The New York Times Tries Impotently to Fix AOC’s Munich Disaster

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Tuesday, February 17, 2026

 

The New York Times’ Kellen Browning would very much like us all to know that the key problem with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s excruciating performance at the Munich Security Conference was that we noticed it. Today, Browning writes that,

 

rather than the substance of her arguments, it was her on-camera stumbles when answering questions about specific world affairs that rocketed around conservative social media and drove plenty of the discussion about her visit, as political observers speculated whether they would make a dent in a potential presidential run in 2028.

 

Ah, yes. The “substance of her arguments.” Substance such as:

 

Um, you know, I think that this is such a, you know, I think that this is a um — this is, of course, a, um, very long-standing, um, policy of the United States. And I think what we are hoping for is that we want to make sure that we never get to that point, and we want to make sure that we are moving in all of our economic research and our global positions to avoid any such confrontation — and for that question to even arise.

 

And:

 

What we are seeking is a return to a rules-based order that eliminates the hypocrisies around when too often in the West we look the other way for inconvenient populations, to act out these paradoxes.

 

Elsewhere in his piece, Browning notes that Ocasio-Cortez was worried that, having been “microscopically dissected,” her message “was being lost in all the commotion.” But what she said was “her message.” One could dissect her words for the next ten years straight, with the best of intentions, and still one would not glean anything coherent or useful from them. This wasn’t the fault of “conservative social media” or “rocketing” or “speculation”; it was the fault of Ocasio-Cortez herself, who went to a security conference, was asked questions about security, and fell flat on her face at the first hurdle. The “commotion” doesn’t enter into the equation. What AOC said didn’t mean anything because AOC doesn’t know anything. Her ideas weren’t lost in translation. She didn’t “stall,” as Kellen Browning pretends she did. She wasn’t afflicted temporarily by madness or dehydration or anesthesia. She had no clue what she was talking about, so what she was talking about had no content.

 

At best, her answer on Taiwan represented a meandering refusal to respond. She was asked, “Would and should the U.S. actually commit U.S. troops to defend Taiwan if China were to move?,” and, in return, she said, “I hope it doesn’t happen.” Which . . . yes, we all do. That’s why we ask politicians what they’d do if it does. As for the other line — “a rules-based order that eliminates the hypocrisies around when too often in the West we look the other way for inconvenient populations, to act out these paradoxes” — I would defy even Kamala Harris to top that exercise in flustered filibustering. If, at some point in the future, Mad Libs decides to contrive an International Relations–themed version of its famous game, I guess they’ll know exactly whom to call.

 

Browning suggests that AOC went to Munich to insist that “wealthy world leaders must better provide for their working classes or risk their countries sliding toward authoritarianism.” Apparently, he considers this exonerative. In truth, though, that is the whole problem: AOC is a one-trick pony. What she says in America is what she says in Munich, because she doesn’t know how to say anything else. At some point in her life she became attracted to warmed-over democratic socialism, and since that point she has declined to learn anything more. She’s a meme, an avatar, a vibe. In her interview with Browning, she griped that the press had focused on “any five-to-10-second thing” from her remarks. But of course it did. She is a five-to-10-second thing. She is a limerick competing with a bunch of novels. What did she think was going to happen?

 

Elsewhere, AOC implies that the media’s interest in her potentially “running for president” has made it tough for her agenda to break through. But one must wonder why, if political drama is to blame, this did not apply to Marco Rubio, who is constantly depicted as being involved in a monumental power struggle with JD Vance, and yet managed to deliver a speech at the same conference that was widely regarded as masterly. As it happens, the explanation for this difference is simple: Marco Rubio went to Germany to make a discrete case to the Munich Security Conference, and AOC went to Germany to make yet another Instagram video about nothing. The results matched the aims.

The Greatest Sports Story Ever Told

By Rich Lowry

Wednesday, February 18, 2026

 

Everyone who witnessed it remembers where they were.

 

The victory of the gold-medal-winning U.S. men’s hockey team over the Soviets at the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, N.Y., was the greatest American sporting event of the 20th century, featuring the greatest call of all time — broadcaster Al Michaels indelibly counting down the final seconds before exclaiming, “Do you believe in miracles? . . . Yes!”

 

On the occasion of this year’s Winter Olympics, Netflix has released a new documentary on the team, Miracle: The Boys of ’80.

 

It is a story that has been oft-told, but never grows old. David vs. Goliath. Amateur vs. Professional. Freedom vs. Tyranny.

 

The backdrop of U.S.–Soviet geopolitical competition and our national humiliation in the late 1970s gave the victory an extra emotional punch. Malaise, at least for a time, gave way to joyful flag-waving and exultant chants of “USA!”

 

The centerpiece of Miracle is the interviews with the players, now old men, individually and sitting together on their old bench in the Lake Placid arena. There are plenty of tears, as the players think about their youth, about their achievement, about lost family members.

 

The missing figure looming large is the late coach Herb Brooks. His strategic insight, psychological acuity, and extremely demanding style forged a group of college kids into a historic team. (The Olympics back then were for amateurs, although the Soviets were professional in all but name.)

 

Brooks was obsessed with Soviet hockey and wanted to turn its insights against it. His team would be physically tough, but would be able to skate and pass, too, and be better conditioned than anyone else, giving it better legs in the third period.

 

The U.S. team compiled an impressive record during the exhibition season. But the Soviets were giants. They’d won the gold at every single Olympics since 1964. During this run, their combined Olympic record was 27–1–1, and they had outscored the opposition 175–44.

 

The U.S. played an exhibition game against the Soviets at Madison Square Garden right before the Games and got crushed 10–3.

 

At the Olympics, the U.S. managed a last-minute tie against Sweden and then manhandled a good Czech team, 7–3. As they racked up more wins, they caught the nation’s attention, but the Soviets awaited in the medal round.

 

No one gave the U.S. a chance. Al Michaels says he was just hoping it’d still be close, say, the Soviets up 3–1, in the middle of the game.

 

Brooks delivered a famous pre-game St. Crispin’s Day speech to his team: “This moment is yours.” The coach’s grown children show the documentarians the card that he wrote his notes on — surely one of the most precious relics in the history of U.S. sports.

 

The U.S. emerged tied with the Soviets 2–2 after one period, and survived an onslaught in the second, getting outshot 12–2 but trailing only 3–2. Then, magic happened in the third. Team captain Mike Eruzione scored his iconic goal to put the U.S. up 4–3.

 

Ten minutes of Al Michaels–narrated agony ensued as the U.S. had to protect the lead against an explosive Soviet team.

 

The U.S. still had to beat the Finns for the gold. True to form, Brooks ran his team through punishing drills to prepare, even after they’d become national heroes.

 

Ordinary sports create an ersatz nationalism, with fans feeling a deep connection to their own team, to its history, colors, and past heroes. When this sports patriotism was combined with the real thing in 1980 — especially when arrayed against an aggressive, malign rival power — the effect was explosive.

 

The documentary shows the U.S. players walking down the street at Lake Placid. Forty-five years later, people still stop them and yell out their thanks. They showed that miracles happen, and did it for the red, white, and blue.

Civilizational Erasure

By Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, February 17, 2026

 

Marco Rubio’s most valuable skill as a politician is bilingualism.

 

By that, I don’t mean his fluency in English and Spanish (although that’s also a useful skill), but his ability to master different political dialects. The secretary of state has always had a canny diplomatic knack for convincing his audience that he’s speaking their ideological language.

 

In 2010, the New York Times anointed Rubio as “the first senator from the Tea Party” despite the Senate candidate himself not personally identifying as a member of that movement. He charmed centrists by championing comprehensive immigration reform in 2013, yet somehow continued to speak conservatism fluently enough to become a top-tier contender leading up to the 2016 Republican presidential primary.

 

After Reaganism was all but extinguished by Donald Trump’s victory that year, Rubio began teaching himself how to speak nationalism. He picked it up well enough to land a spot in Trump’s Cabinet and today is its chief ambassador to the world, which is a bit like someone converting to Catholicism and becoming a cardinal within a decade.

 

His most impressive achievement in political bilingualism, though, may have come last week at the Munich Security Conference. At the same event one year ago, J.D. Vance berated the stunned crowd by questioning whether America and Europe still shared enough values to sustain the Atlantic alliance. On Saturday, a soft-spoken Rubio made a similar argument in more politic terms … and drew a standing ovation.

 

In fairness to Vance, the vice president spoke at a moment when the White House still believed it could bully America’s allies into doing anything it liked. A year later, things are different; Rubio’s tone was more conciliatory because it had to be. The two men’s roles in the administration also require different approaches. The secretary of state’s job requires cooperation from Europe, whereas the vice president’s job consists mainly of boorish grandstanding to impress Tucker Carlson and the chud right in hopes of averting a primary challenge in 2028.

 

And so, if Vance’s tone was that of an angry father warning his adult child to get a job or move out, Rubio’s was that of a concerned mother reminding the child that daddy’s only saying that because he loves you. “We are part of one civilization—Western civilization,” he said on Saturday. “We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir.”

 

The only way to defend our shared culture against the forces of “civilizational erasure,” Rubio warned his audience, is for Europeans to embrace nationalism—namely, reindustrialization and tight borders rather than unfettered free trade and mass migration. If “we Americans … sometimes come off as a little direct and urgent in our counsel” on that point, he added, alluding to Vance’s speech last year and Trump’s perpetual belligerence, it’s only “because we care deeply. We care deeply about your future and ours.”

 

At one point, Rubio proclaimed that the United States and Europe “belong together,” which probably explains the standing O. He was, in a way, recommitting to the Atlantic alliance.

 

Sounds good. Just tell me this: Why bother? Which mutual threat is this newly reconstituted Atlantic alliance supposed to contain?

 

Three threats.

 

“Why, the threat from China,” you might say. Nonsense.

 

If the White House wanted to weaken China by strengthening ties with Europe, it wouldn’t have spent the past year waging a trade jihad that made every country on the continent a target. We’re less than a month removed, remember, from Trump threatening to slap new tariffs on eight European nations for no better reason than that they refused to let Denmark be extorted into forfeiting its sovereignty over Greenland.

 

The administration was also conspicuously more critical of Europe than it was of China in the new National Security Strategy it released in December. The president has done everything he can since returning to office to show European powers that America is no longer a reliable ally, a predictable trade partner, or a stable hegemon. Beijing now looks more, not less, attractive to those powers than it used to, and they’re acting accordingly.

 

Postliberals have no real ideological commitment to containing China. It’s awfully late in the game for anyone to still be pretending otherwise.

 

“Fine, it’s about containing the threat from Russia,” you counter. That’s even sillier.

 

U.S. aid to Ukraine dropped by 99 percent in the first year of Trump’s second term. After a few fits and starts of correctly blaming Vladimir Putin for the war’s continuation, the president seems to have settled on placing the onus squarely on the Ukrainians. An exasperated Volodymyr Zelensky has been reduced to whistleblowing, howling into the void that the Russians are offering our venal White House economic deals in exchange for siding with them in negotiations and complaining about the insanity of the U.S. pressuring Ukraine for concessions without serious security guarantees.

 

The Trump administration is at best indifferent to the outcome in Ukraine, and plainly keen to move on to the kind of rapprochement between Washington and Moscow of which the president has dreamed for years. It’s not interested in some grand alliance with Euroweenies to restrain a Russian menace that it doesn’t regard as actually menacing.

 

“Well, then, the new Atlantic alliance is aimed at containing Islam,” you offer, hoping the third time’s the charm. “Muslims are migrating to Europe en masse, and the White House fears that a white Christian stronghold won’t be white and Christian for much longer.”

 

Now we’re getting somewhere. But even this theory has a weakness.

 

Without a doubt, the muttering about “civilizational erasure” in Rubio’s Munich speech and in the National Security Strategy I mentioned earlier refers to a cultural threat more so than a military or economic one. It couldn’t be otherwise, as nationalists are chiefly concerned with defending the rightful cultural dominance of their nation’s ruling tribe from rival tribes. The more foreign those rivals are in terms of race and religion, the more urgent the defense needs to be. That was the core of the secretary of state’s message over the weekend.

 

“It was this continent that produced the genius of Mozart and Beethoven, of Dante and Shakespeare, of Michelangelo and Da Vinci, of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones,” he noted. The subtext was clear enough: If the Muslims take over, Europe will no longer produce Beethovens and Mozarts. The cultural heritage that Americans and Europeans share will be gone. That’s why Americans are and must remain committed to Europe’s—white, Christian Europe’s—success.

 

Islamization is what the new Atlantic alliance is supposed to contain, or rather prevent.

 

Here’s the problem, though. Knowing Donald Trump as you do, whom do you think he’d rather have in charge of France? Emmanuel Macron or Mohammed bin Salman?

 

Civilization without liberalism.

 

I think the point of Rubio’s Munich speech was to redefine “Western civilization” so that it no longer includes liberalism.

 

He referred in passing to Europe planting the “seeds of liberty” and to its role in developing “the rule of law, the universities, and the scientific revolution” that became fundamental aspects of the Western world. But the kinship between the U.S. and Europe that he outlined was palpably more tribal than it was ideological. “We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share,” he said, “forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir.” That’s as close as one can get to blood-and-soil nationalism in describing two populations that no longer occupy the same soil.

 

What’s missing is the Enlightenment.

 

Until recently, any account of the ties that bind America and Europe would have emphasized—and possibly led with—democracy, legal restraints on government power, and freedom of thought and of religion. Those are, or were, the pillars that supported the Western liberal order and on which arguments about the superiority of Western civilization frequently relied. I’m old enough to remember right-wingers citing classical liberalism as a triumph of Christianity, in fact, as only a faith that celebrated the value of every person could inspire a politics that took individual rights seriously.

 

Nationalists dislike liberalism because they resent the accountability that legal regimes inspired by the Enlightenment demand from leaders. That’s why I’d bet my bottom dollar that Trump would rather see a Muslim like bin Salman, an authoritarian after his own heart, in charge of France than a secular liberal like Macron. President bin Salman wouldn’t ride to Denmark’s defense when America sought to seize Greenland, scolding Trump by citing various international rules and norms that prevent such things. No, I suspect that he would acquiesce because he’s no more eager to be bound by those rules and norms than our president is.

 

As long as treasures like the Louvre and the Notre-Dame de Paris were protected, I don’t think the White House would care a bit how “Western” or non-Western an Islamic French government behaved. For postliberals, “civilization” is measured exclusively in terms of culture, not civics; illiberal modes of government don’t affect the calculation.

 

Absorbing that lesson has been part of Marco Rubio’s own education in nationalism.

 

In 2019, the then-senator from Florida co-signed a letter warning Trump about a meeting he planned to hold with Hungarian President Viktor Orbán. “In recent years, democracy in Hungary has significantly eroded,” it read, explaining that the country “has experienced a steady corrosion of freedom, the rule of law and quality of governance. … Under Orban, the election process has become less competitive and the judiciary is increasingly controlled by the state.” Sen. Marco Rubio was offended by Hungary’s departure from Enlightenment ideals and worried that the leader of the free world was normalizing that.

 

Seven years later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio swung by Budapest after his speech in Munich last week to … effectively endorse Viktor Orbán for president. And he did so at a moment when Orbán’s chief opponent is promising to end Hungary’s Putinist foreign policy if elected and reestablish strong ties with Europe.

 

There’s no way to reconcile that endorsement with support for “Western civilization” without reading liberalism out of your definition of the latter. Orbán, Trump, and Putin are all attempting to redefine “the West” in the same basic way, dialing up their followers’ chauvinism about cultural touchstones like Christianity while dialing down liberal expectations for constraints on their own power. According to that redefinition, the Russian army rampaging across Europe would be a triumph for Western civilization, not a calamity, which probably explains Trump’s and Orbán’s rooting interests in the Russia-Ukraine war.

 

Reimagining the West without liberalism is a form of “civilizational erasure” all its own. How far is Marco Rubio prepared to go to enable it?

 

Nostalgia.

 

Awfully far, it seems. Unless I missed it, for instance, Rubio hasn’t made a peep about his boss’ scheme to tamper with this fall’s election.

 

He also hasn’t said anything about the comical degree of corruption in and around the White House. Or the Justice Department trying to indict its political opponents for speech crimes on evidence so flimsy that even a grand jury laughed them out of court. Or the president’s secret immigration police force enjoying total legal impunity for its conduct, even when it kills Americans. Or the dark-age hostility with which the administration has greeted remarkable scientific advances, as anti-Enlightenment as politics in the 21^st century gets.

 

As America’s chief diplomat, Rubio is now the international face of a population that has chosen—chosen—to replace a civic order that made it the preeminent nation on Earth with the sort of third-world “sh—hole country” political culture that mass migration is supposedly forcing on Europe. Where he and Vance get the nerve to lecture foreign diplomats on their supposed betrayal of Western culture while they preside over the institutional and ethical ruin of the United States, I simply can’t imagine.

 

But Rubio does have the nerve. To all appearances, he doesn’t seem perturbed by a bit of what’s happening around him.

 

We’re left, then, with the question with which we began. Without a common enemy to contain, why does the White House want to keep up the pretense of being allied with liberal Europe in the first place? Why not just be done with the Atlantic alliance and form a postliberal Voltron with Russia and China, as the president would surely prefer to do?

 

I wonder if the answer lies in nostalgia, as it often does with Trump’s movement.

 

In aspiring to make America great again, Trump and his supporters have always been slippery about specifying when they believe America was great in the first place. A “RETVRN” bro might tell you that our nation was born a millennium or two too late to ever experience true greatness, but I sense the touchstone for most MAGA types is the 1950s or thereabouts. The U.S. had just won the war, the economy was booming, the white-picket-fence American dream was within reach, and, with the civil-rights era not yet in full flower, the proper tribe was still in charge of everything. That’s the period to which we should retvrn. Er, return.

 

Not coincidentally, that period encompasses the president’s childhood, the most nostalgic period of a person’s life. And not coincidentally, that period was when the United States became the unquestioned leader of the free world, head of the greatest peacetime alliance in history. When you think of American greatness, in other words, you inevitably think of the U.S. as primus inter pares among dozens of European allies, forming a unified front against the threatening East.

 

That relationship is part of our “heritage” now, to borrow one of Marco Rubio’s new favorite words, and heritage isn’t lightly dispensed with. Postliberals are perfectly capable of imagining the West without fraternity between America and Europe, but the other 85 percent of us will struggle to do so, including and especially the nostalgists among us.

 

So, despite our obvious and growing incompatibility, the White House will continue the supposed partnership between our country and the continent. All Europe needs to do to cement it for many years to come is jettison liberalism. A small price to pay in the name of defending Western civilization, don’t you think?

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Not a Serious Person

By Jeffrey Blehar

Monday, February 16, 2026

 

The 2026 Munich Security Conference concluded over the weekend and, well . . . it certainly wasn’t the worst historical result to ever come out of Munich, so let’s have a round of applause for the collected diplomats of the West! Marco Rubio gave a well-received address (essentially playing “good cop” to JD Vance’s “bad cop”), telling Europe that while we love them and all, America is no longer interested in helping them “manage their decline.”

 

But of course I wasn’t paying much attention to the international politics of it all. I was watching elected Democrats run around Munich like hogs seeking a slop trough, desperate to sit on panels, give speeches, and take interviews from the international media about The Situation back home in Trump’s America. You fly to Munich, as a domestic elected politician, for one reason only: You’re thinking about running for president.

 

This isn’t news with regard to California Governor Gavin Newsom; everybody knows he’s running for president, and if you don’t mind he would love just a few minutes of your time to explain personally that “Donald Trump is temporary.” (Guess who he thinks should replace him?) For that reason alone, his comments while in Munich were entirely perfunctory and drew few headlines. You know what you’re getting from Gavin, and you’ve known for a long time now.

 

But it was news for Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the superstar New York City progressive and foundational “Squad” leader. Her appearance in Munich marked the first time she has ever stepped out at a high-profile foreign policy event outside the country — she sat on two separate panels while there — and had the feel of a public audition. Ocasio-Cortez, like her or not, has a fierce following among young and activist Democratic voters, but could she handle herself in a forum devoted to foreign policy rather than to catfighting with Marjorie Taylor Greene? Is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a serious person?

 

Nope. Not really. Even the New York Times is willing to concede that Ocasio-Cortez had “some stumbles” — that of course is their way of being polite. To the rest of us, she looked completely out of her depth. Ocasio-Cortez didn’t quite barf word-salad all over her blouse the way Kamala Harris assuredly would have in the same situation, and because of that, I suspect, she is being treated with kid gloves. But the airheaded vacuousness of her answers will convey the message all the same to potential voters: She is not ready for prime-time.

 

She was completely unprepared for the sorts of questions she would field at a foreign policy summit. When questioned about whether the United States should send troops to defend Taiwan from an invasion by China, she literally had no answer: “I think that, uh, this is such a, a — you know, I think that — this is a, um — this is of course, a, uh, a very longstanding, um, policy of the United States, and I think what we are hoping for is we want to make sure we never get to that point?” (Listen to the clip; aside from everything else, Ocasio-Cortez’s “vocal fry” is going to be a huge problem for her with voters if she ever runs.)

 

And even when AOC was in a better mood, and rolling along with her typical rhetorical style, she continued to steer into amateurish potholes. It was hard not to cringe with joy when she garbled her geography like an overconfident high-school student, stating that merely because Maduro is a bad man “doesn’t mean that we can kidnap a head of state and engage in acts of war just because the nation is below the equator.” (Check a globe, Sandy — there’s a reason another country that shares a continent with Venezuela calls itself Ecuador.)

 

If Munich was meant as a test run for AOC ’28, then Ocasio-Cortez can thank her lucky stars that it was just that — a test run, an audition. With her charisma and power among her base, she will get more. We will see if she can raise her game, but needless to say, I am doubtful. After all, she does not strike me as a serious person.

The Republicans Made Peace With Science

By Alexander Furnas & Dashun Wang

Tuesday, February 17, 2026

 

Which political party provides more federal funding for science? Given climate-denial rhetoric, attacks on expertise, the size of government, and culture-war battles over research, many Americans may believe that Democrats support science and that Republicans don’t.

 

But this is not what we have found. In research published last fall in Science with our colleagues Nic Fishman and Leah Rosenstiel, we analyzed a comprehensive database of federal science appropriations, collected from presidents’ budget requests, from House and Senate committee bills, and from final, enacted annual appropriations from 1980 to 2020. The data include 171 budget accounts across 27 agencies, such as National Institutes of Health, NASA, National Science Foundation, and CDC, as well as Pentagon R&D programs.

 

When Republicans controlled the House or the presidency, science funding was substantially higher—on average, about $150 million more per budget account under a Republican House than a Democratic one, and $100 million more under a Republican president than a Democratic one. These differences held up across dozens of statistical tests and weren’t explained by the overall size of the budget or economic conditions. We found significantly higher appropriations for NIH under Republican control, higher funding for CDC under Republican presidents, and marginally higher support for NASA and NSF.

 

For the past year, we have wondered if our paper had documented something purely historical—a pattern from a Republican Party that no longer exists. The Trump administration proposed slashing NIH by about 40 percent. It attempted to cap indirect-cost recovery—the portion of federal grants that reimburses universities for expenses such as facilities, compliance, security, and equipment—at 15 percent, threatening billions in research infrastructure. It stalled grants; cleared out agency leadership; imposed political approval requirements on funding decisions, such as requiring senior political appointees to sign off on grants before they could be awarded and terminating programs addressing racial health gaps; and implemented targeted funding freezes at particular universities. The postwar compact between government and science appeared to be collapsing.

 

But Congress—under Republican control in both chambers—has systematically rejected the administration’s most extreme proposals.

 

In the funding bill that President Trump signed into law this month, lawmakers not only declined to cut NIH’s budget by 40 percent; they instead increased it by roughly $415 million. They added targeted funding for cancer research, Alzheimer’s disease, and the BRAIN Initiative for the development of neurotechnologies. The final number: $48.7 billion—virtually unchanged from the prior year.

 

Just as important, Congress included detailed language constraining executive overreach. It reiterated that NIH cannot unilaterally change how indirect-cost rates work. It limited the agency’s ability to shift funds toward multiyear awards that crowd out new grants. It required monthly briefings to Congress on grant awards and terminations to ensure the allocated money is actually being distributed. And it directed NIH to continue to professionalize the hiring of institute directors, with external scientific input and congressional oversight.

 

Similar patterns hold elsewhere. NASA faces a 1.6 percent cut rather than the 24 percent the administration sought. The NSF budget dropped 3.4 percent instead of 57 percent.

 

The budget accounts in the database we analyzed track the recurring operating expenses allocated across all parts of the federal government for science and research, including science done through grant-making and contracting with corporations. They don’t follow outgoing grants to researchers directly, so the numbers do not capture the kinds of funding freezes the Trump administration imposed on universities including Harvard, Columbia, and Penn.

 

Even so, the Republican-led Congress behaved much more like our data predicted than like what Trump requested. The appropriators funded science, protected research infrastructure, and asserted control over how agencies operate. In this regard, they did what Republicans in Congress have done for decades.

 

The Trump administration’s hostility to science is real and deeply concerning. But it has not—so far—reset the Republican Party’s position on science funding in the way that Trump reshaped GOP stances on trade, immigration, or foreign alliances.

 

Science funding in the United States has been sustained not just by partisan enthusiasm but also by institutional structure. In our data, funding tracked with control of the House and the presidency, but not the Senate. That’s because the House majority controls the appropriations process. And Republican appropriators seem to have once again funded science not despite their priorities but because of them. Economic competitiveness, technological leadership, and national security all rest on a foundation of scientific advancement.

 

This outcome appeared improbable six months ago—to many, including us, it looked nearly impossible. This wasn’t a normal policy disagreement. It was a stress test. And the institution is holding. The 2026 funding package highlights the commitment of the Republicans in Congress to consistently fund science.

 

Staffing losses are real, leadership vacancies create drift, and political interference in grant decisions remains a serious threat. Budgets alone don’t guarantee a functioning research system. But treating the GOP as monolithically anti-science risks alienating a coalition that has historically sustained federal research. Scientists who want to protect funding should spend less time lamenting Republican hostility and more time engaging Republican appropriators—particularly in the House, where the funding decisions get made.

 

Science came under attack, and a Republican Congress pushed back. That’s not an aberration.

The Kinds of Abstractions Armies Fight For

By Daniel Foster

Monday, February 16, 2026

 

It’s the dead of midwinter and that means that I’m spending my days watching curling and moguls and luge and foreign policy speeches at the Munich Security Conference.

 

Like pretty much the entire American right, I mostly liked Marco Rubio’s speech there, certainly better than the last guy’s. But I took note of one perhaps tellingly awkward construction, the one the State Department chose to blast out on social media as the money quote: “Armies do not fight for abstractions. They fight for a people, a nation, and a way of life. That is what we are defending.”

 

I caught hell on X/Twitter from other fans of the speech, for pointing out that a people, a nation, and a way of life are, in fact, abstractions — paradigmatic ones, even. For this I was called a pedant, a stupid leftist, and sundry slurs about my masculinity. But I’m obviously right. And not just for semantic reasons, but for substantive ones. Let me explain.

 

First, the easy part. A “people” is not a concrete object. You can’t trip over it. It has no home address. A “nation” is a community of shared sentiment and mutual obligation that, critically, need not constitute a state or any other geographically contiguous area. It’s an “imagined community,” and all the more powerful for being imagined. A “way of life” is the vaguest and most abstract of the three, the sort of thing that resists specification because its power is precisely in its capaciousness: Your way of life and mine overlap in important places but diverge in a hundred others, yet we’re both American.

 

When I asked one of my more energetic social media critics to list the people the U.S. Army fights for, he (and others) offered conventional or stipulative definitions. And you could do that a thousand different ways: Every living U.S. citizen. Or citizens plus legal permanent residents. Or all the ones who actually reside in the United States. Or the ones who reside in the United States but not the outlying territories. Or only the patriots. And so forth.

 

Those are all fine, but they don’t change matters a whit. Because nobody who wields the term “the American people” has met them all, and indeed none can even specify the exact list of members, and yet they still understand what the term means.

 

Your mother is a particular. The nation is an abstraction. More precisely, it’s a social construction. But both your mother and the nation are real. It very much doesn’t follow that because something is socially constructed it’s fake. Take the U.S. dollar, or the English language, or civil marriage, or the infield fly rule.

 

So there’s nothing wrong with the fact that a people, a nation, and a way of life are abstractions. They’re still predicates in good standing. And Rubio, it seems to me, used them advisedly. That is to say, I have a hard time believing that he and his writing staff didn’t understand the apparent contradiction in his construction: “Armies don’t fight for abstractions. They fight for [abstractions a, b, and c].”

 

Notice that Rubio could have said “Armies don’t fight for the rules-based international order,” or “Armies don’t fight for procedural liberalism,” and gotten all the same back-slaps and attaboys from his domestic supporters. Indeed, those are the kind of unspecified abstractions it seems Rubio’s hootin’-and-hollerin’ domestic fans imagined him to mean.

 

But Rubio didn’t use those examples. The interesting question is why. I think it’s because he wanted to make an affirmative point, one that distinguishes his view from the one articulated by JD Vance in his RNC speech and elsewhere, in which Vance suggests that Americans only fight and die for their actual families and their literal homes (or, if you like, for their blood and their soil).

 

Contra Vance, Americans understand that they share Americanness with people they’ve never met, and they understand what it means without generating a specific set of necessary and sufficient conditions. That’s an abstraction, and it’s the kind of abstraction that armies have always fought for. They already fight for a “people” they can’t fully specify. For a “way of life” that has no home address. For a “nation” whose boundaries are as much conceptual as geographic. The question was never whether to fight for abstractions; it was always which abstractions.

 

The inherent contradiction in Rubio’s construction suggests he was trying to make this point in a way that didn’t call too much attention to itself, to build a bridge from Vance’s smaller and more insular view and invite MAGA to walk a little ways across it. Given how many people who fundamentally agree with Vance are aggressively missing my point about Rubio, it seems he succeeded. He smuggled what was, if not a universalist sentiment, then at least a transnational and expansive one, through the checkpoint of populist nationalism, and nobody patted him down.

 

Indeed, people seem to miss the point that Rubio’s entire speech was about Western civilization, an idea so abstract it makes “the American people” look like the Empire State Building.

 

But that’s okay. Because armies fight for Western civilization all the time, and precisely because of its strange and unprecedented decision to extend its circle of moral concern beyond blood and soil to anyone who accepts the same premises. That’s a hell of an abstraction. The best one we’ve got.

Rubio’s Munich Speech: Serious, but Still Wrong

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, February 18, 2026

 

Finally free from the demands of being chief archivist of the United States, secretary of state, national security adviser, and unofficial viceroy of Venezuela, Marco Rubio made his way to the Munich Security Conference to deliver a major address on Saturday.

 

I shouldn’t make fun. Rubio, unlike so many major figures in this administration, is a bona fide serious person. Indeed, that’s why President Trump keeps piling responsibilities on him. Rubio knows what he’s talking about and cares about policy. He is hardly a free agent; Trump is still president after all. But in an administration full of people willing to act like social media trolls, Rubio stands out for being serious. And I welcome that.

 

But just because Rubio made a serious argument, that doesn’t mean it was wholly persuasive. Part of his goal was to repair some of the damage done by his boss, who not long ago threatened to blow up the North Atlantic alliance by snatching Greenland away from Denmark. Rubio’s conciliatory language was welcome, but it hardly set things right.

 

Whether it was his intent or not, Rubio had more success in offering a contrast with Vice President J.D. Vance, who used the Munich conference last year as a platform to insult allies and provide fan service to his followers on X. Rubio’s speech was the one Vance should have given, if the goal was to offer a serious argument about Trump’s “vision” for the Western alliance. I put “vision” in scare quotes because it’s unclear to me that Trump actually has one, but the broader MAGA crowd is desperate to construct a coherent theory of its case.

 

So what’s that case? That Western Civilization is a real thing, America is not only part of it, but its leader, and it will do the hard things required to fix it.

 

In Rubio’s story, America and Europe embraced policies in the 1990s that amounted to the “managed decline” of the West. European governments were free riders on America’s military might and allowed their defense capabilities to atrophy as they funded bloated welfare states and inefficient regulatory regimes. Free trade, mass migration, and an infatuation with “the rules-based global order” eroded national sovereignty, undermined the “cohesion of our societies” and fueled the “de-industrialization” of our economies. The remedy for these things? Reversing course on those policies and embracing the hard reality that strength and power drive events on the global stage.

 

“The fundamental question we must answer at the outset is what exactly are we defending,” Rubio said, “because armies do not fight for abstractions. Armies fight for a people; armies fight for a nation. Armies fight for a way of life.”

 

I agree with some of this—to a point. And, honestly, given how refreshing it is to hear a grown-up argument from this administration, it feels churlish to quibble.

 

But, for starters, the simple fact is that Western Civilization is an abstraction, and so are nations and peoples. And that’s fine. Abstractions—like love, patriotism, moral principles, justice—are really important. Our “way of life” is largely defined and understood through abstractions: freedom, the American dream, democracy, etc. What is the “Great” in Make America Great Again, if not an abstraction?

 

This is important because the administration’s defenders ridicule or dismiss any principled objection critics raise as fastidious gitchy-goo eggheadery. Trump tramples the rule of law, pardons cronies, tries to steal an election, and violates free market principles willy-nilly. And if you complain, it’s because you’re a goody-goody fool. As White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said not long ago, “We live in a world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.” Rubio said it better, but it’s the same idea.

 

There are other problems with Rubio’s story. At the start of the 1990s, the EU’s economy was 9 percent bigger than ours. In 2025 we’re nearly twice as rich as Europe. If Europe was “ripping us off” they have a funny way of showing it. America hasn’t “deindustrialized.” The manufacturing sector has grown during all of this decline, though not as much as the service sector where we are behemoth. We have shed manufacturing jobs, but that has more to do with automation than immigration. Moreover, the trends Rubio describes are not unique to America. Manufacturing tends to shrink as countries get richer. 

 

That’s an important point because Rubio, like his boss, blames all of our economic problems on bad politicians and pretends that good politicians can fix them through sheer force of will.

 

I think Rubio is wrong, but I salute him for making his case seriously.