The Not-So-Obvious Price of Trump’s Trade Incoherence

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, February 16, 2026

 

To the surprise of no thinking person, economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York last week released a study finding that the economic burden of Donald Trump’s imbecilic—and, let us not forget, unconstitutional—tariff regime falls almost exclusively on Americans rather than on foreign firms that export goods to the United States. For the period of January-August 2025, 94 percent of the tariff burden fell on Americans; in September and October it was 92 percent, and in November it was 86 percent. One way of looking at that is that for most of the year, firms exporting goods to the United States absorbed $6 (in the form of lower prices) for every $100 collected in tariffs, with the other $94 being paid by U.S.-based importers.

 

Some of that $94 is passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices (one reason inflation remains well above the 2 percent target) but that is not a straightforward thing, inasmuch as buyers and sellers both have a say in the marketplace, and firms have other options when passing on costs to consumers is difficult, i.e. passing on costs to their employees in the form of lower wages, a strategy that often takes the less visible form of raises or new hires that never happen rather than the more visible form of actual pay cuts or layoffs. Firms may also seek to recoup costs in other ways, such as reducing payments to vendors and service providers or forgoing certain investments or spending. A tariff that adds $10 to the price of a tire does not necessarily mean that the price of a tire in the shop goes up $10, but it may mean that there are no tire-shop employee bonuses at the end of the year, that employees are expected to take on additional work at no additional pay, or that the tire store owners decide to wait another year to have the shop painted and the parking lot resurfaced. The guy who owns the local restaurant that used to be a favorite of the tire shop manager will not be conscious of the fact that a tariff schedule is the real reason the manager takes his family to dinner there once a month instead of two or three times a month—and that the commercial painter and the guy who owns the asphalt company are not making up the difference but instead are cutting back, too—but he will notice that it is a little bit harder to come up with the money to send his kids to summer camp this year.

 

The near-term effects of the tariffs are very bad for some firms and industries, but they are not in the main catastrophic and should not be expected to be—because, for all the Sturm und Drang attending the trade discussion, we are not talking about very much money here. Total tariff revenue for 2026 probably will run something like $200 billion, though it is difficult to say because Donald Trump treats tariffs as a form of personal psychotherapy, for instance, by jacking up tariffs on Switzerland because his feelings were hurt by a lady he identified as the prime minister of Switzerland, which does not have a prime minister.

 

That $200 billion sounds like a great deal of money, but it is something on the order of 0.6 percent of U.S. GDP. In 2025, total federal revenue was about 17 percent of GDP (spending was 23 percent of GDP, hence the huge deficit), and, to put that tariff revenue into context, we typically see much larger year-to-year variations in corporate income tax revenue, which is itself a relatively small source of federal income. Revenue produced by the personal income tax routinely swings by more than 2 percent of GDP over short periods. Tariffs are a stupid policy for 10,000 reasons, but we have a large, robust, and sophisticated economy that can absorb a great deal of stupidity, especially when the price tag is relatively low as a share of GDP. Given that regulatory compliance costs are estimated to run as high as 12 percent of GDP, the administration’s regulatory reform agenda, imperfect though it is, may provide real economic savings that exceed the cost of its destructive trade policies.

 

(Emphasis on may: The great problem with the Trump administration is that even when it stumbles into the right policy, reform is by necessity entrusted to incompetents and sycophants, with the entire enterprise subject to the minute-by-minute whims of the president, who is profoundly corrupt and possessed of a toddler’s self-control and attention span. So, who knows?)

 

The real long-term cost of Trump’s anti-trade tantrum is not the $200 billion or so a year in higher taxes on American consumers and businesses. We’ll get through that. But there are other costs: There is the misallocation of capital as tariffs, a product of artificial advantages for less efficient producers and handicaps on more efficient producers; there are new inefficiencies built into the trade system; because trade deficits are the mirror image of capital surpluses, there is less investment capital flowing into the United States than there would have been (U.S.-bound foreign direct investment fell 21 percent in the first quarter of 2025 and has been declining in the longer term), meaning that some kinds of capital will be harder to secure and more expensive to access, a boon to U.S.-based banks and private-equity firms and other allocators of capital but a burden for start-ups, small businesses, and growing American enterprises that would benefit from readier access to capital.

 

The Trump administration offers a lot of grandiose promises and the occasional press release about how his tariff agenda is bringing back something like the factory economy of the postwar years, but, as with the case of Foxconn’s supposed $10 billion investment in Wisconsin (which turned out to be about 93 percent baloney), there is a great deal of fanfare but not much else. The main result of Trump’s trade policy has not been a replacement of Chinese imports by U.S.-produced goods but a replacement of Chinese imports by Mexican and Vietnamese imports, as well as a shift away from goods and services offered by those nefarious ... Canadians. Japan’s share of U.S. imports is down a little, and the Republic of Korea is up a bit over 2017 but down a bit vs. 2024.

 

Hurray for Mexico.

 

I don’t hate that outcome, inasmuch as I feel a lot better about buying Pendleton shirts made in Mexico than I would about buying Boot Barn shirts made in China. (I am not much of a “Made in the US of A!” guy, but I am a little bit of a China-avoider.) But that’s a $200 shirt—not everyone can afford such principles. (Think how much better the world would be if the so-called People’s Republic had been Hong Kong-ified rather than Hong Kong’s having been abandoned to socialism.) I am all for building up Mexico and Canada—anybody with a proper understanding of the actual national interest of the United States would see, without too much trouble, how much better off our country would be with a rich and stable Mexico next door rather than a struggling, sometimes unstable, middle-income Mexico next door. Call me a snoot, but I’d rather have Australia next door than Pakistan. And while Canada is doing just fine, if our northern neighbor were as prosperous as the Netherlands or Denmark, the United States would stand to benefit enormously—more than any nation in the world other than Canada itself. This is all pretty obvious stuff, but not obvious enough for the Trump administration, which is a nest of rage-monkeys, dimwits, and cynical operators who make their living milking rage-monkeys and dimwits.

 

Damaging U.S. trade relationships around the world will cost Americans bigly, but not always in the obvious, easily quantified ways that can be derived easily from month-to-month or quarter-to-quarter data. And that should be fairly obvious, too: Trade policy consists of doing various invasive things to prevent people from making the economic exchanges that they would have made left to their own devices and based on their own understanding of their own interests. As long as he is not standing in a voting booth or in front of a television camera, the average American is a pretty bright fellow, more than capable of deciding for himself whether to buy the $30 jeans made in China or the $300 jeans made in the United States, the Corolla or the Tundra or the F-250, the 2,000-square-foot house with a 20-year mortgage or the 3,500-square-foot house with a 30-year mortgage.

 

Trade policy, like industrial policy and other forms of economic steering, is a politician saying, “I don’t want you to do what you think is best for you—I want you to do what I think is best for me.” Call me cynical, but that’s really the whole thing.

 

Words About Words

 

A friend sent me something he was writing with a question about the “third-to-last paragraph.” There isn’t anything wrong with “third-to-last,” of course, but when a chance to use antepenultimate presents itself—seize it, I say.

 

Penultimate is one of those words like epicenter that gets used the wrong way because people who don’t know better think that the prefix is an intensifier: There’s the center, and then there’s the center center we really mean it center! that people mean by epicenter, which does not mean center at all but refers to an imaginary point above the center of an earthquake. Penultimate does not mean super-duper-ultimate but second to last, and antepenultimate is whatever comes in the series before the penultimate, the word of in the case of this sentence.

 

Ante- is a funny prefix in that when we speak of the antebellum era, no one has to guess which war it is we are talking about: Antebellum means before the Civil War in much the same way that postwar period or postwar economy refers to the period right after World War II. There are many wars to choose from (too many) but those words came into being, or into current usage, in reference to those particular wars.

 

In Other Wordiness

 

Some Slate headlines over the past few days:

 

A New Version of Woke Is Coming. Conservatives Aren’t Going to Like It.

 

Why a Floppy-Haired 27-Year-Old Olympic Skier Is Making Conservatives So Very, Very Angry

 

Conservatives Are Terrified That People Like Me Are Buying Guns Now.

 

Do you see the theme there?

 

There is a line attributed to Adolf Hitler asserting that the genius of totalitarian systems is attested to by the fact that they cause their enemies to imitate them. H.G. Wells, in calling for the development of a scientifically planned global state, called for the progressives of his time to become “liberal fascisti” and “enlightened Nazis.” (I read that in a book.) Appreciating the energy and the apparent solidarity of the fascist movements of the first part of the 20^th century, many progressives and nationalists in the liberal democracies—including Franklin Roosevelt, who was both a progressive and a nationalist, arguably a bit more a nationalist—found themselves experiencing a good deal of jackboot envy. In the current era, when right-wing rhetoric amounts to very little more than sneering and bullying—“liberal tears,” “cry more,” etc.—it should be no surprise to see our friends on the left arguing that if x discomfits or hurts conservatives, then x must be good, which is the subtext of those Slate headlines. But I do not think that this sort of thing is really a reaction to the Trumpist style, inasmuch as it precedes the emergence of that style as the dominant form of expression on the right. “Your uptight Christian parents are going to hate this!” is a very, very old marketing ploy, one part “Banned in Boston!” and one part “Republicans pounce!” Incidentally, I spent a lot of time with right-wing gun nuts, and I have yet to meet one who is upset that nice suburban liberals are buying firearms—and the Slate report has not convinced me that these fearful conservatives actually exist beyond the anecdotal level.

 

And Furthermore ...

 

A few years ago, many conservatives—myself included—practically gave ourselves hernias from harrumphing so hard when the executive editor of the New York Times, Dean Baquet at the time, confessed that his writers and editors didn’t really understand Christianity and the role it plays in American life. Journalism at large is culturally weird, and the New York Times is more culturally weird than the average outlet, for all sorts of reasons. I chuckled a little when the New York Times announced that it had hired a new Austin-based reporter to cover politics, whose LinkedIn bio describes her as focused on gay rights and implores readers to “ask her about her wig collection.” I’m sure she is a fine reporter and will do good work covering the very interesting stories of Texas politics (as, indeed, she already has), but if the Times were looking to really underline its cultural weirdness, it could hardly do better than sending a wig-collecting gay-rights crusader to talk tariffs with the Texas Soybean Board in Lubbock (and Lubbock is more liberal than much of Texas) or to talk with some rural border sheriff about transnational crime. Ask her about her wig collection!

 

Granted, there was a time when a man such as myself would have a collection of hairpieces—but that’s beside the point!

 

It is interesting to see the Times investing so much in Texas—but Texas is one of the places where they’re putting the new in the news, while New York City and its new mayor are busy exploring the freshest economic and political thinking of the 1840s.

 

In Closing

 

The Trump administration is winding down its theatrical display of brutality in Minneapolis with nothing to show for it other than millions of dollars in economic damage and two dead Americans, shot down by agents of their own government. I suppose that from the outside it looks like a lot of fun being right all the time but, I promise you, it isn’t.

The UN Doesn’t Deserve to Be Free of Francesca Albanese

By Seth Mandel

Monday, February 16, 2026

 

I concede the field to no one in my disdain for Francesca Albanese, who speaks as if she’s reading Julius Streicher’s notebook in Mussolini’s accent. But I still cannot imagine how she can resign, or be forced to resign, from her perch at the United Nations—even in the face of unprecedented pressure to do so by several European governments.

 

To be clear: She should resign. To state the obvious, she never should have been given a position of influence in any organization for any reason. But how can she step down now? Albanese has come to represent something crucial to the UN ecosystem. She is the tireless mascot of the Global Intifada, the activist masquerading as an academic and a respected legal figure to confer a patina of legitimacy on the corrupt and corrupting NGO complex.

 

Normally, this slot would be easy to fill, were Albanese to take a more traditional position for an anti-Semitic resume-builder, such as the presidency of an Ivy League university. But we don’t live in normal times. Or, rather, we live in the new normal. Hamas’s crimes on October 7 were identical to those of the Kishinev pogromists and the Nazis, broadcast proudly by the barbarians burning Jews alive and torturing and raping their way through village after village of peacenik kibbutzniks. 

 

Because the UN’s Gaza institutions were coopted by Hamas, the UN was not only pro-Hamas—a monstrous-enough position already—but implicated directly in the crimes. It wasn’t sufficient, therefore, for the UN’s pretend legal expert on the conflict this time to be a mild-mannered jurist who spat lies about Israeli “disproportionality.” This time, the job required someone with a fiery, wild-eyed demeanor and a comfort with representing a level of evil that was thought to have been left in civilization’s past.

 

How many people would volunteer for this job after seeing Palestinian militants kidnap a baby, murder it with their own hands, and then parade its remains around in a coffin in a televised event set up by the Gazan government? Even for a professional anti-Zionist, it’s a lot to ask.

 

But it’s not a lot to ask of Francesca Albanese. So here we are.

 

The current controversy is over Albanese’s remarks at a recent Al Jazeera conference which Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal also addressed. Albanese referred to Israel as the “common enemy of humanity.” Albanese’s defenders deny that she was referring to the Jewish state as the “common enemy,” and that she was only talking about those who “control vast amounts of financial capital, algorithms, or weapons.”

 

To reiterate: that is the defense of Albanese. That the enemy of humanity is merely a global cabal of financiers who support Israel.

 

My sense is that the hilariously weak “defense” of Albanese is evidence of Albanese’s own likely belief that her comments don’t require a defense or an explanation at all, because she does see Israel as the common enemy of humanity. Albanese has never been subtle about this. Her long history of anti-Semitism exists in the public record precisely because she does not want there to be any confusion about her bigotry. 

 

So it’s encouraging to see the French foreign minister say enough is enough: “[Albanese] presents herself as a UN independent expert, yet she is neither an expert nor independent — she is a political activist who stirs up hate.” 

 

Austria and Germany have joined France’s declaration of no confidence in Albanese. Longtime UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric distanced Secretary General Antonio Guterres from Albanese’s comments and, in general, “much of what she says.” Next week, at a UN meeting, France will publicly call for her resignation. Britain may even join the club.

 

But what would the UN do without Albanese? What would it be? It would certainly be less honest, for starters. People should think of Albanese when they think of the UN. She is an indefatigable agent of misery, a publicist for totalitarian death squads, and a figure of unity in the vast interconnected movement of Jew-haters worldwide.

 

We deserve a better UN. And until we get it, the UN and Francesca Albanese deserve each other.

AOC’s Breakout Performance

By Noah Rothman

Monday, February 16, 2026

 

Did you see Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? She really stuck it to Marco Rubio over the weekend. Everyone’s talking about the speech Trump’s henchman delivered at the Munich Security Conference — or, they were before AOC blew him and his Cuban-inflected version of Eurocentric “whiteness” out of the water.

 

“Marco Rubio’s speech was a pure appeal to ‘Western culture,’” she sneered from the stage at the University of Berlin, deploying deservedly exaggerated air quotes. She added that her “favorite part” of the speech was “when he said that American cowboys came from Spain,” at which point she and everyone else in the audience laughed at Rubio’s ignorance. “The Mexicans and descendants of African enslaved peoples would like to have a word on that,” she continued.

 

Okay. So, ChatGPT says the Spanish introduced horses to the North American continent, and Gaucho culture is a late 18th-century import to the Americas. Regardless, Ocasio-Cortez’s confidence put Trump’s smug diplomat in his place.

 

“We can’t underestimate the appeal of going back to these well-worn grooves,” Ocasio-Cortez warned of Rubio’s “thin” appeal to shared cultural affinities across the Western world. “A lot of what we talk about when we talk about a class-based internationalist perspective also means ending the hypocrisy toward the global south.”

 

Like what? Well, like the unilateral U.S. operation that resulted in Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro’s capture. Sure, AOC conceded, Maduro was “anti-democratic.” But that “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.” If you ignore the fact that Maduro’s capture was pursuant to a U.S. arrest warrant, and Venezuela is situated entirely north of the Equator, the representative’s logic is unassailable.

 

Sure, much of the “global south” sloughed off the “class-based internationalist perspective” imposed on them by the Soviets the second they had the opportunity, after which about 1 billion people emerged from extreme, transgenerational poverty. Nevertheless, AOC’s remarks were in keeping with her contention that market-based free trade is basically protectionism for big corporations. That must mean that protectionism isn’t really protectionism, and we can safely assume that protectionism — whatever it is — is bad.

 

Ocasio-Cortez had some less impressive moments during her swing through Germany. But even if you didn’t understand precisely what she was saying, you could feel that her heart was in the right place.

 

“I think what we identify is that in a rules-based order, hypocrisy is vulnerability,” the representative said, scratching out something like a doctrinal approach to foreign policy. “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.”

 

She might have phrased that more clearly, but you know what she’s saying. In short, nations that pursue their interests irrespective of their values invite the charge of hypocrisy, and paradoxes surrounding inconvenient peoples invariably follow. It makes sense if you don’t think about it.

 

The whole world seems to be coming down around AOC’s shoulders over her response to the very simple question of whether the United States should come to Taiwan’s defense if it is attacked by communist China. And yes, Ocasio-Cortez stumbled around a little bit, but she eventually got around to a salient thought. It’s important for us to follow her journey.

 

“Um, you know, I think that this is such a — a — you know, I think that this is a, um, this is of course a very longstanding, um, policy of the United States,” she began. “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.”

 

What’s so hard to understand about that? Of course, America hopes to deter Chinese aggression, and we will do that by “moving in all of our economic research and global positions.” Maybe she didn’t exactly answer the question, which was premised on a failure of deterrence, but she answered the question she wanted to answer. Whip smart.

 

Perhaps her answers were a little garbled at times, a bit too high-flown and academic at others. But she was inspiring. “We are all drops that when put together make an ocean, but we don’t see the ocean at the start,” she said. AOC warned against corporate power and giving corporatists license to tell themselves, “Let’s have a big oligarchy party!” You know that they would just love to have that oligarchy party, those corporatists. “We have to learn how to hold conflict and hold together in conflict,” the great communicator closed. Ain’t it the truth.

 

Obviously, the ideas AOC promulgated in Germany are beyond reproach. Only the keenest minds would be attracted to them, much less capable of articulating them. So, she stumbled here and there. So what? The philosophy to which a mind as sharp as AOC’s is attracted must have some real intellectual heft to it. With champions like her, how can those ideas lose?

Rubio’s Impressive Tightrope Walk

National Review Online

Tuesday, February 17, 2026

 

Images of Marco Rubio, secretary of state, national security adviser, and now-former national archivist, wearing a seemingly endless variety of costumes have long since gone viral. Unfortunately, no one had provided him with a tightrope walker’s outfit before he began his speech to the Munich Security Conference. Fortunately, he made it to the other side nevertheless — to applause and sighs of relief. It was an impressive performance. He had remained true to the orthodoxies of the Trump administration but in a fashion sufficiently soothing to calm down at least some of our European allies. That matters, above all, perhaps, because, as Rubio put it, “the fate of Europe will never be irrelevant to our own.” He did not specifically spell out — but he should not have had to — that if Europe were to fall to or, more likely, be neutralized by a Beijing-backed Russia, that would leave the U.S. in a much more vulnerable position.

 

As Rubio put it:

 

We do not want our allies to be weak, because that makes us weaker. We want allies who can defend themselves so that no adversary will ever be tempted to test our collective strength.

 

That test could come if the transition to a future where Europe is more responsible for its own defense is botched, something that could easily happen. The administration needs to accept that it will take time for the Europeans to build up their defenses to the appropriate level, and both sides need to avoid incessant acrimony. An abrupt divorce would be a clear win for Xi and Putin, while a soured alliance would call into question the essential understanding that an attack on one alliance member is an attack on all.

 

On the American side, there should be no repeat of the destructive Greenland misadventure or anything like it, and, of course, we should avoid fighting trade wars with those we would like to keep as friends. We should also remember that what we have looked for in our allies in the past are shared interests and a mutually reinforcing ability to secure them. We have never required that they be in ideological lockstep.

 

In his speech, Rubio sketched out his understanding of our times, including the consequences of mass immigration, climate change policy, and the “delusion” that history had come to an end. Europe’s ruling class would do well to take such views more seriously than hitherto.

 

Rubio conceded that “we Americans may sometimes come off as a little direct and urgent in our counsel,” adding that “is because we care deeply. We care deeply about your future and ours.” Rubio acknowledged that there are “disagreements,” but that appeared to be a reference to past and present more than future. He should have also said that there will be disagreements (indeed we should expect them; a stronger Europe will be a more assertive Europe) but that we — and the Europeans — should learn to agree to disagree. There is more that unites than divides us.

 

For their part, the Europeans must show that their commitment to building up their defenses is serious and the date by which they are capable, with the assistance of an American backstop, of defending themselves is real rather than something as fluid as the completion date for a Californian high-speed rail project. They should also commit to their defense buildup taking place within NATO’s framework. Militarizing the EU, something clearly on Brussels’s mind, is a recipe for confusion, obfuscation, and unnecessary duplication and a pathway to a potential divorce in which both sides would be left weaker. Speaking of which, they should remember that cozying up to China as a sort of counterbalance to those wicked Americans will end in disaster.

 

And if we should ease up on trade wars, the EU should stop abusing their laws to loot American high-tech companies.

 

Rubio went to Munich with an olive branch, albeit one with a few thorns. Our European allies should accept it and, focusing more on the speech’s tone than its details, concentrate on working jointly with the U.S. on the necessary reshaping and overdue strengthening of a NATO capable of facing the challenges of a dangerously changed world.

Marco Rubio’s Impressive Speech

By Eliot A. Cohen

Tuesday, February 17, 2026

 

As Cabinet members snarl at representatives and senators, and social media fills with semiliterate trolling and insults by public officials, we need to remember that rhetoric—the art of persuasive speech—still matters. Marco Rubio, the U.S. secretary of state, gave an excellent demonstration of that fact at this year’s Munich Security Conference.

 

Any contemporary speech carries the burden of multiple audiences. In this administration, the first and most important is the volatile and tempestuous president. But at Munich, there are other audiences as well: those in the room who represent not only a European but a global national-security elite; European and other politicians outside the room who care chiefly about domestic politics but are aware of international politics; real and potential enemies; and an American audience taking the measure of its country’s leaders.

 

Delivering speeches at Munich is a perilous business. In 2018, Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster gave a podium-thumping address about nuclear proliferation and jihadists. A month later he was sacked; he’d received a tweeted dressing-down in midair on the way back for having acknowledged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Last year, J. D. Vance headed in the other direction—denouncing democratic decay in Europe while calling out errant allies by name. This undiplomatic tirade went over well in the White House, but marked him as a belligerent nativist abroad and something of an isolationist at home. The speech might have elevated his standing with MAGA world, but showed him to be out of the mainstream of American foreign-policy views as measured by consistent polling of what the American people want. Vance’s tone was loutish in the distinctive, and tiresome, Trump way.

 

Rubio’s lengthy speech this past weekend was very different. There was nothing in it to offend the president, who was referenced three times, enough to flatter but not so often as to seem to grovel. The phrase sigh of relief was used by Rubio’s European host after the speech, and he meant it: The secretary of state received a standing ovation at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof. The American political class, including those on the right, cheered as well. Fox News approvingly noted, “Rubio Fuels 2028 Speculation.”

 

This reception was not surprising. Rubio is not merely bright and well spoken but a far more experienced politician than anyone else in the Trump Cabinet: He spent eight years in the Florida House of Representatives, including two as the youngest speaker and the first Cuban American to hold that position; served three terms in the Senate with weighty experience on the Foreign Relations Committee and the Select Committee on Intelligence; and now holds the combined roles of national security adviser and secretary of state in the highly personalistic Trump White House.

 

At 55—older than he looks—Rubio is a politician in his prime. It is highly unlikely that his career is over. He has articulated high principles and shown the occasional streak of ruthlessness and expediency—the latter having landed him in the Cabinet of a man he once despised. In theory, he has indicated his intention to play second fiddle in a Vance administration, but the current vice president would be a fool to take that as the final word. If the slippery turns of politics leave Vance exposed or failing, Rubio will undoubtedly do to him what he did to his mentor Jeb Bush, shunting him to the side with brutal skill. He assuredly wants to be president and might very well end up there.

 

There is every reason, then, to take his speech seriously and examine it carefully. While keeping Trump onside, Rubio sought not only to reassure but to rally Europeans. Where Vance seems only to have desired to berate and insult, there was something more urgently coaxing in Rubio’s tone. He seems to understand that the United States needs allies, that NATO was and should remain a cornerstone of American foreign policy, and he probably knows as well that an alienated Europe is dangerous for the United States. He spoke of our “intertwined destiny” and asserted that “the fate of Europe will never be irrelevant to our own.” In short, he reaffirmed the old saw that the only thing worse than fighting with allies is fighting without them.

 

His description of the common bonds, however, was predominantly civilizational. He cited poets and authors rather than political thinkers: Shakespeare, Mozart, Michelangelo, and the Beatles got shout-outs, not Montesquieu or John Locke. God appeared once, Christianity twice, and cathedrals, but not the Mother of Parliaments in London.

 

He disparaged globalism and the “rules-based international order,” though not in nearly as simple-minded a fashion as Pete Hegseth or his subordinates, a dull array of bumpkin Metternichs. The main themes that Rubio hit were the profoundly damaging consequences of unfettered free trade and mass migration. In this, he addressed the justifiable anger that has fueled populism in the United States and abroad, and that even now baffles an uncomprehending wealthier class that does not feel, understand, or even particularly care about what its fellow citizens are experiencing.

 

Like Vance, Rubio named no foreign adversary—not Russia, China, Iran, or jihadist fanatics. This was partly out of deference to a president who thinks not of enemies but only of potential counterparties to be bargained with, bullied, swindled, or accommodated. And Rubio was evasive when asked about Moscow and Beijing in the brief question-and-answer session. But he also reflected an introversion in the West that can easily go too far.

 

Rubio’s critique of the rules-based international order echoed that of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. Both accept the truth that such rules as have existed have resulted much more from American hard and soft power well exercised than from a Kantian consensus among right-thinking politicians. Far more troubling was Rubio’s substitution of the word civilization for values.

 

Rubio’s vaunting of America’s roots in Europe may not play well with the descendants of enslaved peoples, Native Americans, and Asian American immigrants. His celebration of Europe’s expansion—“its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe”—may seem rather one-sided to populations that felt the lash as much as or more than the benefits of colonial rule. And the invocation of Christian civilization leaves at best an uncomfortable marginality for atheists, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Muslims, and Jews.

 

Abraham Lincoln once said, “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.” There was in Rubio’s speech, however, no “decent respect for the opinions of mankind,” no affirmation of innate human equality, no insistence on the fundamental natural rights of the individual, no reverence for God without proclaiming the preeminence of any sect. The Declaration mandates no particular American foreign policy, but the values the document embodies have always informed it, even as American statesmen have struggled to reconcile the country’s many mundane interests with the principles that gave it birth.

 

This was indeed a noteworthy divergence. It may represent Rubio’s actual views, or alternatively, his adroit maneuvering within an ideologically constrained political space. The son of refugees from Castro’s Cuba must have within him something that echoes Lincoln’s faith and that of the Founders—at least so one hopes. Whichever it is, his speech outlined a path for American foreign policy that may wander from older verities yet prove far more acceptable to America’s allies, and far more constructive, than that of the first year of an administration so shamefully out of the American norm.

Cuba Faces a Sunset of Its Socialist Revolution

By John Fund & Rainer Zitelmann

Monday, February 16, 2026

 

Faced with a tightening U.S. oil blockade and the consequences of its 67 years of suffocating state planning, Cuba’s economy is shutting down. The island is rationing fuel, going to a four-day workweek, imposing blackouts, and ending refueling for international airlines.

 

The crisis is “an opportunity and a challenge that we have no doubt we will overcome,” says the island’s deputy prime minister, Oscar Pérez-Oliva Fraga, the grandnephew of Fidel and Raúl Castro. “We are not going to collapse.” Ludicrously, Fraga’s colleagues talk about accelerating a transition to renewable energy sources.

 

Watching Cuba’s aged leaders (at 94, Raúl still exercises a veto power over policy) refuse to alter a discredited revolutionary model of socialism is painful. It’s like watching someone claim that because they watched Grey’s Anatomy, they know how to operate on a patient.

 

Michael Bustamante, the chairman of the Cuban and Cuban-American Studies Department at the University of Miami, says Havana has “missed every opportunity” to improve the economy and alleviate the suffering of its 10 million people. Public order is collapsing. Ruaridh Nicoll, a Cuban novelist who lives in Havana, wrote last week in Britain’s left-wing Guardian newspaper: “Children who would once have had to answer to the police if seen on the streets in school hours now use the time to beg.”

 

It doesn’t have to be this way.

 

There are two models for a transition from socialism to a market economy. The first model is represented by Poland, where in 1989 and 1990 the political and economic system of socialism collapsed and was replaced by a market-based and democratic society. Poland has since become Europe’s growth champion, outstripping nations such as Germany, France, and Great Britain.

 

That model is currently inconceivable for Cuba’s dictators. But there is a more realistic one.

 

Vietnam, a nation of 100 million people, began market-oriented reforms in the late 1980s as communism collapsed in Europe. But the political system of one-party rule remained in place.

 

When Vietnam adopted its “Doi Moi” (“Renewal”) policies, it was the poorest country in the world, with a per capita GDP of $98, behind that of Somalia. Like Cuba today, it was at ground zero with its economy. During the Vietnam War, which ended in 1975, it was hit by up to 15 million tons of bombs — ten times as many as had been dropped on Germany in the Second World War — and had millions of orphans and war invalids to feed.

 

As late as 1993, 80 percent of the Vietnamese lived in poverty. By 2006, the rate had fallen to 51 percent. Today it’s only 3 percent.

 

Vietnam is now one of the most dynamic countries in the world, with a vibrant economy that creates great opportunities for hardworking people and entrepreneurs. Once a country that, before the market reforms began, was unable to produce enough rice to feed its own population, it has now become one of the world’s largest rice exporters — and also a major electronics exporter as firms pivot away from making their products in China.

 

If one looks at the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom, Vietnam has gained more points than any other country of comparable size. Further, while Vietnam was able to increase its score by 24 points from 1995 to 2024, the United States lost 6 points over the same period. Vietnam officially calls itself socialist, but its current economic-freedom rating of 65 is a score higher than Asian and world averages.

 

No one suggests that Vietnam is a free country. The media is state-controlled, and there are no free elections. State-owned companies generate as much as 20 percent of GDP, and they operate on highly preferential terms.

 

But there is no attempt to impose socialist thinking. Even government academics justify inequality and explain that it’s not the same as injustice. People accept inequality because they have had their own negative experiences of living in a society that proclaimed everyone to be equal.

 

Public-opinion polls bear this out. From 2021 to 2023, the polling institute Ipsos MORI conducted a survey in 35 countries to find out what people in different countries feel about capitalism. In most countries, negative attitudes toward capitalism dominated. In Vietnam, by contrast, people associated “capitalism” with positive features, such as “progress” (81 percent), “innovation” (80 percent), “a wide range of goods” (77 percent), “prosperity” (74 percent), and “freedom” (71 percent).

 

Despite Vietnam’s economic success, Cuba’s geriatric leaders clearly suspect that they would not be able to duplicate the success of Vietnamese leaders in continuing a one-party socialist state. They clearly lack self-confidence in their abilities or a willingness to take risks.

 

The problem is that Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a son of Cuban exiles in Miami, has made it clear that Cuba must grant both more economic and political freedom if it wants relief from Washington’s ever-tightening pressure.

 

He told Bloomberg News at last week’s Munich Security Forum that Cuban leaders “don’t know how to improve the everyday life of their people without giving up power over sectors that they control.” He went on to note that the series of tentative steps Cuba has occasionally taken to encourage “never ends up working.” That’s because “the Cuban regime has no fundamental understanding of what business and industry look like, and the people are suffering as a result of it.

 

So for now, there’s a stalemate. The U.S. and its allies will send just enough humanitarian aid to prevent starvation and a chaotic exit of people from the country. It hopes that the fuel shortage will force Cuba to undertake real reforms.

 

In response, Cuban officials say they are open to a dialogue on improving relations, but any discussion of changing their one-party communist system is off the table. But even leftist scholars who’ve written with admiration about how Cuba’s revolution has survived a U.S. embargo imposed by President John F. Kennedy in 1962 are privately convinced the current crisis is different.

 

In 1989, East German leader Erich Honecker told visiting Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that his regime would resist reform. Gorbachev later recalled: “I was horrified. I talked with him for three hours. . . . And he kept on wanting to convince me about the wonderful achievements of [East Germany].” Then Gorbachev spoke to Honecker’s Politburo and warned them: “If we lag behind, life will punish us straight away.”

 

The Berlin Wall fell the next month.

Sex, Lies, and Washington Red Tape

By Jeffrey Blehar

Tuesday, February 17, 2026

 

Long-time readers are by now well familiar with my negative opinion of Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, which probably solidified back in April of 2024 — somewhere around the time I suggested seeking a warrant to search her backyard as an illegally unregistered pet cemetery. My take on her abilities as a political memoirist having thus been set quite firmly, I was never enthusiastic about the idea of her becoming secretary of homeland security anyway. Why give a key domestic portfolio to the lightweight governor of a small and noncompetitive Plains state?

 

I had my own theory — Donald Trump’s TV-addled lizard brain requires his administration be represented by his idea of “glamorous dames” whenever possible — but that was irrelevant. (His pick, not mine.) Two years later, however, in the wake of her performance after the shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, my view now is that Noem should be launched in a SpaceX rocket into the heart of the sun. You might therefore justifiably regard me as a biased commentator.

 

But with the publication of last week’s enormous Wall Street Journal investigative piece on Noem’s tenure as DHS secretary, I’d like to claim at least a bit of vindication. “A Pilot Fired Over Kristi Noem’s Missing Blanket and the Constant Chaos Inside DHS,” reads the headline, and it is quite the intentional undersell.

 

For the record, the Journal

 

·         describes Noem as addicted to headlines and completely out of her depth when it comes to immigration enforcement and homeland security issues — but then, you knew that already.

 

·         strongly hints that Noem is conducting a long-term affair with ex-Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who is also depicted as her thinly veiled Svengali and inner-circle patron in Trump World. (Both are married to other people; the Journal reports that their own attachment dates as far back as 2019, which means I’m holding him personally responsible for greenlighting the publication of the “Cricket” anecdote.)

 

·         reports that Noem’s primary enemy within the administration is Tom Homan, whom she regards as more competent and experienced than her — and thus, a mortal threat to her reputation with Donald Trump.

 

·         alleges that Lewandowski has abused his 130-day, time-limited role as a “special government employee” — he’s unconfirmable by the Senate, for transparent reasons — beyond all elasticity of law.

 

·         claims that Lewandowski and Noem are responsible for massive mismanagement of funding at the Department of Homeland Security, holding up disbursements of cash for projects like the border wall, among other things, in a tangle of self-imposed red tape. The reason? Lewandowski wants to personally oversee and approve all money.

 

·         reports on Lewandowski’s unceasing attempts to be designated a “law-enforcement officer” and issued a government badge and weapon — despite his obvious inability to qualify for either.

 

There are many other scandalous details within the Journal’s remarkable, lengthy chronicle of Noem’s incompetence and self-importance. Several of them would have been firing offenses in any previous administration. But of course, the punch line is that nobody cares nowadays, because we all understand Donald Trump is the last person to fire anyone on morals charges.

 

Noem and Lewandowski may still be wedded to others, but they’re clearly now joined to one another at the hip, at least politically. She needs him to be the “brains” — I use this term advisedly — of the operation; he needs her to be the “front.” It strangely reminds me of the relationship Trump has to his own adviser Stephen Miller, increasingly dependent on his unconfirmed amanuensis to translate his ill-formed impulses into something resembling policy, though not always for the better. (The parallels really are striking; it’s turtles all the way down with this administration in many ways, as Trump’s subordinates end up recreating his own dysfunctional style.)

 

The true import of the WSJ piece about Noem’s incompetence is not necessarily what it reveals. What matters is that you’re reading about it in the pages of the Journal now. This kind of piece can only come from deep sourcing within the administration — the Trump-friendly part of the administration, mind you, not “deep state hacks.” (Complain about anonymous sourcing all you wish — I have long learned to read between the lines when it comes to journalists elevating the parochial gripes of bureaucratic infighters — but the fire-to-smoke ratio here is convincing.) She has lost the allegiance of those she works with, from top to bottom. Corey Lewandowski won’t be able to save her from that.

 

My assumption is Noem will not be fired by Donald Trump — she can’t be; nobody is going to sit through a DHS confirmation battle in the Senate with midterms approaching — but she has been back-benched, and it looks to be permanent. Now she limps along in public, like a horse with a shattered leg, waiting only for a dignified moment to be properly put down. Don’t lament. Instead, remember Cricket. It feels like karmic justice to me.

 

Giant Metaphor Alert

 

I regret to inform you that Washington, D.C., is currently full of sh**. I know, I know — this is nothing new. But this time the matter feels a bit more acute: Nearly a month ago, on January 17, a 72-inch sewer pipe broke along the border of our nation’s capital and the state of Maryland — very close to where I grew up, near the Clara Barton Parkway exit of the Beltway — and sent over 240 million gallons of raw sewage straight into the Potomac River.

 

Worry not, D.C. and Maryland residents! Most of the fecal and waste material apparently has been safely quarantined in the C&O Canal, which I have to imagine will make your next stroll upon the canal path even more pleasant than it usually is once you get to Glen Echo. Anyway, the Potomac River south of Carderock is more or less off-limits to human beings for the foreseeable future, and D.C. authorities are warning that it will take up to ten months to repair the broken pipe.

 

This isn’t getting enough attention. The nation’s capital has been hit with an ecological and engineering disaster, and it’s largely been a topic for Twitter journos and local news radio, while attracting some national coverage. On the one hand, I think, “Well, the Washington Post sure picked a bad time to axe their Metro desk staff.” On the other hand, I can’t imagine they’d be too interested in what amounts to an indictment of the blue-state governance of everyone in the region. The real story here is that denizens of the nation’s capital are being taxed at blue-state rates for the privilege of receiving third-world utilities and public safety.