing, vulgarizing, and disfiguring everything they subsumed.

 

Once again, J.D. Vance needed to find a way out of his social circumstances. And he did.

 

And now J.D. Vance has found Jesus the same way he found Donald Trump: at the moment when doing so best served his immediate material interests. St. Peter’s, Mar-a-Lago: One gilded and gaudy old pile full of relics is the same as another to such a creature as the vice president of these United States. J.D. Vance’s new Catholic sensibility is something like Caravaggio painted on velvet: It alludes to the fine forms of fine things, but it is phony, tacky, and cheap.

 

Naturally, in Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, Vance tells the same half-baked story about his religious wanderings that he has told about his political conversion: He was misled after putting his faith in the wrong people. “To believe, as I once claimed, that the theory of evolution disproved the Christian creation story, I had to accept a couple of things on, well, faith. I had to accept that the theory of evolution was true. And I had to believe that the Christian Bible was incompatible with evolution. I did believe these things, but I believed them because of whom I trusted. I trusted that the Christians in my orbit had instructed me well in the tenets of Christianity. And I trusted the many biologists, paleontologists, anthropologists, and geneticists I had read—almost all secular—in their views on evolution.”

 

Once again, Vance was led astray. So the story goes.

 

Maybe Vance has read “many biologists, paleontologists, anthropologists, and geneticists” on the subject of evolution—though I doubt this—but you’ll understand at this point, if you know Vance’s supposed life story, that there is a considerable asymmetry there. Presumably, those biologists and geneticists and such were experts in their fields rather than … barstool paleontologists? … whereas Vance’s desultory Christian formation came via his opioid-abusing mother, his absentee “holy roller” (as Vance describes him) father, and from watching television evangelists with his Mamaw. Vance attempts to paint himself as a kind of curious seeker, but what he was, it is plain from his own telling, was simply a social Christian, a conventional conformist who attended some youth group meetings and things of that nature, the way many young people in his milieu did. He tries to inject a sense of urgency into the story, but there is no peep of a voice crying in the wilderness here. Vance is a smug striver writing smugly about what a smug striver he used to be, smug in the knowledge that he has come so far from that. “God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican.”

 

Vance’s opportunistic turn to right-wing Catholicism came when a particular strain of right-wing Catholicism bubbled up as a revivified political current in the swamp that is Vance’s natural political home, “integralism” and “post-liberalism” and all that happy horsepucky. Vance saw a parade and ran to get in front of it, muttering a few “Hail Marys” along the way. Of course he had never done any religious reading heavier than The Screwtape Letters and the Narnia books: There was no juice in that for the future lawyer and finance bro. Judging by Communion, he still hasn’t bothered to read or think seriously about these things. To describe his religious thinking here as superficial would be to extend to Vance a degree of intellectual generosity he has not earned.

 

Vance’s insincerity is comically transparent at times. Some of you will remember the matter of Vance’s trying to capitalize on malicious fictions about (black) immigrants in his native Ohio rampaging through peaceful (white) neighborhoods eating up the cats and dogs. It never happened, and Vance knows it never happened, and Vance has at times halfway admitted that he knows it never happened but seized on the story, anyway, because it was politically useful. Perhaps his religious instructors somehow glossed over the part about “bearing false witness.”

 

As it turns out, a talent for bearing false witness—in the service of a president who has made a point of routinely violating nine out of the Ten Commandments—is really what Vance brings to the party. I do not write this lightly, but it seems to me that I have never in my lifetime seen a public man work so assiduously to prepare for himself a place in Hell. If Dante were working today, he’d break his protractor trying to sketch out an appropriate circle in the Inferno for Vance, the “George Babbitt of Elmer Gantrys™.”

 

I will admit feeling my faith a bit challenged at times when reading this imbecilic dreck. E.g.:“[T]o divorce political judgments from morality is to make yourself less human,” Vance writes. Somehow, he was not immediately turned into a pillar of salt after putting the period at the end of that sentence. Maybe God is dead, after all. Vance continues and laments when “conservatives backbite a Christian pastor for talking about taking care of the poor or treating immigrants with dignity.” J.D. Vance of the Trump administration—the Look-out-them-foreign-darkies-is-eating-the-cats! guy—wrote that: “treating immigrants with dignity.”

 

Maybe God has not received His review galley yet.

 

I feel embarrassed for Vance’s wife—a broadly secular Hindu, this surely is not what she signed up for, and if being vice president is “not worth a bucket of warm p–s” in the estimate of Vice President John Nance Garner, what can be said about being the vice president’s wife—and, especially, this vice president’s wife? I feel sorry for Vance’s children, who are deployed as moral props throughout Communion, with Vance fretting about his son’s character development even as he proudly serves as the most self-abasing henchman of would-be caudillo and quondam pornographer Donald Trump. I would write that I am embarrassed as a Catholic to share a church with this schmuck, but, of course, God’s house is a refuge for schmucks, and scoundrels, and worse. It is the sick who need a physician, and all that. To put things in terms of that tension that Vance once imagined to exist between Catholicism and biology: I am embarrassed to be a member of the same species as this despicable little gargoyle.

 

J.D. Vance rejoices (often) in being one of the youngest men elected to his office—and, at only 41 years of age, perhaps he believes that he has plenty of time to repent, that, as Thomas Becket never actually said, “one can always come to a sensible little arrangement with God.” No man knoweth the hour, Mr. Vice President.

 

If there is something supernatural at work here, I am not at all sure that it is the work of the God worshiped by the church that counts J.D. Vance among its members. I suspect that, if anything, it is the hand of the Other Guy at work here. In trying to shanghai the angels and saints into the service of whatever you want to call the grotesque and infernal political project that J.D. Vance and Donald Trump are undertaking, the vice president is playing with fire. And brimstone.

Vance Drops the Pretense

By Abe Greenwald

Thursday, June 18, 2026

 

JD Vance's Jew-baiting is no longer hiding in plain sight. It’s no longer something that has to be inferred from his choice of anti-Semitic allies, his serial flirtations with the rhetoric of the podcast right, or his clear displeasure whenever the Jewish state asserts itself in a way that conflicts with his political faction's priorities. It’s now out in the open.

“If I was in the cabinet of the Israeli government,” he said today, “I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world.” Vance then added that Donald Trump is “the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment in time.”

 

We get it. Everyone hates Israel, and maybe they’re all onto something. Vance has been itching to say this for a long time, and Donald Trump’s failure in Iran finally gave him the opportunity. The president is letting JD be JD. Turns out, he’s exactly who I thought he was.

 

Vance’s premise, it’s worth noting, is false. Israel has relations with dozens of countries and maintains significant strategic partnerships throughout the world, even with countries that criticize it obsessively. And while Vance claims that Israeli cabinet members are personally attacking Trump, they’ve merely commented on the Iran deal and what it means for Israel. 

 

But the real problem here is moral. Vance's formulation is intended to put Israel in a position that Jews know all too well: that of a people whose fate depends on staying in the good graces of a powerful ruler. And Jews in this circumstance, Vance was saying, should really know when they’re pushing their luck.

 

The vice president wasn’t describing an alliance. He was describing dependence—a dependence that strips a nation of the right to disagree. The logic runs as follows: Because Israel needs American support, Israel must refrain from criticizing the American president. Because Trump is sympathetic to Israel, Israel should suppress its own judgments whenever those judgments conflict with his. It doesn’t matter that Israel hasn’t let a day of Trump’s presidency pass without expressing its gratitude for his support. What Vance is talking about is obedience.

 

That’s not how alliances work. The United States has never expected Britain, France, Japan, or any other ally to surrender its voice in exchange for American protection. In a healthy alliance, partners are free to speak candidly when interests diverge. The alliance works because it’s rooted in shared aims and shared values, not because one side has purchased the silence of the other. But Trump doesn’t speak the language of shared values and, anyway, it’s time Israel was reminded that it’s subject to different rules. So Vance was instructing the Jewish state to remember who its protector is.

 

Of course, Zionism emerged, in part, as a rejection of the idea that Jews should live at the mercy of leaders whose favor could be granted one day and withdrawn the next. That’s why anti-Semites can’t tolerate it.

 

And the anti-Semites loved Vance’s reprimand. The anti-Jewish left cheered along with the groyper-adjacent right. “Finally!” Cenk Uygur wrote on X. “This is the kind of energy we need from our leaders. I hate to give @JDVance credit, but he’s obviously correct here. It’s infuriating to see them assume they can boss us around when we’re their only remaining ally and they owe us everything.”

 

Actually, Israel is the only country “at this moment in time” that’s been unwavering in its support for the president and the only country that’s proved itself fighting alongside the United States in ages. You could say it’s the only powerful true ally that this administration has. And it will not be bound by the terms of Trump’s Iran deal or chastened by the scolding of JD Vance.

Trump’s Prompt and Utter Humiliation

By Philip Klein

Thursday, June 18, 2026

 

It is impossible to describe President Trump’s deal as anything other than total humiliation.

 

You could argue that he had no choice, that it was in America’s best interest for him to cut his losses, and that he had to suck it up and do whatever it took to reopen the Strait of Hormuz (which, by the way, is only temporarily reopened under the current deal). But there is no credible way to argue that what has happened represents anything other than surrender.

 

To claim that this isn’t an embarrassment for the U.S. requires ignoring months of Trump statements before and during the war about his red lines and war aims. People are getting too focused on the text of the memorandum of understanding itself, when the text needs to be viewed with the added context of Trump’s public statements, in which he gave away the store on just about every major point of contention he claimed he had with Iran until very recently.

 

Trump, either in his words or in the MOU, abandoned his positions in favor of the Iranian position on: supporting anti-regime protesters; allowing the enrichment of uranium; removing Iran’s enriched uranium; and on its ballistic missile program.

 

To review:

 

• In January, Trump urged Iranian protesters to “keep protesting” and to “take over your institutions,” promising them “help is on its way.” He vowed “very strong action” if Iran executed its protesters. Iran then massacred 30,000 protesters. When Trump launched the war on February 28, he said, “To the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand. Stay sheltered. Don’t leave your home. It’s very dangerous outside. Bombs will be dropping everywhere. When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take.”

 

In the text of the MOU that he signed, the U.S. and Iran pledged to “refrain from interfering in each other’s internal affairs.” After agreeing to the Iran deal, Trump said, “I never really cared about regime change.” And he claimed the new leaders of Iran were “not radicalized.” Yet just this week, Iran executed two more protesters.

 

It is perfectly defensible for an American president to argue that democracy promotion shouldn’t be the job of the U.S. military. But Trump himself was the one who encouraged protesters to rise up, claiming he would help them.

 

• Trump negotiator Steve Witkoff said when talks broke down before the war that the major sticking point was that the Iranians asserted a right to enrich uranium and the Trump administration was insisting on no enrichment. Trump wrote on Truth Social in April that “there will be no enrichment of Uranium, and the United States will, working with Iran, dig up and remove all of the deeply buried (B-2 Bombers) Nuclear ‘Dust.’” Yet at the G-7, Trump said it would be unfair if other countries were able to enrich uranium and Iran was not. Furthermore, the MOU said instead of being removed, the enriched uranium would be downblended and remain in Iran — the same standard that existed in Barack Obama’s Iran deal.

 

• As I wrote in more detail yesterday, for nearly a decade, going back to his first term, Trump criticized Obama’s Iran deal on the basis that it allowed Iran to maintain its missile program and cited the missile threat as one of the primary reasons why he launched this war. And yet, at the G-7, Trump said it would be unfair to tell Iran it couldn’t have missiles if our ally Saudi Arabia also had missiles.

 

Again, people could have different perspectives on whether Iran should be able to enrich uranium, have ballistic missiles, or massacre domestic protesters. But the record is clear that Trump moved dramatically in the direction of the Iranians over the course of negotiations, rather than the other way around. And in doing so, he unlocked tens of billions of dollars in sanctions relief for Iran.

 

As a result of his capitulation to Iranian demands, Trump has degraded his ability to have his threats taken seriously. Throughout the war, Trump spoke in apocalyptic terms about what he was going to do if Iranians didn’t bend to his will. He threatened to take Iran’s oil depot at Kharg Island and knock out its energy infrastructure, and, in arguably the most reckless statement ever made by an American president during wartime, he even claimed ahead of a phony April deadline that “a whole civilization will die tonight.”

 

The Iranians simply ignored Trump and held out for what they wanted, and he caved to them on everything that matters. I suspect that other world leaders will take the same lesson from this debacle.