No One Who Bought the Gaza Starvation Narrative Deserves to Be Taken Seriously

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, August 25, 2026

 

The Free Press’s Olivia Reingold published a bombshell report this week:

 

At the rate of 0.5 percent, Gaza has one of the lowest rates of acute child malnutrition in the region, according to an analysis by The Free Press of data from the World Bank and the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification IPC, a U.N.–affiliated hunger-monitoring system. The researchers also concluded that about 12 percent of children in Gaza had stunting, or impaired growth and development that is the result of poor nutrition. That is less than half of the region’s 26 percent stunting rate, according to the latest report on child malnutrition by UNICEF, the World Health Organization, and the World Bank.

 

Today, U.N. functionaries are encountering a very different problem in Gaza: “obesity and excess weight, which affect a combined 4 percent of children under the age of 5.” And that is to say nothing of the clearly well-fed adult Gazans who miraculously resurface only after the latest round of fighting with Israel has concluded.

 

“A researcher who has overseen teams collecting malnutrition data in the Horn of Africa remarked that she had ‘never seen’ the emergence of obesity and excess weight in a place that was declared only a year earlier to be suffering from famine,” Reingold continued. “How did Gaza go from being officially classified as famine-stricken to having—in less than a year—one of the region’s lowest levels of severe child malnutrition? Humanitarian agencies have failed so far to answer that fundamental question, and one major organization is still fundraising on the claim that starvation rages on in Gaza.”

 

We’re confronted with one of two possibilities: Either Israel has pulled off the greatest disappearing act in human history or the famine we were supposed to obsess ourselves with in the spring of 2025 never happened.

 

It is impossible to summon any sympathy for those who were surprised by UNICEF’s findings. They are either hopelessly gullible or were so committed to their alternative version of reality that they refused to acknowledge any other. After all, the falseness of the allegation against Israel was obvious at the time.

 

Discerning news consumers might have noticed the discrepancy in the international press’s coverage of “food-starved Gaza,” in which residents were forced to eat “lentils, pasta, and rice.” They might have asked themselves why self-described humanitarian organizations resorted to proving the existence of a famine by promoting pictures of children — and it was only ever children — who suffered from emaciating genetic disorders or preexisting conditions. They could have just applied elementary logic to claims like the one issued by the BBC alleging that there were “14,000 babies that will die in the next 48 hours” unless U.N. functionaries could reach them. That one depended as much on the audience’s innumeracy as their indifference to the truth.

 

Much of the public’s confusion is attributable to the United Nations itself. The United Nations’ Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) insisted a famine was afoot in the first place. The organization was incensed when Israel limited its access to the Gaza Strip after it was revealed that Hamas was raiding U.N. convoys and rationing food aid to the Gazan people — that is, when it wasn’t working directly with the U.N. Israel and the US established an alternative aid-distribution mechanism in the form of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), but that charity was swiftly accused of deliberately starving the Gazan people. “The newly developed distribution scheme is more than just the control of aid,” said senior U.N. official Jonathan Whittall. “It is engineered scarcity.”

 

If the U.N. wasn’t overseeing its distribution, there might as well have been no food aid at all. That’s what Democratic politicians in the U.S. appeared to believe. Or, at least, those were the shibboleths the activist class expected them to mouth. Far too many Democratic politicians dutifully obliged.

 

“Hunger and malnutrition are widespread, and, alarmingly, deaths due to starvation, especially among children, are increasing,” read an open letter signed by 40 Democratic lawmakers. Senator Peter Welch (Vt.) accused Israel of executing a “war crime,” using “starvation” to advance the “government’s strategy of forcibly displacing Palestinians from their land.” Senator Brian Schatz (Hawaii) correctly intuited that it was “not at all credible” to think that the Israeli military was incapable of providing aid to the Gazan people, but he rejected the logic of his own conclusion.

 

Israel’s “blocking all food and emergency aid” ensured that “tens of thousands of children” would face “imminent starvation,” Senator Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) concluded. “Half a million Palestinians are now at serious risk of famine,” said the equally emotive appeal of Senator Chris Murphy (Ct.), “and every day that food and medicine are kept from starving families, more children suffer, and more innocent lives are lost.” To Senator Chris Van Hollen (Md.), the “burgeoning famine” in Gaza amounted to “collective punishment that is clearly illegal under international law.”

 

“This man-made famine and genocide must end,” wrote Representative Summer Lee (Pa.). “Over 2 million people are being intentionally deprived of food, water, medicine, and baby formula,” Representative Ayanna Pressley (Mass.) concurred. None of them could beat Michigan Representative Rashida Tlaib’s dramatic crescendo: “This is the final stage of their genocide,” she declared.

 

Some of these heedless politicians and their credulous followers might convince themselves that the epochal famine they warned of last year has since been mitigated. After all, high-intensity ground operations inside Gaza concluded ten months ago. But that is not an evasion that is available to those who continue to accuse Israel of engineering a “genocide” inside Gaza even today. Nor would an appeal to that kind of illogic absolve those who subordinated their powers of critical thinking to their desire to participate in a moral panic.

 

The most you could say for those who fell in line is that they deferred to the U.N.’s authority. After all, it was that body that sounded the alarms in the first place. But when Reingold went looking for the data that informed the U.N.’s conclusions, she found that the folders to which she’d been granted access “containing recent presentations and meeting minutes” were “gone.” They’d been offline for about a week before Reingold discovered it, only for them to be “restored about 11 hours later.” Suddenly, the IPC’s website showed that malnutrition rates in Gaza had precipitously declined.

 

“The whole system is built on nobody checking anything,” one Israeli government consultant told Reingold. That isn’t just true of the United Nations. The global anti-Israel movement rests on a reliable and durable foundation of incuriosity. But that is an explanation, not an excuse. At the very least, we should expect those who allowed themselves to be taken in by this flimsy lie to explain why we should ever take them seriously again.

It’s No Mystery Why Young Men Are Leaving the Workforce

By Caroline Downey

Wednesday, August 26, 2026

 

Gen Z are an enigma to some people. Why are they whining about $20 burritos? Why are they obsessed with buying a starter home? Why aren’t they dating? The typical answer is that something mucked up the natural order. Among other culprits, technology contributed to the phasing out of both old-school courting rituals (say, approaching a love interest at a bar) and some sectors of employment. The latest head-scratcher, it seems, is: “Where have the men gone in corporate America?”

 

The guilty parties will play dumb. But the answer is no mystery — because it wasn’t really a voluntary exit, was it? It was expulsion and exile.

 

“American women now hold 176,000 more payroll jobs than American men,” according to the Wall Street Journal and July data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

 

For many years under progressive administrations and in major companies, the DEI regime has reigned. A lot of firms had either official or unofficial gender and/or race targets they were striving to meet. The NASDAQ, which includes more than 3,000 major companies, had rules requiring its listees to publicly disclose diversity statistics and to have — or explain why they did not have — at least two directors who are minorities, including one who self-identifies as female.

 

Though not a strict numerical quota, such forced diversity disclosure served as a moral litmus test for companies. Though a court eventually struck down the rules, the exchange for over three years signaled that females should be privileged in C-suites.

 

That and other virtue-signaling memos trickled down through the culture to this generation of young men. In college, I remember a male friend’s frustration as he and other finance undergrads competed for a small pool of jobs while big banks clamored to fill spots with females, despite their having, in his telling, less impressive applications.

 

Before President Trump issued executive orders prohibiting DEI in the federal government, affirmative action in the awarding of government contracting was widespread, effectively a different kind of cronyism.

 

The message was the same in college admissions. Before the Supreme Court declared affirmative action in admissions unconstitutional in 2023, colleges participated in discrimination against white men by applying racial preferences. Even now, some schools, including Duke Law, have tried to circumvent the Supreme Court’s Harvard ruling via proxy discrimination, developing mechanisms to flag for ostensibly marginalized backgrounds in admissions essays and usher in minority candidates.

 

As for women, their rising numbers in colleges were aided by the lifting of artificial caps on female enrollment. Before the 1970s, schools such as Yale University limited female enrollment to a small fraction of the class. With affirmative action and Title IX, universities dropped these ceilings and invited many new female students. However, some STEM institutions didn’t just open the doors — they gave favorable consideration to women to counter underrepresentation.

 

“Girls are twice as likely as boys to get into Caltech or MIT, to make up for the fact that they are half as likely to apply,” the Washington Post wrote in 2024.

 

To be fair, now that females make up nearly 60 percent of all college students nationwide, some colleges have allegedly practiced gender balancing in the other direction. Dubbed “affirmative action” for men, this isn’t the way, either. But even if female enrollees didn’t technically steal spots that would otherwise go to men, the disproportionate number changed the constitution of the average college. It is not a coincidence that gender studies, which is based on the idea that the patriarchy is the root of evil in society, has exploded as a discipline across academia in the past decade. With women dominating, colleges have evolved to focus on women’s concerns, as Helen Andrews wrote in her essay “The Great Feminization.”

 

Gee, maybe that was a deterrent to men? If colleges are increasingly adopting an ideological tone that treats maleness as problematic, that might chase men out or keep men away.

 

A conscious policy choice that has displaced young men in the workforce involves legal immigration programs such as H-1B, which, aside from being a corrupt labor arrangement, takes jobs from young men in technical fields. For those who would argue that these immigrants bring special genius and expertise that Americans cannot provide, there is no highly skilled worker shortage in the United States. Rather, it is more likely that the infusion of foreign labor depresses wages for Americans, disincentivizing them from putting their STEM degrees to use or pursuing them in the first place.

 

That being said, there is a whole sector begging for young men to join. An analysis this year found that nearly 1.4 million trade jobs across seven essential industries will be unfilled by 2030. Since the turn of the century, labor force participation has steadily declined across the board. As tradesmen retire, new apprentices aren’t replacing them fast enough. For every five tradesmen who leave the workforce, only two younger workers step up. There is incredible financial opportunity for young men in vocations if they want it.

 

It’s true that for many years, young men have repeatedly run into walls erected by politicians and corporate partners who determined that the appearance of equity was more important than fairness. The trend of the stay-at-home boyfriend is partly a consequence of a workforce now dominated by women, which was not so much an organic development as one that was socially engineered. Their disengagement from American life did not happen in a vacuum. Young men feel defeated, and they cannot be entirely blamed for that.

 

But the answer is not to grovel to despairing young men or treat them with kid gloves. The Trump administration has done the foundational work of ripping up the institutional barriers standing against men, though some remain. We, as a culture, must continually affirm that young men are valuable parts of our economy and our future. And entrepreneurship and getting your hands dirty are still paths welcome to young men who desire to build.

The Data Center Backlash Is Just a New Moral Panic

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, August 26, 2026

 

Don’t look now, but we seem to have a moral panic on our hands.

 

The term moral panic, at least as a social science concept, is relatively modern. It was coined by Stanley Cohen in the 1972 book Folk Devils and Moral Panics. Moral panics emerge when large numbers of people start to freak out about something that doesn’t warrant the freak-out.

 

When I was kid, there was a moral panic over Dungeons and Dragons, the role-playing game. It was sparked by the tragic suicide of a gamer and quickly led to various Christian groups insisting, in the words of one Georgia pastor, that “the game is an occult tool that opens up young people to influence or possession by demons.”

 

Moral panics are seductive to journalists. CBS News’ 60 Minutes host Ed Bradley interviewed Gary Gygax, the creator of the game, in 1985, asking “If you found 12 kids in murder suicide with one connecting factor in each of them, wouldn’t you question it?”

 

Gygax responded, “I would certainly do it in a scientific manner, and this is as unscientific as you can get. It’s nothing but a witch hunt!”

 

Gygax was right, but it took a while for people to realize it.

 

History is full of similar episodes. Some were entirely silly—like the 1950s hysteria about comic books corrupting the youth. But often they take real concerns and legitimate issues and turbocharge them. The child-abduction panic of the late 1970s and early 1980s was sparked by some actual, horrific child abductions. The understandable fear among parents led to a kind of mass hysteria.  

 

Moral panics form a bit like “perfect storms” with just the right conditions. But they differ in three ways. First, storms are easy to predict. Second, when you’re in a deluge, no one disputes that you’re in one. But when you’re in a moral panic, the people panicking can’t recognize it until it’s over—sort of like when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said recently, “Woke 1 was crazy.” She didn’t think so when she was fomenting Woke 1.

 

Which brings us to the third difference: Humans don’t know how to create hurricanes, but they do know how to create moral panics.

 

Consider the freak-out over AI data centers, which are proliferating across the country. A recent poll found that more people would rather have a nuclear power plant or steel factory in their community than a data center. That’s bonkers.

 

Panic-peddlers are pushing even crazier stuff. Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast is describing AI data centers as “weapons labs” to be used on Americans. His “tech correspondent” claims that data centers are like the embryonic “neurons of the Antichrist, that’s what we’re witnessing. The false messiah.” A Kentucky farmer who turned down a $26 million offer for her property explained to CNN that part of her reasoning is that the vibrations from data centers “vibrate at a low frequency that can bring up cortisol levels.”

 

We shouldn’t rule out the possibility that this moral panic isn’t entirely homegrown. Fracking induced a similar freak-out 15 years ago, and foreign governments played a role in fomenting it, hoping a moral panic would block the practice much as a similar panic killed the nuclear industry for a generation. It would not shock me if we’re seeing something similar today.

 

Not all concerns about data centers are so crazy or even unreasonable. They do use a lot of water, though not nearly as much as some claim. They can cause electricity rates to go up. They’re ugly. And, if you’re freaking out about what AI will do to your job or to American society, taking it out on data centers makes a certain amount of sense.

 

Politicians, as a class, tend to indulge moral panics. Which is why it’s no surprise that Republicans and Democrats alike are racing to get on the “right” side of the issue.

 

Consider Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott, up for reelection this year. Texas has prided itself on being the most business-friendly environment possible, enticing Big Tech to flee California for the accommodating Lone Star State. Just last November, Abbot boasted that a $40 billion investment by Google proved that “Texas is the epicenter of AI development, where companies can pair innovation with expanding energy.”

 

Now, Abbott is throwing Google and Big Tech under the bus. By failing to win over local communities, he told ABC’s Jonathan Karl, “They basically dug their own grave for the problem that's been caused for them.” He added, “that's why they got the backlash they deserve.”

 

AI is coming. The only question is whether America should take the lead or let China. If your answer is “America,” then data centers are the price. If your answer is “China” then by all means keep freaking out.

No Daylight Between Abdul El-Sayed and Hasan Piker

National Review Online

Wednesday, August 26, 2026

 

Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed spent this week trying to create the appearance of daylight between himself and poisonous internet personality Hasan Piker. There is no reason for Michigan voters to take his statements, which don’t even directly criticize Piker, as anything more than a desperate general election gambit.

 

Piker garnered attention for a livestream this week in which he claimed that “if Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone’s going to come around and take action. Not against the state of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews.” He made the statement while the screen showed a photo of Jeremy Moss, a Jewish Democrat who is running for a U.S. House seat in Michigan.

 

There is a long history of blaming Jews for bringing antisemitism on themselves, including in Nazi propaganda. The idea that a particular religious group cannot hold a given set of views without inviting violence is deeply un-American. While Piker’s comments could be charitably interpreted as his sympathetically noting the way things are, rather than arguing that this is how they ought to be, there is very little reason to give him the benefit of the doubt.

 

Piker has claimed that “America deserved 9/11” and regularly defended terrorist groups. He said Hamas is “a thousand times better” than Israel, that he did not have “a single issue with Hezbollah,” and that what the Houthis were doing was “not only moral, but it’s just.”

 

Headlines that El-Sayed has “distanced” himself from Piker are overstated. In response to Piker’s latest comments about American Jews inviting violence on themselves, the candidate released a statement that could have been generated by AI, declaring generically, “Americans deserve the right to advocate what they believe without fear of violence.” Notably, he avoided directly criticizing Piker, merely claiming that “while politicians and pundits try to make this race about a Twitch streamer,” he wanted to focus on affordability.

 

But the politician most responsible for making Piker an issue has been El-Sayed himself, by happily campaigning with the streamer — and not just once. He embraced Piker at an April campaign rally at which he mocked the idea that it was deemed controversial even as President Trump was trying to commit “genocide in Iran.” Just a few weeks ago, Piker appeared at El-Sayed’s final rally before the Democratic primary. Piker’s views were no secret.

 

That Piker would again say something controversial about Jews during the campaign was not an unforeseeable event, considering that El-Sayed consciously used Piker to energize the youth vote that helped deliver him the nomination. And there’s plenty of evidence that El-Sayed, who has made rabid anti-Zionism a cornerstone of his campaign, shares a lot of Piker’s sentiments. El-Sayed himself said that Israel was just as “evil” as Hamas.

 

What’s happened, of course, is that Piker was seen as an asset during the Democratic primary and now is viewed as a liability. Given the strong environment for Democrats in a state where Republicans have not won a Senate race in over 30 years, a generic Democrat would be expected to be coasting to victory. But El-Sayed, who dramatically underperformed polling in the primary, finds himself in a dead heat with former Representative Mike Rogers, the Republican nominee.

 

El-Sayed is eager to convince reluctant voters that they can vote for him in good conscience. But there is no reason to believe that daylight exists between him and the terrorist-sympathizing hater Hasan Piker.

The Gray Zone Descends on Leipzig (Again)

By Andrew Stuttaford

Tuesday, August 25, 2026

 

As a reminder, the term “gray zone” describes an action or series of actions that are not quite war, and not quite not war, either. I wrote a bit the other day about how the pace and intensity of Russian operations within this zone had been increasing, noting among other developments the dispatch of an explosive-laden drone (it contained twice as much Semtex as the device that blew up Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie) to Leipzig Airport. Mercifully, it was headed off by a vigilant bus driver.

 

The same day, reports The Guardian, a second drone possibly collided with a DHL cargo plane, which had to land elsewhere. No sign of a drone was found, but inspectors found damage to the tail section of a type that suggested it had been hit by something. One theory is that a drone could have been sucked into the engines after the collision and shredded into small pieces.

 

We’ll never know, I suppose.

 

And now, however, there’s this:

 

German investigators uncovered a third drone and suspected military explosives thought to be connected to an attempted attack on Leipzig airport, local media have reported.

 

The drone was discovered in Kabelsketal, just to the west of the airport, along with about 50g (1.8oz) of a suspected military explosive on 14 August, 10 days after the unsuccessful sabotage. Leipzig airport is a cargo and military logistics hub used by Nato and Ukraine’s Antonov Airlines for transporting military supplies.

 

Germany’s Chancellor Merz has said the government would soon provide information about who it believed was behind the drone attacks.

 

That shouldn’t take long, but proving it may take longer.

 

Merz has also promised that those responsible would “pay.”

 

But how?

 

One aspect of gray-zone operations is that the absence of hard proof of those responsible makes it more difficult to justify (publicly anyway) retribution. And their scale is typically set at a level too low to be treated, formally anyway, as an act of war — although that, judging by the growing seriousness of these incidents, is something that seems to bother Russia less and less.

The CIA Director’s Surprise Visit to Moscow Comes at an Ominous Moment

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, August 25,2026

This post is in response to The Gray Zone Descends on Leipzig (Again)

By Andrew Stuttaford

Andrew Stuttaford has been a devoted chronicler of the “gray zone” provocations that cannot be directly pinned on America’s adversaries but sure do have a conspicuous tendency to advance their interests. His latest dispatch on the subject follows the discovery of an explosive drone discovered at Leipzig airport, in Germany, earlier this month.

 

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has pledged that the people or groups behind this and other hybrid attacks on German soil “will pay for them.” But, Andrew asks, how? The logic of the “gray zone” attack is that there is no return address, no chain of custody that links the attacker to the state sponsor.

 

That’s what makes CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s surprise visit to Moscow so inauspicious. The White House took unusual steps to conceal the director’s itinerary before he departed for Moscow on a U.S. Air Force C-17 out of Riga, Latvia. No one in the administration is commenting on the trip for the record. On background, sources will only confirm that the trip is real. “Publicly available flight tracking data does not show the C-40B on the next flight to Moscow,” the Washington Post reported. “The aircraft is a modified business jet used to transport senior government officials.”

 

The details are sparse, but the backdrop against which this rare in-person meeting is happening is portentous.

 

Ratcliffe’s trip comes as Ukraine’s long-range strikes on Russian infrastructure have precipitated an energy crisis in Russia. Moscow’s worsening manpower shortages have made Western analysts fear that the Kremlin will attempt to escalate its way out of the crisis that Vladimir Putin imposed on his people. Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal revealed that U.S. intelligence suggests that Russia will test the NATO’s resolve to challenge Moscow’s ambitions with a provocation that risks all-out conflict.

 

“U.S. and European leaders increasingly see signs of Russia conducting probing attacks to test NATO’s resolve, including Russian cruise missiles that have landed in Poland and drones flown into Romania,” the report read. “The possible threats range from a cyberattack on a NATO country or sending unmarked armed groups to occupy territory to a limited incursion on the alliance’s eastern flank.”

 

The “gray zone” provocations in parts of Europe that Moscow regards as sensitive are likely part of the multivalent Russian threat. U.S. intelligence is reportedly convinced that the Kremlin was behind the event in Leipzig. It is highly likely, according to Latvian intelligence, that Russian military intelligence was behind the explosives smuggled into Europe in summer 2024. “Security officials in Lithuania said last year the four parcels were part of a test run for a Russian plot to trigger explosions on cargo flights to the United States,” CNN reported last year.

 

These operations raise the risk of miscalculation to unacceptable levels. Perhaps Moscow wants to confront the West with a “Why die for Danzig?” moment. The Kremlin asks us to consider, Would the West really maintain its support for Ukraine if the world were in the balance? But alliance dynamics are sticky things. And if Moscow succeeded in sponsoring attacks that killed NATO civilians on or over NATO soil, there is no guarantee that an escalating series of reprisals and retaliations would not take on a logic all its own and spiral out of control.

 

Whatever Director Ratcliffe’s mission in Moscow is, this is certainly more than a get-to-know-you confab.

El-Sayed’s Circumcision Quip Was Too Clever by Half

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, August 25, 2026

 

You know that a Democrat has done or said something indefensibly asinine when the political press covers the reaction to it with more vigor than the precipitating event. So far, that is what we’ve witnessed in the hours since Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed asked Fox News Channel host Jesse Watters if his penis is intact.

 

The exchange, via Mediaite:

 

“Sex change for minors. Do you support that?” Watters asked at one point.

 

“I just think the government shouldn’t tell you what kind of healthcare you should have,” El-Sayed replied.

 

Watters then pressed him with a more graphic formulation: “So you think it’s OK for a parent to slash his kid’s ding-a-ling off?”

 

El-Sayed fired back: “Do you really want to have this conversation? Are you circumcised?”

 

“Yeah, but I mean that’s a personal question, doctor,” a visibly surprised Watters responded.

 

Watters argued that circumcision is “different than castration,” prompting El-Sayed to reply: “I’m just saying that yes, circumcision is surgery on a kid’s ding-a-ling.”

 

The coverage of these remarks diverted quickly away from them, focusing instead on how the candidate’s political opponents were supposedly fit to be tied over El-Sayed’s failed attempt at cleverness. But the reaction to this story, however entertaining it may be, is not the real story here.

 

Surely, El-Sayed’s revealed confusion over the practice of circumcision and how it is distinct from genital mutilation will do nothing to dispel the allegations of antisemitism swirling around his campaign. More damaging to him, perhaps, is the candidate’s flat-footedness on the controversial issue of youth gender transition therapies and the harm they do.

 

The minimally curious should by now have grappled with the medical literature that finds young people suffering from gender dysphoria do not, on balance, experience positive mental health outcomes as a result of surgical or pharmaceutical interventions. Indeed, their conditions often worsen. El-Sayed and others should be expected to have surveyed the landscape in Europe, where the public health apparatus expresses increasing uncertainty about the value of those interventions.

 

They should recognize, at the very least, the political peril associated with their incuriosity, especially if they’re running for office. It’s not too much to expect candidates to familiarize themselves with the public’s anxieties toward biological males playing in women’s sports or the increasing episodes of violence attributed to gender dysphoric personalities.

 

If El-Sayed had acquainted himself with even the basic contours of the issue, he probably wouldn’t have struck the condescending posture he adopted on Monday night. Instead, he smirked his way through an exhibition of profound ignorance — a display that was not masked by the candidate’s obviously practiced and admittedly expert Barack Obama impression — that conveyed only his contempt for the concerns shared by a majority of Americans, including a plurality of Democrats.

 

“You should want to move on,” said El-Sayed, closing out the interview with the confidence of someone who hadn’t just fumbled the ball on the one-yard line. But anyone who watched the exchange would conclude that it was El-Sayed who was desperate to change the subject.

Trump’s Trade War With Canada Is Not About Canada

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, August 26, 2026

 

The leaders in Iran will agree to nothing. The leaders in Canada could agree to anything—and it would not be enough. What should be understood is that the latter is, to some considerable degree, a consequence of the former.

 

Poor Canada has been geopolitically upgraded from afterthought to distraction—our polite friends to the north were better off when we U.S.A.-type Americans had forgotten they were there.

 

In trade as in most things, the Canadians have been nothing if not agreeable: They agreed to NAFTA, they agreed to NAFTA’s reworking as the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, just as they had agreed to the Reciprocity Treaty of 1854 and the Canada-U.S. Reciprocal Trade Agreements of 1935 and 1938, and the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement of 1989.

 

That’s a lot of agreement. The Canadians probably would agree to a good deal more if Donald Trump and his clown car of an administration were to put a serious deal on the table in front of them, but there is no such proposal. Prime Minister Mark Carney was right to walk away from “negotiations” with the United States because there were no genuine negotiations under way: Canada is simply a punching bag for the Trump administration, a prop used to gin up a couple of days’ worth of headlines when a distraction—from Iran—is desired by the retired game-show host and quondam pornographer who has been, incredibly enough, twice elected president of these United States.

 

The notion that the United States is being victimized by trade with Canada is so insipid and so imbecilic that one almost feels degraded by explaining it, if only because such an explanation implicitly takes seriously the premise that Trump et al. take the premise seriously.

 

But here goes:

 

The United States does have a substantial trade deficit with Canada, for which the United States ought to be grateful, inasmuch as that deficit is mainly driven by Canada’s export of discounted crude oil to U.S. refineries, without which the price of gasoline and diesel—and everything that is moved, processed, or stored with the use of petroleum products—would be even higher than it is right now. (Diesel is damned near $6 a gallon at my local.) Canadian producers sell their oil at a discount to U.S. buyers for a couple of reasons: 1) Canadian pipelines mostly run north-south rather than east-west, and the only potential buyer north of Canada is Santa Claus; 2) Canadian oil is sulfurous, sludgy stuff, and there are not many refineries outside of the United States set up to efficiently handle that kind of crude.

 

It takes a special kind of stupid to believe that Canada is victimizing Americans by selling us oil at below-market rates. The case is closer to the opposite: Americans buy Canadian oil on sale because Canadian producers would have a hard time getting market rates for their oil from buyers in Europe or Asia. Crude oil is not an entirely undifferentiated commodity, and transporting the stuff is a major factor in the market. Canada desperately needs investment in its energy-export infrastructure but, alas, it is as difficult to build a pipeline there as it is in the United States, and so Canadian producers remain largely captive to the U.S. market—however fickle and abusive a trade partner the United States may prove to be.

 

The more meaningful points of trade friction between Canada and the United States are relatively minor and mostly parochial: Canadian and U.S. timber producers work under different pricing structures because most Canadian production happens on public land while most U.S. production happens on private land, and U.S. producers complain that the Canadian government should make it more expensive for Canadian producers to operate, because Americans who want to buy wood-framed houses simply must be protected from lower prices. Canada does maintain a very stupid regime of dairy protectionism that should be reformed—as, indeed, does the United States, which keeps milk prices artificially high in the U.S. market through the usual methods of government controls and trade restrictions.

 

I do not enjoy writing this, but: None of the preceding 384 words really matters. The current U.S.-Canada trade drama is not about U.S.-Canada trade: It is about the Trump administration’s amazing feat of compressing about 80 percent of the political experience of the Vietnam War into a few months, packing in all of the defeat and humiliation but sparing Americans—for now, at least—the draft and the body bags.

 

The world is laughing at Scott Bessent, and only in part for his greatest personal faux pas, i.e., being Scott Bessent. The proximate cause of today’s laughter is that, having announced an “economic D-Day” targeting Iran, the Trump administration has announced a program amounting to—as predicted in this space—approximately squat. Tehran’s economic lifeline is held by Xi Jinping, with China consuming about 80 percent of Iranian petroleum exports. A regime of “secondary sanctions”—meaning applying economic sanctions to those countries whose governments decline to enforce American sanctions on Washington’s behalf—would mean a direct and ugly economic confrontation with Beijing. It is worth remembering that China ran circles around the Trump administration the last time the incompetents and amateurs in the dopey red caps tried that, with Beijing using the threat of withholding rare-earth minerals to force Trump to cry whatever is Mandarin for “Uncle!” in about two minutes.

 

Trump does not have a free hand to beat on Iran because he does not have a free hand to beat on China. But beating on Canada is a low-risk proposition.

 

The Canadians might, someday, wish to do something about that.

He Went to Jared

By Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, August 25, 2026

 

American norms around diplomacy are strange. For instance, next month the president will roll out the red carpet for a nuclear-armed Asian communist dictator whose political enemies routinely end up in gulags. And no one has very much to say about it.

 

As it happens, the president is also hoping to meet this year with another nuclear-armed Asian communist dictator whose political enemies routinely end up in gulags. And pretty much everyone to the left of Kid Rock is appalled.

 

Likewise: Try to imagine the public’s reaction if U.S. officials reached out to the leadership of al-Qaeda for talks. (It’s not that implausible.) We must not meet with jihadists who’ve killed Americans, most of us would say, rightly outraged.

 

But last year a former member of al-Qaeda in Iraq who surely killed some American soldiers back in the day was given a grand reception at the White House—and, again, hardly anyone batted an eye. As of yesterday, the nation Ahmed al-Sharaa now leads is no longer considered a state sponsor of terror by the U.S. State Department.

 

Ronald Reagan correctly described the Soviet Union as “evil” yet met Mikhail Gorbachev repeatedly without much fuss. Richard Nixon paid his respects to Mao Zedong, whose policies killed tens of millions of Chinese, and his trip was considered a diplomatic master stroke.

 

Dialogue with monsters: It’s a fine line!

 

The lines around dialogue with hated domestic opponents can also be awfully fine.

 

Socialist heartthrob Zohran Mamdani has met with Donald Trump twice since being elected mayor of New York, appearing conspicuously chummy with the president before the cameras after their first meeting. (The two have reportedly also been known to text.) The left’s reaction to that, broadly speaking, was delight. Not only did Mamdani successfully disarm Trump’s usual demagoguery about “communists,” he scored a policy victory in the process.

 

That’s a reliable rule of thumb for dialogue with bad guys. If you believe you can get something useful out of them by talking, then talking is acceptable.

 

Not coincidentally, that’s also how House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries is defending his decision to meet recently with presidential son-in-law turned globetrotting envoy Jared Kushner. Clad, oddly, in a mint green polo shirt and matching Yankee cap, Jeffries cut a video for social media explaining that Kushner “asked for a meeting, and I took it to discuss the affordability crisis that exists—that is not a hoax.” (That last bit alludes to a notorious Trump sound bite.)

 

Jeffries believed he could get something useful out of the White House by talking, as Mamdani did. And not for the first time: As House minority leader, Jeffries was also part of the Democratic team that met with the president and J.D. Vance during last year’s shutdown negotiations. It’s not like he hasn’t spoken with Trump officials before. Surely the left wouldn’t care about his conversation with Kushner.

 

But the left does care, it turns out—a lot—and not just the usual progressive garment-renders. Clinton administration veteran James Carville has spent much of the summer bashing the Democratic Socialists of America, even threatening to leave the Democratic Party at one point if far-left streamer Hasan Piker continued to gain influence within it. But Carville sounded as irate as any hair-on-fire DSAer over Jeffries’ rendezvous.

 

“On one thing, on one thing, there is no disagreement. There’s unanimity,” Carville said in a video about his disagreements with the left. “And it is simply this: in the opinion of every Democrat in the United States, progressive, moderate, middle road, left, f—, I don’t know whatever you want, we believe one thing above all. These people are a pack of felons and traitors and you do not meet with them. You do not meet with them!”

 

Just as only Nixon could go to China, it appears only Zohran can go to the Oval Office. Why do Democrats have their undies in a twist about Hakeem Jeffries chatting with Jared Kushner?

 

Strange circumstances.

 

The answer has partly to do with leftist grievances against Jeffries, partly with grievances against Kushner, and partly with the distinctly odd circumstances of this encounter.

 

Start with the last. Why on earth is Jeffries meeting with Kushner less than three months before the midterms?

 

It’s not like there’s a chance of the two parties striking a grand bargain on the cost of living before November. Even if Republicans were game, Democrats wouldn’t dare throw them an electoral lifeline by handing them a bipartisan victory on affordability in the home stretch of the campaign. Jeffries should have refused any talks until the expected blue wave arrived this fall, then used his new leverage as presumptive House speaker to open talks with the White House from a position of strength.

 

Holding negotiations now, even informally via an envoy like Kushner, achieves nothing while handing the GOP a useful headline about how earnest it supposedly is about solving Americans’ cost crunch.

 

Another thing: Why was this meeting secret?

 

One reason Mamdani’s backslapping with the president was acceptable to Democrats is that it was above board. The visit was announced in advance and the two men met the press afterward to reveal what was discussed. Ditto for Jeffries’ meeting with Trump and Vance during the shutdown. All sides recognize that political necessity sometimes requires bitter opponents to converse.

 

What’s sketchy about the Kushner confab is that it wasn’t strictly necessary—and, as far as I can tell, might never have been disclosed if not for the reporting of the New York Times. Jeffries’ jolly green social media video about it was a simulacrum of transparency after the fact, posturing as being forthcoming once the Times had already let the cat out of the bag.

 

The episode has the curious odor of the Democratic leader in the House inexplicably doing the Trump White House a favor at a moment when Democratic fortunes are rising and Republican fortunes are declining. The left has endured nearly two years of remorseless Trumpian ruthlessness, counting the days until it regained some power to hit back, and now it’s at last on the cusp of doing so … and, instead of making a fist, its next speaker is extending an open hand to a presidential flunky.

 

And not just any flunky. For very different reasons, Kushner and Jeffries each have particular legitimacy problems with the left.

 

Kushner’s illegitimacy.

 

Legitimacy is the dividing line in the various examples I gave at the start of this newsletter, of course. Trump can meet with Xi Jinping without major objection for the same reason Reagan could meet with Gorbachev: For better or worse (i.e., worse), modern China and the Soviet Union amassed too much military, economic, and diplomatic power for America to effectively marginalize either.

 

We can try to stigmatize them all we like by calling them “illegitimate” and refusing to meet with them, but the rest of the world is going to engage because the rest of the world has no choice. So we’re better off talking instead.

 

Not so with weaker powers like North Korea and (until recently) Iran. Less formidable militarily and less influential economically, they can more plausibly be turned into pariah states by stigmatizing them diplomatically. That’s why it’s infuriating when Trump reaches out to Kim Jong Un or, to take another au courant example, Vladimir Putin. Rather than join the international (or at least Western) effort to isolate those rogue regimes in hopes of forcing them to behave, the president is undermining the pressure campaign by meeting with them.

 

Democrats’ reaction to Trump’s two terms as president illustrates the point about legitimacy, ironically. Resistance 1.0 was essentially an attempt to stigmatize the bad orange man as illegitimate: He lost the popular vote, after all, and his boorish authoritarianism was far out of whack with American civic traditions. Resistance 2.0 has all but given up on trying to stigmatize him and has pivoted instead to norms-busting solutions of its own designed to beat Trump and postliberals at their own game.

 

That might help explain why Mamdani got a pass for meeting with the president. As with China and the Soviets, there’s no point in trying to marginalize someone whom a majority (well, near-majority) of Americans legitimized on Election Day 2024. For the same reason, I doubt that a meeting between Jeffries and Trump or Jeffries and Marco Rubio would have caused much of a ruckus on the left.

 

But a meeting with Jared Kushner? That’s a problem. More so than any figure in the administration apart from the president’s own sons, Kushner epitomizes the corrupt cronyist irregularity of the Trumpist government.

 

When Carville sputters about “a pack of felons and traitors,” he’s alluding to the egregious conflicts of interest Kushner has created for himself by retaining his private business interests while conducting shuttle diplomacy. According to House Democrats, no less than 99 percent of the funding for Kushner’s multibillion-dollar investment firm comes from foreign nationals, including a notorious $2 billion from his pals in Saudi Arabia.

 

Normally that sort of thing would require ethics disclosures but, as of April, Kushner hadn’t filed any. Why? Because, as a “special government employee”—i.e., a volunteer, supposedly acting in his private capacity—he’s not bound by ethics regulations, according to the White House.

 

Civically, in other words, he’s a symbol of a grotesquely rogue regime whose apparatchiks flagrantly monetize their access to America’s monarch. Kushner’s business dealings should be one of the very first targets for Democratic oversight next year. Yet, rather than stigmatize him by refusing to meet, Jeffries opted to legitimize him by granting him an audience.

 

Kushner isn’t even supposed to be involved in domestic matters. If Jeffries was keen to talk to someone in the White House about affordability, why didn’t he call up Scott Bessent or Howard Lutnick or some other figure with power over economic policy? When I say that their meeting felt like the Democrat was doing his counterpart a favor, that’s what I mean.

 

Jeffries’ illegitimacy.

 

That brings us to Jeffries’ own legitimacy problem: The left doesn’t trust him.

 

They do trust Mamdani, which is why a private chat between the mayor and Trump raised no alarms. There was no concern that an ardent socialist might be swayed from his beliefs by the president, in the same way that there was no concern that a hawkish Cold Warrior like Nixon might be swayed by Mao.

 

That’s what “only Nixon could go to China” meant: A Democratic president, being more sympathetic to leftist ideology, couldn’t be trusted to the same degree to drive a hard bargain with the commies. Ditto for Trump meeting with Putin, given the president’s glaring authoritarian sympathies.

 

The leftists pummeling Jeffries today for meeting with Kushner regard the summit between the two as more like Trump-Putin than Nixon-Mao. The House Democrat is too simpatico with certain right-wing positions—support for Israel, specifically—to reliably represent his party’s interests in negotiations with a White House, they believe.

 

“Back home in New York City we consider Jerusalem to be the sixth borough,” Jeffries joked in a 2020 speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). That rhetoric was unexceptional at the time, as was hauling in hundreds of thousands of dollars in fundraising from pro-Israel groups and visiting the Jewish state as part of an AIPAC-funded congressional junket. Things are different on the left in 2026, causing the would-be speaker to inch away from his old allies—although, as recently as last month, he opposed a House bill to end aid to Israel that dozens of other Democrats supported.

 

Last summer a popular left-wing radio host derisively dubbed Jeffries “AIPAC Shakur,” a nickname that’s stuck on Twitter, and some Israel-skeptic progressives set to enter Congress next year are openly ambivalent about being led by him. You would think he’d be sensitive to all of that and avoid secret meetings with the diplomatic face of Donald Trump’s pro-Israel Middle East policy, one whose family “has longstanding and ongoing deals with major Israeli financial institutions” and is personally friendly with Benjamin Netanyahu. But no.

 

“[I] personally think we deserve an opposition party that doesn’t compromise with the people who want to turn Gaza into waterfront vacation rentals for white people,” one Jeffries critic tweeted, referring to one of the president’s most insane ideas.

 

The speaker-in-waiting has another problem, though. As head of the Democratic House caucus since 2023, he’s presided during an era that saw the president escape legal accountability for his coup plot, return to the White House as a “soft” autocrat bent on retribution, and reduce Congress to a pitiful Duma-fied shell of representative democracy. Not a great track record for an opposition leader.

 

None of that is Jeffries’ fault, his supporters would retort, with justification. The House minority has virtually no power.

 

True, but why voters do and don’t trust certain politicians isn’t always rational. (They elected Donald J. Trump twice. QED.) In the same way, perhaps, that Republican politicians who failed to thwart Barack Obama are presumptively untrustworthy to the right-wing base, Democratic politicians who failed to thwart Trump might be growing presumptively untrustworthy to the left-wing base. That was my theory for why Resistance 1.0 candidates are losing primaries this year, in fact: For all their righteous opposition to the president during his first term, when push came to shove, they failed miserably to prevent a kakistocratic restoration.

 

Jeffries, one of the party establishment’s two most powerful leaders, is obviously part of that failure. By definition, he didn’t fight fight fight effectively enough to avert a total takeover of government by one of the stupidest and most vicious political movements since the Civil War. Why would Democrats trust him now to drive a hard bargain with Kushner, let alone with Trump?

 

The caption Jeffries placed on his video about their meeting said it all: “No one from the Trump Cartel is getting a pass.” So little do left-wing Democrats trust him to fight that he has to reassure them explicitly that he really will investigate the administration’s corruption as speaker. I’m not sure that the Tea Party ever reached a fever of suspicion about John Boehner’s motives as blazing as that.

 

I think the Kushner confab says less about Jeffries’ willingness to hold the Trump administration to account than about his instincts. It’s silly to doubt whether House Democrats will come after the president and his toadies, as there’s an endless amount of political ore to be mined from the endless supply of scandal Trumpworld has provided for them. But it isn’t silly to doubt whether a guy who can’t read the room well enough to avoid looking chummy with an especially shady Trump aide 10 weeks before an election has the chops to prosper in a critical new role.

 

Nixon can go to China, but an establishment Democrat can’t go to Jared. It bodes poorly for Hakeem Jeffries that he needed to find that out the hard way.

The Military and Politics Don’t Mix

By Mike Nelson

Tuesday, August 25, 2026

 

Jason Watson, an active-duty major in the U.S. Air Force, was detained and ordered into “pretrial custody” (the military equivalent of being held without bail) last Tuesday. While he hadn’t been formally charged at that time, it seems fairly clear that Watson will face charges under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) stemming from his repeated public criticism of President Donald Trump and demands for the president’s impeachment. The day before his detention, Watson criticized Trump in a primetime interview on CNN while clearly identifying himself as a member of the U.S. military. (His lawyer has suggested the arrest might be related to Watson’s refusal to wear his uniform at work.)

 

This is actually Watson’s second legal entanglement due to his dramatic displays and big mouth: On July 1 the Capitol Police detained Watson when he staged a one-man protest while in uniform (although the specific reason for this detention was his presence on a restricted part of the Capitol grounds without a congressional escort). His chain of command was no doubt preparing charges based on those antics, but it seems the CNN appearance prompted the latest detention.

 

Many prominent Democrats, who may agree with the specific claims Watson made about the president’s failure to seek congressional approval for the war in Iran or broader issues of public corruption, have spoken out vociferously against Watson’s detention and the punishment he will no doubt receive at the end of military legal proceedings. Pennsylvania Democrat Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, herself an Air Force veteran who should, therefore, know better, not only applauded Watson but specifically praised him for having worn his uniform while he made explicitly political statements. Rep. Al Green, a huge fan of impeachment resolutions—and the sponsor of the Watson event at the Capitol—said Watson’s example provided “the kind of courage necessary to inspire others.”

 

In fact, Watson represents a dangerous, unprofessional, and self-important impulse that should be confronted at every turn. Nobody, regardless of the virtue of their arguments or the degree to which one agrees with them, should politicize the military, attempt to speak on behalf of the military, or imply a uniform opinion among service members or, in fact, suggest the military, as an institution, has an opinion on matters of politics.

 

Many observers, potentially unfamiliar with military order and discipline, suggest that punishing Watson infringes upon his First Amendment rights. But service members are governed by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which has more restrictive prohibitions on speech and conduct than the freedoms enjoyed by civilians. Among other prohibitions, Article 88 clearly states, “Any commissioned officer who uses contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President, Congress, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of a military department, the Secretary of Homeland Security, or the Governor or legislature of any State, Commonwealth, or possession in which he is on duty or present shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.” This would apply to Watson under any circumstances, but it’s even more egregious that he chose to criticize the president publicly while also wearing his uniform, a fact that Houlahan thought was praiseworthy.

 

Many of those rightfully condemning Watson’s behavior seem to have been less critical of the same offenses when they agreed with the criticism being leveled. In 2021, then-Marine Lt. Col. Stu Scheller produced and distributed a video in which he criticized senior military commanders and civilian leaders for their handling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Scheller was tried via court-martial, as Watson is likely to be, and pleaded guilty to six UCMJ offenses, including the previously mentioned Article 88, as well as Article 89 (disrespect toward superior commissioned officers).

 

Both Watson and Scheller used their positions in the military to criticize their political leadership, failing in their duty as military officers to refrain from either endorsement or criticism of the decisions made by the civilians who lead the country. But Scheller has found status as a bit of a cause célèbre among the MAGA right. At the time, his lawyer, Tim Parlatore, appeared on Fox and Friends Weekend to make his case for Scheller to receive an honorable discharge rather than more severe punishment, with the Fox host on the other side being one Pete Hegseth (Scheller received a general discharge—the level beneath an honorable discharge but not as damning as a dishonorable discharge). Hegseth invoked Scheller during his 2025 confirmation hearing, praising Scheller’s criticism of the Biden administration rather than criticizing his unprofessional behavior. Scheller has since been appointed as a senior adviser within the Pentagon. Parlatore, who was also Hegseth’s personal lawyer as he faced allegations of sexual misconduct, has been brought into the Pentagon himself as a Navy reservist and adviser to Hegseth at the same time that he represents, in a personal capacity, military officers whose career advancement Hegseth decides—a profound conflict of interest.

 

Watson and Scheller using their uniforms to lend credibility to their causes is not only unprofessional and illegal but is intended to create the perception of larger institutional support for their statements or to boost attention. Nobody would pay attention to a random citizen holding a sign on Capitol Hill calling for Trump’s impeachment or a video calling Biden’s shameful handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal exactly that. It was precisely because Watson and Scheller chose to violate their responsibilities that they received the attention they sought. It’s also why some of those no longer bound by the constraints of the UCMJ try to use their uniforms to influence public opinion, just as John Kerry did when he protested the Vietnam War or as serial fabricator Anthony Aguilar and perennial protester Josephine Guilbeau did when they disrupted a congressional hearing to protest U.S. support for Israel. Even if these former military members are no longer governed by the strict prohibitions of good order and discipline, they shamefully use their status as veterans to undercut the belief in a rigidly apolitical military.

 

The purpose of keeping the military apolitical is not just to prevent critical statements against one side or the other, but also to prevent the inverse—the military or members of the military should not give endorsements to specific policies or to any political party. Neutrality requires neither condemnation nor commendation. But the current administration, whether through explicit endorsement or tacit permission, is allowing the kinds of obsequious and laudatory statements that have become the first item of business in Trump administration Cabinet meetings to start to become, to a degree, part of military culture.

 

Chris LaNeve, then a lieutenant general and commander of the 8^th Army based in Korea, zoomed into President Trump’s inaugural ball to heap fawning praise on the president. “Congratulations on your victory as the 47^th president of the United States  … Welcome back, Mr. President.” It was odd that LaNeve, despite several layers of command between him and the commander in chief, would dial in, the only commander to do so, to make sure the president was aware of his support—it would have been odd for any commander to do so. But it seems to have gotten the president’s attention, and that of those looking to stay in the president’s good graces. “(I)s this man central casting or what? If I’m doing a movie, I’d pick him to play my lead,” Trump said after LaNeve’s comments that night, and in a way, he has picked him to play his lead.

 

In February 2025, Hegseth fired Air Force Lt. Gen. Jennifer Short as his senior military adviser and named LaNeve as her replacement. Eight months later, Hegseth fired Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. James Mingus and named LaNeve to replace him. Six months after that, Hegseth fired the occupant of the Army’s top job, Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George, and—to quote Gomer Pyle—surprise, surprise, surprise, LaNeve has been serving as the acting chief of staff since and is Hegseth’s pick to permanently fill the job, although he seems to face some pushback from GOP senators.

 

The message is implicit but clear: A way to get ahead in Trump’s military is to show slavish devotion to Trump and Hegseth above and beyond dutiful execution of their directives as legitimate members of the chain of command. It’s why active-duty Army officers feel confident enough to criticize members of Congress knowing that, instead of a reprimand for their lack of professionalism, they will receive the pat on the head and the attaboy they desperately desire. Instead of reinforcing a commitment to an apolitical military, this kind of reward system, and lack of enforcement, encourages partisanship—as long as the unprofessional political grandstanding goes the “right” way.

 

Of course, the perception of military support for Republicans and contempt for Democrats is what the administration wants, norms and guardrails be damned. It’s why the vice president resorted to cheap punch lines about former President Biden’s infirmities in front of a crowd of sailors and Marines at NAS Oceana (ironically on the same day that Watson staged his demonstration at the Capitol). It’s why Trump has done campaign-style rallies to troops, whom he commands, at Fort Bragg and at America 250 events. It’s why Hegseth demanded an audience of his top generals and sergeants major to rail against the previous administration.

 

The military represents the legitimate use of the government’s force against foreign enemies and adversaries and, in extreme circumstances under specific conditions, against domestic ones as well. It does not, and cannot, come to represent an armed force with a desired outcome in political disputes between Americans and the politicians who represent them. Maintaining the legitimacy of the military requires rigid commitment, to both the letter and spirit of the law, by the service members who comprise it and the politicians who command it. Sadly, too many people prefer partisanship when it favors their side over a principled commitment to an apolitical military—yet another erosion of longstanding norms during the current era of American politics.

Why European Innovation Lags Behind the U.S.

By Eli Kronenberg

Tuesday, August 25, 2026

 

In September 2024, former Italian Prime Minister and European Central Bank President Mario Draghi released a European Commission report taking stock of the EU’s slowing productivity and innovation. What he found was startling.

 

Over the previous 50 years, Europe had produced zero companies created from scratch with a market capitalization above 100 billion euros ($116.7 billion), while in the same time span six American companies now valued at more than $1 trillion had launched. Since 2013, 137 venture capital funds larger than $1 billion had been created in the U.S., while only 11 such funds had emerged in the EU. And when it comes to cutting-edge technology, 61 percent of global funding for artificial intelligence startups went to American companies, compared with just 6 percent to companies in the EU. That’s despite the EU having a larger population than the U.S. by over 100 million people.

 

Taken together, these numbers paint a clear picture of a stagnating European economy where the conditions needed for innovation and growth lag significantly behind the U.S. and China. Although Europe has had no trouble producing a substantial volume of startups, almost none have grown into globally dominant companies. In few areas is this phenomenon more pronounced than in technology-intensive sectors. The EU’s share of global corporate research and development spending fell from 25 percent in 2004 to 17 percent in 2024, and that drop-off was especially steep in the electronic equipment and technology hardware sectors, according to calculations by Italian economist Andrea Dugo. So how did Europe fall so far behind, so quickly?

 

Europe’s costly fragmentation.

 

One variable that some economists observing Europe’s sluggish technology sector pinpoint is the continent’s lack of a true single market and the regulatory fragmentation that occurs as a result. Differences in national regulations, taxes, and legal systems mean that a company attempting to expand across Europe often has to deal with multiple sets of rules.

 

“Europe is like a very slow elephant,” Adriana Hoyos, an adjunct economics professor at IE University in Spain, told The Dispatch. “You have European regulation, then you have the national regulations, then you have state regulations with all these completely different ways of behaving.”

 

The Draghi report found that the EU had roughly 100 tech-focused laws and more than 270 regulatory authorities who govern some facet of digital networks across the bloc, including telecommunications and data protection regulators. For example, the AI Act—the EU’s comprehensive regulatory framework for AI passed in 2024—imposes different compliance burdens on AI models depending on which category of risk level they fall into. Although these safety measures can be crucial to preventing abuses in areas like law enforcement, hiring, and education, some provisions may impose disproportionate costs on young technology companies.

 

Understanding Europe’s market segmentation is especially crucial when analyzing its deficit in venture capital investment relative to the U.S. In a January article, Harvard Business School investment banking professor Josh Lerner pointed out that Europe lags significantly behind the U.S. in both the total quantity of its venture capital spending and the return on that investment. While only a tiny percentage of total U.S. businesses are backed by venture capital, half of all American companies that have gone public in the last two decades relied on venture capital funding, and nearly 90 percent of corporate research and development spending by young publicly traded firms is undertaken by venture-backed companies. “All the innovation in the United States being done by dynamic, young, recently public companies is basically being done by venture-capital-backed firms,” Lerner told The Dispatch.

 

While tech companies seeking to grow and raise capital in the U.S. have access to a large public market in Nasdaq—a reliable aid for young entrepreneurial firms looking to go public—European IPO markets are divided among smaller national exchanges. In the late 1990s, a group of venture investors launched a Pan-European stock exchange called EASDAQ to serve as an EU-wide market, but a series of competing regional markets soon emerged and, by 2003, EASDAQ had failed to make a sufficient impact and was shut down.

 

The lack of a continent-wide exchange similar to Nasdaq means promising European firms looking to scale up may be more likely to move to the U.S. for better access to capital, to remain private, or to sell to a larger firm. Between 2008 and 2021, nearly 30 percent of European startups that eventually became valued at more than $1 billion moved their headquarters abroad, with the vast majority of those moving to the U.S, according to the Draghi report.

 

Europe’s difficulty holding on to its most entrepreneurial citizens and their companies is not just a matter of a segmented market, but also of a more difficult tax environment. One example Lerner draws from is Norway, where, according to a recent paper by doctoral candidate Christine Blandhol, an increase in the wealth tax rate preceded a rise in the out-migration rate from 0.2 percent to 2 percent for affected households—and 40 percent of the departing households were active firm owners. And, between 2014 and 2024, the number of U.S. millionaires rose 78 percent, while the number of millionaires in Germany and France grew only 10 and 7 percent, respectively, and the United Kingdom’s share of resident millionaires declined 9 percent.

 

Further fueling its innovation advantage, the U.S. attracts a substantial number of foreign students to its university system, many of whom go on to become entrepreneurs. In an article published in April, Hoyos noted that roughly 75 percent of European Ph.D. students at American universities remain in the U.S. at least five years after graduation. “I have students I teach at IE, and I have students from all nationalities, and … the ones that are interested in technology, basically all of them want to go to the U.S. to work or to study” for advanced degrees, Hoyos said.

 

While tax and regulatory regimes can play a role in fostering or discouraging innovation, some have argued that differing notions of productivity also figure in. As Nicolai Tangen, the CEO of Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, put it bluntly in a 2024 Financial Times interview, “We are not very ambitious. I should be careful about talking about work-life balance, but the Americans just work harder.” Indeed, labor is more strictly regulated in the EU, with the Working Time Directive guaranteeing workers in all member states at least four weeks of paid time off per year, time that cannot be replaced by a monetary stipend. In the U.S., meanwhile, 31 percent of workers have no paid time off, and the average American receives 11 days of paid vacation per year, just above half the European minimum.

 

Could the Trump administration provide an impetus for change?

 

While the U.S. has historically drawn the best and brightest from around the globe to contribute to its innovation edge, whether that advantage will continue isn’t entirely clear. President Donald Trump’s restrictive immigration policies, combined with his “America First” trade and foreign policy, could give Europe and the rest of the world an opportunity to close the gap.

 

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the administration is weighing a $100,000 fee for all foreign students to work in the U.S. upon graduation, after a policy charging that same fee to companies seeking H-1B visas for workers was struck down by a judge in June. In July, the Trump administration also issued a final rule eliminating what it called the “duration of status loophole,” which allowed foreign students on F-1 visas to remain in the U.S. for the duration of their academic program, without setting an exact expiration date on their stay.

 

Lerner recalled a joke he used to tell members of the Canadian government whom he advised. “My joke with them is that the first Trump administration did more for Canadian entrepreneurship and venture capital than 30 years of Canadian government policy ever accomplished,” he said. “Which is to say that when you think about the great successes that the U.S. has had, a lot of that is driven by immigrants, who are just incredibly creative.”

 

Additionally, Trump’s continued pressure on NATO allies to invest more in their own defense capabilities could boost European innovation, especially as the war in Ukraine rages on. The European Commission has acknowledged as much in its Readiness 2030 plan, which could enable up to 800 billion euros ($935 billion) in additional defense spending over the next five years, including by mobilizing “private capital.”

 

However, according to Hoyos, European leaders will need to adopt a more fundamental mindset shift in how they approach artificial intelligence and other technological innovation before the continent can end its decades-long slide in economic influence. “I think Europe is clearly lost [in the] technological world,” Hoyos said. “They don’t see the priority, they don’t see how fast this is going, and they think it’s something that’s optional.”