The Logical Effect of Undermining Our Allies’ Trust

By Mike Nelson

Wednesday, July 22, 2026

 

Before entering office and in the year and a half since, officials comprising the second Trump administration’s defense and foreign policy establishment have been sending a clear message to our NATO allies in Europe: The United States is no longer putting as much of an emphasis on the alliance nor on the defense of the European continent. This message has been sent directly and indirectly.

 

Individuals appointed to key Pentagon positions have for years advocated for a diminished American presence in Europe. Vice President J.D. Vance—both in statements intended for public consumption and those revealed to the public through the administration’s incompetence—has characterized Europeans as freeloaders whose security is no longer a primary American interest. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered a reduction in Army forces present in Germany and Poland and—on the anniversary of D-Day, of all times—chose to demean, berate, and scold our European partners about their domestic politics. And Elbridge Colby, the undersecretary of defense for policy, has intervened to halt approved aid to Ukraine, denied support for Ukrainian deep strikes using U.S.-supplied munitions, and recently championed “NATO 3.0,” wherein reduced U.S. support for the alliance would be explicit.

 

Perhaps most concerning to the allies, however, are the messages from the man leading the administration. President Trump, who has for years harangued our European partners for not providing enough for the common defense—about which he was correct—seemed to believe these countries were in arrears in membership dues that the United States was covering and, therefore, that the United States deserved repayment—about which he is incorrect. The historical under-contribution by European allies was rather a failure to meet promised spending goals on their own militaries as a percentage of GDP.

 

This historical deficit is being, or in most cases already has been, corrected. The historical goal of 2 percent of GDP spent on defense, codified in 2014 at the NATO Wales summit, has since been reached by all member states. The allies have further expanded this goal to 5 percent of GDP, to be reached by 2035, with Poland currently leading the way with 4.48 percent of its GDP spent on defense in 2025. (The U.S., meanwhile, is actually spending a lower percentage of its GDP on defense now than it did in 2014.)

 

The president deserves a large share of the credit for this shift. The world’s liberal democracies had grown comfortable and complacent, like the eponymous character at the beginning of Rocky III, while the tyrannical, authoritarian, and malign regimes (the Clubber Langs of the world, if you will) grew stronger and more prepared.

 

Ironically, the president must share some of the credit with Russian President Vladimir Putin—a man for whom the prospect of diminishing NATO is a primary motivation. Europe's rearmament has come about largely in response to Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, as did the expansion of the alliance to include two previously nonaligned powers: Finland and Sweden.

 

But President Trump has continued to suggest that the United States—the most powerful of NATO’s member nations—might not support its fellow members if they were attacked. Trump has even suggested that the United States might be the country doing the attacking. The Danes took his threats against Greenland so seriously that they deployed their special operations forces to the territory in preparation for an American offensive.

 

The message is clear, through both the Trump administration’s words and actions: Europe should not count on the United States. The nation that had once been the stalwart ally might, in the near future, be a neutral observer at best or an adversary at worst. Even if the Trump administration does not progress further down this path, the idea that America may be fickle about commitments in which we had previously been resolute is not a concern that can be ignored. Europe now has to consider the possibility that the indispensable nation may choose to be dispensable in the future of European security.

 

It shouldn’t come as a surprise then that defense officials in capitals throughout Europe may start planning and implementing the steps necessary for a post-American Europe; not as a preference, but as a matter of necessity.

 

Europe is expanding its defense industrial base, and NATO countries are weighing a shift away from traditional arrangements of purchasing American-made or designed equipment. Canada, after witnessing America shutting off certain targeting capabilities in the GMLRS missile guidance systems provided to Ukraine, is considering building its future air force footprint around the Gripen fighter instead of the F-35, not because the Gripen is superior, but because it is not reliant on the continued approval of a mercurial American government to perform after purchase. German arms manufacturer Rheinmetall and Sweden’s Saab, maker of the Gripen, are expanding in preparation to fill European demand created by a reduction in orders for American weapons and, ironically, by the increased spending the president demanded.

 

It is realistic and rhetorically clear that if the United States keeps banging on the table demanding that Europe become less dependent on us, the result would be for it to become more independent from us. The result of the Trump administration pushing Europe to the side is Europeans adapting to that reality. Yet Colby seemed perturbed at the effect for which his policy was the cause when he posted a condemnation of Europe’s plans on X last week, saying that a “‘middle powers’ strategy”—the idea that second-tier powers would align independently and in prevention of aggression by the great powers—is not “a serious possibility.” In a demonstration of the underlying problem, Colby condemns Europeans who consider procuring weapons elsewhere, but then reminds them that “access to the American DIB (defense industrial base) is a privilege, not a right.” How dare you consider looking elsewhere for weapons, but also remember we might cut off your access to them, fail to fulfill already paid-for orders, deny software integration that makes the weapons usable, or deny you access to repair parts. Gee, who would want to build a hedge against that unreliable supply chain?

 

Colby seems to want inelastic European demand for a product for which we are specifically threatening to cut off supply. It’s an extension of the larger issues at play between the administration and NATO allies over Iran. The administration doesn’t feel the need to share its plans with or get input from European allies, but begins clutching its pearls when those allies don’t jump to join our rudderless conflict.

 

In other words, the administration seems to want Europe to provide more for their interests, but as we determine their interests to be. It’s an overcorrection. Rather than building on the legitimate win of reviving NATO defense spending and capabilities, this rhetoric is creating cracks that can spread into full fractures in the alliance. Colby is correct that developing a middle powers strategy is not the best option for Europe; but neither is America receding from its role as the leader of the free world. And the administration doesn’t seem to grasp that the former flows from the latter.

 

Without a strengthened transatlantic alliance, the world will become less advantageous for liberal democracies and more favorable for those rising powers looking to fill the empty space created by the gaps in the alliance. There are some who convince themselves America has no business maintaining interest in, or benefiting from the liberal world order and instead recommend a withdrawal to behind the walls of an American-dominated fortress of the Western Hemisphere. But history demonstrates that the storms that gather around the world eventually spread to those who seek refuge in isolationism.

For the DSA, ‘Working Class’ Is a State of Mind

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, July 21, 2026

 

For a movement that is obsessed with class distinctions and interclass conflict, the Democratic Socialists of America don’t seem to have an uncontested definition of what makes someone a member of the “working class.”

 

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani recently took a stab at it, though not to the satisfaction of his interlocutor, the New York Times’ Lulu Garcia-Navarro:

 

 

Mamdani’s confusion is not his alone. He and his fellow Democratic Socialists are apt to craft definitions so expansive that they include well-compensated professionals — from programmers to doctors who are “making $400,000-plus,” according to New York City DSA co-chair Grace Mausser — only so that they can include themselves among the proletariat.

 

For those of us who can recognize Hasan Piker’s costumed reenactments of the Cultural Revolution for the teeth-shatteringly cringe-inducing spectacles they are, there’s a lot of humor in this. But there is a long Marxist tradition in which the well-heeled and overeducated assume a working-class identity so as to appropriate its assumed authenticity. Marx himself agonized over how to define class without casting himself and his fellow discontented wastrels as irredeemably bourgeois.

 

Where does the proletariat end and the managerial class begin? Does it end with what Marx called the “labor aristocracy” — wage earners, to be sure, but also trade unionists co-opted by and in league with the upper classes? Does it include the “lumpenproletariat,” whom Marx derided as criminals and degenerates that nevertheless make up a significant portion of the disaffected masses?

 

The most enduring Marxian definition settled on “a class of laborers who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital.” That could describe just about anyone who “sells” labor in the marketplace. And eventually it did. Marx and, later, Friedrich Engels identified a phenomenon in which even highly paid professionals can be “proletarianized.”

 

In the end, all that makes someone reliably a member of the “working class” in the Marxist conception of the word is the extent to which they experience “class struggle.” But the struggle they envision is only ever against the forces unleashed by capitalism, not those imposed on American workers by the imperious state.

 

As the DSA’s Gustavo Gordillo ill-advisedly admitted on national television, workers’ rights take a back seat to socialist power grabs. “If one publicly owned store is enough to put someone out of business,” Gordillo said of the struggling grocers with whom Mamdani’s state-owned outlets will now compete, “then maybe they shouldn’t have been in that business in the first place.”

 

Of course, the malleable definition of what constitutes the working class papers over this conflict. With this solipsistic device, the upstart bodega owner who operates on the thinnest of margins becomes an aristocratic elite, while his tormentors, who have only ever known the rarified redoubts of academia and advocacy, somehow cast themselves as the weather-beaten avatars of the great unwashed.

 

It’s a neat trick, but an old one. What’s most impressive about it is that it still works.

Socialists vs. the Senate

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, July 21, 2026

 

Political parties tend to harshly reject the idea that they are a threat to the constitutional order, but the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is making it part of its brand.

 

The DSA has released a new program that, besides contemplating the advent of a classless society, calls for abolishing the Senate, the presidency, and the Supreme Court.

 

This is literally a revolutionary program to topple the American system as we have known it since 1789.

 

It’s the kind of thing you might expect after angry rebels mount the barricades in Washington, D.C., and overthrow the government. It makes proposals to abolish the filibuster seem trifling in comparison and even Court-packing look relatively moderate.

 

The proposal to kill off the world’s greatest deliberative body has gotten the most attention. The DSA’s co-chair, Gustavo Gordillo, went on Fox  News to explain that the Senate is “undemocratic,” while Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has said that she opposes the filibuster and elements of the Senate that “were founded on Jim Crow.”

 

Contra Gordillo, the Senate is a democratic institution; no one wins a Senate seat without getting more votes than his or her opponent.

 

Yet part of its role in our system is to serve as a check on popular passions. At the institution’s inception, state legislatures appointed senators. Those days are long gone (the 17th Amendment, ratified in 1913, requires direct election), but six-year terms and staggered elections give the Senate more insulation from the transient currents of public sentiment than the House of Representatives.

 

Then, there are the Senate rules that put an emphasis on consensus and delay. AOC sounded confused when she cited Senate practices created under Jim Crow, the system of formalized racial discrimination that arose about 100 years after the creation of the Senate. It’s true that the filibuster was used as a tool to attempt to block landmark civil rights legislation, without ultimate success. But the filibuster is an instrument of every minority party in the Senate trying to block the agenda of a president of the opposing party, very much including Senate Democrats arrayed against President Trump today.

 

The Senate has another function, which is giving small states equal representation with large states. This is the source of the charge that it is undemocratic. Why should Wyoming, population roughly 600,000, have as many senators as California, population nearly 40 million? This is meant, though, to keep large states from having overwhelming influence on the nation’s governance and to give easy-to-ignore places a say in the nation’s affairs.

 

For proportional representation, there’s the House; California has 52 members of Congress, whereas Wyoming has one.

 

All this said, regardless of the merits, the Constitution deems the provision of equal senators for the states unamendable: “No State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.”

 

This suggests that the dissolution of the constitutional system couldn’t be achieved by constitutional means, since the Founders didn’t supply a readily available self-destruct button for their brilliant handiwork.

 

Not that the DSA cares. What it is seeking would, in some ways, be a return to the Articles of Confederation, under which we had a unicameral legislature and neither a presidency nor federal courts. But this made for a very weak central government, when the DSA wants an overweening Washington, D.C., shorn of the inherent checks on the popular will that come with a multi-layered federal system.

 

In short, it hopes for what Lord Hailsham, in his criticism of the British parliamentary system, famously called an “elective dictatorship.”

 

Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave a speech last week where he inveighed against left-wing extremists who seek to destroy rather than build, targeting “the physical embodied symbols of power and invention and achievement.” He might have added, with a nod to the DSA, the U.S. constitutional order. The socialists have met the enemy — and it is our own long-standing, highly successful governing institutions.

The Anti-Odyssey Crusade Has Lost the Plot

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Monday, July 20, 2026

 

Who would have thought that it could be so sinful to enjoy a cinematic epic? This weekend, Christopher Nolan’s latest blockbuster, The Odyssey, opened to a flurry of ticket sales, to a storm of acclamatory notices, and to the enmity of a bunch of rattled conservative “influencers” who seem to have had Odyssea delenda est tattooed in wine-dark ink across their foreheads. Merely to signal one’s intention to see the film has caused one to be chased around Twitter by a cadre of digital Furies, flouncing, denouncing, and renouncing as they go. Among the charges that they have thrown at would-be audience members is that they are “enemies of Western civilization.” Gosh!

 

This, suffice it to say, is Weird Behavior — and it is no less so because it comes from people who maintain that their ends are pure. There is nothing whatsoever wrong with criticizing a popular  movie, but, in its tone, its substance, and its aims, the present anti-Odyssey crusade no more constitutes “movie criticism” than last summer’s freakout over Sydney Sweeney’s denim commercial constituted “commercial criticism.” Criticism of art — which, naturally, is only possible after the critic has actually experienced that art — involves analysis, judgment, and thought. The suggestion that a person who attends a given film is, ipso facto, an accomplice to the destruction of the United States — or, in my particular case, ought to be “deported”! — reflects none of those things. Instead, it reflects  politics — and a stunted, aggressive, illiberal politics at that.

 

This weekend, I saw it argued in various places that those who claim to have enjoyed Nolan’s movie are, in fact, motivated by the desire to construct a “narrative,” or to change America’s immigration laws, or to reshape the Republican Party. This is a monomaniacal, totalitarian, Stasi-like non sequitur. It is projection, on an IMAX scale. It represents everything that I have always hated about the insistence that “everything is political” — an insistence that, for most of my life, has been the preserve of the idiopathic left but has recently started to derange the right as well. As a free person, living in a free country, I reserve the right to watch things, or listen to things, or eat things without being expected to don armor and go 18 rounds for the privilege. You didn’t like the movie? That’s great. I don’t like a lot of movies — including one of Christopher Nolan’s recent offerings that I am simply not intelligent enough to understand (Tenet). You are so upset that someone would go to the movie that you elect to send them emails telling them that they should be denaturalized? Well, now we have a problem. This is not East Germany.

 

Unlike with music, I do not have especially refined or useful thoughts about movies. But if I were to offer a criticism of Nolan’s production of The Odyssey, it would be that, for a Greek text that predated the New Testament, the treatment is altogether too Christian. Xenia — which is referred to exclusively as “Zeus’s law” in the film — is a real concept of that era. But the nature of the guilt that Odysseus feels about its violation, together with the implication that all the lives of Troy were individually valuable, is anachronistic. Add in that Odysseus’s resistance to the sirens is transmuted into an ersatz crucifixion scene, and that none of his infidelity is depicted or openly acknowledged, and one is left with a moral framework that, in some respects, would have been alien to the authors of the original text.

 

Still, one ought not to jump from there to the supposition that this is an attack on the Western canon. Odysseus’s in-film conviction that his deployment of the horse at Troy constituted an unforgivable violation of xenia was probably not intended by Homer. But it was what Dante thought. In the Inferno, Dante condemns Odysseus — appearing under his Latin name, Ulysses — not as the cunning hero of Greek epic but as a fraudulent counselor, and he explicitly cites the use of the Trojan Horse among the sins for which Ulysses is damned. In so doing, Dante is not attempting to recover Homer’s moral universe; he is deliberately reinterpreting it through the lens of medieval Christianity. Thus is Dante’s Odysseus judged not by the standards of Bronze Age Greece, but by those of 14th-century Catholic Europe. (In the 17th century, this same impulse led Milton to perform a similar feat in reverse, appropriating the Homeric and Virgilian epic tradition to tell the story of Genesis.) Seven hundred years later, Christopher Nolan has made the same move. If one’s sole concern is accuracy, one may dislike this, but one cannot in good faith propose that it serves as a repudiation of our culture.

 

But, of course, the loudest voices against The Odyssey — the people who have become so committed to the conclusion with which they began that they have talked themselves into the position that the only authentically socially conservative approach toward the  movie is to steal it — are not concerned about the adaptation’s accuracy. They are not upset that the story has been Christianized, any more than they were upset with Virgil for Romanizing it, or with Chaucer and Shakespeare for Englishing it, or with James Joyce for translating it into his interminable modern prose. Rather, they are upset with other things — transient, prosaic things — and they are hoping that they can fashion their censoriousness into a weapon fit for those battles. They cannot. Kick as they may, their attempts will have the same ultimate effect as those made by their peers on the other side of contemporary Wokery: If they are heard at all, they will be received without alacrity, roundly ignored, and then woven into contempt for the very  political agenda that their architects had hoped to advance.

 

Again, Dante shows the way home:

 

O ye who are in little bark, desirous

To listen, following after my own ship,

That singing voyaged on,

Turn back to see again your shores. . . .

 

 

Trump’s Canadian Tariffs Make No Sense

National Review Online

Wednesday, July 22, 2026

 

Donald Trump is compiling the most anti-Canadian record of any president since James Madison, who launched multiple invasions.

 

The White House has announced new 50 percent tariffs on a wide range of Canadian imports, “covering products ranging from wine to hockey sticks to cement,” a blow for American affordability as well as Canadian exporters. The new tariffs are set to take effect in 30 days.

 

The administration is claiming the authority to impose these latest tariffs under Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, an act better known as Smoot–Hawley, a familiar name to students of the Great Depression. Section 338 itself had lain dormant for the better part of a century. It was considered on a few occasions in the 1930s and, again, in 1949 as something to be used against newly communist China. No tariffs were imposed in any of these cases. Regarded as an irrelevance in the age of postwar trade multilateralism, it was never repealed. The election of a “tariff man” in 2016 revived interest in this long-dormant section, which has now finally been reawakened. We are reminded once again, if only by default, of the value of sunset clauses.

 

Under Section 338, the president is authorized to impose tariffs of up to 50 percent on goods from a country on one of two conditions. The first is that that country has imposed “an unreasonable charge, exaction, regulation, or limitation” on any U.S. products without subjecting similar products from other countries to the same treatment. The second is when there is de facto discrimination in that country that “disadvantages” U.S. commerce as compared with that of any other foreign nation. As an example of the latter, the White House cites the way that, “beginning in March 2025, all Canadian provinces and territories halted the purchase, distribution, or retailing of U.S. alcoholic beverages.” Leaving aside the question whether the White House’s actions are in compliance with WTO rules or the provisions of NAFTA’s successor, the USMCA (questions that would take a long time to resolve), it seems to us that, on the facts, the president is within his legal rights to take the actions he has under Section 338 under domestic law, even if doing so is a mistake.

 

When it comes to negotiations, especially with historically friendly nations, adopting a tough stance is one thing; taking a belligerent one quite another. Suddenly announcing a 50 percent tariff hike on a wide range of items shortly after beginning the formal process that would terminate the USMCA in its current form in 2036 can be reasonably described as aggressive. The same can be said of the introduction of earlier tariffs on our northern neighbor, tariffs made no easier for Canadians to stomach by unnecessary, counterproductive, and insulting talk of their country as the “51st state.” Indeed, they triggered the Canadian retaliation against which the U.S. is now retaliating. That’s how escalation works.

 

We would add that in an era of rising geopolitical tensions, concern about supply lines, and worries about the Arctic, alienating Ottawa makes little sense. Mark Carney’s unwise diplomatic pivot toward Europe and China was something that he was probably always inclined to do, but the administration has now made it easier for him take this course.

 

So, what to do now? The logic behind NAFTA and the USMCA (the latter, it should be remembered, a treaty agreed during the president’s first term) was three-fold: economic efficiency (and thus greater prosperity), a reduction of the degree to which trade could act as an irritant between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, and closer ties among North America’s three largest powers.

 

All those arguments still make sense to us, if not to the Trump administration. We hope, however, that the White House can see that trying to bludgeon its way to what it sees as a fairer trade relationship with Canada is hurting more than it helps. It should throw a few olive branches on the table as trade talks between the two sides continue.

 

More broadly, this episode only reinforces our conviction that, despite the best efforts of the Supreme Court, the current state of the law still gives the president too much latitude to turn tariffs into his playthings. That has to stop. A tariff is a tax. Taxation is, under the Constitution, a matter for Congress. When it comes to tariffs, Congress must do its constitutional duty, reverse the excessive delegation of its powers to the executive, and take back control.

The Robots Die So We Don’t

By Luther Ray Abel

Tuesday, July 21, 2026

 

Anduril Industries, arguably the Apple of this new generation of venture-capital-funded defense tech firms, just released its latest weapon system: Thunder. An autonomous attack rotorcraft — think an unmanned Falcon from Halo or the chick of a V-22 Osprey — Anduril’s Thunder is being sold as the multi-tool wingman for Apache attack helos and the forthcoming Cheyenne II from Bell (co-creator of the V-22). The added payload, load-out, and protective envelope that such slavecraft (in the engineering sense) could offer is enticing.

 

 

The concept of concentric defense is nothing new. Troy, Constantinople, even the humble hill fort, are all static examples. Layers of protection provide the soft innards multiple opportunities to retard an aggressor’s advance. The U.S. Navy puts this strategy to sea, with carrier strike groups composed of picket vessels — destroyers, cruisers, frigates, and subs — and aircraft providing a third dimension of surveillance and interdiction to ensure the continued operation of the carrier, the heart of the strike group. Should all weapons fail, we were informed that our ship, the USS Rodney M. Davis, would sail between the incoming threat (be it missiles, drones, or small-boat explosives) and sacrifice itself (ourselves) so that the carrier would survive. The same is expected of any vessel that orbits the floating nuclear airfield.

 

What Anduril aims to do is swap out the 200 souls aboard a frigate and replace them with swarms of sacrificial drones/chaff/missiles launched from autonomous motherships similar to the Thunder rotorcraft. Doing some napkin math, each sailor’s family would be due a minimum of $100,000 in the event of the ship’s loss. So $20 million and the public’s outrage at the very least but, more likely, something north of $250 million after all survivor benefits are factored. And that’s just for the loss of our most basic ship class with the smallest crew.

 

Whether Thunder will be successful, I can’t say. Anduril is a young, hungry company making products no government has commissioned. Yes, that’s right, they use VC funds to make products they think the military needs and only then sell them, which is an inversion of the procurement status quo since the 1990s. This has its advantages and disadvantages. Having developed this system with Archer Aviation for commercial or defense applications, Anduril may ultimately sell more for domestic rather than military use. I’d be interested to see what such a system could do for firefighting in California, for example.

 

I’ll be writing at length about Anduril and its peers in an upcoming magazine piece, but I’m not spoiling anything by admitting that their marketing chops are something else:

 

Mamdani Finally Admits He Can’t Arrest Bibi

By Jim Geraghty

Wednesday, July 22, 2026

 

Back in the early 1990s, Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan denounced Bill Clinton’s promises of welfare reform as “boob bait for bubbas.” (Ironically, welfare reform turned out to be one of Clinton’s greatest achievements as president.)

 

But the alliterative term stuck around, a useful moniker for the sort of dumb and unrealistic but popular promise that politicians are inclined to blurt out as they frenziedly pursue higher office.

 

In his mayoral campaign, Zohran Mamdani offered some grade-A “boob bait for bubbas” by promising to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he visited New York for the United Nations General Assembly.

 

If you are not addled by a frothing-at-the-mouth hostility to Israel and think about this for 30 seconds, you start to see the problems:

 

·         What charge would the city of New York bring against Netanyahu? Mamdani made a big deal out of the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant issued in November 2024, but the U.S. government does not recognize the authority of the ICC.

 

·         Not only does the U.S. government not recognize the authority of the ICC, the Trump administration has imposed sanctions on it. Secretary of State Marco Rubio pledged earlier this month, “using all the tools at our government’s disposal, working beside every ally with whom we can make common cause, we will dismantle the ICC — brick by brick, if necessary.”

 

·         Not only does the New York City government not have the authority to enforce an ICC arrest warrant, doing so would violate federal law. The American Servicemembers’ Protection Act states, “No agency or entity of any state or local government, including any court, may cooperate with the International Criminal Court.” No mayor has the authority to overrule federal law.

 

·         Criminal prosecution in a jurisdiction generally requires a connection to that jurisdiction, such as criminal conduct occurring within the state, a harmful result occurring there, or an offense intended to affect the state. Even if you buy into the allegations in the ICC arrest warrant, there is no tie to New York City or the United States.

 

·         While traveling to or from the United Nations for the annual general assembly or any other reason, Netanyahu would be immune from arrest, as covered by the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations, adopted by the U.N. General Assembly on February 13, 1946. That convention grants representatives of member states immunity from personal arrest or detention while exercising their functions and traveling to and from the place of meeting.

 

·         The Agreement between the United Nations and the United States of America Regarding the Headquarters of the United Nations, signed in 1947, declares that federal, state, and local authorities generally may not obstruct representatives of member nations traveling to or from the headquarters district.

 

·         Netanyahu travels with an extensive, well-trained, and experienced personal security detail, managed by the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security and counterintelligence agency. In past visits to New York City, Netanyahu has had 20 agents protecting him when he goes to the bathroom; he was described then as “the most protected man in the world.” The Shin Bet is exceptionally good at its job, and the NYPD is exceptionally good at theirs as well, and neither one is interested in getting into a confrontation or shootout with the other.

 

I was going to throw in the additional point that there is a widespread view among international law experts that “heads of state and heads of government are, and have long been, entitled to an absolute personal immunity from foreign jurisdiction.” With that said, Nicolás Maduro, Juan Orlando Hernández, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milošević, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and Manuel Noriega could not be reached for comment.

 

For a multitude of reasons, the notion of New York City police arresting Netanyahu was absurd from the start. But a whole lot of progressive activists in the city utterly loathe Netanyahu, and their little hearts went pitter-patter at the thought of the Israeli leader sitting inside a jail cell.

 

Last night, in a short video statement, Mamdani acknowledged that he has no authority, and never had any authority, to carry out his campaign promise.

 

“My administration has reviewed every avenue available under applicable law to determine whether New York City could execute the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant if Benjamin Netanyahu came here,” Mamdani said. “It is clear that we do not have the independent legal authority to enforce this warrant.”

 

No Shinola, Sherlock.

 

Nothing changed between last fall and now; the only difference is that the U.N. General Assembly is in two months, and Netanyahu intends to be there. (The Israeli leader may feel that he must attend the UNGA this year, to prove the point that no one has the authority to arrest him on U.S. soil.)

 

In the end, Mamdani is like the kid who runs for middle-school student council promising to replace the school lunches with McDonalds and Chick-fil-A and ban homework. He either didn’t know, or more likely, didn’t care that he didn’t have the authority to keep this promise; he just wanted the applause and to look like a tough guy.

 

Mamdani added, “The federal government, however, does [have the authority] — and I call on them to join the ICC and execute this warrant.”

 

No, the U.S. government does not have the authority to execute that warrant, at least not without repealing the American Servicemembers’ Protection Act and recognizing the authority of the ICC, which would give the ICC the authority to indict and arrest U.S. government officials and members of the military.

 

In 2020, the ICC ruled its prosecutor could investigate American citizens who worked in Afghanistan, claiming “a reasonable basis to believe that members of United States of America armed forces and members of the Central Intelligence Agency committed acts of torture, cruel treatment, outrages upon personal dignity, rape and sexual violence against conflict-related detainees in Afghanistan and other locations, principally in the 2003-2004 period.”

 

The Trump administration told the ICC to go pound sand. In September 2021 — after Joe Biden took office — the ICC’s chief prosecutor announced he had “decided to focus my office’s investigations in Afghanistan on crimes allegedly committed by the Taliban and the Islamic State — Khorasan Province (“IS-K”) and to deprioritize other aspects of this investigation.” Groups like the ACLU were “deeply disappointed” that an international court that had never been recognized as legitimate by the U.S. government was dropping its investigation into American citizens.

 

Rubio warned earlier this month that under the ICC’s perception of its own powers, “U.S. soldiers, police officers, Border Patrol agents and elected leaders could be dragged before an international court, tried by judges from random countries across the globe, found guilty under international laws we neither consent to nor control, and then imprisoned thousands of miles from America.”

 

Mamdani concluded, “I want to be equally clear: Benjamin Netanyahu is not welcome in New York City, nor is any other war criminal at large.” This means nothing. Mamdani can declare that the San Antonio Spurs are not welcome in New York City, and they’re still going to show up at Madison Square Garden for the game.

 

It will be interesting to see if any progressive gives Mamdani any grief for making an unrealistic promise, and once elected, admitting he never had the ability to keep it. My guess is those complaints will be few and far between. The “bubbas” don’t really care that much if the “boob bait” is real or not, they just like the thrill of hearing the promise, and can easily shrug off it being broken. That’s one of the traits that makes them “bubbas.” They’re happier being lied to than dealing with reality as it is.

 

Yearning for your political opponents to get arrested is a broad, bipartisan passion in America, from former ambassador Joe Wilson wanting to see Karl Rove “frog marched in handcuffs,” to the Republican chants of “lock her up” during the 2016 presidential campaign against Hillary Clinton, to Kamala Harris and other Democrats saying that Donald Trump should be sentenced to prison for his alleged crimes.

 

And occasionally, an elected official does get caught committing crimes and heads off to prison. Former New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez is currently residing in a minimum security federal prison in Allenwood, Pa., serving an eleven-year sentence for bribery, acting as a foreign agent, and obstruction of justice offenses.

 

The DSA Is Not Sending Its Best

 

New Jersey Democratic Representative Josh Gottheimer, Monday: “I’m glad to see other Democrats reiterating what I’ve been saying all along: the DSA are not Democrats. They’re socialists, who want to hijack the Democratic Party. The Democrats have a big tent. That’s our strength. We embrace a range of ideas — but there’s no room for anti-American bomb-throwers who oppose our ideas, values, & leaders.”

 

Democratic Representative Summer Lee, of Pennsylvania, a former member of the Democratic Socialists of America, responded: “What about Dems who sign bombs and vote to drop them?”

 

Except . . . Representative Josh Gottheimer has never signed a bomb. Lee is thinking of Pennsylvania’s Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro.

 

Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar jumped in, adding, “He signed the bombs you voted to be dropped. Hope this helps!”

 

Except . . . Omar is thinking of Shapiro’s visit to the Scranton Army Ammunition Plant in 2024 alongside Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, where he signed an artillery shell that would be shipped to the Ukrainian armed forces, not the Israeli ones. (And for what it’s worth, Omar voted for Ukraine military aid, just like Gottheimer did.)

 

I’m sorry, but the members of Congress who speak on behalf of the DSA are antisemitic morons. All Jewish guys named Josh look alike to them, and they can’t remember whether the guy they’re thinking of was signing bombs used by Ukraine or Israel, but it doesn’t really matter because they believe every Jewish officeholder is a warmonger anyway. They’re an absolute embarrassment, a disgrace to the already low standards of the U.S. House of Representatives, and a Democratic Party that had an ounce of self-respect would ask themselves why they put up with such shameful bargain-basement-bin imbecilic dolts to represent safe blue districts.

 

ADDENDUM: Over in the Washington Post, I point out that “Qatar Force One” — the plane that President Trump accepted from the Qatari government — was not, as promised, 100 percent up to the mission and when the U.S. Air Force declared, “No risk was taken in security, safety or mission communications,” that was not accurate. It turns out the new plane doesn’t have the advanced antimissile capabilities of the old model, which is why the president used one of the older planes to fly back from Turkey earlier this month.

 

“Even if you could have closed your eyes to the ethical problems, you had to wonder how secure a plane from Qatar was. (You know who used to work in the Qatari Water Department? Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11.) If you doubt that accepting an unsolicited large-scale gift can lead to bigger problems, check out that new movie about how accepting a big wooden horse worked out for ancient Troy.”

Russian and Chinese Support for Iran Is a Testament to the War’s High Stakes

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, July 21, 2026

 

The two U.S. service members who were killed in an Iranian missile attack on an American base in Jordan were reportedly victims of Iran’s battlefield adaptations, some of which are attributable to America’s foremost geostrategic adversaries, Russia and China.

 

“Iran has adapted to U.S. defenses, firing missiles that travel at extremely high speeds and can maneuver as they streak toward the earth,” U.S. officials told the Wall Street Journal. “Iran’s ability to hit sensitive targets also has raised concerns that the regime is getting targeting help from China or Russia, the officials said.”

 

It was an unnerving aside in an equally disturbing report, but the Journal did not dwell on the nature of the support Iran is receiving from Moscow and Beijing. The analysts at Defense Security Asia, however, provided more detail.

 

“This is the ‘eyes and fist’ problem now defining the conflict,” its report read. “Chinese commercial satellite constellations and Russian reconnaissance platforms increasingly supply the targeting layer, while Iranian solid-fuel missiles and one-way attack drones supply the kinetic layer.”

 

“For Indo-Pacific planners watching from Taipei to Manila,” the piece continued, “the Iran theater is functioning as a live-fire preview of how a peer or near-peer adversary might fuse commercial space intelligence with saturation missile doctrine to defeat American forward basing in a future contingency.”

 

The dispatch explains in granular detail how a “combined Sino-Russian support architecture” has helped the Iranian regime withstand the American onslaught and why Tehran is likely benefiting from “real-time” targeting intelligence. It notes, though, that even though America’s adversaries are using the Iran war to refine their understanding of American capabilities, Moscow and Beijing are also exposing their own “targeting-support tradecraft” that both would otherwise conceal.

 

The risk America’s enemies are taking in facilitating American combat deaths is also a testament to the importance of the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to wrest control of the Strait of Hormuz from Iranian hands.

 

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty recently illustrated the stakes by focusing on how America’s allies in the Philippines are adjusting to the necessities imposed on them as a result of the Iran War. There, “the Marcos administration has sought to increase Russian crude access and expanded discussions over long-term energy cooperation.” That’s a warning sign for Washington and, possibly, a leading indicator of the compromises other Asian economies might be willing to make with America’s adversaries.

 

“If Russia successfully reorients its economy eastward,” one energy industry analyst told RFE/RL, “Western sanctions become structurally less effective.” China, too, will benefit from a status quo in which the strait remains contested. “China doesn’t really need to do anything but wait,” a Filipino defense analyst observed.

 

If the U.S. successfully weakens Iran’s capabilities in the strait to the point that de facto American control is established, if not acknowledged, the investments America’s enemies are making in this conflict will seem short-sighted in retrospect. If, however, America comes up short, events today set the table for bigger conflicts to come.

 

As Defense Security Asia’s analysts note, “this episode establishes a precedent in which commercial space-imagery firms function as deniable intelligence-sharing conduits, a model that could be replicated in a Taiwan Strait or South China Sea contingency involving different state and proxy actors.”

 

In short, America had better get this right. The consequences of failure could be serious.

The Graham Conspiracy

By Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, July 21, 2026

 

American political history is the story of a people overthrowing a hereditary nobility and then doing more or less everything they can to re-create it.

 

In our short existence we’ve had two sets of father-and-son presidents, another set who were related by blood and marriage, and we might well be on our third or fourth Kennedy in the White House if not for a series of murders, accidents, and cover-ups. It was only a decade ago that we came thisclose to having our first husband-and-wife presidential tandem. And while it’s unlikely, the odds of Michelle Obama facing off against either Donald Trump’s or Robert F. Kennedy’s son in 2028 aren’t zero.

 

Even so, the real action in hereditary politics has always been in Congress.

 

Readers of a certain age will remember the 2000 Senate race in Missouri, when Democratic candidate Mel Carnahan was killed in a plane crash three weeks before Election Day. It was too late to remove his name from the ballot, so the state’s governor promised to appoint Carnahan’s wife, Jean, to the seat if her now-deceased spouse went on to win the race. He did. It was weird—but, in a way, quite traditional.

 

That’s because wives have been filling vacancies in the House and Senate left by their late husbands for ages. When Rep. John Rogers of Massachusetts died in 1925, his wife, Edith, ran in the special election to succeed him and won in a landslide. She remained in the House for the next 35 years. Margaret Chase Smith’s husband, Rep. Clyde Smith, passed away in 1940, triggering a special election in Maine in which she ran unopposed. She served in the House for nearly a decade before being elected to the Senate, where she won four terms.

 

More germane to this week’s news is Hattie Caraway, the better half of Sen. Thaddeus Caraway of Arkansas. When he died in 1931, the governor appointed her to serve out the rest of his term. The next year, to everyone’s surprise, she announced she would run for a full six-year term and ended up winning easily with help from the most notorious populist demagogue in elected politics at the time. Caraway went on to serve for 14 years.

 

So there wasn’t much fuss last week when Darline Graham was appointed to finish the final few months of her late brother Lindsey’s current term in the Senate. The two were famously close and he never married, making her the obvious choice for the part of “grieving widow named to high office as a consolation.”

 

Obvious, but not perfect: The substantive argument for having a wife succeed her husband in Congress is that she’s intimately involved in his daily political business, knows his staff and donors well, and therefore can pick up where he left off more easily than any alternative could. Whether any of that is true in Darline Graham’s case is unclear. She didn’t live with Lindsey, he may or may not have consulted with her on affairs of state, and the extent of her interest in national politics is opaque. She’s made exactly one political donation over the past 36 years, in the amount of $100 to a candidate running for state legislative office.

 

No matter. As of last night, she’s following the Hattie Caraway playbook.

 

“I’m in,” she told Sean Hannity when asked whether she’ll run in the snap primary South Carolina is holding to replace her brother as the Republican nominee for Senate this November. Given her seeming disinterest in politics, it was assumed she’d serve out his current term as a “caretaker” before graciously making way in January for an elected successor. Now she hopes to be that successor herself.

 

And as of last Friday, she has the enthusiastic endorsement of the most notorious populist demagogue in elected politics. Numerous Republican leaders have dutifully followed the president’s lead by endorsing her themselves, forming a sort of establishment conspiracy to anoint a successor to Graham’s open seat before the snap primary in South Carolina gets rolling.

 

All of which is very strange. It’s strange that Donald Trump and his party are so keen to have her in the seat, it’s strange that Graham is eager to compete for it, and it’s strange that Republican voters—a famously populist group, last I checked—will likely end up rubber-stamping the Beltway-approved sister of a politician whom many of them long disdained as a “RINO.”

 

Graham’s motives.

 

There are charitable and less charitable ways to understand Darline Graham’s intentions.

 

An uncharitable one is simple power lust. Few of us will ever have an opportunity to set policy for hundreds of millions of people, and fewer still will have that opportunity gift-wrapped by the president and his party. Who among us would turn it down, whether or not we have the faintest idea of what we would do with it?

 

In this case, it might run in the family. No one relished being a political big shot as palpably as Lindsey Graham did, enough so that he spent the second half of his career in the Senate betraying every civic principle he held to protect that stature. To watch him was to know, with diamantine certainty, that he’d never relinquish his office voluntarily. Either he’d be beaten at the polls, or he’d exit the way he ended up exiting. There was no third possibility.

 

But “like brother, like sister” is hard to swallow given that Darline Graham never showed interest in holding public office (as far as I’m aware) until now. The sibling of a well-known senator with a large network of friends and donors would have been instantly competitive in any race she chose to enter over the last 25 years, but she never took advantage. Power lust is an odd trait to develop in one’s 60s.

 

Another uncharitable possibility is that she believes she owes it to Lindsey to hold the seat. "He’s worked so hard for so long. I can’t just let that die,” she told Hannity on Monday. “I’ve got to step in and carry on his legacy.” Carry on his legacy … for another six years?

 

The only thing worse than gerontocracy in America would be letting politicians continue to exert a dead hand over policy after their demise because of some sentimental felt obligation to carry on with their agenda. Especially in South Carolina: Until last week, exactly two people had filled the Senate seat occupied by Lindsey Graham since 1956. Fresh blood in the upper chamber in that state is a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence—literally—and now here’s Darline Graham proposing some sort of “legacy” norm that would continue to bind voters to the status quo well into a dearly departed incumbent’s afterlife.

 

Which is ironic, since Darline herself has dropped several hints that she won’t continue her brother’s “legacy” in every particular. “I am not Lindsey. I have my own way of doing things,” she wrote cryptically in a letter to her new constituents on Saturday. She got more specific with Hannity:

 

“I used to see him on the talk shows. I would watch him, and I’d be like, ‘Lindsey, are you just talking about national security all the time?’,” she explained. “And I understand that’s important. Protecting our borders, national security, absolutely.”

 

“I said, ‘But talk about also what matters to the average person. The price of groceries, the price of gas, health care. Insurance, those kind of things.’ That’s what I’m worried about.”

 

That’s the charitable read on Darline Graham’s intentions—that she does have an idea of what she wants to do with power and can’t pass on the opportunity. She’s spent her life as an advocate for the disabled; she appears sensitive to the cost of living; it’s possible, if not plausible, that she’ll be considerably more liberal than the average Senate Republican on matters like cutting Medicaid. It’s even conceivable that she’ll be meaningfully less hawkish than her brother was, although that would be hard to square with faithfully honoring his “legacy.”

 

But all of this is strange in its own right. If Darline Graham governs as a centrist, she’ll be more vilified by South Carolina’s Republican base than Lindsey was. Her career as a senator will be brief, unhappy, and hobbled by criticism from Trump. Why would she want to put herself through that? If, on the other hand, she intends to be a rubber stamp for the president on legislation—which would be in keeping with her brother’s legacy—then how is she planning to do some good with her new power unless she defines what’s good as “anything Trump wants”?

 

All I can think is that she hopes to follow Lindsey’s lead by trying to become a “Trump whisperer,” building a personal relationship with the president and leveraging it to point him in her own direction on policy. Like brother, like sister.

 

Trump’s motives.

 

There are practical reasons for Trump to prefer Darline Graham as Lindsey’s successor. One is name recognition: In theory, if the midterm environment turns rocky for the GOP, having a Graham on the ballot could dissuade angry South Carolinians from rolling the dice on Democrat Annie Andrews in the Senate race. Plus, nudging the party to coalesce quickly behind an anointed nominee reduces the chances of a messy primary fight that might divide the right before the general election, which probably explains why Senate Republicans are lining up behind her.

 

Another is the rubber-stamp effect. The president craves loyalty above all things and expects it unconditionally from politicians for whom he played kingmaker. No Republican in Congress would have more reason to be loyal to him, he might assume, than the grieving sister of a close friend whom he plucked from obscurity and handed a Senate seat on a silver platter. Darline Graham’s elevation might be a sort of sequel to the aborted scheme to have his daughter-in-law run for Senate in North Carolina: So great would the candidate’s debt to him be that he would expect to essentially control her vote.

 

Do any of these “practical” reasons make sense, though?

 

Republicans will almost certainly win November’s Senate race in South Carolina no matter who their nominee is. (The state hasn’t had a Democrat in that role since Fritz Hollings retired in 2005.) And while the Graham name obviously carries weight, it’s an open question whether Darline is the best the GOP can do. Other well-known Republicans are planning to challenge her in the primary, and they won’t have the baggage she’d carry in the general election: nepotism, being a “black box” ideologically, a familial relationship with a politician whom grassroots Republicans always viewed suspiciously.

 

As for the rubber-stamp effect, literally any Republican who’s elected to the seat will be a dutiful stooge who follows the president’s lead unless he or she is willing to be ousted after one term. In fact, Graham is almost certainly more likely to stray off the Trumpist reservation given the opacity of her beliefs than challengers like self-proclaimed “MAGA warrior” Rep. Russell Fry are. Loyalty is an odd reason to prefer her in a state like South Carolina, where well over half the population is “loyal.”

 

So then why does the president prefer her? For stupid reasons, probably.

 

One is showmanship. A guy who judges nominees for important offices based on their “central casting” appeal and who teases big decisions before announcing them to ratchet up the suspense would naturally appreciate the theatrical drama of a late senator’s beloved little sister getting to fill his shoes. Remember, Trump is a game show host by trade; to him, endorsing Darline Graham probably feels like awarding a grand prize to a contestant the audience is rooting hard for.

 

The other is autocratic prerogative. In the same way that Napoleon installed his relatives as monarchs in nations he conquered, our own emperor might regard the governance of red-state fiefdoms as marks of prestige to be bestowed on worthy “family” members. Lindsey Graham wasn’t related to him by blood, of course, but he performed all the duties Trump would expect from a blood relation—unquestioning fealty, lavish praise, total commitment to the belief that Trumpist rule is the very best America can hope for.

 

So when he passed away suddenly, why wouldn’t the president decide that the conquered territory of South Carolina continue to belong to the House of Graham? It’s the best he can do legally to have a title of nobility pass by inheritance in the pseudo-monarchy he’s built. And it’s a little dig at Congress, a body whose authority he obviously disdains: Endorsing a complete novice like Darline Graham might be his way of signaling that anyone can do the job, a sort of MAGA version of Caligula making his horse Incitatus a senator.

 

Grassroots Republicans’ motives.

 

There’s a fair chance that South Carolina’s Republican voters will reject Darline Graham.

 

If they do, it won’t be the first time this summer that they’ve defeated a candidate endorsed by Trump. In May he backed Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette in the GOP’s gubernatorial primary, only to watch with horror as state attorney general Alan Wilson raced ahead in the polls anyway. A few days before the vote, the president revised his endorsement to say that he supported both candidates, actually. Wilson ended up winning in a waltz.

 

Graham already has two credible challengers in GOP Reps. Russell Fry and Ralph Norman, who’s been endorsed by Sens. Mike Lee and Rick Scott. Evette and former Gov. Mark Sanford could enter the race as well, viewing a cipher like Lindsey’s sister as ripe for an upset. After Trump endorsed her, one county Republican chair told Politico of his members that “95 percent are saying, ‘What the hell are we doing here? We don’t know how she votes. We don’t know what she believes.’”

 

Both the candidate herself and the process by which she was chosen are antithetical to the spirit of revolutionary populism that defines the modern GOP. The Washington establishment is attempting to ram some unknown, untested suspected RINO down the collective throat of the base for no better reason than that she’s related to a beloved crony who belonged to their old boys’ club.

 

And not just any crony. Lindsey Graham. A man who never met a Middle East military intervention he didn’t like. A man whose pre-Trump record on immigration was so soft that border hawks dubbed him “Grahamnesty.”

 

It’s essentially Harriet Miers all over again, in which an out-of-touch Republican president driven by personal affection attempts to foist a questionable candidate whose right-wing bona fides are highly suspect on his party. The only difference is that Miers, whom George W. Bush nominated for the Supreme Court, was selected for a lifetime appointment whereas Darline Graham …

 

… actually, given the history of the seat she now holds, I suppose hers is basically a lifetime appointment too.

 

Republican voters in South Carolina might reject her. But none of us would bet very heavily on it, would we?

 

Nepotism and populism are enemies in theory but not in practice. In theory, nothing should offend feral populists more than the thought of further entrenching America’s already despised elite by bestowing new trappings of nobility on them. Far worse than being ruled by milquetoast career politicians like Lindsey Graham would be converting the office he held into a sort of royal title and presuming to hand it to his next of kin. Jacobins aren’t in the business of kneeling before nobles; they’re in the business of guillotining them.

 

But it’s not that simple, is it? In practice, for all their pretenses to empowering the common man, revolutionary populists have never sought to dismantle the elite so much as to re-create it in their own image. To most of the modern right, that image is defined by one man, the heroic leader of a victorious revolution. If he says Darline Graham belongs in the elite, then she must belong.

 

Besides, the sort of postliberalism that grassroots populists champion is clannish by nature. One of its core beliefs is that the elite consists of various enemy “foreign” tribes that are hoarding power and wealth and sharing it among themselves. Only by confronting them on similarly tribal terms, not through “fair play” norms of liberalism, can that power and wealth be wrested away and redistributed to more deserving recipients.

 

Egghead postliberal ideologues will insist that membership in the tribe should depend partly on having the right beliefs, but the average Republican doesn’t care about the intellectual claptrap that serves as scaffolding for Trumpism’s primal urges. Tribalism is enough. (Ask Tucker Carlson, who’s still waiting for an “America First” backlash to our new “forever war” against Iran.) Now the chief of their tribe is asking them to trust him when he says that Darline Graham will serve the tribe well. Why wouldn’t they?

 

Jacobinism has a habit of turning into monarchy. In France, the revolution led to the House of Bonaparte that I mentioned earlier. In North Korea, communism led to dynastic rule by a family of psychopaths. In America, the Tea Party led to a twice-impeached convicted criminal governing like a mafia boss and rewarding the relatives of favored capos with red-state Senate seats. We’ve gotten off easy, all things considered.

 

So if Darline Graham ends up winning a six-year term, it won’t bother me. In a legislature that’s about to make one of the president’s most sinister henchmen attorney general and to fund a war that it was never asked to authorize, all because he says so, who cares who the members are anymore? A Congress of horses couldn’t do any worse.

In Search of Liberalism

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, July 20, 2026

 

I spent part of the week at Liberalism for the 21^st Century—LibCon 2026—an annual conference put on by the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, a relatively new organization headed by my friend Shika Dalmia, long associated with Reason magazine and now publisher of the UnPopulist. I am interested in opportunities for right-left collaboration on issues such as the rule of law, free speech, free trade, and similar things that traditionally fall under the heading “liberalism,” and so I try to go to things like this when I can. They are, as we say around here, worth our time.

 

The lineup presented some opportunities for political intermixing: There were familiar libertarian types such as Dalmia and Walter Olson of the Cato Institute, left-liberal types such as Ezra Klein and Danielle Allen, idiosyncratic liberals such as Francis Fukuyama and Yascha Mounk, and a fair number of regular ol’ conservatives, including me, David French, and Bill Kristol. I can hear the keys clicking as emails are written denouncing the last of these, or, at the very least, tartly informing me that he is no longer a conservative; about that I will write only that while he and I may have some wide and deep disagreements about the best way to approach the current political moment in these United States, in conversation Bill Kristol strikes me as being, if anything, more conservative in the genuine sense of that word than he was 20 years ago—more skeptical, less ideological, free from party feeling, more interested in preservation and continuity, etc.

 

It is a good mix, but an uneasy one.

 

***

 

I try to put on a friendly face when I encounter some of the lefty types here, many of whom I have exchanged some pretty harsh words with in the past. There is nothing in particular that I wish to retract, but this is a conciliatory occasion. My efforts meet with decidedly mixed results. I do not blame my interlocutors for this: My attempts to be friendly must seem as disturbing and unnatural to them as it does to me.

 

***

 

I have been going to political conferences like this for a long time—more than 30 years now—and have been to conservative conferences, libertarian conferences, progressive conferences, Texas separatist conferences, flat-earther conferences, etc. Sometimes one hears some interesting things, has a useful conversation, meets a new interesting person, and that, of course, is really what these things are for: The panels and the formal program serve a convening function, but most of the real value is created on the sidelines, over by the coffee urns.

 

The programming varies, but there are two things you can always count on hearing: 1) a lament about the movement’s frustrating inability to get young people involved in whatever it is the conference is about; 2) several instances of people insisting that the challenge is finding new and better ways to talk about the agenda, whatever it is, the need to tell emotionally compelling stories about the program under discussion. Conservatives, in particular, have a thing about the need to recruit more young people—if you ever want to see Jonah Goldberg try not to wince, just watch him at one of these conferences when the youth-outreach stuff comes up. One of the things that conservatives, libertarians, classical liberals, etc., never seem to quite understand is that whipping crowds of young people into a state of emotional excitement not only is unnecessary to their program but is, in fact, antithetical to it. No good comes of it.

 

There’s an old joke that libertarianism is “a shadowy conspiracy to leave you alone,” and while conservatism and liberalism (I mean what we call “classical liberalism,” though I do not much care for that phrasing and do not want to repeat it every time) are distinct from libertarianism, they have a certain libertarian character and share a certain libertarian disability: The practical pursuit of political power is always in tension with philosophies based on restraining political power. Populism is exciting and enjoys a certain built-in political advantage because it is based on an underlying premise of action rather than on an underlying premise of restraint: A populist demagogue, of the right or of the left, can promise a crowd just about anything—there is no limiting principle. Ezra Klein, speaking at the conference, praises the “unbounded” vision of New York’s socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani. Liberalism is not an unbounded vision of the scope of state action.

 

The hard part of selling liberalism or American conservatism (which seeks to conserve the liberal principles of the American founding) is not how we talk about the philosophy—the trouble is with the philosophy itself. Restraint is (barring some kink) unsexy. There is nothing thrilling about acknowledging the necessity of trade-offs, the role of prudence applied ad hoc to individual cases, or that the best-case scenario we are offering is a series of good-enough second-best settlements and accommodations.

 

I recently reviewed Luigi: The Musical, which closes with the titular antihero (Luigi Mangione is being tried for the murder of health insurance executive Brian Thompson) singing a song in which he proposes to keep murdering people until there is peace and justice upon the land while the chorus behind him sings about policy trade-offs, the complexity of health care as a social issue, and the necessities of compromise and negotiation. Of course, Luigi drowns out the chorus. That is how it goes.

 

***

 

Liberalism, like conservatism, is less of a policy agenda or a coherent political movement than it is a sensibility and a set of attitudes. It is not a platform or a party. The foundation liberalism provides is by no means prior to politics, but it is, in a sense, prior to the familiar divides and controversies in American politics in the current era. I disagree with your typical left-leaning New York Times columnist (Jamelle Bouie is in attendance) on a great many things, but, if we agree on some fundamental things—the rule of law, freedom of speech, due process, the dangers of official corruption, etc.—then there is room to cooperate, and a need to cooperate, on those things when our shared bedrock values are threatened, as they are now.

 

I have in the past joked that you will know conservatives have won the day when I decide that the fact that Ramesh Ponnuru is wrong about child tax credits is now at the top of my list of things to care about and the time has come for us to get down to having a real fight about it. I would rather be in a position in which my top political priority is fighting with my progressive friends about their various batty and impractical ideas rather than looking for ways to work with them to preserve the fundamental things that create the conditions under which such a fight can be had at all. But that is not where we are.

 

We are not preparing ourselves for some hypothetical future crisis: The crisis is upon us, though there are different views about how best to approach that—differences in views about that (and judgments about what practical responses are necessary) are really the basis of the differences in sensibilities between organizations such as The Bulwark and National Review and our style here at The Dispatch, though none of these is homogeneous. I do not take precisely a Bulwark view of the current crisis, but the argument that the most meaningful practical thing we can do at the moment is to reduce the political power of Donald Trump and the Republican Party by electing Democrats, including loopy socialists, is not obviously bananas. I think it probably is wrong, in the way simplifications always are wrong, but I don’t think it is insane.

 

There are many people at this conference who believe that the project of liberalism in our time is electing Democrats. The people who believe this do not want to hear about the illiberalism of the Democratic Party or the illiberalism of the left. There are many self-described liberals in attendance, including Danielle Allen, a Harvard political scientist whose top priorities include overriding the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United and thereby empowering the government to engage in political censorship under the guise of regulating campaign finance, a body of regulation that is mainly about preventing bribery in one form or another. I do not think that is a liberal position, though she no doubt makes a good case that it must be.

 

Allen and Ezra Klein, in their discussion, agree that it is necessary to do such things to counteract “concentrations of capital and power,” as Klein puts it. Klein is associated with the New York Times Company, arguably the most influential corporation of its kind in the world, one with a revenue stream measured in billions of dollars and that is, and has been over the years, controlled by people who might be described in the pages of the New York Times as oligarchs if they had different kinds of last names or different political associations. Allen is associated with Harvard, arguably the most powerful institution of its kind on Earth, one backed by a $57 billion endowment among its other considerable financial resources. Concentrations of capital and power, to be sure. I am reminded of a South by Southwest conference I once attended, where I heard very comfortable people, some of them rich and famous, lamenting their situation as members of “marginalized” groups at a forum sponsored by Google, PepsiCo, AT&T, NBCUniversal, Facebook, UBS, JPMorgan Chase, and Deloitte. “We should all be so marginalized,” I wrote at the time.

 

But fish don’t know they’re wet.

 

***

 

Are simplifications always wrong? If I have a single political idea that is always at the back of my mind, it is Paul Valéry’s maxim: “Everything simple is false. Everything complex is unusable.”

 

***

 

The conference is at the Watergate Hotel, which leans into its association with the scandal that ruined Richard Nixon’s presidency. (The scandal by means of which Richard Nixon ruined his own presidency, I mean, J.D. Vance’s recent judgment notwithstanding.) A sign offers office space at the “infamous address,” and there is a hospitality room called the Vault, which one approaches through a hallway bedecked with scandal memorabilia and images of Nixon. For a slightly disreputable right-winger with a shaved head and a considerable firearms collection, skulking around the Watergate is a bittersweet thing. I am no G. Gordon Liddy, but I feel like I should be wearing a trenchcoat.

 

What I am wearing when I enter the hotel is a very good suit. It is a cotton suit, not a silk suit—it is very, very hot in Washington this week—but I have silk suits on my mind. More precisely, what I have going through my head is a bit of dialogue spoken by John Goodman in the film Born Yesterday, in which he plays a wealthy businessman, a rich but vulgar self-made kingpin who feels condescended to by a slick journalist who is profiling him, a role played by Don Johnson. The journalist, indicating the magnificent hotel suite in which his subject is being pampered by a barber and manicurist, asks, “Are you afraid of losing all this?” The businessman says he does not worry about that, because he believes in himself.

 

I started with a wagon, selling somebody’s junk. And I got here, in a silk suit, talking to a college know-it-all like you. If I lose it, I’ll meet you right back here in this room, in a new silk suit.

 

The first time I heard that line, I heard only the well-earned confidence of the self-made man. Now, I hear both that confidence and the resentment behind it, the chip on the shoulder. I have my own little history with the Watergate, where the Atlantic had its offices during my infamously brief period of employment there. I meet the Dispatch’s production guru, Victoria Holmes, for lunch at the lobby restaurant and pick up another Dispatch-associated guest, David French, along the way, running into him in the lobby. The last time I was in that restaurant was when I learned, over breakfast, that I was going to be fired. I got fired over breakfast from another job a long time ago, too—the most important meal of the day, to be sure, but, for me, a fraught one! I like to think that I do not have a very large chip on my shoulder, but I do hear that bit of dialogue from Born Yesterday in the back of my head. And I do make a point of putting on a very good suit.

 

***

 

One of the conference speakers is Bob Rae, who served as Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations. As he tells it, the wake-up call that something had really changed in the United States beyond Donald Trump’s idiotic talk about making Canada a state was something he experienced at the United Nations. Canada and its European allies, among many other nations, were putting forward a resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but the United States, at the last minute, introduced a much softer resolution, one calling for an end to the war but omitting any reference to the cause of the war—Russian aggression. That measure carried the day, with the United States voting in a bloc with the world’s autocracies over the objections of the world’s despairing liberal democracies. When Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney talks about “the rupture,” Rae said, that is what he is talking about. Under the Trump administration, the United States has become less like Canada or the United Kingdom and more like Russia or China, and the consequences are profound for the American people and for the world.

 

Rae’s remarks raise a question about how enduring we should expect the stamp of Trump and Trumpism on American politics to be. The optimists believe that we will look back on this period, after a few years, as a mere aberration; the pessimists believe that we will look at it as the beginning of something, a new ugly era of caudillo-ism and corruption. At the conference, I heard good arguments for both sides, and I still am not entirely sure what to think.

 

***

 

Reporting from some of the first Tea Party rallies lo these many years ago, I wrote:

 

There was an interesting coalition assembled for the Tea Party, and my unscientific sampling suggests it was about two-thirds regular Joes and about one-third people who are involved, in some way, with heterogeneous political enterprises, whether Ron Paul’s Campaign for Liberty, Libertarian- or Republican-party factions, anti-tax and anti-Fed groups, and the like. The regular Joes with whom I spoke were almost to a man talk-radio listeners, and their cheery ferocity makes me suspect that even conservatives have failed to truly appreciate the reach and power of that medium. There were some single-issue fanatics, inevitably, including one colorful clown who kept shouting “Abolish the Fed!” with the occasional improvised expletive. Another fellow was explaining, with great animation, that Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada was a converted Jew (this would have come as a surprise to his uncle, Cardinal Juan de Torquemada) and that various Jewish and Islamic tendencies, including the concept of machismo, had been imported into the New World by the conquistadors, most of whom were conversos as well, and that this apparently has something or other to do with something or other. One meets these sorts of characters in political crowds, and one learns to dread obsessions with matters Semitic, or mentions of the Knights Templar.

 

There is an inverse relationship between the specificity of political ideas and the sanity of political ideas. There are sensible people who are generally liberal and sensible people who are generally conservative, and then there are passionately deontological libertarians slugging it out with angrily consequentialist libertarians, or Objectivists affiliated with the Ayn Rand Institute vs. Objectivists loyal to the Atlas Society, because A is A, damn all heretics. I met a fellow at the Tea Party who described himself as an anarchist, and it seemed natural to us both that I asked him: “More of a Rothbard guy, or more of a Proudhon guy?” One wouldn’t want to associate with the wrong sort! The scattered nuts in the tea-party mix showed great specificity: abolish the Fed, or adopt a new tax code, or abolish the Fed, or legalize homosexual marriage, or abolish the Fed, or whatever.

 

...

 

I wonder if the people at the Tea Party want the same things, or want enough of the same things to cohere, and to cohere in a movement that is recognizably conservative. And if they do want enough of the same things, I wonder what those things are — because I was there, and I am not sure.

 

Looking backward, one can see a line, not quite straight and not quite unbroken, from those rallies to the present moment—a political current, right-wing but revolutionary rather than conservative, getting near to bursting its banks. And now the flood is upon us. It seems almost inevitable that Tea Party figures such as Sen. Ted Cruz were so easily swept away by the sewage flood of Trumpism. But if you were to ask me today whether the Republican Party still had a core around which it might once again be able “to cohere in a movement that is recognizably conservative,” I have a more definite answer, and it is “no.”

 

And so here I am—and here we are—looking for alternatives and allies. And this, I am more confident, is the beginning of something rather than the end of something.