The Unbearable Lightness of American Restraint

By Ludovic Hood

Wednesday, September 30, 2026

 

Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being turned on a cruel paradox: A life unburdened by weight feels like freedom until the weightlessness itself becomes unbearable.

 

A similar temptation inspires “restraintism,” a school of foreign-policy thought that has gained traction among the populist right, including influential pockets of the Trump administration. Reports this month that the Pentagon is weighing cuts of between 25,000 and 40,000 troops in Europe — while Russia escalates its hybrid warfare on the Continent — mark the latest turn in a fierce behind-the-scenes debate.

 

The “restrainers” promise a lighter foreign policy: narrower interests, an end to wars of choice, and the use of force only as a last resort. After two decades of costly, inconclusive war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the appeal is easy to understand. However, a great power cannot shed its mass simply because it has grown weary of the weight.

 

The populist-right restrainers are not the Barry Posen realists who would prune “liberal hegemony” while keeping a balance-of-power watch on Eurasia. Nor are they progressive budget-cutters who recast strategy around “human security” and climate policy. Their political project is more radical.

 

Many of these restrainers would retrench to the Western Hemisphere; they regard NATO as a bad bargain and view Ukraine as a problem for Europe to solve. Some see value in Pacific alliances that constrain China, though they demand more quid pro quo from the Japanese, Koreans, and Australians; others argue for pulling back to the second island chain.

 

Restrainers are not two-dimensional isolationists. They support international trade, diplomacy, and a strong military with which to safeguard the homeland. What they reject is the post–Cold War claim that Americans’ security and prosperity are bound up with global stability, specifically the order made possible by Pax Americana.

 

The restrainers’ diagnosis contains kernels of truth. The United States arguably overreached after its triumph over the Soviet Union; nation-building projects proved unbearably costly; threat inflation became a Beltway habit; and allies underinvested because they could. But none of that makes the remedy of restraint sound.

 

While geography and a nuclear arsenal make America difficult to invade, they do not make us immune to coercion. A hostile power that dominates Asia or Europe need not land a soldier in California or Connecticut to coerce markets, choke energy routes, weaponize supply chains, and force American firms and U.S. partners to live on its terms. Homeland security is downstream of he who writes the rules beyond the water’s edge.

 

Slogans such as “strong defense” and “diplomacy first” are compatible with almost any worldview — the fight is about thresholds and presence. If restrainers would deter China while drawing down in Europe and the Gulf, they owe an account of why Taipei, Tokyo, Seoul, and Canberra should treat American commitments as more credible after Washington has advertised its eagerness to leave. A smaller forward presence does not make diplomacy easier. It makes stalling, probing, and seizing cheaper for adversaries.

 

“Allies will do more if we do less” is a hope, not a plan. Free-riding is real, as are abandonment panic, nuclear hedging, and bandwagoning with the nearest bully. Spheres of influence, sold as sophisticated great-power politics, mean a Russian veto over Ukraine; a Chinese veto over Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea; and an Iranian veto over the Gulf and the Red Sea.

 

The record of restraint is not encouraging. On at least three occasions in the 20th century, Washington narrowed its commitments and advertised new lines in the sand — and then watched adversaries cross former red lines, leading to conflicts that were more costly than if the United States had stood its ground.

 

In 1919, after U.S. intervention proved decisive in ending the First World War, America’s political class chose to withdraw from European security, spurning President Woodrow Wilson’s vision of collective security and the League of Nations. Isolationism carried the day in the 1920s and 1930s, but it emboldened two revisionist powers: Japan to the east and Germany to the west. The Axis’s subsequent declaration of war on America in December 1941 brought Washington and the American people into a conflict far costlier than early engagement might have required.

 

Less than five years after World War II, American attempts to prioritize commitments in the Pacific backfired when Secretary of State Dean Acheson laid out an American defensive perimeter that ran through Japan and the Philippines but omitted the Korean Peninsula. Within months, Soviet-backed North Korea invaded South Korea. The United States then fought a three-year war costing 36,000 lives, essentially to restore a frontier that its leaders had implied was not worth defending.

 

In the 1970s, a war-weary America retrenched in the wake of the Vietnam denouement, counting on Cold War equilibrium to deliver stability. What followed, however, was a decade of Soviet and proxy advances, from Angola and Ethiopia to South Yemen and, in 1979, Afghanistan, capped by the humiliation in Tehran. Adversaries had read American fatigue as opportunity — and Jimmy Carter, a president who longed for a foreign policy of restraint based on “moral idealism,” was compelled to reassert American hard-power redlines in the Middle East via his Carter Doctrine.

 

The same dynamics are visible in Eastern Europe. Russia’s 2022 invasion followed 15 years of unanswered probing: Georgia in 2008, Crimea and the Donbas in 2014, then a full-scale war now in its fifth year. A settlement that ratifies conquest would not close the file. It would signal to Moscow — and to Beijing — that aggression and nuclear threats can move borders. That is why publicly floating a large-scale U.S. drawdown in Europe, while Russian drones and sabotage campaigns test NATO members, is not burden-shifting. It prices the next grab as a bargain.

 

The historical record is not an argument for reflexive primacy. Responsible American leadership means bearing the weight where American power is irreplaceable, coaxing rich allies to carry more of the load, and avoiding nation-building projects. The opposite of reckless hegemony is not frictionless withdrawal — it is a visible, potentially costly presence in the theaters that will decide whether the next decade is contested or conceded.

 

Restraint has its appeal, but it belies what follows when America does less: emboldened rivals, rattled allies, and rules written by states that do not share core American interests. Pulling forces back from Europe or the Pacific will not insulate Washington from great-power conflict; rather, it all but ensures a more costly reckoning down the road. Lightness feels elegant, right up until the floor gives way.

Make American Democracy Great Again

By Jianli Yang

Tuesday, September 29, 2026

 

The world watched last week’s Trump-Xi summit with the familiar expectation that the leaders of the world’s two most powerful countries might finally unveil a “grand deal.” The same expectation surrounded their Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Busan, South Korea, last November and President Trump’s state visit to China in May. Each time, observers were disappointed: no historic reconciliation, no decisive confrontation, no grand bargain. This week’s summit, with its extraordinary pomp and ceremony, was therefore widely dismissed as a made-for-TV event with few deliverables. I think this misses what actually happened: The grand deal is already taking shape. It is simply not the kind people have been looking for.

 

There is a line in an old Chinese poem: One searches for her a thousand times in the crowd, only suddenly to turn around and find her standing where the lights are dim. We have been searching for a grand deal in communiqués, tariff schedules, and dramatic concessions. But the real deal is emerging through the increasingly frequent interactions between Trump and Xi themselves: a tacit understanding about the nature of their competition and, above all, that neither side currently wants to overturn the table.

 

After seven years of trade conflict, the Busan summit crystallized an uncomfortable reality. Each country possesses tools capable of inflicting serious economic damage on the other. Neither can easily force the other to capitulate, and both would pay dearly for unrestricted economic warfare. The resulting trade truce bought something more important than tariff relief: time.

 

What has followed has been extraordinary diplomatic choreography. Trump visited China in May; four months later, Xi came to Washington. Both received unusually elaborate treatment. More meetings are planned. Behind the pageantry is recognition of a strategic fact: G-2 has become a reality. But it is a realist G-2.

 

Realism begins not with what we wish the other country to be but with what it is: an opponent with the power, interests, ambitions, and capacity to hurt us. Trump and Xi are, in different ways, masters of transactional politics. Neither expects the other to convert. The emerging framework rests on mutual recognition of power and calculations of national interest.

 

That does not make the framework stable. The Chinese saying is blunt: “One mountain cannot accommodate two tigers.” International-relations scholars call the corresponding danger the Thucydides Trap: When a rising power challenges an established one, structural pressures can push them toward war. But Xi has repeatedly insisted that the Thucydides Trap can be overcome.

 

Perhaps. But Xi cannot know that. Trump cannot know it. Nobody can. That uncertainty explains the emphasis on “strategic stability.” What Trump and Xi appear to be constructing is neither friendship nor surrender. Competition continues. Conflicts continue. Each side still seeks advantage. But both have concluded that now is not the time to flip the table. If a showdown can be avoided, avoid it. If it cannot be avoided, postpone it. Meanwhile, accumulate strength. That, I believe, is the Trump-Xi grand deal. It is not a treaty. It is an understanding about how to compete.

 

Xi gave it its most audacious formulation during this visit: The “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” and making America great again can “go hand in hand” and even reinforce each other. Let’s call Xi’s objective MCGA — Make China Great Again.

 

Can MAGA and MCGA really reinforce each other? Taken literally, the proposition strains credibility. America wants to restore manufacturing, maintain technological primacy, strengthen its military, and preserve global influence. China wants technological self-sufficiency, industrial dominance, military modernization, greater global influence, and national “rejuvenation.” Their ambitions collide precisely where each matters most.

 

MAGA-plus-MCGA is therefore less geopolitical reality than useful strategic fiction. Both leaders nevertheless have reasons to behave as though it might be true.

 

Trump places American reindustrialization at the center of MAGA. The new U.S.–China Boards of Trade and Investment could allow selected Chinese capital and technology to contribute to American manufacturing.

 

Taiwan presents the harder test. For Xi, “reunification” is inseparable from national rejuvenation. Beijing says Xi urged Washington to adopt the “correct position of opposing ‘Taiwan independence.’” Trump has not publicly accepted that formulation. America traditionally says it does not support Taiwan independence, not that it opposes it. Yet the White House summit account conspicuously omitted Taiwan, while a roughly $14 billion Taiwan arms package has remained unsigned for months.

 

More strikingly, the White House shared that the “United States and China were allies in World War II and fought side by side to win the war” against Japan. This version of history is errant. America’s formal Chinese ally was the Republic of China under Chiang Kai-shek, not the People’s Republic, which did not exist until 1949. That wartime ROC survives today on Taiwan.

 

Why emphasize such deliberately broad historical language now? One possible interpretation, perhaps the only logical one, is that strategic ambiguity is becoming even more ambiguous — about who are friends and who are adversaries, extending beyond whether America would defend Taiwan toward how Washington places Taiwan, and perhaps Japan, within its larger accommodation with Beijing. This does not prove that the U.S.’s Taiwan policy has changed. But this new friend-or-foe ambiguity has strategic consequences, which help explain the unease in Taipei and Tokyo.

 

There is another foundation beneath the new G-2. Trump and Xi increasingly acknowledge and praise each other’s civilizations. Trump invoked Confucius during his China visit; at the National Archives, he contrasted America’s 250 years with China’s thousands. Xi, in turn, praised America’s distinctive founding spirit.

 

Admirable diplomacy. But something is missing. The leaders can celebrate each other’s civilizations while avoiding the enormous difference between their political systems. And here an apparently unrelated event during Xi’s visit becomes important.

 

The White House had barred CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from White House grounds. The organizations sued. Other major media organizations stood with them. Then U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, appointed by Trump himself, ordered their access restored. The administration complied.

 

Consider how strange this must appear from Beijing. A president appoints a judge. The judge later rules against the president. The president is angry. The ruling nevertheless takes effect.

 

That is constitutional government. But in Xi’s China, the media must “bear the Party’s surname.” In America, the media does not bear Trump’s surname, the Republican Party’s surname, or the Democratic Party’s surname. Presidents can attack journalists; journalists can attack presidents; courts can restrain presidents; and presidents remain presidents.

 

This is not peripheral to the competition with China. It is part of what America is competing with. Talking about competition. Nowhere is that more consequential than in artificial intelligence.

 

Trump and Xi deserve credit for establishing a dialogue on “super intelligence” and a bilateral communication channel for AI incidents. Advanced AI can enable cyberattacks, manipulate information, affect weapons and critical infrastructure, and increasingly act with degrees of autonomy its creators may not fully anticipate. Its benefits will not respect national borders. Neither will its dangers.

 

Yet Washington and Beijing remain obsessed with one question: Who will win? The harder question is: What does winning mean?

 

Suppose America develops the world’s most powerful AI and dominates compute and robotics but concludes along the way that defeating China requires adopting China’s methods of surveillance, information control, centralized data collection, and political management. Would that constitute an American victory? If America must become more like China to defeat China, China has achieved something remarkable without firing a shot.

 

This is why freedom should not be the sentimental appendix to American strategy. It is part of the strategy. And it points to the weakness of the Trump-Xi grand deal: It is highly personalized. Particularly on the American side, it is difficult to imagine this arrangement emerging so rapidly and dramatically under another president.

 

But Trump and Xi will eventually leave the stage. What survives them?

 

Realism is indispensable. America should recognize Chinese power, negotiate where interests overlap, deter where they conflict, and avoid turning every disagreement into an ideological crusade. But realism works until it does not. Leaders change. Interests change. Relative power changes. Miscalculations happen. America therefore needs something beneath realism, not instead of it, but underneath it.

 

American democracy itself is unquestionably troubled. The information revolution has amplified polarization, rewarded outrage, fragmented the public sphere, and weakened institutional trust. AI may intensify these problems. No serious defender of democracy should pretend otherwise.

 

But the answer to malfunctioning democracy is not less constitutionalism. It is better constitutionalism. This is where a third acronym belongs beside MAGA and MCGA: MADGA — Make American Democracy Great Again.

 

I do not mean another crusade to remake China in America’s image. MADGA means something more conservative: repairing and preserving the constitutional inheritance that made American power possible, independent courts, a free press, political competition, peaceful transfers of power, federalism, private enterprise, protection for dissent, and the capacity to discover mistakes and correct them.

 

Authoritarian systems can move faster because they suppress friction. Democracies often appear disorderly because they institutionalize it. But friction is not necessarily weakness. In engineering, friction prevents machines from spinning out of control. In politics, constitutional friction can prevent a powerful country from making an enormous mistake that nobody is permitted to identify.

 

That becomes more important in the age of AI. A superintelligent authoritarian state may become extraordinarily efficient. It may also become extraordinarily efficient at being wrong.

 

America’s advantage should therefore not consist merely of better chips, larger data centers, stronger armies, or more capable AI. It should include a system in which enormous power remains subject to law, competing institutions, independent scrutiny, and citizens who retain the right to say no.

 

That is not idealism. It is national strategy. MAGA and MCGA may coexist for a time. The realist G-2 Trump and Xi are constructing may even help prevent two nuclear superpowers from stumbling into catastrophe. But America should enter it knowing what it seeks to preserve.

 

Something happened during Xi’s visit that was much smaller than a G-2 summit and, in another sense, much larger. A president tried to exclude journalists he despised. Other journalists stood with them. They went to court. A judge appointed by that president ruled against him. And the journalists walked back through the White House gates. Xi may regard that as evidence of American disorder. Americans should recognize it as evidence of American strength.

 

Trump and Xi may be right that MAGA and MCGA need not lead to war. But America should add one condition to its grand bargain, a condition imposed not on China, but on itself: In competing with China, America must remain America. MAGA needs to be committed to the democratic ideals that are at the core of what the country is all about.

The Makings of a Prewar World

By Thomas Wright

Wednesday, September 23, 2026

 

Donald Trump offered perhaps the clearest summation yet of his worldview in an otherwise discursive address to the United Nations General Assembly yesterday. Defending the American takeover of Venezuelan oil, he invoked an old maxim: “To the victor belongs the spoils.” He then presented Iran with a choice between accepting his terms and being driven “into hell with no chance of survival.”

 

These remarks are the latest sign that world politics is entering an era when might makes right. Yet Trump is only one of the leaders driving this rupture from the post–World War II international order. Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping have also broken the order, although their methods differ profoundly—morally, legally, and otherwise. American policy may change when Trump leaves office in January 2029, but Putin and Xi may remain in power well into the next decade.

 

A new American president will likely not be able to restore the old order or create a better one, even if they want to. Their greatest challenge will be to arrest the slide.

 

International order is a notoriously vague and politically contested concept. Many leaders in the global South, along with Western critics, reject the idea that the United States ever consistently abided by a rules-based system. They point to Western military interventions, double standards, and the unequal distribution of power within international institutions. But the old order’s failures do not mean that its restraints were meaningless.

 

In his first book, A World Restored, Henry Kissinger argued that a stable and legitimate order rests on a limited consensus: an understanding among the major powers about what he called the permissible aims and methods of foreign policy. Governments can compete intensely and violate rules without seeking to overturn the system itself. The danger arises when a major power becomes so dissatisfied with the limits imposed upon it that it adopts a revolutionary foreign policy.

 

Under the old international order, major powers did not, as a general rule, conquer and annex the territory of their neighbors. The global trading system was based on reciprocity, tariffs were historically low, and markets were relatively open. And, although it was the world’s strongest country, the United States exercised enough self-discipline to allow its allies to grow into genuine partners, not vassals to be constantly squeezed for concessions.

 

Over the past decade, and decisively since the pandemic, that consensus about permissible conduct has collapsed. Putin launched the largest war in Europe since World War II with his invasion of Ukraine in 2022. He more than anyone has revived the idea that countries can expand their borders through the use of force. Combined Russian- and Ukrainian-military casualties (those killed, wounded, and missing) have reached approximately 2 million people. European governments have accused Russia of an expanding campaign of sabotage, cyberattacks, arson, and drone incursions below the threshold of conventional war. North Korea has intervened directly in this war, and many other nations are indirectly involved—China and Iran on the side of Russia; Europe, the United States (at least under Joe Biden), and Asian democracies on the side of Ukraine.

 

Under Xi, China has broken the global trading system. Xi has used the power of the Chinese state to establish dominance in advanced manufacturing, reduce China’s imports as much as possible, and aggressively grow its exports. The result is that China has enormous excess capacity. Its goods flood into the rest of the world at prices impossible to compete with, leaving other countries to choose between deindustrialization and protectionism. More and more of them are selecting the latter. This policy is not as morally egregious as Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, but it has toppled a key pillar of the international economic order.

 

Since taking office for a second term, in 2025, Trump has turned American power against U.S. allies and partners. He imposed the highest tariffs in nearly a century on Canada, Japan, South Korea, India, and the European Union and used the threat of more to extract hundreds of billions of dollars in investment pledges. He mused about making Canada the 51st state and seizing Greenland. He pushed Ukraine to sign over a share of its mineral wealth in the middle of a war for its national survival. Under Trump, the United States sees itself not as the guarantor of an alliance system of like-minded democracies, but as a dominant power that wields its influence for singular, transactional gain.

 

Trump has broken the restraint that made American primacy tolerable to most of the rest of the world. Reports suggest that he may meet Xi and Putin for a “big three” trilateral on the margins of the Asia Pacific Economic Summit in Shenzhen in November, which could mark the formal end of the old order.

 

The rupture has produced an international environment that feels ever more like that of a prewar period. This does not mean that a major conflict is inevitable. But if one occurs, future historians will not find its causes sudden or mysterious. They are in plain sight.

 

The major powers are building up their militaries and racing to master drone warfare and artificial intelligence. Trump’s lack of commitment to alliances, especially in Europe, raises the prospect that an aggressor may calculate that it can act without triggering much of a U.S. reaction. Meanwhile, America’s rivals are more and more aligned as they integrate their military production, share sensitive technology, and assist one another in battle.

 

The shift has generational and psychological drivers. Putin, Xi, and Trump are elderly, sometimes erratic, insulated in information bubbles, and animated by ideological visions of national revival. The moment may feel like a closing window—a now-or-never opportunity to remake the world while they still can.

 

A future American president may promise to build a new and improved international order. But Xi and Putin will have little reason to accept the restraints that Washington wants to restore, and although American allies may welcome a return to a more internationalist U.S. foreign policy, they will harbor doubts that it will survive the next election.

 

Rather than promising what they cannot deliver, aspiring presidents should level with the American people. The international order has come to an end. The next president will inherit one of the most unforgiving international environments since 1945. Their task will be to stop the deterioration, inject some stability into world affairs, and begin to lay the foundation for a better future, even if that is not achievable in the short term.

Young People Need to Know the American Dream Isn’t Dead

By Emil Barr

Thursday, September 24, 2026

 

I grew up with a simple understanding of what America was supposed to offer: If you worked hard, took risks, and built something people valued, you could create a life better than the one you started with.

 

I got that opportunity. I started my first company from my dorm room, sold it in a multimillion-dollar deal, and by 22 had accumulated a net worth of more than $25 million. Becoming a deca-millionaire in your early 20s doesn’t happen in a country where opportunity has dried up. It does happen in one where it’s still wide open—if you’re willing to take the risk.

 

This isn’t unusual. It’s happening more than at any other point in this country’s history, but we’ve stopped telling the story. Instead, young people today hear increasingly dangerous rhetoric from both the left and the right, equally reminiscent of dictatorships throughout history: that the system is rigged and that someone (the government) should step in to fix things.

 

That should concern anyone who believes in the American dream.

 

I’m 23 years old, and I’m seeing this shift among my own Gen Z peers, including many who consider themselves conservative: According to one poll, 27 percent of young voters who backed Trump in 2024 now say they’d want a democratic socialist president in 2028, and only 39 percent of Americans my age support capitalism, down from 45 percent just five years ago. When people stop believing that hard work and ownership can change their circumstances, socialism starts to look less like a radical alternative and more like an answer.

 

Zohran Mamdani won 78 percent of voters under 30 in the 2025 New York City mayoral election, and while I disagree with much of what he proposes, I believe conservatives should pay attention to why his message resonated so strongly. Affordability was central to his appeal, and that appeal was a warning about what happens when an entire generation feels the economic system has stopped working for them.

 

Young Americans have real reasons to be frustrated, but the facts show the American dream is actually easier to achieve than the political rhetoric suggests.

 

When a young person looks at the price of a house, the cost of college, or the difficulty of starting a family and concludes the system is broken, politicians are happy to provide a quick explanation. The left increasingly says the problem is capitalism and billionaires, whereas the new right says the system has been captured by foreign nations or immigrants.

 

Both begin with something real, then turn it into a completely made-up conclusion that points to the American economic system itself as the problem.

 

I don’t believe that. But I do believe we have a storytelling problem. We have become extraordinarily good at telling young Americans what is broken, and remarkably bad at telling them what is possible. We used to look at someone like Bill Gates in his ultra-rare Porsche 959 and think: How do I get there? How do I build something like Microsoft? Now we make a TikTok asking: Who did he exploit to get there?

 

That change in attitude matters because my generation has not lost its ambition. Leading online HR platform Gusto found that Gen Z accounted for 9 percent of new business starts in 2025, compared with 5 percent for baby boomers, the first year Gen Z has surpassed another generation in new business formation.

 

QuickBooks found that 43 percent of Gen Z adults are considering starting a business in 2026, higher than any other generation surveyed. This isn’t a generation being pushed into business ownership because the job market failed them: Only 8 percent of Gen Z entrepreneurs started their business because they or a partner lost a job.

 

So, this is not a generation that has stopped believing in work. It’s a generation looking for a way into the American dream and increasingly finding one through entrepreneurship. A teenager with a laptop can now reach customers worldwide, hire across continents, and use AI to handle tasks that once required deeply specialized consultants.

 

Capitalism has never guaranteed success, and none of this changes that, but what it offers is something more important: the freedom to try.

 

I know what that freedom looks like because I benefited from it. I did not inherit a company. I built my social media and advertising marketing agency, Step Up Social, from the ground up, and required little more than an iPhone and an internet connection. That business went from $0 to $1 million in revenue within six months, and quickly upgraded from a dorm-room idea to closing million-dollar client deals left and right. It’s proof that the door is always open to someone who starts with nothing, not just people who already have money or connections.

 

That is one of the basic mechanisms of a market economy: You create something another person values, and you discover whether the market agrees. There are no guaranteed outcomes, but that’s not the point. Freedom is. And that is the part of capitalism I worry we are forgetting.

 

The government has a real job here: Ease the restrictions that limit more housing, tear out the regulations strangling new businesses, help workers displaced by AI get skills that actually pay. What it doesn’t get to do is use every legitimate frustration as an excuse to take over.

 

Markets give millions of people an incentive to decide what to build, where to invest, and what consumers actually value, rather than concentrating those decisions in the hands of a small number of political officials. That doesn’t mean markets are perfect, but simply that replacing them with political decision-making creates its own problems.

 

Socialism can sound appealing when you start with a genuine problem. Housing is too expensive, so the government should provide it. Healthcare costs too much, so the government should control it. College is unaffordable, so the government should pay. The wealthy have more money than I do, so tax them and redistribute it.

 

Each proposal can sound compassionate in isolation. The problem is that none of them answers the harder question: Who creates the homes, businesses, medicines, technologies, and jobs we ultimately want more of?

 

When the state takes over the economy, politics replaces economics. Millions of people stop deciding what gets built, invested in, and bought, because a handful of officials do it for them instead. Once politicians control who gets resources and opportunity, your success stops depending on what you build and starts depending on who you know in Washington.

 

The fact that housing is too expensive doesn’t tell us who should own the housing market, and individuals upset at an unfavorable outcome do not automatically prove that the government should take control of the process that produces it.

 

The problem, whether it comes from the left hating on billionaires or the right blaming globalization, is that young Americans have learned to see people who create wealth as thieves. That’s not an accident: Blame sells better than economics ever will. If we actually want young Americans to believe in capitalism, telling them socialism is bad isn’t enough.

 

Instead, show them what capitalism builds: the immigrant who opens a restaurant, the teenager who builds an app, the family that turns $100 into something real. We need to tell young people these stories are still available to them.

 

My story isn’t proof everyone becomes a multimillionaire, but a reminder that nobody’s future is locked in by where they started. That’s the American dream I inherited, and I’m not apologizing for still believing in it.

 

A country cannot remain confident in its economic system when the generation set to inherit it no longer believes it can deliver a better future. So this is where we start: not by telling young Americans they’re wrong to be angry, but by refusing to let anger be the only thing we ever hand them.

America’s Allies Are No Longer Waiting for Trump to Leave

By Vivian Salama

Tuesday, September 22, 2026

 

In 1917, as Canadian troops fought at Vimy Ridge in northern France, Lieutenant Leslie Miller collected acorns from the battlefield and carried them home to Ontario. Saplings from the resulting oaks were sent back to France about a century later, and became a living link between the two countries. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney recounted that story in Strasbourg last week to the European Parliament as he proposed an alliance that went far beyond trade to encompass defense, energy, critical minerals, and artificial intelligence.

 

The pitch was part of a broader transformation under way among America’s allies. For years, the strategy among U.S. allies was to wait President Trump out. Now many are preparing for a world in which the United States is no longer indispensable—not simply during Trump’s presidency but afterward as well, regardless of who occupies the White House. They are building military capabilities, diversifying trade, developing new domestic industries, and forging relationships that reduce their dependence on Washington.

 

This isn’t a coordinated revolt against America or a wholesale turn toward China. Most U.S. partners see Washington as an essential partner and don’t fully trust Beijing. But nations that were once firmly in the American orbit are concluding that they cannot rely on the U.S. to provide the same leadership, markets, technology, and military protection that it has for decades. And that, foreign officials told me, is true no matter who wins the presidency in 2028.

 

The shift may be the most consequential legacy of Trump’s foreign policy. Since his first term, he has demanded that allies become more self-reliant. In his second term, Trump has accelerated the emergence of a world in which American influence is less central—and China has more room to maneuver. Beijing benefits if Europe, Canada, Japan, or South Korea becomes more willing to engage and less certain that Washington is the power around which all strategic decisions must revolve. And the shift undercuts the delicate strategic balance Washington seeks with Beijing itself—an issue Trump will confront when he meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping this week.

 

The changes are already visible, including in rising European defense spending, Canada’s commercial outreach to China, and Japan’s efforts to become a larger arms supplier. Taken together, these trends point to a reordering of the international system that stretches far beyond Trump. “Trump brought with him an earthquake, but we’d be foolish not to prepare for aftershocks,” a senior European official told me. “The fact is, we’ll be setting ourselves up for failure if we assume that everything will go back to the way it was after Trump leaves office. The world is changing, and we can see very clearly now that America is changing too.”

 

That belief is altering the calculations of governments that spent decades organizing their security and economic policies around the United States. What was once viewed as institutional hedging until the 2028 election has morphed into a longer-term effort to build alternatives. This theme of finding alternatives to Washington has become so prevalent that it’s likely to dominate discussions at the United Nations General Assembly this week.

 

Katherine Tai, the U.S. trade representative in the Biden administration, told me that she and other senior officials were sent on an “apology tour” following Trump’s first term to convince allies that the America they knew had returned and that President Biden was committed to protecting the relationships. (The reference was a throwback to the Barack Obama–era “apology tour,” as some later called it when he traveled the world after taking office to apologize for past American actions, military interventions, and foreign-policy decisions.) But the message dissipated over the next few years amid the political divisiveness in the U.S., Tai recalled. Foreign diplomats relayed to her and other top Biden officials a nervousness “that what you kind of hoped was an aberration is actually going to come back,” she told me. With Trump’s second term, “everything is more over the top than even in the first administration,” Tai said. “The insults are more insulting, the jabs are drawing more blood, and my gut is that there is not a second time for America to declare that it’s back.”

 

***

 

Whether the next president is a Democrat or a Republican, allies see cause for concern. Officials from countries around the world have told me that they worry that Vice President Vance’s vision of a less interventionist America could become a lasting conservative doctrine. “Our real fear is that after Trump comes J. D. Vance, and he has made clear that he is not a friend of Europe’s,” one senior European official told me. Others see calls from the Democratic Socialists of America to “defund the Department of War” as evidence that skepticism about America’s traditional global role is no longer confined to one side of the political spectrum. Progressive Democrats are also embracing tools championed by Trump, including certain tariffs and other protectionist measures. As president, Biden kept most of the tariffs Trump imposed during his first term, even as his “America Is Back” mantra sought to reassure allies they still had America’s support. A dramatic reset of U.S. relations with allies appears unavoidable.

 

Even more moderate Democrats are moving toward a foreign policy closer to “America First,” reflecting growing skepticism of overseas interventions and a desire to prioritize domestic needs. Representative Ro Khanna, a progressive and a potential 2028 presidential contender, told me that the U.S. needs an economic agenda focused on rebuilding America’s manufacturing base through an industrial investment bank, expanded trade schools, and investment in hollowed-out communities—though, he added, it would be a mistake for allies to discount the U.S. as a partner in the post-Trump era. He favors keeping overseas markets open and using tariffs selectively.

 

But what once appeared to allies like temporary political turbulence is now looking like a more lasting change in Washington’s priorities. Just ask the Canadians. For decades, Washington and Ottawa have been the closest of allies. Although they have been frequently at odds over trade, their militaries have operated together, their intelligence services have cooperated closely, and their economies have been deeply integrated. Yet Trump has repeatedly suggested that Canada would be better off as part of the U.S., while imposing and threatening tariffs on Canadian goods. Last month, his administration imposed 50 percent tariffs on roughly $20 billion of Canadian products.

 

Carney, who has called for what he calls “middle powers” such as Canada to become more self-reliant, has responded accordingly. In January, he traveled to Beijing—the first visit for a Canadian prime minister since 2017—and announced a new strategic partnership focused on trade, energy, and agriculture. Canada subsequently secured renewed Chinese-market access for canola, seafood, and beef and set a goal of increasing exports to China by 50 percent by 2030. Canada also became the first non-European country to participate in the European Union’s new Security Action for Europe defense-financing program, giving Canadian companies access to European defense contracts and deepening military ties.

 

Earlier this month, the EU proposed making Canada its first “associate member,” a status that would reflect the closeness of the relationship and give Ottawa—as well as, perhaps, other nations—an alternative to the U.S. and China. Trump has taken notice of their deepening ties, but in ways one imagines Carney might see as a form of respect. The president recently told reporters, “A lot of people say, Who’s the toughest one to deal with? Is it China, sir? Is it China? Is it Vietnam? I said, No, actually, it’s Canada. Canada has felt emboldened.”

 

***

 

The American decision to pull back from its alliances has created opportunities for China, particularly in the Pacific region. The U.S. has few allies stronger than Australia, which during the Biden administration agreed to a deal with the U.S. and the United Kingdom to receive a supply of nuclear-powered submarine technology. But China is Australia’s largest trading partner, and the Australian government has been trying to bolster its relationship with Beijing in other areas as well, including energy and climate. “The United States—not by accident or circumstance, but by design—has become a less dependable ally,” former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull told my colleague David Frum in a recent interview. America’s “traditional allies have got to hedge.”

 

Japan, meanwhile, has eased its arms-export rules. The country has largely isolated itself from global arms markets since the end of World War II, and the shift has sparked interest in countries around the world that have long relied heavily on U.S. weapons sales. Japan and South Korea, longtime rivals, have also been drawing closer to each other as they confront both a powerful China and the unpredictability of the Trump administration.

 

That unpredictability was on display with recent annual joint military exercises between the U.S. and South Korea. Known as Ulchi Freedom Shield—the name evokes a seventh-century Korean general celebrated for repelling a Chinese invasion—the exercises have been held for decades. But hours before this year’s exercises were due to begin, Trump blindsided officials by announcing on social media that he was ordering a substantial pullback in U.S. participation. He argued that the drills were costly and sent a signal that was “totally inappropriate and hostile” to North Korea. Trump continues to praise the country’s dictator, Kim Jong Un, despite the leaders’ failure to reach a rapprochement during Trump’s first term.

 

U.S. and South Korean forces, as well as those from other countries, were confused about how and whether to proceed with the exercises. They ultimately went ahead but on a much smaller scale, with the 11-day schedule cut to five and major field-training activities scaled back. “It was an absolute clusterfuck,” a U.S. official told me as the mess was unfolding. In the meantime, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung has moved aggressively to deepen ties with Beijing. His January state visit to China included a summit with Xi and a business forum attended by about 600 Korean and Chinese business leaders. Fourteen government-to-government memorandums were signed during the visit. With Seoul stuck on Trump’s bad side, that may be just the beginning.

 

Experts told me that even if these countries don’t open the floodgates to Chinese cooperation, Beijing still stands to gain. Every weapons system current U.S. allies build themselves, every supply chain they diversify, and every new relationship they develop gives Beijing another opening—a possibility that even Trump allies acknowledge. “We have to make sure that China doesn’t take advantage of the situation in the short term,” Richard Grenell, who has held a number of positions in both Trump administrations, including as ambassador to Germany, told me. “But I’m not worried about the long term, because what we hear over and over from world leaders is that dealing with China is not worth the price they pay.”

 

Last year, European leaders traveled to Beijing with major complaints about China’s growing industrial output, their limited access to its markets, and the massive trade imbalance. But the summit also reaffirmed a collective desire among European nations for deeper engagement with Beijing, despite the Chinese government’s obvious weaknesses as a prospective alternative to the United States as a global superpower. Their appetite for closeness reflects evolving public opinions around the globe. This year, a Pew Research Center survey in 36 countries found that for the first time, China was viewed more positively than the U.S. in a majority of the countries surveyed. In Canada, 44 percent of respondents expressed a favorable view of China, compared with 33 percent for the United States. China also overtook the U.S. in overall favorability in several European countries.

 

I asked William Taylor, who twice served as head of the U.S. embassy in Ukraine, whether Europeans feel that they can just buy time until Trump leaves office in 2029, when things might presumably snap back. “They’re not sure that it’s going to snap back,” Taylor responded.

 

The economic stakes of these shifts are substantial. Trade wars with allies raise costs for American consumers. U.S. defense companies could eventually lose market share as allies develop their own industries and buy more from one another. And the more that countries diversify their supply chains and commercial relationships, the less leverage Washington enjoys. “Our old relationship of steadily deepening integration with the United States is over,” Carney said, weeks after assuming office last year. “While this is a tragedy, it is also the new reality.” Trump’s biggest impact during his second term may be that America’s allies are now planning for that reality to outlast him.

At Turtle Bay, Trump Sinks Under His Own Weight

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, September 23, 2026

 

Donald Trump, the retired game-show host who serves, incredibly enough, as president of these United States, addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations on Tuesday, and, of course, he gave a second-rate rally speech that was daft and superficial and dishonest in all the ways Trump customarily is daft and superficial and dishonest. Dog bites man, if toothlessly.

 

The ladies and gentlemen of the United Nations, for their part, did what they do best, i.e., approximately nothing, although they did apparently undertake several separate inspections of the escalator Trump would use, hoping to avoid repeating last year’s fiasco in which a malfunction had the president fuming about being victimized by “sabotage” at the international body. This time around, the stalled equipment was Trump’s inferior (very) frontal gyrus, specifically the bit known as Broca’s area, which is the part of the brain responsible for accessing vocabulary and evidently experienced a glitch as the president raged against the “mutilization” of children under the influence of radical gender ideology.

 

Trump’s speech was intended for domestic rather than international consumption, and it contained no good news for Republicans—rather the opposite, in fact: Trump reiterated his insistence that he expects an Iranian peace deal and a rapid decline in gasoline and diesel prices after the midterms, which is Trump’s beef-witted way of saying that he expects no such developments before the midterms. Not unrelatedly, he made a point of reminding the room that he is not going to be on the ballot. Allow me to translate that into English from the original Low Chimpanzee: You Republicans are hosed, nothing is going to be done about the one big issue that most irritates the greater part of your voters, and my main concern here is that this could make me look bad, so I’m just going to pretend that it doesn’t have anything to do with me. Trump is getting ready to tell defeated Republicans “I never knew you,” words he himself might expect to hear in the near future in another context.

 

Indeed, much of the speech was given over to Trump’s rehearsing the emotional self-defense litany he will be chanting to himself (and to anyone who will listen) after Republicans get their asses handed to them at the polls and he gets to spend a lot more time answering questions about why it is that a family of supposed billionaires needs a Russian oligarch to pay for Uday’s ghastly wedding: greatest economy ever, strongest country ever, strongest military ever, etc.—an all-American bed of roses until those ungrateful MAGA rube voters Democrats came along and wrecked everything.

 

President Ronald Reagan gave seven addresses to the General Assembly in the closing days of the Cold War, which was in its closing days in no small part because of the efforts Reagan described in his U.N. speeches, which were themselves moral weapons wielded in that war to considerable effect. The first, second, and last of them together form a sort of essay on Reagan’s view of international relations in his time. Many Americans, particularly miseducated young people, will find those speeches enlightening, even shocking: Reagan, caricatured in our time as a warmonger and bigot, is remarkably conciliatory toward the Soviets, denounces South African apartheid and comparable moral blights on the second half of the 20^th century, presses for reduction in both conventional forces and nuclear weapons, quotes Mohandas Gandhi, etc. At the United Nations, Reagan the peacenik is on full display: You know—the man who wanted the United States to share anti-missile technology with the Soviets as a way to make nuclear missiles less strategically valuable.

 

In much the same way that civil rights leaders such as Frederick Douglass and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. were at their best and most influential when they indicted the United States for failing to live up to its national creed, Reagan put the United Nations on the spot by celebrating its ideals and idealism and pressing the body and its member states to live up to its own words. In his series of speeches, Reagan reiterates his belief that the two great mandates of the United Nations—the pursuit of international peace and the defense of fundamental human rights—are, in fact, the same mission:

 

If we would have peace, we must acknowledge the elementary rights of our fellow human beings. In our own land and in other lands, if we would have peace, the trampling of the human spirit must cease. Human rights is not for some, some of the time. Human rights, as the universal declaration of this Assembly adopted in 1948 proclaims, is “for all people and all nations,'” and for all time.

 

This regard for human rights as the foundation of peace is at the heart of the U.N. Those who starve in Ethiopia, those who die among the Kurds, those who face racial injustice in South Africa, those who still cannot write or speak freely in the Soviet Union, those who cannot worship in the Ukraine, those who struggle for life and freedom on boats in the South China Sea, those who cannot publish or assemble in Managua—all of this is more than just an agenda item on your calendar. It must be a first concern, an issue above others.

 

Trump, on the other hand ... well:

 

I have a big decision to make.

 

Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before?

 

Maybe one of the greatest in the Middle East, or even the world.

 

Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again?

 

Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?

 

But I believe we’ll make a deal right after the election, because it doesn’t make sense for them not to.

 

They’re waiting to see how I do in the midterm election.

 

What they don’t realize is that I’m not running.

 

I did that already and won in a landslide.

 

We won in a giant landslide.

 

Trump also reiterated his favorite political slogan: “To the victor belong the spoils,” a slogan introduced into U.S. politics in the early 19^th century as a defense of the patronage and corruption of the “spoils system.” Its antonym is “Drain the swamp,” if anybody remembers that much-abused phrase.

 

Of course, it is embarrassing for Americans to be represented by such a man as Trump: ignorant, rage-addled, smeared in make-up applied with an artistry that falls somewhere between clown and hooker along with an evolving assortment of hair dyes, doddering, bloated. It is tempting to treat a pathetic figure such as Trump the way Trump would treat such a figure. But what afflicts Trump more than whatever causes his ankle swelling is a curse that might be best understood as a form of moral obesity, a suffocating excess of self that has the ironic effect of disfiguring the self—here I mean the moral self and the mind—rather than aggrandizing it and fortifying it. One can overdo the metaphor, but Trump is a man who seems to have suffered the spiritual equivalent of an ischemic stroke when he was about 27 and never to have recovered the full use of his faculties. It is not for nothing that he insists on traveling with the emotional equivalent of a nurse.

 

Perhaps Natalie Harp could be dispatched to represent U.S. interests at Turtle Bay. The United Nations is not what it used to be, and it is a very long way down to Ambassador Mike Waltz from George H. W. Bush, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, George Ball, or Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. It remains a very high platform from which to speak and might prove useful for a man with something to say. But the American president is not that kind of man: He has nothing at all to say, beyond even if he does go on and on and on about it.

Taking Down the Confederate Flag Is Not Woke

By John M. Sandy

Monday, September 14, 2026

 

There are some things history makes difficult to sentimentalize.

 

Frederick Douglass was a child when he learned what slavery meant. The lesson came through a closet door. Douglass remembered that his Aunt Hester was beautiful, strikingly so. She was, he wrote, “a woman of noble form, and of graceful proportions, having very few equals, and fewer superiors, in personal appearance.” She also had an admirer, a young man named Ned Roberts. Douglass remembered Ned as “quite a good-looking young man.”

 

Captain Anthony, the slaves’ master, did not like it.

 

He ordered Hester not to go out at night and warned her never to let him find her with Ned. “Had he been a man of pure morals himself,” Douglass wrote, “he might have been thought interested in protecting the innocence of my aunt; but those who knew him will not suspect him of any such virtue.” Anthony owned Hester. But there was one thing his ownership could not command: who she desired.

 

One night, he found her with Ned. Anthony took Hester into the kitchen. He stripped her from the neck to the waist. He bound her hands and fastened them above her head. Then he rolled up his sleeves.

 

“I’ll learn you how to disobey my orders!” he said. He began to whip her.

 

“The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped,” Douglass remembered, “and where the blood ran fastest, there he whipped longest.” Soon “the warm, red blood” was dripping to the floor.

 

Douglass hid in a closet.

 

“I was so terrified and horror-stricken at the sight,” he wrote, “that I hid myself in a closet, and dared not venture out till long after the bloody transaction was over. I expected it would be my turn next.”

 

The law recognized Anthony’s claim to her body while recognizing no corresponding claim by Hester to herself. Anthony could dictate where she went, whom she saw, and what happened when she disobeyed. Ned could court her, perhaps. Hester could choose him, perhaps. But neither could make her free.

 

***

 

There is a temptation, when Americans argue about the Confederate flag, to begin with politics. We begin with “wokeness.” We begin with statues and statehouses, heritage and cancel culture. Before long, people are arguing about what someone displaying the flag today intends it to mean. One side sees racism. Another sees ancestry, rebellion, regional identity, or the courage of soldiers who fought beneath it.

 

I think we should begin in the closet.

 

What happened in that kitchen is inseparable from what the Confederacy later chose to defend. The Confederacy did not invent slavery. Neither, for that matter, did the American South. Slavery stained much of the early history of this country. It existed under the American flag. Northern merchants profited from it. Our Constitution accommodated it. Americans inherited a terrible contradiction between the self-evident truth announced in the Declaration of Independence and the human bondage practiced beneath it. And that history belongs to all of us.

 

In 1861, the contradiction finally tore the country apart. And the men who formed the Confederacy were not coy about the institution they meant to protect. Mississippi’s declaration of secession announced that its position was “thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery.” South Carolina complained that Northern states had “denounced as sinful the institution of slavery” and wrongfully resisted the return of people who escaped bondage. The Confederate Constitution went further. It prohibited its government from passing any law “denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves.” It protected the ability of slaveholders to travel with enslaved people and retain their claimed property rights in them. And in Confederate territories it commanded that slavery “shall be recognized and protected.”

 

Those are not the words of modern granola activists imposing their woke fashionable morality. They are the Confederacy’s words. Which is why I have trouble with the claim that removing the Confederate flag from places of public honor is somehow “woke.”

 

There was nothing woke about Frederick Douglass. There was nothing politically fashionable about a formerly enslaved man standing before 19^th-century America and forcing it to confront its principles and practices. Douglass did not need a modern theory of oppression to understand what slavery was. He had crouched in the closet. He had heard the screams. He had seen the blood.

 

This does not mean we should erase the Confederate flag from history. Quite the opposite. Preserve it. Put it in museums. Display it on battlefields where Confederate soldiers carried it. Teach children what it was and why men fought beneath it. Read the secession declarations. Read the Confederate Constitution. Read the letters of soldiers, including those whose motives were more complicated than the motives of the government for which they fought. History should not be cleaned up for our comfort.

 

But neither should history be confused with honor. I contend that a museum preserves and a history book teaches. But a government building and state flag honors. That is an important distinction. We do not erase history when we decide that a symbol no longer deserves a place of civic reverence. We make judgments about our history constantly. Every monument, portrait, flag, and name placed in a courthouse, capitol, or public square reflects a choice about what part of our inheritance we wish to hold up. The Confederate flag should be remembered and studied. But it need not be honored.

 

I understand that many people who display it today do not intend to celebrate slavery. Symbols can acquire meanings beyond their origins. For some, the Confederate flag may call to mind a grandfather, a battlefield, Southern identity, defiance of authority, or simply home. We do no service to one another by assuming the worst motive in every person who sees a symbol differently than we do.

 

But private intention cannot rewrite public history. The question is not simply what the flag means to us now. We should also ask what political order it represented then. And when we do, Frederick Douglass deserves a place in the conversation. Because the power Anthony exercised over Hester was the power of one human being to own another. And when the nation finally fractured over the future of that system, the Confederacy placed the protection of slave property into its fundamental law.

 

Perhaps that is what bothers me most about calling opposition to the Confederate flag “woke.” The word allows us to dismiss an old moral question as though it were a new political fad. It turns something Americans have wrestled with for generations into another skirmish in today’s culture war. Douglass takes us back to a time before our vocabulary became so convenient. Back through the arguments about monuments and flags. Back through Reconstruction and emancipation. Back before Gettysburg and Antietam and Fort Sumter. Back before there was a Confederacy at all.

 

Back to a kitchen, where blood drips onto the floor and a little boy hides in a closet, terrified that he will be next.

 

The Confederacy chose to preserve that world. We should preserve the flag that represents that history too. Preserve it behind glass and in books so that our children can see it and ask what happened here. But preservation is not veneration. And declining to honor that flag is not woke. It is remembering.

Russia’s Threats to Europe Extend Beyond Ukraine

By Elizabeth Kennedy Trudeau & David J. Kramer

Friday, September 11, 2026

 

Russia’s war against Ukraine, initiated in 2014 and then launched on a full-scale basis in 2022, is the gravest security crisis on the European continent since World War II.

 

But it’s not the only Russian threat on the continent. Russia’s gray-zone, or hybrid, war against the rest of Europe beyond Ukraine poses additional, serious challenges to NATO and U.S. interests.

 

Russia has been testing NATO’s resolve and solidarity since 2006, when ex-Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko died after being poisoned with polonium in downtown London. It continued the next year with a massive cyberattack against Estonia that left NATO unsure how to respond. And in the years since, this campaign has only intensified.

 

Russia has carried out or attempted assassinations on NATO territory, and its drones and missiles have violated member nations’ airspace. According to a senior NATO military official, NATO has scrambled fighter jets nearly 700 times in two years to intercept Russian aircraft. Russia has weaponized migration, manipulating migrant flows to destabilize and pressure NATO allies. It has threatened to attack NATO states that aid Ukraine, most recently the United Kingdom and Germany. Germany has blamed attacks aimed at critical infrastructure, including an explosion at a train station and two separate incidents targeting power stations, on Russia, as well as attempts to damage aircraft at Germany’s Leipzig airport with explosive drones. Even U.S. interests in Europe are not safe from Russia. In a September 3 Russian missile attack against Ukraine, Russia badly damaged a Coca-Cola plant.

 

In response to Germany’s claim of Russian responsibility for the drone threats at Leipzig airport, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov declared “the beginning of a real war with Germany.” This typifies Russia’s approach: Blame the targets and victims of its aggression. It does it with Ukraine by absurdly accusing the government there of being run by Nazis. It’s doing it with Germany and others who provide support to Ukraine to help Kyiv defend against Russia’s brutal war.  

 

Russia’s poke-and-prod approach also seeks to divide NATO and expose as hollow its Article 5 guarantee—the core NATO principle that means an attack against one shall be considered an attack against all. Its increasingly complex alignment with other autocracies like China, Iran, and North Korea adds to the level of danger.

 

And every day, as casualties mount and drones and missiles kill civilians in Ukraine almost four and a half years after Russia’s full-scale invasion, Vladimir Putin has repeatedly demonstrated that he has no interest in peace. Immediately after a brief ceasefire to enable U.S. envoys to visit both Moscow and Kyiv last weekend, Russian forces resumed their brutal aerial campaign against Ukraine.  

 

The Saturday visit to Moscow by U.S. special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner followed two other known meetings between U.S. and Russian officials. In August, CIA Director John Ratcliffe traveled to Moscow, reportedly to warn his Russian counterparts against an attack on a NATO member state and to argue that Russia’s war against Ukraine was going poorly. Putin refused a meeting with Ratcliffe, perhaps because the CIA director was delivering a message Putin didn’t want to hear. By contrast, Putin warmly welcomed Witkoff and Kushner, whom he’s met on numerous past occasions.

 

In between the Ratcliffe and Witkoff-Kushner visits to Moscow, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent invited—over the objections of European members—Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov to North Carolina for a meeting of G20 finance ministers, the first time Russia was represented at such a gathering since its full-scale invasion.

 

We both served in the State Department with a combined three decades of experience (including stints at NATO and the Pentagon for Elizabeth). Experience has shown us, time and again, that adversaries pay close attention to what we say, as well as what we do. They notice divisions and hesitation; they exploit ambiguity. They play with words. Russia certainly does. We cannot give Russia reason to doubt our commitment to our allies.

 

We are past the warning stage. The lights are blinking on the dashboard. The Trump administration, together with NATO allies, needs to provide Ukraine with the military assistance it needs to win the war, not just defend itself. It’s also imperative that Russia and other adversaries understand that America is committed to freedom and stands in solidarity with all of our allies in Europe and beyond.

 

For nearly eight decades, NATO has symbolized the ideal of deterrence, ensuring that any adversary understands the consequences of aggression. That, for example, a country that attacked Estonia, Poland, or Finland knows it would not be taking on that country alone—it would be starting a conflict with NATO. This idea is the heart of Article 5, but Article 5 only has meaning if our adversaries believe the United States will honor it. One hopes that Ratcliffe’s visit to Moscow disabused Russian officials of their wishes that the United States will not follow through on its NATO commitments.

 

Any ambiguity about Article 5 isn’t leverage, but a weak link in that chain of solidarity. If Moscow assesses that readings of NATO obligations rest on political moods, deterrence simply crumbles. The probing and testing will become more frequent and may end in dire choices for the alliance.

 

On the anniversary of September 11, we should also clearly recall the one time in NATO’s history when Article 5 was invoked—in our defense.

 

After the devastating attacks in New York and Washington, and the crash in Pennsylvania, NATO was there. NATO aircraft patrolled American skies, and, in the years to come, our European and Canadian allies deployed thousands of their forces with us in Afghanistan. Men and women from NATO countries, large and small, fought shoulder to shoulder with us, and thousands died there.

 

NATO, of course, is changing: European allies are spending more on defense, building their own military capacity, and assuming greater responsibility for their own security, including assuming a leadership role in supporting Ukraine. These are certainly steps that needed to happen—and more should be done.

 

But Europe’s increasing investment in defense does not relieve the United States of its obligations. A stronger Europe, partnered with the ironclad American commitment to NATO, both makes the alliance stronger and reestablishes deterrence.

 

Russia and its malign partners must understand that starting a war with a NATO ally would be a terrible mistake. After all, Russia is no match for the United States and Europe if the latter two stick together and support each other.

 

A peaceful and secure Europe has been one of the United States’ great strategic advantages since the end of World War II. The greatest threat to such a Europe arose when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In defending its land and freedom from Russian takeover, Ukraine contributes to European security by standing between the rest of Europe and a Russian military on the march. During his visit to Moscow, Ratcliffe reportedly urged his Russian interlocutors to recognize that continuing the war Putin started would end badly for Russia.

 

While not a member of NATO, Ukraine is most deserving of Western support not just to stay in the fight but to help it win the war Russia started against it. Supporting Ukraine helps secure the rest of Europe, plain and simple.

Russia does not have to like NATO, but it must believe NATO and the United States when we say, with no ambiguity, that an attack on one will bring a response from all, and that the United States keeps its word. Russia should clearly understand what will happen if it attacks a NATO ally because, simply, that’s how we make sure it never does.

The Coming Post-Trump Reality

The Dispatch Editors

Tuesday, September 08, 2026

 

History has a way of surprising you.

 

When this publication launched in October 2019, we announced our intention to set a journalistic course distinct from that of our competitors, both in the so-called mainstream media and in the partisan and ideological press, regarding the biggest story of the day. Our animating spirit was to be neither perfervidly pro-Trump nor neurotically anti-Trump but cheerfully and soberly post-Trump, ready to focus on the many important facets of this American life not dominated by the eccentric principal resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, whose retirement then seemed incipient.

 

We were premature.

 

The country, of course, endured the shameful events of January 6, 2021, Donald Trump’s risible attempts to nullify the results of the 2020 presidential election, and, in 2024, his unlikely comeback from disgrace and exile—surely aided by both the excesses and incompetence of former President Joe Biden and his administration. But now, as we approach November’s midterm elections, we are cautiously hopeful that we are within spitting distance of the end of the Trump era.

 

If we are correct in that hope, the federal and state elections that take place eight weeks from today will signal the start of a transition to what could be a new era. Much can happen in two months of politics in this goldfish-memory era, and we have no illusions about the ugliness ahead. Partisan Republicans will spend their days insisting that the republic will end if the walking scandal that is Ken Paxton, a singular disgrace even among the rising class of profoundly dishonorable public servants, loses a GOP-held Senate seat in Texas and, with it, perhaps, the GOP majority in the upper chamber. Too many Democrats, meanwhile, will rally behind the radical anti-Americanism of Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, shrugging off his persistent antisemitism and association with unapologetic terrorist sympathizers, just as they eagerly dismissed the Nazi tattoo and casual misogyny of Graham Platner in Maine until electoral, rather than moral, considerations ensured his defenestration.

 

At least from this temporal distance, it looks like much of the country seems prepared, finally, to reject the frivolity and depravity of Trumpism and its namesake. Democrats have opposed Trump from the beginning, of course. Many independents who once supported the president have turned on him. Most worrisome for the White House, and encouraging to us, are the Republicans who have had enough. To be sure, Trump still enjoys the backing of a substantial majority of his party and, as we’ve seen, his influence in GOP primaries remains. But his support among Republicans is slipping, in both breadth and intensity. Recent polling suggests that nearly half of the non-MAGA GOP, a substantial minority of the party, disapproves of his job performance. Even among Republicans who say they back the president, the number who strongly approve has been tanking. And yet Trump, obtuse and obstinate as ever, wants the midterms to be all about him.

 

Whatever the election brings, three things are true: Trump is broadly unpopular, he will soon be a lame duck, and, at some point, the Trump era will come to an end. So now is the time to contemplate in earnest what decisions Americans must face in that new era, and whose vision for confronting the existential problems these United States face will win out.

 

Consider: The federal government is headed for a fiscal crisis. Just last month the federal debt surpassed $40 trillion, and this year, interest payments on that debt will reach their highest shares of both GDP and federal tax revenue in the country’s history. Interest payments alone are a bigger expenditure than national defense. The debt has more than doubled since the end of the 2016 fiscal year, from $19 trillion. Out-of-control deficits and compounding entitlement liabilities drive that incomprehensible debt, and fixing this mess is not something the U.S. can simply “grow our way out of,” as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently claimed.  

 

Or consider how the U.S.’s position in the world is much diminished. This has come principally by Trump’s dishonorable attacks on NATO and other long-standing democratic allies, his aimless and dashed-off war in Iran, and by his destructive tariff war on low prices and flexible supply chains (attacks that have more than a little in common with the “economic patriotism” championed by Barack Obama and many contemporary progressives, whose ideas about national security and trade are nearly as wrongheaded as Trump’s).

 

Trump’s national security intellectuals—a term we use advisedly, given that some of his advisers are not intellectuals and some of his intellectuals seem shockingly unmotivated to bolster national security—insist that the administration is realistically adjusting to an era of great power, multipolar rivalries, and the need to maintain what some have called “spheres of influence.” This sophisticated theorizing has given us the “Donroe” Doctrine and “Lake America.” The truth is the theorizing is little more than gauzy window dressing on Trump’s impulses.

 

We would criticize the Democrats’ theories on national security too, but aside from reflexively opposing Trump and welcoming “anti-Zionists” into their tent, we have no idea what the Democratic understanding of foreign policy might be.

 

Regardless, for reasons partly attributable to Trump, but also for reasons long in the making, the world we face today is vastly more dangerous than the one America faced at the end of the Cold War. Ironically, that time of peace and prosperity, purchased with decades of perseverance and sacrifice, seems to arouse scorn from both left and right. It is apparently preferable to enjoy the luxury of denouncing an era of American “empire” in the rearview mirror than to ask how we might once again make the world safer for America, and more peaceful and prosperous in general, by providing global leadership.   

 

Addressing these crises—foreign and domestic—will require making difficult, unpopular decisions at a time when most politicians want easy sound bites instead. Some of those decisions, principally in foreign policy, will require more spending. Rearming our depleted armed forces and outfitting them to face the challenges presented by China, Russia, et al., is one such example. Other decisions, such as reforming the entitlements now bankrupting the country, demand real and painful fiscal discipline. Making these choices will require the kind of long-term, consensus-oriented program that Washington has shown no talent or appetite for in recent years, and any worthwhile program of reform will necessitate painful trade-offs that will leave precisely no one satisfied or unscathed.

 

But even less tractable than fiscal or foreign policy is the deeper cultural decay at the heart of our political dysfunction that has many Americans turning to a particularly ugly form of tribalistic politics as a kind of ersatz religion, a source of community and meaning. If we have a crisis of political leadership—and we do—we also have a terrifying crisis of American citizenship. Our decline is the product of countless choices at every level of society. Leaders of institutions surrender to the vibes and zeitgeist, dashing out of their lanes and roles to perform for their own aggrandizement or protect their own interests. Politicians, educators, public health officials, businessmen, clergy, philanthropists, and journalists certainly have particular responsibilities in all this, but so do we all. When the people do not demand better, they should not expect to get anything good.

 

These facts underscore the necessity of returning to a commitment to limiting the size and scope of the government’s influence in our daily lives. That principle is embedded in the gift the Founding Fathers left to us: a remarkably intelligent and adaptive constitutional architecture with which to organize our response to these challenges. That constitutional structure was designed to constrain power, to frustrate the ability of any one ideologue or iconoclast to wield the power and purse of the state like a foolish college student wields his father’s credit card and good name.

 

But there is no denying that the country no longer has a major political party devoted to limiting the size and scope of government. Broadly speaking, Republicans insist they care deeply about fiscal sanity and strong national defense. The message of the Democrats, meanwhile, is that budgetary discipline is unnecessary while national defense is a luxury we cannot afford. We are often chastised for our “both-sides-ism.” Well, we can at least say this much: The difference between these two messages is that the Republicans are right, but they are lying; the Democrats are at least honest, but they are wrong.

 

Democrats, of course, have long been the party of big government—from the New Deal through the Great Society—appealing to voters by promising government programs available to help at virtually every stage of our time on this earth. Remember, Barack Obama’s “Life of Julia?” Or Joe Biden’s shameless ploy to shift the burden of billions in student loans from those who took them out to American taxpayers? Now, while the Democratic Socialists of America and affiliated radicals enjoying a surging—but not unchallenged—ascendence in the Democratic Party, those same impulses live on in renewed pushes for Medicare for all, pledges to freeze rents, and promises of “free” universal childcare. Nothing new here.

 

For most of the past half-century, meanwhile, Republicans have promised voters they would be the party of limited government, through the Reagan presidency and the Gingrich and Tea Party congressional victories in 1994 and 2010, respectively. But in the decade since Trump was first elected, the country has seen an unmistakable trend toward expanding government.

 

Sure, there was DOGE, the ill-conceived and poorly executed Elon Musk effort to make the federal government more “efficient” at the beginning of Trump’s second term. But despite the administration’s absurd promises and Musk’s cringey showmanship, the actual savings of the effort were minimal. All the while, the president has declared that the entitlements driving our debt would largely be protected from cost-cutting reforms.

 

Instead, MAGA Republicans use government power to achieve their own preferred ends. While populist Republicans have warned of the creeping socialism among Democrats, they’ve cheered a president whose administration has taken stakes in 32 private companies, including a just-announced plan of dubious legality that would have taxpayers funding a Pentagon-led ownership of large swaths of the Venezuelan oil industry. Trump has also advocated public equity stakes in the technology companies driving American development of artificial intelligence—a proposal that in many respects mirrors one put forward by socialist Bernie Sanders.

 

Any talk among members of the Trump-era Republican Party of constraining government seems not to apply to the ones currently running the government.

 

All that is to say nothing of the rampant corruption within the Trump administration itself, which, on the matter of mere ordinary financial corruption alone, is without precedent in American history. Whether it’s the president cashing in on his cryptocurrency business to the tune of 11 figures, the way the aforementioned stakes in private companies benefit the president’s own family, or how the administration’s foreign policy seems to line the pockets of both Trump and his friends, this is an administration that manages to do three times a week something that would have resulted in an impeachment in more sober and self-respecting times.

 

So, in 20 years, will we look back on the Trump era as a parenthetical aberration or as the front-page headline announcing the arrival of something new, enduring, and ghastly—something alien to the best of our traditions and principles?

 

As our own Jonah Goldberg has observed, a two-party system cannot have a single sane political party: It will have two reasonably responsible and sober parties, or it will have two irresponsible and demagogic parties. At this moment, it may seem we are headed for the double-basketcase scenario rather than for a return to our senses.

 

It doesn’t have to be this way. There are sane and serious people in both parties. What the good people lack is either the incentives or the courage to take a stand. They tell themselves, not without reason, that it is better to work within the current dysfunction to make small improvements and prevent large disasters, biding their time like Christians in the catacombs of Rome for the opportunity to emerge and preach the secular gospel of political sanity.

 

Now is that time. The Trump era is ending, and that ending brings an appetite and a political opportunity.

 

We understand that even the best people find it difficult to work across the party line, to extend trust across that line, or even to see that authentic fellow Americans could even live on the other side of that line. But the contest now before us is not the extremists vs. the moderates so much as it is the grasping nihilists on either end of the political horseshoe against those exhausted and dispirited citizens in the horseshoe’s bend—those who still cling to decency, intelligence, prudence, good citizenship, neighborliness, and a rigorous commitment to dealing with the actual facts of the world, however inconvenient they may be.

 

As Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg made clear in this institution’s founding manifesto, The Dispatch has never attempted to force into existence a new great awakening of republican virtue. As journalists, our role in public life is simply to try to describe what is going on in the world and to host arguments about what to do about it. Nor do we pretend to a position of Olympian detachment and objectivity. We have seen some things, and we have reasoned judgments about what we have seen.

 

Nor is this a manifesto for some kind of No Labels-style centrism and bipartisanship. The times call for stronger stuff: If they mean only staying within the Venn overlap between MAGA and the DSA—and there is more overlap than you might think—then the cause will be lost even before the battle begins. What we need now are policies that call America back to fiscal discipline, advance faith in America’s ability to be a force for good around the globe, and that hold the rule of law and individual liberty as sacrosanct.

 

There are no ironclad laws of politics or history, but if there were one, it would be this: When responsible actors refuse to deal with legitimate issues responsibly, irresponsible actors will fill the vacuum and deal with them irresponsibly. Look to the last 10 years for proof of this. Why has the president felt so free to do the rampant self-dealing since returning to the White House last year? “Because I found out nobody cared,” he told New York Times reporters early this year.

 

So as reporters and commentators and publishers, as fathers and mothers, as voters and public officials, as members of religious congregations, as operators of businesses—as citizens participating in the glorious variety of American life—we have, to an extraordinary and often unappreciated degree, the power to make of our public life whatever we choose to make of it.

 

Whether we adorn our choices in blue or red, we can have more crises and convulsions, more rage and more monetization of rage, more ad-hocracy and mobbery and profligacy. Or we can have something better. We are not ready to entertain airy thoughts about national renewal or a renaissance of republican virtue, as happy as these things are to contemplate. We are talking about the grubby, difficult details of governance required of leaders in a republic: getting the deficit down to a manageable level, shoring up the rule of law against the forces of anarchy and predation, and talking to the American people like grown-ups rather than pandering to them like they’re angry, aggrieved teenagers.

 

That would be, at least, a start.

 

There is much that is good and admirable and inspiring and worth celebrating in America today. We have vast reserves of decency and ingenuity in this country that could be tapped if we could just clear the rust from the gears. We should be grateful for these resources and what they have accomplished, from the consistent improvements in material living conditions worldwide to wondrous technological and medical innovations led—for good reason—by American businesses, American workers, American scientists, American universities, American cities, and the capacious, audacious American spirit. We do not know what comes next, but we know that the power to decide what comes next is in the hands of the only people on this Earth who have ever raised their flag on the moon. In that, at least, we find reason for hope—sober hope—at the end of a long, vicious, squandered decade.