The Resurgence of Political Terrorism

By Marco Rubio

Thursady, July 16, 2026

So let me start by saying that the most essential duty of the state -- the first responsibility, frankly, of any government of any kind -- is the protection of its people, is the protection of its country. This is a sacred obligation that should transcend all political and all ideological divisions. It is why, for example, we have militaries. It’s why we have intelligence agencies. It’s why counterterrorism bureaus exist, why police forces exist. Keeping our people safe is the reason why every country represented here has all of these things.

 

We are all very well acquainted as of now, of course, by now with what has been described as traditional terrorist threats. For 25 years, the term counterterrorism -- at least in the West -- has meant, first and foremost, the fight against radical Islamist extremism. And there’s a very poignant reason for that. On the 11th of September in the year of 2001, 19 men murdered 3,000 people here in my country. Then that same enemy struck Europe, murdering nearly 200 commuters aboard trains in Madrid in 2004 and 52 more aboard London buses and the Underground in the following year. The entire architecture of Western counterterrorism was rebuilt from the studs around the singular traumatic event.

 

That made sense at the time. Our job was to keep our people safe, and the realm of terrorism, the specter of global jihad, was the premier threat to their safety. And so we went to work and we assembled a global coalition, working with many of the friends that are represented here in this room today. And we destroyed the ISIS caliphate; we killed al-Baghdadi, and al-Zawahiri, and bin Laden. And we built intelligence and law enforcement systems capable of anticipating and stopping attacks before the public even hears about them. Every country represented here today has disrupted a terrorist threat at some point emanating from this source.

 

Jihadists attacks and plots in the United States are down by two-thirds since ISIS’s peak. The number of people killed by jihadist terrorism in Europe dropped by roughly 97 percent from the year 2015 to the year 2024. In other words, to a very great extent, our counterterrorism strategy has worked. The threat has not disappeared, of course. It will continue to exist, particularly so long as we tolerate immigration systems that imports these threats directly into our respective homelands. But this threat has been severely diminished. The world looks very different today because of it.

 

For far too long, however, our counterterrorism doctrine has had a blind spot -- a blind spot when it comes to extremist violence from the political left. Even today, the very idea that far-left terrorism could be a serious threat is treated as a right-wing fever dream, or worse, as a dangerous fascist conspiracy. It’s treated this way by many in the press, by many in academia and our universities, and by many of our legacy institutions. You will no doubt see the dogma rear its head in the coverage of this very conference. In spite of the clear and the undeniable reality, in spite of the objective numbers and statistics, in spite of the fact that in this room today there are representatives from across the political spectrum, we will hear this organized -- that this kind of organized violence and terror will be dismissed. It will be dismissed as a partisan fiction.

 

A whole industry grew up in our countries around the study of extremism. We have think tanks and fellowships and journals and consultancies, with the unspoken understanding among them that the only kind of political violence that was a true threat to our system -- I’m sorry -- that only one kind of political violence was a true threat to the system. A bomb planted by a neo-Nazi group was a nefarious and murderous act of evil. It is. But a bomb planted by a Marxist revolutionary -- well, that’s just merely a tragic excess of idealism. Perhaps its means were misplaced or overzealous, but its ends were virtuous and just. That’s the implication of how they treat it.

 

For years, this extraordinary ideological prejudice was embedded in the way we talked about political violence and extremism. It was repeated again and again, until it was accepted as the neutral and objective baseline, so entrenched -- so entrenched in the mainstream conventional wisdom that it came to be regarded as an apolitical fact. It is the reason why, here in my country, so many people in positions of power have repeatedly dismissed acts of violence and even terrorism as legitimate forms of political expression so long as they served a left-wing cause.

 

It is why during those George Floyd -- so-called George Floyd -- riots in the summer of 2020, as criminals and extremists burned and looted their way through American great -- America’s great cities and nearly brought the country to its knees, city governments all across the country simply refused to prosecute the people conducting these acts of violence and terror. It is the reason for the now infamous image -- and you all recall this -- of a news anchor from a very prominent agency -- a news anchor standing in a neighborhood consumed in flames; meanwhile the chyron on the bottom read that the protests were mostly peaceful. This was something worse than a double standard. Left-wing violence was not just excused; it was treated as sacrosanct, a protected class unto itself. That era has to end.

 

The coalition in this room today includes political leaders and experts and law enforcement officials from more than 60 countries across the world. You have come here from a wide range of governments, parties, and political persuasions. Some of your governments and ours disagree publicly. Sometimes we disagree sharply about trade, about energy, about immigration. You did not come here today because you have been persuaded on every single aspect of the American view of the world.

 

You came here -- you are here -- because two weeks ago, a 72-year-old woman was burned on over 80 percent of her body in her own home in Greece, and she died, executed by a firebomb because her daughter dared to stand for office. You are here today because for five days this winter the lights went out in Berlin, the longest blackout in the city since the Second World War, sparked by an attack that left tens of thousands of households without power in the freezing cold and left an 83-year-old woman dead.

 

You are here and you came because a month after that Berlin blackout, a French 23-year-old succumbed to traumatic brain injuries, beaten to death on the streets of Lyon by a group of far-left militant thugs. You are here because your political leaders are being attacked and stabbed and shot in your streets, because your businesses have been bombed, because your railways have been sabotaged, because your police officers have been beaten and burned. You are here because this is real, and it is getting worse, and it can no longer be denied, and it can no longer be ignored, because it is time to crush this evil forever.

 

The simple fact is none of this that I’ve just described is new. Far-left political terrorism is not a recent-day, modern novelty. It is not a fiction manufactured by conservative politicians. For most of the modern era, it was, in fact, the dominant form of political violence. Every one of our friends here from the nations of the Western Hemisphere remember -- remember the decades of kidnappings and bombings and assassinations and executions, the violent terror of the Tupamaros, of the Montoneros, of the FARC, of the ELN. You remember the inhuman savagery of Peru’s Shining Path, the Maoist fanatics who massacred the peasant villages of Peru, hacking pregnant women and newborn infants to death with axes and machetes. You remember the tens of thousands of Marxist guerrillas trained to kill in Castro’s terrorist camps.

 

All of you here from Europe remember. You remember the machine gun massacres of Italy’s Red Brigades, which held the five-time prime minister captive for 55 days before subjecting him to a revolutionary, so-called “people’s trial” and executing him in 1978. You remember the Red Army Faction’s nearly three-decade campaign of bombings, kidnappings, and assassinations in Germany, murdering dozens and injuring hundreds more. You remember the 17 November organization in Greece, the Marxist extremists that terrorized Athens for more than a quarter century, including, by the way, shooting my country’s CIA station chief dead outside of his home in front of his wife as they were returning home from a Christmas party.

 

And here in America we remember. We remember the same reign of deadly terror, justified by the same slogans, motivated by the same wicked ideas. We remember the Weather Underground, which bombed the Pentagon, which bombed the State Department, and bombed the Capitol. We remember the Black Liberation Army, which staged armed robberies and executed police officers at point-blank range. We remember the Symbionese Liberation Army, which shot a public-school superintendent to death with cyanide-packed hollow-point bullets. In one 18-month period between 1971 and 1972, the FBI counted some 2,500 bombings on American soil, a rate of nearly five a day. The overwhelming share of that violence came from left-wing extremists. Between 1970 and 1980, 93 percent of terrorist attacks in the West came from the far extremist left.

 

These are numbers that would shock most Americans today because we’ve been taught to believe that this kind of political violence, it simply doesn’t exist or it’s being exaggerated. But it does exist, and we’re actually underestimating it, and our nations bear the scars to prove it.

 

And today, we face a new wave of this old evil. Here in the United States, the share of left-wing terrorist attacks and plots has risen to levels not seen in decades. In Germany, far-left violence has jumped by more than 40 percent in just the last year alone. In Greece, more than 80 percent of radical violence is now driven by far-left and anarchist actors. These are not abstract statistics.

 

Americans have seen what those numbers mean -- an all-out assault on our immigration officers, sniper attacks, explosives, armed ambushes. A transgender shooter opening fire on Catholic elementary school students as they pray, his gun marked with slogans like, “Where is your God now?” A health care executive executed in cold blood in the streets. Multiple assassination attempts on a sitting president. And the murder of the greatest conservative activist of a generation, a man who happened also to be a husband and the father of two young children, shot and killed while speaking to a crowd of students.

 

This is a distinctive and unique evil. It has always been driven by a hatred above all else, a hatred for civilization itself. It is a revolt of the worst against the best, a revolt of the weak and the cowardly against the strong and the good. It is perpetrated by those who cannot build, who cannot create, who cannot achieve great things, and take their revenge upon the world for their own inadequacy by seeking to destroy those who can. This is what radical leftism is. It may wear various different slogans and ideologies across place and time. They can call themselves anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist or communist or anarchist or Marxist. But the fundamental character is always the same. It’s always the same.

 

It is a poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality and justice and liberation, an overwhelming need to tear down what greater men have built, to wreck what is beautiful and what is right on behalf of people who are only filled with ugliness and have nothing else to offer the world. Through violence and through terror, they once again seek to impose their ugliness on all of us. The old dogma was wrong. The old dogma was wrong; none of this is driven by idealism. It is not utopian. In fact, it is the opposite.

 

One of the criticisms you sometimes hear of communism, for example, is that it sounds good in theory, but it never works in practice. That’s actually not true. Communism does not sound good in theory. The world it envisions for all of us is small, flat, grey, leveled of all exception, drained of all that is good and noble in the human soul. The world it envisions is a world without courage, a world without creativity or ambition, a world without heroes or glory or great causes to strive towards, without -- a world without miracles, without myths, without men who rise above the rest to do incredible and extraordinary things. And the world communism envisions is a world without God.

 

For these architects of revolutionary violence, the towering achievement of our civilization -- for them it’s an unbearable humiliation, a reminder of what they cannot do and a reminder of what they cannot be. So they choose instead to destroy. They attack pipelines; they attack railroads; they attack power grids and laboratories, the physical embodied symbols of power and invention and achievement. This is the nature of the terrorism we face today. They despise the West because the West is great.

 

This is an international conference because we are facing an international -- we are facing a transnational threat. These are not distinct and isolated cells. They are interconnected networks. They do not recognize our borders. They do not believe, in fact, in the nation state itself. They coordinate, they communicate, they travel, they train, and they act together, sharing the same infrastructure, sharing the same enemies, sharing the same mission. Antifa militants and their comrades travel from across Europe and to the Americas to participate in each other’s attacks, to funnel propaganda and training materials and target information through shared encrypted channels, moving through underground networks of safe houses and finance, and sustain their operations through transnational funds.

 

And they work alongside hostile foreign states that share their mission, like Iraq’s -- Iranian proxy networks who are increasingly intimately tied to leftist militant groups around the world. The Cuban regime’s sprawling intelligence and ideological network helped to build the far-left in our country and in our hemisphere, and it remains inextricably linked to the far-left groups and movements across and beyond the West.

 

Today’s far-left terrorists can raise money in one country; they can host their communications in a second country; they can receive training in a third country; they can recruit militants in a fourth country, and then together strike a target in a fifth country. And so, we have no choice but to confront this menace together. We will either cooperate across our borders or the terrorists will continue to exploit the gaps between them.

 

Under President Trump, for the first time, the United States is building the infrastructure, the partnership, and the strategy to defeat the scourge of far-left terror. The President signed National Security Presidential Memorandum number 7, outlining a comprehensive strategy to investigate and disrupt Antifa terror networks and their allies. Last November, the State Department designated four violent far-left extremist groups as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, and there will be more designations soon.

 

In December, we announced Rewards for Justice offering up to $10 million for information disrupting the financing behind these groups. In May, we convened the first Counter Terrorism Law Enforcement Workshop, joining American law enforcement officials and their counterparts in our partner country -- nations together to map and develop strategies for dismantling these networks. The next workshop will be co-hosted with our partners in Germany. The coalition we’re building together is already bearing fruit, and we are here today to build on that work.

 

We can -- and we must -- identify and map this threat and rebuild our counterterrorism architecture to defeat it. Just as we have done together before, now we must do it together again. Through intelligence and information sharing, through coordinated law enforcement strategy, through financial targeting and disruption, we will dismantle these networks brick by brick. It is time for the people of the civilized world to defend ourselves, to stand united against this encroaching darkness, and fight -- fight for what is ours.

 

It is easy to destroy great things; it is far more difficult to make them. The enemies of civilization are only capable of the former. They are only capable of destroying great things. All they know is destruction. But we have built great things together. We have done it time and again. We know what we must do, and now we must do it.

Countering Left-Wing Terrorism

National Review Online

Monday, July 20, 2026

 

Marco Rubio gave a great speech last week.

 

Addressing the delegates at a 60-nation conference on the threat posed by left-wing political violence, he argued that the Western world’s counterterrorism doctrine suffers from a “blind spot.” The global anti-terror apparatus has become adept at tracking and interdicting Islamist terror plots, and it is forever scanning the horizon for indications that violent elements on the far right are a threat. There is, however, no similar vigilance when it comes to political violence emanating from the left.

 

“Even today, the very idea that far-left terrorism could be a serious threat is treated as a right-wing fever dream, or worse, as a dangerous fascist conspiracy,” Rubio said of the elite precincts of Western academia and culture. When “this kind of organized violence” is not being “dismissed as a partisan fiction,” the secretary of state continued, it’s excused as “merely a tragic excess of idealism.”

 

Rubio explained that the threat he identifies is both Marxian in nature and violent in its tactics.

 

Rubio anticipated that a variety of sneering left-wing observers would apply that dismissive “dogma” to “the coverage of this very conference.” They swiftly proved his point.

 

Yet, the evidence is on his side. The secretary outlined some of the recent incidents of left-wing terror in America: the attempted and successful assassinations of right-wing figures; the armed assaults on federal law enforcement; the insurrectionary mobs that have descended, with varying degrees of intensity, on urban America regularly since the infernal summer of 2020.

 

Rubio also related the threat to Europe: an elderly woman firebombed because her daughter ran for office on a platform that offended the radicals; a left-wing campaign of sabotage against rail lines and civilian infrastructure in which one attack left Berlin darkened for days; the beating and burning of civilians and police officers alike in the streets.

 

The secretary could have gone on longer. Rubio might have cited the director of national intelligence’s assessments of the violence committed recently by outfits with names that hearken back to the Marxist guerrilla movements of old: Italy’s Informal Anarchist Federation and the International Revolutionary Front, Greece’s Armed Proletarian Justice, Germany’s Antifa Ost, and Turkey’s Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party, among others.

 

Nonetheless, Europe is stubborn in its complacency. “Our law enforcement authorities have not focused on left-wing terrorism because this is not considered a high-priority threat in our country,” one typically complacent Eurocrat told reporters amid the international media’s attack on the conference and its organizers’ motives.

 

Rubio maintained that the left-wing extremists are part of a transnational network, linked by a shared ideology as well as their mutual contempt for individual liberty and personal property. This is nothing new. The secretary noted how the wave of left-wing violence today shares many of the features of the wave that crashed into the Western world in the 1970s.

 

In Latin America, there were the FARC rebels, the ELN, the Shining Path, and, in general, the seditious activities of those “trained to kill in [Fidel] Castro’s terrorist camps.” In Europe, there were crises instigated by Italy’s Red Brigades, Germany’s Red Army Faction, and Greece’s Leninist 17 November gang. And, in the U.S., there were the Weather Underground, the Black and Symbionese Liberation Army, the FALN, and the New World Liberation Front, among other left-wing terrorist groups.

 

“In one 18-month period between 1971 and 1972, the FBI counted some 2,500 bombings on American soil, a rate of nearly five a day,” Rubio said. He added, “Between 1970 and 1980, 93 percent of terrorist attacks in the West came from the far extremist left.”

 

In the finest anti-communist tradition, Rubio wed the geopolitical and moral dimensions of the West’s struggle against militant socialism.

 

“None of this is driven by idealism,” he explained. “Communism does not sound good in theory. The world it envisions for all of us is small, flat, grey, leveled of all exception, drained of all that is good and noble in the human soul.” He concluded, “They attack pipelines; they attack railroads; they attack power grids and laboratories, the physical embodied symbols of power and invention and achievement. They despise the West because the West is great.”

 

In short, it was a vitally important address at a time when the seeds of revolutionary resentment are once again taking root in Western soil.

The Next Russia Threat

By Michael Kofman

Tuesday, June 26, 2026

 

The war in Ukraine, now in its fifth year, has reached another inflection point. Russian forces are visibly struggling on the battlefield as Kyiv’s strategy of making the war futile for Russia is working. But the future of European security does not hinge on the outcome of this war alone. Even if defeated, Russia will remain the primary threat in Europe for years to come. Despite its stagnating economy, poor demographics, and ossifying authoritarian regime, Russia remains the main power capable of and invested in upending the continent’s security architecture. Moreover, Russian military reconstitution after the war is not a question of if but of when.

 

Defense planners and analysts are divided on the severity of the future danger that Russia’s military poses and how soon the threat could grow. Some fear that Moscow will be capable of continued aggression soon after the war in Ukraine ends. Others believe that it may take many years to reconstitute its weakened and degraded military. There is a sense that Russia’s losses of troops and equipment have left its forces in tatters and that a military incapable of making significant advances in Ukraine can’t possibly threaten Europe.

 

Current trends suggest that Russia will reconstitute its military enough to pose a major threat faster than analysts expected back in 2022. It will likely take five to seven years, with Russia able to use force to threaten NATO members or Ukraine in more limited ways shortly after the current war comes to a close. Even if full reconstitution takes a few years longer, such a time frame is still short by defense planning standards. Russia will field a larger force with more drones, deep-strike capabilities, and personnel than before the war. It will continue to prioritize defense spending and maintain higher levels of defense industrial production. But the path to reconstitution will not be easy. Historically, Russian force development has been riddled with compromises, overly ambitious designs, insufficient resources, and poor execution. It is often a process of two steps forward and one step back.

 

As the United States and many European states focus on ensuring Ukraine’s success, they must also think beyond this war and begin preparing for the enduring challenge that Russia poses. Russia’s military will remain strong enough to threaten NATO members’ territory and undermine the alliance, especially if continued U.S. commitment becomes uncertain. Rather than fight the way the Russian military has in the last two years in Ukraine, where the battlefield has been defined by entrenched defenses and positional fighting, Moscow will try to rebuild its capacity to conduct large-scale offensive maneuvers. It will retain a traditional focus on firepower, including artillery and precision-strike capabilities, while adding a large number of drone formations to the force. NATO forces remain superior overall but have yet to adapt to some of these changes, which could lead to higher losses in the opening days of a future war with Russia.

 

The Russian military is a force in transition. In the coming years, it will continue to have one foot in the future and the other in the past. A NATO-Russian conflict would undoubtedly play out differently than the war in Ukraine has, but poor Russian performance and observable weaknesses should not be cause for complacency among NATO countries. The enduring threat from Moscow is not one that Washington should readily dismiss or simply hand off to Europeans. The United States and its European allies need a more grounded conversation on the future Russian military threat and how to deter it.

 

RECONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS

 

Military reconstitution is not something that takes place only in the wake of intense fighting. A country’s forces are in a continuous state of transformation. As the military analyst Dara Massicot has explained, reconstitution should not be measured “only through the restoration of prewar numbers of personnel and equipment.” Rather, it is a “process of regaining combat functions, proficiency, and capabilities” to execute combat missions. Moreover, military power cannot be understood in the abstract; it depends on the specific scenario being considered. When NATO members put forward competing timelines for Russian military reconstitution, for instance, they may be basing their assessments on different scenarios. The force required for a limited Russian cross-border incursion into a Baltic state could be starkly different from that needed for an invasion of Poland.

 

The baseline for analyzing Russian military reconstitution should be large-scale combat operations because they pose the greatest threat to NATO and the greatest challenge for U.S. forces in Europe. To conduct operations at scale, the Russian military will need to restore not only its manpower and materiel but also its ability to command and support larger formations such as armies, corps, and divisions, and to integrate different branches. The ability to conduct more complex operations is one of the most significant differentiators among modern militaries and an area in which Russia stumbled at the opening of the war in Ukraine. At the same time, NATO must also consider other threats that Russia poses, including a much more limited ground campaign backed by intense missile and drone strikes.

 

Analysts also need to realize that the Russian military will not be reconstituted to its prewar size and structure. It will pursue an expansive redesign to accommodate a larger force composed of traditional artillery, motorized rifle and tank formations, and drone units. The future Russian military will have more infantry—reversing prior cuts—and more drone formations to provide fire support or conduct precision strikes. It will still be a force seeking to balance capability, capacity, and readiness that will remain dependent on a mix of conscripts, contract service personnel, and partial mobilization of reserve soldiers. Some percentage of the standing formations will be able to deploy on short notice without conscripts, depending on the scenario, while others will require a call-up of reservists to get to full combat strength. Whether the Russian military is forced to keep a large ground force along the 800-mile frontline with Ukraine even after the war ends will also determine what units it has available to deploy elsewhere.

 

One reason for the uncertainty about how Russian forces will develop is that members of the older generation of military leaders, such as Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the general staff, have set the trajectory. Gerasimov concluded from Russia’s failures early in the Ukraine war that the military was not Soviet enough—that is, it lacked sufficient troops, equipment, reserves, and formations capable of sustaining a war of attrition. In late 2022, before many of the developments in the ongoing war in Ukraine, including the decisive role of drones on the battlefield, the military brass announced that it would significantly expand the force. It also sought to undo prior reforms and remove command structures that enabled the armed forces to better conduct joint operations between branches, in some cases obviously misdiagnosing problems as it did so. But these leaders are not going to be the future of the Russian military. The vision of what Russia’s forces should look like might change as those with current combat experience rise through the ranks.

 

QUANTITY OVER QUALITY

 

Defense analysts need to carefully examine the notion that the Russian military has been badly depleted by this war and will take a long time to recover. Although they have suffered massive losses, Russia’s armed forces have expanded over the course of the war, and the country’s production of key munitions and weapons systems has increased. Russia’s military has been degraded significantly in some areas, especially in the quality of its officers and overall personnel, but it has also demonstrated an ability to adapt and evolve.

 

At least 400,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in action in Ukraine—a British intelligence report released at the end of May suggests nearly 500,000—and another 600,000 to 800,000 have been seriously wounded. Despite these massive casualties, the size of the force has grown from approximately 850,000 active personnel before the war to 1.3 million now. Many formations have doubled or tripled in size, and most of these have added drone, reconnaissance, assault, and electronic warfare units. Following Ukraine’s example, Russia has also introduced a new combat branch dedicated to drone warfare called Unmanned Systems Forces. Although many of the current units will shrink after the war, and assault detachments and reserve formations will be eliminated, the military is unlikely to go back to its prewar size.

 

At the same time, Russian equipment losses in the war have been staggering. According to open-source accounts, as of the beginning of May 2026 the Russian military has lost more than 14,000 armored combat vehicles, 2,100 pieces of artillery, and thousands of other items. Because of Ukraine’s increasingly successful strikes, Russia is now losing air defense systems in much greater numbers than it was earlier in the war, which raises questions about how it will compensate for the more expensive systems it cannot easily replace. Between the losses to aircraft and air and missile defenses, the war is degrading the Russian armed forces in significant ways. In the near term, this will make them more vulnerable to NATO’s airpower and its superior long-range precision-strike capabilities.

 

Nevertheless, in the last four years, the Russian military has pulled thousands of vehicles and artillery pieces from its stocks. It has refurbished or newly produced thousands of vehicles, and North Korea has supplied over 300 pieces of artillery. Today, the Russian military likely has as many, or perhaps slightly more, armored combat vehicles, including tanks, than it did at the start of the war. These may not be as modern as those it had in 2022, but Russia continues to increase new vehicle production. Estimates suggest that it is now annually producing more than 200 T-90M tanks, the most advanced tank in its arsenal; at this rate, half the tanks in Russia’s armored fleet could be T-90Ms within seven to eight years. Russia also continues to rapidly produce air defense systems and will probably modify future air defense designs based on what it has learned from the war in Ukraine.

 

Russia now makes millions of tactical drones each year, and it can produce far more cruise and ballistic missiles than it could at the start of the war. The increase in production of large one-way attack drones, of which the military is launching an average 6,500 per month in Ukraine, is especially notable: in 2025, Russia made more than 70,000 of them, and for 2026 it has contracted to obtain at least 100,000 more. The capability of these weapons continues to increase. The Russian military has improved its ability to conduct strikes and addressed difficulties it had when the war started, such as the delay between detecting and engaging a target. It may ultimately end the war with a similar amount of equipment, more personnel, and expanded drone and precision-strike capabilities than it had when it first invaded Ukraine. And at current rates of production, Russia could have a stock of millions of tactical drones and hundreds of thousands of larger one-way attack drone systems within a few years after the war ends. Assessments of Russian military capability must account for these significant expansions of its capacity to conduct deep strikes and the threat they pose to units, bases, and critical infrastructure.

 

TWO STEPS FORWARD, ONE STEP BACK

 

Although quantity of materiel may be the easiest metric to estimate, it is equally important to consider the quality of the armed forces when assessing the future Russian military threat. As the military historian Stephen Biddle has long argued, how a military uses its forces matters more for determining combat effectiveness than the numbers of troops and weapons it has on the books.

 

The Russian military is and will remain a patchwork force that is uneven in quality and capability. Over the course of the war in Ukraine, the armed forces have become much better at dynamic targeting, precision strikes, integrating drones into combat operations, and employing long-range precision-guided weapons in more sophisticated ways. The Russian military’s ability to execute concepts such as recon-fire and recon-strike contours, which involve the real-time integration of reconnaissance systems with artillery and precision strikes, has also matured. Combat experience, investment in organizational capacity, and adaptations to the force structure have made the Russian armed forces more capable of employing drones and precision-guided weapons at scale.

 

The Russian military has also evolved to better deal with some of the Western capabilities it has confronted in Ukraine and, in select cases, developed effective ways to counter them. Russia has reorganized its logistics and command-and-control systems to reduce the efficacy of more traditional U.S. long-range precision strikes. The net effect is that, over time, Ukraine has already realized much of the shock value from the weapons systems it has previously deployed, including long-range mobile rocket systems such as HIMARS. Conversely, new types of cheap, one-way attack drones with automated targeting are currently wreaking havoc on Russian logistics in Ukraine, but NATO militaries have yet to acquire these systems in substantial numbers.

 

Despite the difficulties it is facing in Ukraine, the Russian military has shown that it can adapt. In the current war, adaptation cycles typically take three to four months, with one side replicating the tactics or technologies used by the other. Although slower at tactical innovation than Ukraine, the Russian military has demonstrated that it can scale solutions across a large force. It is also making progress in the more challenging question of military learning, which is a longer-term process than wartime adaptation. As Massicot wrote in these pages, “By early 2023, Moscow had quietly constructed a complex ecosystem of learning that includes the defense manufacturing base, universities, and soldiers up and down the chain of command. Today, the military is institutionalizing its knowledge, realigning its defense manufacturers and research organizations to support wartime needs, and pairing tech startups with state resources.”

 

But the Russian military has historically underinvested in people. Instead, it has placed its trust in technology. Military exercises are frequently scripted, and readiness checks and training are treated as hoops to jump through. The results have been mixed at best and have often fallen woefully short of what is officially claimed. At times, Russian forces lack the quality to readily execute the concepts that the military is developing, so the military struggles to adopt the lessons it learns. After it intervened in Syria, in 2015, for example, the Russian military trumpeted the experience it had gained and cycled air crews and senior officers through the combat zone. In some areas, the experience helped the Russian military improve, but on the whole, officials overstated the positive effects on the force.

 

The Russian military has also learned some of the wrong lessons. During a period of reform before the war in Ukraine, for example, the Russian military instituted Joint Strategic Commands—unified headquarters above the level of the army that could command different types of troops—to better integrate the branches of the armed forces and improve their ability to conduct operations together. After failing to use the Joint Strategic Commands as intended, the general staff eliminated them and returned control of the branches to their respective service headquarters. The result is that the Russian military is less integrated and will require more ad hoc command-and-control structures in wartime. This is a case of misdiagnosing a problem and adapting in ways that make the situation worse.

 

Despite improvements in some areas, the Russian military has visibly lost the capacity for large-scale combined-arms maneuvers. Many of the officers and trained personnel required to conduct major combat operations have been killed in the war. In their place, Russian forces have relied on newly contracted assault troops who are often given no more than two weeks of training before being sent into battle. Since 2024, Russia has been fighting with smaller and smaller detachments of troops. It first relied on infantry assault groups of six to eight soldiers; more recently, it has been sending one to two soldiers at a time to infiltrate Ukrainian positions. Russian forces have been conducting small-scale operations on a broad front, grinding their way forward at huge cost. Moscow has built a pipeline to replace the infantry it is losing, but it will take years to replace the quality and experience it once had. The military has learned how to guide individual soldiers with drones and fight with small groups of assault infantry, but these are not substitutes for the cohort of lost battalion and regimental commanders who knew how to conduct offensive maneuvers at scale. As a result, Russia’s military will struggle to use the advantages provided by its growing drone force and improving strike capabilities to support offensive ground operations.

 

SUNK COSTS

 

Russia’s military reconstitution faces major obstacles from weakening domestic capacity. Most obvious, the country lacks enough qualified people to staff its military. Although Russian President Vladimir Putin has increased the upper age limit for the service from 27 to 30 and once again raised the official ceiling for the Russian armed forces to about 1.5 million active-duty personnel, Moscow is unlikely to reach this number. The country’s unfavorable demographic profile has further worsened because of the high excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic and the casualties from the war. Russia also has a skilled labor shortage and an unemployment rate of 2.2 percent, and the defense sector is competing with the military for skilled labor. As the Russia analyst Alexander Kolyandr wrote in May, “The army needs men to fight. The arms factories need men to supply them. The result is a labor market so tight that ordinary employers can barely function.”

 

The Russian economy has been militarized, but Moscow has not put it on a wartime footing that would involve full mobilization of its defense industrial base. According to the economist Alexandra Prokopenko, Russia is spending 40 percent of its budget, or eight percent of GDP, on the military. This is roughly double what Russia was spending on defense before the war in Ukraine but well below Soviet expenditures during the latter part of the Cold War. Since 2025, the Russian economy has stagnated. Regional budget deficits are growing, and the national government is borrowing more. The recent boost in oil export revenue resulting from the U.S. war with Iran cannot resolve the structural problems in the Russian economy. The Russian state has sought to raise more revenue to cover the costs of the war, but this will further tax the productive parts of the economy to purchase military goods and to give payouts to soldiers. Moving forward, Moscow will struggle to keep current economic policies, balance inflation, and maintain high levels of defense spending.

 

Since 2022, Russia has significantly expanded defense industrial production. But it has done so unevenly, producing far more munitions, precision-strike missiles, and drones than major weapons systems. Production capacity has leveled off considerably since an initial surge between 2022 and 2024. Western sanctions and export controls continue to constrain Russia’s production of machine tools and components. Moscow has set up an effective repair and refurbishment pipeline, but much of its ground force equipment draws on legacy stocks that it inherited from the Soviet Union. This means that most of what the Russian military is using now cannot be easily replaced again. As it consumes its reserve stocks to outfit the expanded force currently fighting in Ukraine, it is sapping its equipment reserves—and therefore the army’s future mobilization potential.

 

But NATO must consider the investments that Russia has made and their implications for the future. Moscow has already paid to ramp up defense production and shift hundreds of thousands of people into its defense industrial complex. After the war, such spending will continue at a high rate, even if it is reduced from wartime levels. And despite efforts to block its access to technology, Russia continues to acquire components and machine tools that are good enough for many defense applications. In 2026, Russian defense spending is projected to reach $180 billion. Because Russia pays for much of its procurement in rubles rather than dollars, when accounting for purchasing power parity, the effective amount it will spend is about $400 billion to $500 billion. This is how Moscow has been able to sustain the war, expand defense production, and contract over 400,000 soldiers per year since 2023.

 

PAST IS NOT PROLOGUE

 

Historically, the problem for Russia’s military has not been force design but force development. What may have looked promising initially ends up faltering as lofty ambitions and futuristic concepts run into resource constraints, insufficient training, and weak organizational capacity. The force design and operational concepts may be sound, but the military lacks resources to realize them, resulting in a set of compromises.

 

Current Russian military thinking still emphasizes a permanent standing force, higher readiness, and more precision-strike capabilities. The military continues to see NATO as the primary threat and remains focused on being able to fight a regional or large-scale war. It has concluded that its failures in Ukraine were not because its concepts were incorrect, but because its forces couldn’t execute them. What has changed are prior assumptions that the battlefield would be fragmented and that forces would be more dispersed. An earlier emphasis on maneuver defense is shifting back toward a focus on positional warfare and the kind of fighting seen in Ukraine.

 

Besides force design, the hardest part of a military to change is its culture, which can supersede doctrine in wartime. The Russian military suffers from overly centralized decision-making, which discourages and punishes soldiers’ initiative; a reliance on coercion instead of professionalism to ensure discipline; distrust between soldiers and commanders; the frequent falsification of combat reports; and a lack of empowered noncommissioned officers who can manage the force. Corruption has become endemic, with some soldiers paying to avoid participating in assaults. Russia’s military continues to lag behind its Western counterparts because it fails to make sufficient investments in the people, the training, and the changes to organizational culture that would enable it to fight more effectively.

 

But these shortcomings and the weak performance observed in Ukraine do not mean that the Russian military should be dismissed. Certainly, Ukrainian officers and commanders take the Russian military threat seriously. There is also a strong tendency to see the last war a country fought as a good proxy for its next one. After Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, for instance, analysts were slow to adjust their views on Russian military reform and modernization, which left them unprepared for the subsequent Russian military actions in Crimea in 2014 and Syria in 2015. And after the intervention in Syria, analysts overcorrected and failed to account for the enduring problems and compromises that bedeviled the Russian military. Every war is shaped by its specific context. It is appealing—but dangerous—to generalize from Russia’s performance in Ukraine in 2026 what the opening days of a NATO-Russian war might look like.

 

Although it is true that the way Ukraine fights is not how NATO would fight in a potential future war with Russia and therefore that NATO is in many ways well positioned to take on the Russian military, the alliance has its own challenges. Much of NATO’s presumed capacity and capability depends on the United States providing both its armed forces and the logistical and technical support and organizational capacity that NATO needs. NATO militaries evolved to work in conjunction with the United States and are not set up to independently conduct large-scale combat operations. This is not a matter of simply increasing defense spending. Current NATO defense plans presume a strong U.S. role and continued American leadership in managing European security, which Washington has in recent years signaled it is trying to reduce.

 

The United States and NATO have significant advantages in air and naval power, precision-strike capabilities, force quality, and intelligence. But they lack Ukraine’s experience of dealing with a battlefield saturated by the drones, pervasive surveillance, and new strike capabilities that the Russian military is now using. Conversely, Russia has adapted its force structure, organizational capacity, technology, and tactics so that it can employ these capabilities on a large scale against the NATO formations it would encounter. Russia also remains a leading nuclear power with a major advantage in tactical nuclear weapons, which are intended to offset NATO’s conventional superiority. In the absence of traditional arms control agreements such as New START, which expired in February, Russia’s now unconstrained strategic nuclear arsenal—combined with its tactical nuclear weapons—looms large over any future contingency.

 

It is imperative that defense planners take into account how the future Russian military might fight, adjusting for the fact that drones and other emerging technologies might prove more decisive than modernized Soviet tanks. Airpower remains highly relevant, but it may take time to adapt to the challenges that Russian military developments present. NATO could find it difficult to use its traditional air superiority to suppress dispersed drone teams or handle Russia’s large volume of cheap one-way attack drones. NATO ground forces lack sufficient air defenses and counterdrone technologies to protect their formations and enable mobility. It remains uncertain how NATO’s existing advantages and operational concepts will fare against a Russian military that has acquired these capabilities in large numbers and learned how to use them.

 

Consequently, NATO militaries might incur much higher losses than they would need to in a future war. Many of them are too small to afford high casualties, especially in the opening days of a conflict. Over the past year, Ukrainian drone units have been joining NATO forces on exercises. The results have been consistent: NATO members do not know how to operate in an environment characterized by the presence of mass precision—that is, a battlefield dominated by cheap uncrewed or autonomous systems that can conduct both reconnaissance and precision strikes in real time. They are not ready for a situation similar to the one that has developed in Ukraine, where drones are so numerous that they significantly outnumber personnel and equipment, nor are NATO forces prepared for how these drones—in combination with traditional weapons systems—can deny or enable maneuver. The issue is not just that the weapons have become precise, but that militaries such as Russia’s have invested in the tools required to use them effectively on a large scale. Despite its overall poor performance against Ukrainian forces, the Russian military of 2026 poses a different threat to NATO than did the Russian force that began the war in 2022.

 

To address the problems that Russia’s military poses, American and European defense planners must learn the right lessons from the war in Ukraine. They have been slow to absorb Ukraine’s experiences and reckon with how mass precision is changing the battlefield. Planners and military leaders are often too focused on what technology can do, which leads them to overlook the changes they need to make to force structure and organizational capacity to integrate that technology into how their military fights. Strategy requires making choices: if militaries need more drones, electronic warfare units, or cheaper forms of air defense, they have to decide which types of units they will eliminate. They could swap traditional reconnaissance units for uncrewed ones, for example, or reduce the size of some support formations to expand drone teams. In general, NATO militaries need to get bigger: thorny challenges such as air and missile defense require building an ecosystem of both high-end and low-end sensors and shooters to reduce costs and address the increasing threat of cheap, one-way attack drones that can saturate the skies and overwhelm defenses. Military leaders and defense planners say the right things about strengthening military preparedness, but they are often not ready to take the concrete actions or make the hard decisions needed for investments that may take years to bear fruit.

 

The Russian military challenge needs to be put in proper perspective. Russia has been and remains a power in decline. This was true before its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in 2022, and it will remain true regardless of how the war unfolds. But that decline is happening slowly, not suddenly. This gradual erosion will affect Russia’s ability to reconstitute its military, but it will not necessarily prevent such an outcome. Russia also has a history of restoring its military faster than expected after a defeat or a period of decline. The armed forces remain the strongest instrument of national power in Russia’s toolkit and the one Moscow has reached for with alarming consistency. Even if Ukraine, with Western help, decisively defeats Russia, Washington and its NATO allies should not dismiss the future Russian military threat or eschew necessary investments in rearmament. They need to start now to make forward-looking preparations for the challenge that a reconstituted Russian force will pose.

The World Is Giving Up on America

By Richard Wike

Wednesday, July 15,2026

 

Through much of the first quarter of the twenty-first century, as the United States’ popularity around the world has ebbed and flowed, the country has been able to fall back on a baseline of international support established in the previous century. There have been moments when the United States’ global image declined substantially, such as during the unpopular military interventions of President George W. Bush and the dramatic retrenchment from international engagement of President Donald Trump’s first term. But each time, the country’s reserves of soft power and its long-standing international reputation sustained it, and its foreign approval ratings eventually bounced back.

 

Since Trump’s return to office in January 2025, however, cracks are beginning to emerge in those foundations. His trade and immigration policies and his use of U.S. military power have yielded a wave of international disapproval that in its nature and depth has few recent historical parallels. A new Pew Research Center survey of public opinion has found that in many of the 36 countries surveyed, attitudes toward the United States are the most negative they have been since Pew began tracking them in 2002.

 

Ordinary citizens are now critical of Trump in ways they were not during his first administration. As was the case during his first term, they believe Trump is breaking with the United States’ history of international engagement and leadership. But much of the world now also believes that Trump’s use of the United States’ substantial hard power is threatening global stability in ways that were not apparent during the first administration. Moreover, during previous ebbs, people in other countries have not tended to question the basic values promoted by the United States, even if they strongly disagreed with specific policies. By contrast, today, the world has grown increasingly pessimistic about the state of American democracy itself. In less than two years of Trump’s second presidency, a growing number of non-Americans have come to believe that the U.S. government does not respect the individual liberties of its own people.

 

As a result, much of the world is losing faith in the United States’ ability to serve as the leader of a liberal international order. And these new reservations, deeper than those of the past, may prove hard to reverse.

 

LAND OF THE LESS FREE

 

The worsening health of democracy has become a problem in countries around the world. According to Freedom House’s annual assessment, the average level of global freedom across more than 200 countries and territories has decreased for 20 consecutive years. The decline has been especially steep in the United States. Earlier this year, the research institute V-Dem downgraded the country from a “liberal democracy” to an “electoral democracy,” stating that “democracy in the USA has fallen back to the same level as in 1965,” the year of the Voting Rights Act’s passage.

 

Across the 36 nations surveyed by Pew this year, a minority of respondents said they believed the U.S. government respects the personal freedoms of its people, while a clear majority said it does not. The share of respondents who say the United States respects personal freedoms has dropped by double digits in 12 of 13 countries where Pew also asked this question in 2021, at the start of President Joe Biden’s term. The decline has been particularly sharp in Europe. For instance, five years ago, 61 percent of Swedes said the United States respects individual liberty; today just 27 percent do.

 

This is a striking contrast with the findings of previous surveys. During past moments when anti-American sentiment ran high, people in many foreign countries still thought well of the United States’ commitment to protecting the freedoms of its citizens. In 2008, the last year of Bush’s second term, the United States received mostly positive marks: in 20 of the 23 countries polled, majorities or pluralities said the country respected personal freedoms. Today, by contrast, the share of the public who hold this view has plummeted to all-time lows in 15 countries that Pew has surveyed regularly over the years, including countries that enjoy close relationships with Washington such as Australia, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and South Korea.

 

MORE FEARED THAN LOVED

 

The dramatic decline in international opinion of America’s democratic commitment would seem to echo international disapproval of specific U.S. policies of the past—declines that were largely temporary and eventually rebounded. After all, during Trump’s first term, foreign publics largely disapproved of what they saw as the United States’ retreat from its previous role as leader of the global order. They were critical of Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from multilateral treaties and trade pacts. And they opposed the administration’s policies of putting up barriers, whether in the form of restrictive immigration policies or in the form of a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border.

 

Across the 37 nations polled in 2017, a median of just 19 percent approved of Trump’s withdrawing the United States from climate agreements and just 18 percent supported his pulling the country out of major trade agreements. Sixteen percent approved of the border wall or tighter restrictions on people entering the United States from several majority-Muslim countries. And only 34 percent approved of Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Iranian nuclear agreement.

 

Attitudes toward remained largely negative throughout Trump’s first term and fell even further in 2020 in response to his administration’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. But they recovered somewhat during the Biden administration. Biden’s ratings never reached the sky-high global ratings of President Barack Obama, but he was viewed more positively than Trump, and approval of the United States’ approach to world affairs and its respect for individual liberties at home, returned or nearly returned to pre-Trump levels in many countries during his presidency. Favorable opinions of the United States declined again when Trump returned to the White House in 2025, but they tended to be slightly higher than they were at the end of his first term.

 

The outlook since then, however, has been markedly more negative. International audiences once again disagree with specific policies of Trump’s agenda. A median of just 28 percent across the 36 nations surveyed this year approve of Trump’s immigration policy. A median of 18 percent approve of his tariff regime. And last year, when asked whether they had confidence in Trump’s ability to handle climate change, just 21 percent of people across 24 countries said they did.

 

The disapproval of Trump’s approach to immigration, trade, and climate policies are hardly surprising given the global reactions to his first-term policies. But international audiences also clearly view Trump’s second-term foreign policy differently from that of his first. He has used hard power much more liberally, carrying out an operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in Caracas and launching a war in Iran. In our survey, Trump gets mostly poor ratings for both actions: a median of just 22 percent approve of the Venezuela operation and only 20 percent approve of the way he has handled the war in Iran. As the war continued, attitudes toward the United States grew more negative across a diverse set of countries, including Greece, India, Italy, Kenya, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Sweden, and Thailand.

 

Trump did not use military force to acquire Greenland, but Europeans have taken note of his refusal to rule it out. Among the ten European nations polled, approval of Trump’s Greenland threats is no higher than 18 percent, in Hungary. Just three percent of Swedes approve.

 

The backlash to Trump’s foreign policy might appear similar to the global opposition to the exercise of U.S. hard power by previous presidents. Take the Bush administration’s war in Iraq and its “war on terror.” Then, as now, much of the world believed the United States was going its own way, not listening to or considering the interests of other nations, and unilaterally using military force in defiance of widespread international opposition. This was especially true among key European allies of the United States. In 2007, 11 percent of French adults believed the United States considers the interests of countries like theirs when making foreign policy; today, ten percent do. The number of German and British adults who believe the same is also essentially unchanged, from 26 percent in 2007 to 23 percent today in Germany and from 23 percent in 2007 to 26 percent today in the United Kingdom. Across the 36 nations surveyed in 2026, a median of 32 percent believe the United States takes into account the interests of countries like theirs a great deal or a fair amount in its foreign policy decisions.

 

Obama was generally more popular internationally than George W. Bush, but his drone strikes in Africa and the Middle East also faced considerable global opposition. In 2014, a median of 74 percent of respondents across 44 countries opposed U.S. drone strikes in places such as Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. Trump’s second-term policies are of a piece with these internationally unpopular interventions.

 

But they also suggest a different underlying understanding of U.S. power. For many foreign populations, Trump’s second term combines the type of unrestrained use of military force they have disliked in previous administrations with the abandonment of the United States’ historic leadership role that they disliked in his first administration. In their view, America under Trump is unleashed from constraints, norms, and commitments to allies.

 

LOSING FOLLOWERS?

 

For eight decades, the United States has been the leader of a liberal international order it helped design. It has not always lived up to the ideals that order was supposed to promote, but as its hegemon, it has felt a certain responsibility for global peace and stability and has generally sought cooperation with other countries to address major international challenges. Today, foreign publics express strong doubts about Washington’s commitment to those public goods.

 

Since 2023, the share of the global public who believes the United States contributes to peace and stability has shrunk significantly in 19 of 22 countries for which data is available. It has declined by 30 percentage points or more in Australia, Canada, Poland, the Netherlands, and Sweden. The share of the public who consider the United States a reliable partner has dropped significantly in 14 of 17 countries where trends are available since 2022. It has fallen by 30 points or more in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

 

This loss of faith suggests something more fundamental about the nature of current dissatisfaction with America. The United States is not meeting the expectations many around the world have for the standard-bearer of an enlightened global order.

 

It may still be possible for the United States’ image to recover as it has during previous crises. During past moments of unpopularity, the United States has been able to draw on a reservoir of goodwill, along with an enduring ability to attract people from around the world to the principles it has promoted. But having swapped soft power for hard power and having abandoned its commitment to the freedoms of its own citizens in the eyes of much of the world, it will have to demonstrate that it still cares about those ideals. If it does not, the reservoir may one day run dry.

Vance Goes Down the Epstein Rabbit Hole

By Jim Geraghty

Thursday, July 16, 2026

 

Vice President JD Vance appeared on Joe Rogan’s program yesterday, and while the conversation covered many topics, in the second hour, the host steered the conversation to the scandals involving Jeffrey Epstein. The vice president had quite a lot to say on that subject:

 

VANCE: So, what I think a lot of people — I’ve heard this argument is this idea that Donald Trump, you know, was sort of — I’ve even heard people say he was blackmailed into this.

 

ROGAN: Yeah. A lot of people believe this.

 

VANCE: . . . It’s just it’s just not true. I’ve seen the decision making up close. Again, whether you agree or disagree with our negotiation or whether you agree or disagree with the decision to launch the campaign Epic Fury to begin with, the idea that Donald Trump is being like blackmailed is crazy to me because, again, I see the way that he makes decisions. I see the way that he processes this stuff. Like, the idea that he picks up the phone with anybody and says, “Hey, like, I’m going to take orders from you.” No, that’s just not how Donald Trump operates.

 

ROGAN: Can you understand though, why people would come to that conclusion, especially because of the Epstein files?

 

VANCE: What do you mean?

 

ROGAN: Well, the Epstein files were supposed to be released. We were — and there was a tremendous amount of resistance to those files being released.

 

VANCE: Sure.

 

ROGAN: And that concerned a lot of people, because . . . you’re talking about very wealthy, powerful people that were engaged in crimes.

 

VANCE: I see. So, you’re — you’re basically saying, like, there’s a — the fear is that whatever’s in the Epstein files was used to blackmail, like, the administration into doing the Iran thing.

 

ROGAN: Or at the very least the people that were involved in the Epstein files, that didn’t want them coming out, had undue influence.

 

VANCE Well again, like, say this with all candor, like, we absolutely screwed up the comms of the Epstein files. Like, we just did. But do I think the reason we screwed up the comms is because we were trying to hide something? No. I think the reason we screwed up the comms of the Epstein files is one, you know, Pam said, Pam Bondi said the client list is on my desk, right?

 

ROGAN: Well, see, they had binders.

 

VANCE: 100 percent.

 

ROGAN: They were sitting in front–

 

VANCE: But those binders were largely documents that had already been released, right? So, so here’s — let me try to defend—

 

ROGAN: So, what was the purpose of that performative display of the Epstein files, and she was saying there’s tens of thousands of hours of film.

 

VANCE: I don’t know what the purpose of it was, but I know that the effect of it was to make people mistrust the entire effort. And I think — what I think was happening, look, I know Pam. I like Pam. I don’t think there was anything malicious going on. I think Pam was trying to respond to the political moment. I think she overstated what we had and what we didn’t have. And I think that she, you know, got roasted for it publicly by a lot of people, including me. Like, you know, you and I have talked about this a lot. I’m like one of the OG [original gangster, or long-time] Epstein conspiracy theorists. I’ve probably gone down every single rabbit hole. We could go down most of them today.

 

I would make a joke about Bondi getting thrown under the bus, but the former attorney general deserves to get raked over the coals for erroneously telling a Fox News anchor, on live television, that the list of Epstein’s clients is “sitting on my desk right now to review.”

 

A bit later in the conversation, Vance continues:

 

VANCE: Epstein gets pinched. I think he goes to prison, or maybe this is when he was on house arrest. But, like, anything that existed from the ’80s and ’90s up to 2006, 2007, anything that existed that we didn’t get back then, was disappeared. Right? So, like, when people say, has what you’ve seen on the inside make you think that, you know, that Epstein never blackmailed people or that Epstein never engaged in broader sex trafficking? No, absolutely not. What I have seen, and I’ve looked at most of the files, is that there just wasn’t dispositive evidence. And if that dispositive evidence ever existed, it was probably destroyed after 2006, 2007.

 

Vance’s comments are, ironically, echoing the assessment in the unsigned two-page memo released by the U.S Department of Justice and FBI in July 2025 that their investigation had found “no incriminating ‘client list.’ There was also no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions. We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.”

 

Vance continued:

 

Now, look, again, in our defense, yes, was there some, you know, b****ing and moaning and was there some back and forth? Yes. But there we eventually collected 6 million documents as part of the effort. The president — people say the president was forced into releasing the documents. Like again, the idea that Donald Trump could not have killed that legislation, especially with the United States Senate, is a joke. He absolutely could have killed it. What did he do? He actually said, “Nope, we’re going to release these files.” He thought, you know, he was annoyed by the story. He was annoyed by the Democrats accusing him of doing things bad.

 

This is a convenient misremembering of history on the part of the vice president. Yes, the president eventually called for releasing the files, but only after furiously opposing it for months, and after it became clear that increasingly vocal congressional majorities opposed keeping them secret.

 

In July 2025, President Trump raged on Truth Social that no one cared about Jeffrey Epstein, and added an out-of-the-blue contention that unspecified “Epstein Files” were created by former President Obama, Hillary Clinton, and other officials from a Democratic administration.

 

On November 12, the administration invited Colorado GOP Representative Lauren Boebert, “one of the Republicans pressing for more Epstein disclosures,” for a briefing in the White House Situation Room with Bondi and FBI director Kash Patel to discuss her demands.

 

The same day, the seating of Arizona Democrat Adelita Grijalva gave the 218th vote to a discharge petition on the Epstein Files Transparency Act. (If the speaker of the House opposes bringing a piece of legislation to the floor, it requires 218 signatures on a discharge petition to overrule the speaker and bring the bill to the floor for a vote.)

 

On November 16, Trump posted on Truth Social, “House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files, because we have nothing to hide!” Two days later, the Epstein Files Transparency Act passed the House 427–1 and the Senate then passed it without a formal roll-call vote.

 

(Also, it’s an easily forgotten detail, but under the Act, the DOJ was supposed to release all relevant files by December 12; the majority of the files were released January 30.)

 

Later in the conversation, Vance adds:

 

VANCE: The problem is if you go back to the original investigation, it was designed in a way that was way too narrow. If there was a broader conspiracy, and you know, my view is that there probably was. The evidence that existed in 2007, that was the opportunity to get.

 

ROGAN: So, when you say there probably was a broader conspiracy, what exactly are you saying?

 

VANCE: I think there are a few different options. I mean, look, man, like, you could –you and I could literally do two episodes about this. I’ve gone on down every rabbit hole. There’s this funny New York Times story that’s somewhat true, somewhat false, but where Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, says, ‘Well, we know JD’s a conspiracy theorist on this.’ Like, I am, actually. I’ve gone down every rabbit hole here.

 

Look, so there’s the theory that whether it was American intel, or foreign intel, that Epstein was sort of using — Epstein was using sort of the sex ring to blackmail rich and powerful people. There’s that piece of it.

 

Vance went on to speculate about Epstein’s involvement with billionaire Les Wexner; their longtime relationship is well established, and Wexner told Congress he was “duped by a world-class con man.” Vance told Rogan, “Epstein was, like, the genius at identifying weird tax strategies that would allow you to not have to pay taxes,” and “Epstein like doing a lot of tax stuff that was not on the up and up and is that one way in which he gained blackmail. It’s not opposite of the sexual blackmail story, but, in some ways . . . you could imagine both things being true.”

 

Epstein has been dead for 2,532 days.

 

It’s a free country, and the vice president is free to speak his mind. But one can wonder how helpful it is for the second-highest-ranking figure in the executive branch to go on one of the country’s most popular podcasts and lay out all of his theories involving Epstein, and to declare that any evidence that would back up his theories has long since been destroyed.

 

Are we really to believe that Epstein was an agent of U.S. intelligence using sex trafficking and blackmail as a tool for American policy for some considerable period of time, and there’s absolutely no way for anyone in this administration to determine if it is true?

 

Or are we really to believe that Epstein was an agent of some foreign intelligence agency, using sex trafficking and blackmail as a tool for that country’s policies for some considerable period of time, and there’s absolutely no way for anyone in our intelligence community to determine if it is true?

 

Inevitably, someone will ask or complain, “Jim, why are you writing about this?” For starters, the vice president talked about the subject at length.

 

ADDENDUM: Our Christian Schneider, keeping us up-to-date on the sterling choices of the Democrats out in Wisconsin: “The Democratic front-runner in the gubernatorial race is 37-year-old State Assemblyman Francesca Hong, a self-described Democratic Socialist who was taken to court last month for failing to pay a decades-old credit card debt of nearly $30,000.”

 

Capital One was asking Hong, quite literally, what was in her wallet, and why it hadn’t been used to pay down the $29,344 debt she had accumulated since 2011. (If you’re doing the math on this, Hong started accumulating that debt at age 22. Her debt is older than iPads, Instagram, Google Chrome, and any of Netflix’s original programming.)

 

I don’t understand how a person can choose to not pay her debts for decades, live what seems like a pretty happy life serving in the state assembly — base salary of about $61,000, for what is effectively a part-time job — and then somehow complain that capitalism is unfair.

Antisemitism Is Always Evil

By Kathryn Jean Lopez

Monday, July 20, 2026

 

‘I recognize you as the firstborn of Satan.”

 

That may not sound like much of an insult considering some of the things that are said on social media today. But coming from a student of John, the disciple of Jesus, in the second century, it not only stings but reverberates with an important caution about the evil of antisemitism to this day.

 

“Marcion of Pontus was one of the most dangerous men in Christian history,” according to Catholic writer of Catholic history, doctrine, and devotion, Mike Aquilina. Writing in a recent issue of Angelus, Aquilina relays how Polycarp of Smyrna, at the time an aging bishop, ran into the dangerous man on a Roman street. “Do you recognize me?” Marcion asked Polycarp. The response was recorded by the church father, Irenaeus of Lyon. The “famous story captures the depth of the Church’s revulsion” at Marcion and his nefarious agenda. Marcion wanted to ditch the Old Testament and write Israel and the Jewish people out of Christianity.

 

You may be wondering how that’s even possible, given Christ Himself was a Jew. You would have a healthy response to the heresy.

 

But it was a convenient one as it arose, well aligned with Roman prejudices. Marcion “lived in the aftermath of the great Jewish revolts against Rome — above all the Bar Kokhba revolt of a.d. 132–135,” Aquilina writes. There was a real increasing hostility to Jews among Romans. “Emperor Hadrian crushed the revolt with terrible severity, refounded Jerusalem as a pagan city, and barred Jews from entering it. To many Roman observers, Judaism now appeared stubborn, separatist, and politically dangerous.”

 

Marcion was wealthy, son of a bishop (yes, speaking of sin . . .), and probably thought he could buy his way into his unholy project. “He was wealthy, brilliant, disciplined, and utterly convinced that the Church had misunderstood the Gospel. Christianity, he believed, could not be reconciled with the religion of ancient Israel.” He insisted that: “The God of the Old Testament was a deity of law, wrath, judgment, and tribal violence. The Father proclaimed by Jesus Christ was a different God altogether — a God of mercy, love, and pure grace.” It was a “bold and terrifyingly simple” solution he proposed: “Cut Christianity loose from Judaism.” That meant: “Discard the Old Testament. Reject the creator God. Keep only a purified version of Luke’s Gospel and the letters of Paul.”

 

That doesn’t work. But if you’ve had Jewish fatigue and wanted to throw your weight around with the legitimacy of rewritten history and tradition, this was the way to go. Questions at the time included: Is Christianity merely a sect of Judaism? Heavens, no, Marcion exclaimed. “Marcion offered a radical answer. Christianity, he insisted, had nothing essentially to do with Judaism at all,” Aquilina writes.

 

Polycarp answered so harshly and directly because he understood something about the Marcion project that we must always acknowledge: “Marcion was not merely proposing a revised canon or a different interpretation of Paul. He was proposing a Christianity detached from Abraham, Moses, creation, covenant, and history itself.”

 

There is no New Testament without the Old Testament. There are no Christians without the Jews.

 

But Marcion and his ideas did not die despite the church’s decisive rebuke. It enjoyed a revival in the 19th and early 20th centuries in Germany, where Marcion was viewed as a reformer. Adolf von Harnack wrote Marcion: The Gospel of the Alien God, portraying Marcion as “a tragic reformer” — some would regard him as “the first Protestant.”

 

“Harnack did not embrace Marcion’s theology outright,” Aquilina explains. “Yet he admired Marcion’s seriousness, his devotion to Paul, and his attempt to distinguish Christianity sharply from Judaism. In one of his most controversial statements, Harnack suggested that while the ancient Church had been right to reject Marcion in the second century, modern Christians no longer needed to retain the Old Testament as fully authoritative Scripture.”

 

You can see where this is headed.

 

Aquilina notes that one cannot equate Harnack and others with either Marcion or the Nazis. Marcionism was a theology, not an ideology. Likewise, Harnack was not looking to provide a foundation for the Third Reich. But ideas do have consequences. And Harnack did, as Aquilina explains, “admire Marcion’s seriousness, his devotion to Paul, and his attempt to distinguish Christianity sharply from Judaism. In one of his most controversial statements, Harnack suggested that while the ancient Church had been right to reject Marcion in the second century, modern Christians no longer needed to retain the Old Testament as fully authoritative Scripture.”

 

That’s in some ways even more dangerous — the subtlety by which pernicious ideas can become a part of our intellectual — and theological — lives. Before long, people are using it to do much more than erase Jews from the history and tradition of Christianity — but from the face of the earth.

 

It is imperative to remember and reject Marcionism anew because there is, not for the first time, a Christian distancing from Judaism and Israel. That’s, of course, on top of outright antisemitism we see regularly on college campuses. Add to that the existential threats Israel faces — the October 7, 2023, attacks and their reverberations being the gravest and terrifyingly contagious.

 

These dances with looking anew at Jews suspiciously at best are warning signs of a civilization that hasn’t learned its lessons from the past, that didn’t actually mean “never again.” The bad ideas of history repeat themselves when we are ignorant, and they align again with biases — and  political agendas.

 

This is why Tucker Carlson giving a platform to antisemitic podcaster Nick Fuentes, and the vice president casually mouthing off on Joe Rogan, blaming Israel for Iran, cannot be shrugged off. The antisemitic posture was evil in the second century, and it is evil now. Listen to the faith of our fathers. It is ours. The other is heresy. And will leave us answering for following the wrong teachers down the darkest road.