Rikken Dōshikai, the newest political party in Japan’s nascent democracy, was founded by the Prime Minister, Prince Katsura Tarō, to strengthen his minority government. This was the time of the Emperor Taishō, when Japan tried liberal democracy for the first time—contrary to the belief that the Japanese were only democratic after World War Two. During “Taishō democracy,” parties rose and fell with dizzying speed, and Katsura’s new party—the “Association of Comrades of the Constitution”—could not save him. In February 1913, the first successful motion of no-confidence in Japanese history brought down his government. He was dead in October, of stomach cancer. Rikken Dōshikai was founded to support a man; he was gone. What would follow? Would the party dissolve?

Into the void left by a noble prince stepped a count: Count Katō Takaaki. Earlier in his career, Katō was credited with securing the 1902 Anglo-Japanese treaty of alliance. He was an Anglophile who had served as the emperor’s ambassador to the Court of St James’s. Back home, conservatives viewed his attachment to British ways with suspicion. Never mind that Japan had copied the forms of British government. Shinto was the national religion like the Church of England, with the emperor at its head. The Imperial Diet was a parliament made up of a House of Peers of noble lords alongside an elected House of Representatives. And they emulated the Royal Navy for the obvious reason that both were island empires.

He kept Rikken Dōshikai together. Because of their numbers in parliament, when in April 1914 the cabinet supported by the dominant party Rikken Seiyūkai fell due to a defense spending scandal, Count Katō was there to seize the prize. He was denied the post of prime minister outright—still too British—but behind the scenes he led the new cabinet as foreign minister. The “Siemens and Vickers Scandal” shocked the public and confirmed the fears of those skeptical of the West. Japan’s reformers deliberately copied Prussia and Britain to modernize and ensure they were too strong to be colonized by Europeans like India, or carved up into spheres of influence like China. However, some wondered if they were too close to some Westerners. The scandal did not help opinions.

Goldmarks or Pounds Sterling?

To secure bids for warships, electrical equipment, and armaments, the German company Siemens and its British rival, Vickers, systematically bribed Japanese procurement officers, offering them percentages on major contracts. The bidding war escalated when Japanese officials took bribes featuring a 15% commission on contracts, specifically to build the battlecruiser Kongō—which would serve with distinction in WWII, even surviving Leyte Gulf. However, the British had gusto; they swept in at the last minute with a 25% bribe and secured the contract for the Kongō.

Now generally when one is bribed, it is only good manners to stay bribed.

The Germans found out, as of course they would when the British announced they were building the ship. Siemens could not believe it and asked for clarification. That is what we call a paper trail. Lesson of history: don’t do that. Now, a Siemens employee in Japan found the documents and apparently asked for money to keep schtum or else. (Blackmailing your German bosses from Japan is an interesting choice.) They took the “or else,” and he sold the story to Reuters, fled Japan for home in Germany—again an odd choice—and the next thing they knew the story was in The Daily Telegraph, sinking the Rikken Seiyūkai government. Rikken Dōshikai and Count Katō were in. Four months later, Franz Ferdinand was murdered in Sarajevo.

The timing of the Siemens-Vickers scandal could not be worse for Germany. The premier genrō—the leader of the elder statesmen who led the Meiji Restoration—was the samurai-born Yamagata Aritomo, Prince and Field Marshal of the Empire. He was the hero that crushed the Satsuma Rebellion led by the renegade samurai Saigō Takamori. (Saigō was the inspiration for Ken Watanabe’s character in the Tom Cruise film The Last Samurai). Field Marshal Prince Yamagata was favorable to Germany and thought Japan should remain neutral. He and the Imperial Japanese Army had been trained in the Prussian style, and Yamagata had built the Japanese General Staff modeled on the Prussians. In 1914, he was President of the Privy Council, a position from which he could steer Japan to his preferred path of neutrality and let the Europeans fight it out. But Count Katō had other ideas.

On August 7th, the British asked Japan to join the war and cut the Germans down in Asia. But technically the fight was in Europe; did the Japanese have a stake in the fight? Katō figured that driving the Germans out of China would allow Japan to “gift” the territory back to the Chinese and get China to grant major concessions to Japan in return. Would an opportunity to remove a European rival from East Asia ever return? He went to work and won the argument against the old samurai Yamagata.

On August 23, 1914, the Empire of Great Japan, by the grace of Heaven and in the name of His Imperial Majesty the Emperor, declared war on Kaiser Wilhelm II and the German Reich.

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“It’s only our first exchange and already the Prime Minister is asking me the questions. This approach is stuck in the past and I want to talk about the future. He was the future once.”— Dec. 7, 2005, newly elected Conservative Party Leader David Cameron to British Prime Minister Tony Blair at their first matchup at Prime Minister’s Questions

“I will watch these exchanges from the backbenches. I will miss the roar of the crowd, I will miss the barbs from the opposition, but I will be willing you on...The last thing I would say is that you can achieve a lot of things in politics. You can get a lot of things done. And that in the end, the public service, the national interest, that is what it is all about. Nothing is really impossible if you put your mind to it. After all, as I once said, I was the future once.”— July 13, 2016, departing Prime Minister David Cameron at his last Prime Minister’s Questions, following the referendum vote in favor of Brexit which he had campaigned against.

After Napoleon fell in the 19th century, Britain was free to trade and colonize with no fear of a rival shutting it out of the market. But competition came from the upstarts across the Atlantic: the Americans. The United States could not match Britain in might, but it could outdo it in fierce trade and speed. This “Yankee trader” persona later gave rise to the greedy aliens, the Ferengi, in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Americans owed their speed to clipper ships, beginning with the design first produced in Baltimore. American clippers ruled the trade routes because they put speed before cargo. Their narrow hulls and vast sails outpaced every other ship of the era. The Chinese tea trade drove this growth; because tea spoils and loses flavor, the first merchants to reach port got the best prices. Foreign companies began to contract out to Americans.

The two powers also fought to win the minds of the Atlantic world. Which would be the “empire of liberty”? Thinkers from Budapest to Buenos Aires asked this question. When Britain abolished slavery in 1834, it won a round. But in the 1830s, the United States scrapped most property rules for voting while Britain continued to exclude working-class men. Slavery was worse than a lack of votes, but outsiders noted both countries’ urge to reform and the reactionaries who opposed it.

When European revolutionaries fled after the failed uprisings of 1848, many went to Britain, but more chose the United States. Yet Britain did not just outlaw slavery; it waged war, while continuing the industrial revolution. Those who wanted to see the future of humanity went to London, Glasgow, and Birmingham. Britain, not America hosted the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, the first world fair, in 1851.

The American Civil War also became a fight for the future. Abraham Lincoln’s administration outperformed Lord Palmerston’s, by explicitly rededicating the USA to the creed of the Declaration of Independence while the British covertly aided the rebel-Confederate slavocracy. By 1870, Britain was losing its lead—materially and in the imagination of the world—to the United States during the second industrial revolution, marked by electricity and steel. Asia and Africa watched; Japan studied and copied both nations.

In the early 20th century, American liberalism seemed to have won. Millions of immigrants moved to the land of opportunity. After the First World War, however, Soviet communism and fascism emerged as potent rivals. Countries joined the Axis in the 1930s because they thought Germany and Italy were the future. Most of the world disagreed. Others thought they saw the future in Stalinism. American liberalism fought these ideologies to define the next age of humanity. The Cold War was the continuation an ongoing competition. Soviet communism was finally an ideology that could match liberalism in rhetoric, but ultimately not in results. The future always arrives, and countries always look to join the side that represents it. In the 1990s the world followed Uncle Sam. Things are changing.

Ask yourself, “does the United States look like the future or the past”? I recently spoke with students who have studied in Shanghai. They are not impressed with America. They did not see China through a “controlled lens,” as some Americans who seek false comfort believe. They saw the future in China. A theme at “Outside the Academy” is to warn against wishcasting. As in the 1920s, the US faces the challenge of successor ideologies competing for the future. The world is deciding whether to bet on America, China, or a new group of powers.

History has no end, and the competition is constant. If a country wishes to remain a great power, it cannot indulge fantasy and irresponsibility for long. Once lost, a lead, and the admiration of the world is hard to recover.

Act accordingly.

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France and Germany are critical here. Many leaders in Europe—and even in Canada—have determined that if the Americans are willing to weaponize consumer tech, they are no longer reliable partners. Consequently, they are quietly developing tech ecosystems independent of the United States, subsidized by government funds. France, in particular, is not opposed to targeted statism. This response may take the form of building national or pan-European competitors, creating open-source systems to directly compete with American software, and eventually mandating them for government use.1

The clearest example of this came last week.

Below is my translation of this week’s French government announcement that they are dropping Microsoft Windows to end their reliance on American tech because the US government is no longer a trusted partner.

End translation

The press release was issued by David Amiel (Minister of Public Action and Accounts) and Anne Le Hénanff (Minister Delegate for AI and Digital Affairs), coordinating through DINUM, Direction interministérielle du numérique (the Interministerial Digital Directorate.) Officially, “DINUM is responsible for developing and overseeing the government’s digital strategy. It manages digital projects to advance national priorities and improve the efficiency of public administration.”

DINUM is the technical agency within the French government executing strategy and IT infrastructure across all ministries; it serves as the executive arm for the policy objectives established by the ministers. This is not a drill: the French state is quitting American tech.

The State can no longer merely observe its dependency; it must break it. We must desensitize from American tools and reclaim our digital autonomy. We can no longer accept that our data, infrastructure, and strategic decisions rely on solutions where we have no control over regulations, pricing, technical roadmaps, or risks. The transition is underway: our ministries, agencies, and industrial partners are launching an unprecedented effort to map our dependencies and reinforce our digital sovereignty. Digital sovereignty is not optional. [emphasis added]. — David Amiel

“Desensitize” (désensibiliser) effectively means that decoupling from America is now official policy. But I think the literal translation works best for the political problem this poses for the United States. France and others view America’s digital reach as something that touches them where they are vulnerable. If America is not a trusted partner, you have to cut off contact.

“Digital sovereignty is not an option; it is a strategic necessity. Europe must match its resources to its ambitions, and France is leading by example by accelerating the shift toward sovereign, interoperable, and sustainable solutions. By reducing our reliance on non-European technology, the State is sending a clear message: the government is reclaiming control over its technological choices to secure its digital sovereignty.”—Anne Le Hénanff

“TAKE BACK CONTROL” was the slogan of Brexit; it was also an implied subtext of “Make America Great Again.” Now it is France’s. Le Hénanff is stating plainly that Europe is reclaiming control over its technological future — and that American companies are not guaranteed a seat at the table. Europe is worth around half a trillion dollars to the US tech industry. Provoking it was an expensive mistake.

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J.D. VANCE, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: There are three different 10-point proposals at least that I've seen floating around. The first 10-point proposal was something that was submitted, and we think, frankly, it was probably written by ChatGPT that was submitted to Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. That immediately went in the garbage and was rejected. There was a second 10-point proposal that was much more reasonable that was based on some back and forth between us, between the Pakistanis and the Iranians.1

U.S. inflation reached 3.3% in March 2026, marking a two-year high. This spike is almost exclusively attributed to a 21.2% monthly increase in gasoline prices, the sharpest rise since 1967.2

This is less than optimal. An insolvent America is an irrelevant America. The American worker is struggling, and the president’s war against Iran has made Americans poorer. They did not sign up for $70 to fill their tanks for their commutes. While Biden was criticized for an overheating economy, Trump faces a war tax at the pump that he cannot wish away.

Islamabad (the city of Islam) the Pakistani capital is hosting talks between the United States and Iran. The US delegation is led by Vice President James D. Vance,3 a man not known for his skill in diplomacy and most famous for blowing up the Feb 28, 2025 meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Vance got into it again with Zelenskyy this week during Vance’s intervention in the Hungarian election. The Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orban, accused Ukraine of blocking the flow of Russian oil through the Druzhba pipeline. Let’s take note:

• Hungary a NATO member is buying oil from Russia.

• NATO and the EU are aiding Ukraine against Russia.

• This oil must flow through a pipeline that goes through Ukraine, the country Russia is invading.

• Ukraine says that a Russian drone attack damaged the pipeline and it is working to fix not block it.

• Hungary blocked a $100 billion loan from the EU to Ukraine in retaliation for Ukraine “blocking” the oil.

• Zelenskyy then reportedly said he should give the address of those responsible for blocking the loan to the Ukrainian Army.

That’s the dispute; as you see, there is a lot going on.

Vance then, instead of staying out, said that Zelenskyy’s “threat” was scandalous, but not that Hungary blocking the loan for an embattled Ukraine was scandalous. Viktor Orban has long been seen as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s best friend in the EU, and many think he blocked the loan because of his support for Putin, dependence on Putin’s oil, and because Ukrainians and Hungarians have historic animosity. Vance’s comments and interference in the Hungarian elections scheduled for April 12 will continue to lower his standing in Europe.

Back the Islamabad talks

Leading the Iranian delegation is the speaker of the Iranian parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf. Also included in the U.S. delegation are Steven Charles Witkoff, a New York real estate developer, and Jared Corey Kushner, U.S. President Donald John Trump’s son-in-law. However, both men are under increased scrutiny in the US for ties to Israel, and because less than 48 hours after Witkoff and Kushner met with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi in Geneva, Switzerland, the US and Israel attacked, starting the war they—supposedly—hope to end at these negotiations in Pakistan.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) openly maintains that the Geneva talks were a strategic feint. From their perspective, Witkoff was used to provide a diplomatic smoke screen while the military finalized war plans. The US has forfeited its reputation, and this clouds the talks.

America and Israel Divergence

Iranian Foreign Minister Araghchi has said that the American refusal to rein in Israeli strikes in Lebanon is “dumb.”4 Israeli PM Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu faces serious criminal corruption charges, was indicted back in 2020, and has three separate cases against him. The Iranians allege—and they are not alone—that Bibi is pushing for war and other military action to delay his trial and shift the narrative from accused corrupt politician to necessary war leader. The trial has been remarkably delayed. First COVID-19, then elections brought Bibi back to power, then the wars in Gaza, Iran, and now Lebanon. Each has been used by Netanyahu to lengthen the trial and shape the public narrative. Iran therefore thinks he is not trustworthy, as war is to his advantage and peace means Israel has to deal with core domestic issues like political corruption. Vance, for his part, thinks the Iranians would be “dumb” if they let the peace talks fall apart because of Israeli attacks on Lebanon, but to the rest of the world, the US Vice President is not making sense. Lebanon is suffering from an Israeli invasion, which Israel claims is to remove the threat from Hezbollah, a Shia political party and militia that is allied to Iran. However, Iran claims, correctly, that the Israeli military operations in Lebanon are part of the same war and of course would be covered by the same ceasefire.

On this point, the US is losing more global credibility. Pakistan brokered the ceasefire, a fact acknowledged by all, which is why the peace talks are taking place there. However, Pakistan also says that Lebanon was included in the ceasefire as it was supposed to be Middle East region-wide. Who is to blame for the confusion? Israel or Pakistan?

Either way, Iran has preconditioned the ceasefire on Israel stopping its attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The ceasefire may prove to be a mirage, and the US could be at war again by this time the Monday bell rings on Wall Street.5

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Propaganda did not always carry a negative meaning. It began as a phrase used by the Catholic Church to propagate, or spread, the faith. In the early 17th century, the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, (the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith) was simply a church body tasked with spreading religious doctrine. This was important after the Reformation because someone needed to keep Catholicism clear and on point in the non-Catholic countries were there were still practitioners. Nothing nefarious about it. However, the 20th century flipped the term. During the Great War, governments realized that national morale was as vital as bullets. This including making the people hate the enemy and believe their government was just in fighting on despite the death toll. The Nazi Party took the World War One means of propaganda and transformed it into a sophisticated, state-sponsored marketing of evil. But they did not start this trend, they amplified it.

Madison Avenue was the heart of American advertising. By the early 20th century, it was effectively a business psychological laboratory for modern consumerism. Firms on Madison Avenue shifted toward lifestyle branding, marketing goods as symbols of status, health, or social belonging. These campaigns set the pattern of thinking of “citizens” as mere “consumers” and provided a blueprint for manipulating mass behavior through visual and emotional cues. It proved you could bypass the rational mind to sell a feeling rather than a fact.

Governments took the most sophisticated marketing and psychological manipulation techniques and applied them to their information operations. The Nazis like Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s head of propaganda, followed the Madison Avenue trends. The Nazi manipulation lay in its mimicry of commercial advertising. Joseph Goebbels did not just spread information; he built a brand, and developed targets. The Nazi propaganda apparatus used bold color palettes, repetitive slogans, and high-production aesthetics to make extremist ideology appear normal and needed. This process abused logic to short-circuit circumspection and drive immediate conclusions.

Nowhere is this exploitation more evident than in the regime’s targeting of the young. The propaganda poster above, featuring a young girl with the caption Auch Du gehörst dem Führer (You too belong to the Führer) is chilling in its apparent innocence—if you did not know better. It does not sell a policy; it sells an identity. By using the image of an innocent child with traditional braids, the National Socialist fascist regime framed its ideology as wholesome, protective and traditional, disguising its revolutionary nature. It hijacked the universal instinct to cherish youth and redirected it toward the state. Not the family, but the state.

The root word gehören (to belong) has a double meaning in this case. In this paradigm, a child is no longer the ward of their parents’ stewardship but the property of the community, the tool of the movement. The insidious nature of the propaganda was to make total submission to the government feel like a heroic form of belonging. This was the second part: not just ownership by the leader, but belonging to something bigger, being part of a new movement with your little friends. A goose-stepping playdate.

Call it what it was: the seduction of the youth is grooming.

In May 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt announced an unlimited national emergency to prepare the United States for war while still at peace with Germany. Speaking by radio address to the American people, he delivered his remarks in the presence of the Canadian minister—whose government was already at war as part of the British Empire—and ambassadors from the rest of the nations across the Americas. The British Empire was at war, but like the USA the rest of the Western Hemisphere was not. But needed to get ready for the danger. Roosevelt warned what was at stake if an ideology that threatened the fundamental understanding of family and community won the war:

The Nazi propagandists were grooming the youth of Germany for hate that would lead to the near destruction—and permanent shame—of their civilization.

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This brings us to the contemporary crisis: the rise of the “faithless” hero. We see leaders who openly flout the marks of faithfulness—to the Romans, fides—yet maintain a fanatical following. To understand the consequences of the faithless hero, we must look to the Roman Republic’s concept of fides: justice, consistency, and obligation. At the height of the republic, being faithful was not something you declared about yourself, it was the community’s audit of your honor. Faithfulness was a rigorous, public commitment to one’s responsibilities and agreements. To possess fides was to be predictable: you paid your debts, you kept your word, and you honored your elders.

Fides was the glue that held the republic together. If a leader lacked it, they were not just a bad person; they were an empowered threat to civilization. Alongside fides stood virtus, or “manly virtue.” This was the Roman standard for excellence, comprising strength, loyalty, and a willing personal courage during war when called to serve the Senate and People of Rome. Society demanded this of anyone who wished to be an elite: moral purity both in public and behind closed doors. It was not enough to be strong in war; one had to be morally upright at home. You need a reliable elite for domestic justice and to have foreign elites think their governments should trust and deal with you.

What does it mean when leaders are obviously faithless and the people stand behind them? If a hero is a defender, what is a faithless leader defending?

We cannot blame the leaders for this decay without first looking at the society. A hero is a mirror, not of who we are, but of who we would be if we could. If we find ourselves represented by those who treat duties as inconveniences and lies as a default communication strategy, we must ask what that says about our own priorities. Some have traded the social glue of fides for what they think is a defensive wall; but walls do not hold if faithless men keep the gates.

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We are governed by the terrible simplifiers. Life is complicated, especially war, but we have leaders who flatten that which is deep. But life remains deep, wide, and complicated. It resists the inelastic mind. Political oversimplification is not just a handy trick; it is a failure of government. The new elite prefer the false clarity of the caricature—simplified, exaggerated images—over reality.

The Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt coined the term les terribles simplificateurs. A cultural historian, Burckhardt saw the rise of mass democracy and industrialization with deep fear. He saw that as the commoners, the newly educated masses, gained the vote and became political, the demand for uncomplicated or crude solutions would grow. He predicted that “ruffians” would eventually overrun Europe—would-be leaders who would not try to navigate the tangles of history or tradition. Instead, they would thrive by stripping away every shade of meaning that would color their black and white myths. Conspiracy theories often work by simplifying complex stories. The terrible simplifiers kill nuance and nurture lies.

The Pope, the President, and the Enemy

This week brought three major statements regarding the Iran Crisis that I’ll deal with in detail after Holy Week: Pope Leo’s call for an “off-ramp”; the American President’s claim that the threat is “nearly eliminated”; and the Iranian President’s offer of the “will” to end war in exchange for “guarantees.” These declarations are the flashpoint, three rival ways of seeing the international crisis.

Have a good weekend.

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Before we looked to the stars we voyaged into the blue skies, and the path of human flight followed a course of rapid, violent change. On December 17th 1903, the American brothers, Orville and Wilbur Wright were the first in powered flight, a feat of world-changing engineering driven by good old American curiosity and optimism. Barely a decade later, Europeans had repurposed this invention into the latest elite weapon of war: pilots became the new knights.

These new knights of the air were not explorers; they were eyes for the artillery, the first step in a process of fusing the weapon to the vehicle.

The excitement and eagerness for adventure that marked the outbreak of war in the Summer of 1914, gave way to the reality of brutal combat in the trenches. It became clear that the war would not be over before Christmas. Commanders needed something to break the deadlock and looked for knowledge of the enemy through aerial observation.

By late 1914, the initial novelty of flight gave way to tactical necessity. The evolution of aerial photography accelerated this shift by 1915. Air power evolved and became a cornerstone of land-based strategy, providing a view of the battlefield that was previously impossible. Much like our use of satellites today.

Additionally, as the war went on, loss of communication became a critical risk. The scale of the battlefield created too many opportunities for men to move out of range of communication from headquarters. Aircraft provided the solution, acting as a link between the front lines and the rear, supporting command and control. However, this utility created a new problem: if aircraft could provide advantages to you then the same idea worked for the enemy. That had to be stopped. You needed your airplanes to help stop their airplanes. Air combat and direct battlefield assistance, meaning close air support, were integrated into ground campaign planning.

It was no longer enough to fly; one had to rule the skies. This led to a cycle of technological progress, the most significant development of the first year of the air war was the German Fokker Eindecker. Designed by Anton Herman Gerard Fokker, it changed everything, the first monoplane built to be a killer. Its defining feature was the synchronization gear. This mechanism allowed a machine gun to fire through the propeller arc without hitting the blades…usually. While early versions required refinement, the principle was sound: it was this innovation that merged the man and the machine of war. The pilot no longer just flew a plane; he aimed it.

The soldiers on the ground, most of whom had never seen an airplane before the war, viewed these machines and their pilots as symbols of a glorious and terrifying new age, and those who mastered these weapons became its heroes and legends. None more so than the German fighter ace, the Red Baron, who like Achilles died young and remains the most famous warrior of his era: the first demigod of what would become the air-conditioned nightmare of modern war.

As we celebrate the Artemis Program, we must remain vigilant. The America that went to the moon in 1969 with Apollo Program was a more solid state, the lunar landing was the peak of American Cold War liberalism. Today, the system behind the Artemis II mission is shaky economically and morally confused politically. In such times societies make critical errors from hubris and vanity. History shows that the instruments of progress are often the first to be recruited for ruin; that the tools of the dreamers are never far from the hands of the monsters. We are going back to the moon: is it to lead and inspire humanity or to stake a claim on the high ground before the next Great War?

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Although Israel exercises sovereign control over most of the Holy Land, the status of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem remains disputed. Two rival Arab Palestinian groups—the Palestinian National Authority and Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya (the Islamic Resistance Movement, known by its Arabic acronym, Hamas)—also contest the territory.

Governments will have to solve this dispute; however, political agency on both sides is currently frozen. We are talking about two peoples, not simply two governments. Eventually, Palestinians will need a unified administration to speak for them, which will require elections. No longer can a group like Hamas be permitted to drag two million people into a war with no mandate to do so. Yet, no one knows when the Palestinian people will next choose their leaders; there has been no election for the Palestinian Legislative Council, their parliament, since 2006. Israel, for its part, is scheduled to hold an election this year, and the polls are split between pro- and anti-Netanyahu factions. In both cases, peace depends on the citizens empowering leaders willing and able to end the conflict on terms both national communities can live with.

But how do the people recognize what they can and should be willing to live with, and which of their desires asks for too much? If peacemaking is to involve the American people, efforts cannot focus only on governments and fighters. Diplomacy must take place within civil society. This is what we call Track II diplomacy.

Track II diplomacy is the “back-channel”—the informal contact between individuals who do not officially represent governments but often have contact with those in authority. Unlike Track I, which involves formal negotiations between heads of state or high-level diplomats, Track II brings together academics, retired officials, community leaders, and NGOs: the folks on the street. In today’s bitterest conflicts, the civilian-to-civilian contacts and outreach are often when and where societies figure out whether they really want peace or would rather keep killing each other. The job of private conflict resolution efforts is not to sign a treaty but to build a bridge that a population is willing to cross to sign that treaty. For peace to last, the culture of longtime enemies must be reoriented; they must see the other as a permanent neighbor, free to live as they choose without the need to control, dominate, or displace.

One book I often recommend to students is The Culture of Defeat by the late German historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch. He explored what happens to societies after military defeat—not just politically, but emotionally and culturally. Applying Schivelbusch’s ideas to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can help explain how both sides interpret loss and victimhood, and how those narratives shape their identities. His central idea was that defeated nations may not simply accept loss. Instead, they might reframe it into a story of moral superiority against their opponent or project it forward, viewing their present and future through the lens of their loss.

For Palestinians, the Nakba (catastrophe) marks the defining rupture of 1948, when hundreds of thousands were displaced in the creation of Israel during the First Arab-Israeli War. What began as dispossession became a collective wound. Within Schivelbusch’s framework, the Nakba is a constituting myth—one that gives moral coherence to a people without sovereignty. Out of loss, Palestinians have fashioned a vocabulary of endurance: sumud, or steadfastness; the refusal to vanish; the insistence that exile is not erasure. Their unique national political consciousness was born here and their mindsets have been captured by the shared trauma.

Across decades of occupation and diaspora, Palestinian art and politics have made the catastrophe a symbol of survival. Like the defeated societies Schivelbusch studied—the American South after the Civil War or Germany after the First World War—Palestinians transformed defeat into a claim of moral strength. Their poetry, marches, and uprisings recast exile as testimony. Out of ruins a national culture grew, sustained by grief but oriented toward endurance.

Yet the same stories that preserve a people can also imprison them. Schivelbusch warned that cultures of defeat may harden into nostalgia, binding societies to grievance. For Palestinians, devotion to the lost homeland is both a lifeline and a constraint—a sacred inheritance that makes attempts at reconciliation with the dispossessors feel like betrayal. The Nakba remains the emotional core of Palestinian identity, a nation defined by what it remembers about 1948 and the Six Day War of 1967.

Though Israel today holds military superiority, its national imagination remains haunted by vulnerability. From the Holocaust to the wars of 1948, 1967 and 1973, Israeli identity has been shaped by the memory of near-extinction. Even triumphant nations can live within the mental and emotional walls of past defeats. They do not simply remember them; they organize their politics around them.

If “Never Again” is the mantra, what is not justifiable to ensure it remains true?

In Israel’s case, this takes the form of a civic creed built on survival. The nation tells itself a story of endurance under siege—of a new state created in 1948 and rescued from annihilation only by their own vigilance. Abandoned by the world to a genocide, they feel the only people they can trust are themselves, and their own power. The memory of absolute vulnerability can create a psychic need for absolute security, requiring the absolute insecurity of their opponents. Each concession, even to a much weaker adversary, feels dangerous.

The result is a paradox of power. A state born from trauma wields unmatched strength yet continues to imagine itself on the brink. Its dominance is shadowed by dread. Israel’s fierce insistence on defense is emotional and existential—an act of preemption against a memory of mass atrocity that may not match current reality. Both Israelis and Palestinians draw legitimacy from their wounds. Each community sees itself as history’s injured party—the survivor of betrayal, persecution, or dispossession.

A symmetrical victimhood.

This is the moralization of suffering.

The American conscience cannot bear the sins of others’ conflicts. We are war-weary, not isolationist. To provide more than mere summits, Americans must help these peoples imagine mutual justice without surrendering dignity. They must overcome their deadlock of identity. Peace must recognize the reality of power while insisting on the reality of wrongs and the need for redress. That means a future where two states are both sovereign and secure—in their rights of self-defense and internal police—and both societies can live with that reality.

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Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the world knew of drones primarily from American “drone strikes” against terrorists. That changed as the Ukrainians defended themselves against a Russian war for regime change. As in 1914, hopes for a swift victory vanished as defensive technology, improved by better drone manufacturing and lethality, blunted attempts to force a change in battle lines by sheer mass. The Ukrainian defenders have transformed war and the rest of the world is catching up.

America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity…Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence, has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will recommend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign Independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet upon her brow would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of Freedom and Independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an Imperial Diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.

—John Quincy Adams July 4, 1821

Last month, Donald John Trump, the American president, launched another war for regime change against the Islamic Republic of Iran without authorization from Congress. He acted alongside Israel, which had pushed for the war. Like Russia, the Israeli-Trump alliance has failed to defeat Iran after a month of fighting. Although the Israelis killed Iran’s top military and political leaders, the Iranians retaliated by striking American bases, secure sites in Israel, and American Gulf allies’ critical infrastructure. Despite leading the world’s most powerful military, Mr. Trump cannot bring the Iranians to heel. The Europeans, Japan and other American allies are not rushing to help. Most of the world sees the war as a violation of international law; that the administration attacked a UN member state while negotiating has eroded trust in the United States.

The Economist has confirmed my analysis: by decapitating Iran’s incompetent clerical gerontocracy, Israel may have inadvertently modernized its enemy.1

In “The Revolutionary Guards are taking over Iran2” The Economist reported that “People close to the regime describe a system that has shifted from theocracy to something resembling a military junta, akin to Algeria, Egypt or Pakistan. “We’ve gone from divine power to hard power,” says one…“It’s now the military that pulls the strings,” says Mohamed Amersi, a British businessman with regime contacts.”

Operation Roaring Lion did not exorcise the revolutionary spirit but cleared a path for a ruthless state led by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. By installing Mojtaba Khamenei—who lacks the clerical rank for the top job—the Guard signaled that security now overrides religious legitimacy. I warned that this younger leadership would likely stop the old regime’s corruption and adopt a disciplined strategy: avoiding a direct strike on America to focus instead on bleeding its forces in the region and exploiting the vulnerabilities of the Gulf states. Iran is mocking the United States on social media and successfully leveraging relationships with Russia and China.

This week it is clear that Iran has the advantage, while the president’s war hits cash-strapped Americans. Gas and food prices are rising and America’s reputation is tanking, while Mr. Trump makes statements that analysts take as market manipulation.3 He tries to look like a master economic manager despite evidence that his war and tariffs have made Americans poorer.

While Mr. Trump—resembling Tsar Nicholas II in the First World War—rushed into a conflict with little upside, China has stayed on the sidelines. Since 2022 it has traded with Ukraine while supplying Russia, resembling the self-interested non-belligerence of the United States in the 20th century. The United States kept out of the First and Second World Wars for as long as it could while its geopolitical rivals, the European great powers, weakened themselves. They ended up dependent on the Americans, who then swept in to save the day and inherit the wealth of the world. China learned from America; America forgot itself.

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The Great War hit Europe, the British Dominions and America so hard it left them numb.

The 1920s roared for some, but for many, the bleakness of the Great War never truly dissipated. We see a similar pattern today. In the face of the rapid explosion of AI and drone technology, our digital addictions serve as frantic distractions from a growing internal void and looming dread over jobs and an occupation-less life. The pre-Great Depression interwar period, the Roaring 20s, was defined by a great numbness. It, too, coincided with capitalist materialism and consumerism that masked a profound disconnect in the soul of the youth.

The Veteran’s Friction

For the men returning from the mud and blood of the Somme, the home they dreamed of while in the trenches no longer existed. What followed the shock was often a disconnect between those who had witnessed the equality of death in the field and the civilians who had merely endured the rationing of butter.

Alienation set in and many veterans returned with a specific brand of hostility; viewing civilian complaints about wartime austerity as pathetic—a betrayal of the stoicism required to survive the front. This friction was sexed. Across Europe, women, who had found independence in munitions factories, were often alienated from shell-shocked husbands who returned as strangers. In Britain, this rift was so deep that some suffragists regrounded their claim to citizenship in the separate spheres for the sexes, and the benefits of social motherhood and feminine values for society. Among the men of Italy, if they could have built a manosphere4, the angry members of the “trenchocracy5” would have done so.

The Death of the Chaperone

Like the old GOP elite in the Global War on Terror, World War One killed the aristocracy’s claim to lead as an almost accidental consequence, by comparison it basically murdered Victorian modesty. The middle-class conventions of the 19th century dissolved with eros and narcissus running rampant. In the face of what should have galvanized them into action, the Western cultural elite split with some uselessly paralyzed by horror and others taking advantage of the dislocation to sprint toward a cold, mechanical utopia, and others embracing the youthful anti-tradition of fascism.

The American Escape

But then, there was something of an American escape valve. Europeans could look across the ocean and perhaps hope and cheer, somewhat. Jazz, America’s music, was that syncopated escape from the dirge of the early 1920s. Ironically, African American stars like Josephine Baker and Louis Armstrong became the faces of a new, international energy. This was a frantic distraction from the fact that the old world had ended in a muddy ditch, and no one knew what was replacing it. But it was beautiful.

What is the Jazz of today; a new sound of life, offering a rhythm of hope for the future? K-Pop? Perhaps we are lost indeed.

Or maybe this is just our struggle, as every era has had its own. While we study the past, those of us alive today were not supposed to solve the 1920s; however, the 2020s are our problem. Americans have responded to troubled and anxious eras before, with movements like Muscular Christianity and the New Deal. Now we need a Logos of the digital age — one that reorders our relationship with technology, the state, and our neighbors, and recovers what it means to be human in an imperfect and tragic world.

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The stories you tell yourself are powerful. So are the ones you let others tell you—if you are silly enough to believe the Gríma Wormtongues around you. You can tell yourself you are weak and become so. Likewise, you can convince yourself that you are inexperienced, a parvenu with no business being where you are. America has let such ideas creep into its head: the idea that it is a “new” country or that everything is unprecedented. We must return to basics—to the ground level. So much has been forgotten and much else was never learned.

At 250 years old, the United States is one of the oldest governments in the world. Should we act as if Russia is “older” than us? It has a presidential republic that has existed only since the 1990s; before that, it was a totalitarian regime, and before that, a monarchy whose members and aristocracy were murdered or exiled a century ago. Should we pretend that such a government has continuity? China’s 2,000-year-old imperial system was destroyed in 1911 and 1916; the Communists took power in 1949, exiling the old government to Taiwan.

In 1776 Americans declared independence from the Westminster Parliament and their German Hanoverian king, George III, but the Founding Fathers did not expel their memory. They claimed Magna Carta as their birthright—the works of Henry II Plantagenet, the Tudors, the Restoration Parliament, and the Glorious Revolution. We have allowed ourselves to be deluded by the idea that we are a new and experimental nation, so far that we have lost the advantages of being a serious and experienced country. The memo for this Monday is that we must return to the basics of how the American system evolved and why powers are distributed as they are. People who treated the separation of powers as an inconvenience have learned the hard way that Washington, Hamilton, Madison, and the other “old white guys” from the 18th century might actually have known what they were doing. It is time we relearned the lessons they did. We must recognize that political maturity requires what George Santayana called ‘retentiveness.’ As he noted in Reason in Common Sense:

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This week’s critical flashpoint is the refusal of American allies in Europe and elsewhere to help open the Strait of Hormuz.1 America’s European allies may eventually decide to help open the strait, but they are signalling they will no longer be bullied. They and their voters have had enough.

US President Donald John Trump is repeating mistakes made by Germany in the First and Second World Wars, and proving that culture and personality have strategic consequences. Trump’s reaction to old America power structures and immigration reflects his insecurity over his own origins—his grandfather was deported from Germany—and lack of strong ties to the United States. Many are belatedly recognizing what was clear for a decade, that he is unfit for the presidency, as the Iranian-born, post-liberal, Catholic convert Sohrab Ahmari has proclaimed in his article for Unherd “Trump was never the one: His flaws finally became catastrophic.”2 However, as Trump clearly did not possess—nor sought to acquire—the habits of character that made America the leader of the West in the first place, how could he have ever made it “great again?”

The 45/47 president is known for his fixation on—and a shallow understanding of—19th century tough guy history from Andrew Jackson to William McKinley, but both Germany and America have evolved and moved on from the 1800s. His behavior is a regression that does not fit the modern world, or the lessons that the German leaders learned the hard way.

The Economist, back in early 2016, was the first to warn that what was perhaps most important about Trump was that he was not very American; his family was of recent origin and had not engaged in the normal rituals of early 20th-century assimilation—public school, intermarriage, or military service—while remaining sensitive to their German roots. As The Economist pointed out, Donald Trump possessed a very different personality from other German-American presidents like Herbert Hoover and Dwight D. Eisenhower, men who were archetypically American through and through and built their public lives on public service versus personal service. In particular, it noted that his family hailed from Kallstadt, a village known for its culture of the Brülljesmacher—the braggart or “roarer”, someone who makes a big noise. Growing up, the Trumps were encouraged to be “killers” with a “free relationship with the truth.”4

The problem occurs when the village braggart becomes a global leader you end up with the Kaiser Wilhelm II problem: perpetually insecure and thus perpetually aggressive. They burn every bridge because they believe their own hype about not needing them.

First, the Kaiser’s Germany went to war without securing Italian support. Because the Triple Alliance was defensive—like NATO—Italy was able to avoid the start of the Great War, later joining the French and British to open a new front against Austria-Hungary and Germany. By declaring war first, Germany made it so the defense alliance did not apply. Italy pursued a policy of sacro egoismo which meant not letting German vanity and arrogance get to you while you focus on your realist objectives.5

Adolf Hitler made a similar mistake with Japan. He invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 without consulting the Japanese, who were already upset that Hitler had agreed to the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, violating the 1936 Anti-Comintern pact. The 1940 Tripartite Pact did little to fix the problem, as the new alliance between Germany, Japan, and Italy was again defensive. Japan stayed out when Hitler attacked Joseph Stalin in Operation Barbarossa. Once again, Germany suffered for assuming too much of its allies and acting alone. Hitler did not understand practical security architecture.

This is not being a strongman, it is being strategically illiterate.

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After the Great War, Ireland rose against the British in the Anglo-Irish War—aka the Irish War of Independence 1919-1921—commanded by the “Big Fella” Michael Collins. Collins led the Irish well but with resources running low he agreed to a compromise that would end the conflict but give the Irish a state, but one divided with Northern Ireland’s six counties of Antrim, Armagh, Down, Fermanagh, Londonderry, and Tyrone remaining in the UK. Collins was murdered for his pragmatism.

As part of the treaty ending the war, the British king remained the “Free-State” of Ireland’s head of state and a governor-general would reside in Ireland as his personal representative. The new government of the Free-State formed by the pro-treaty faction made William Thomas Cosgrave the president of the Executive Council as head of government and leader of the parliament, and appointed Timothy Michael Healy, a former Irish Nationalist MP, as the first governor-general. Healy’s background signaled that nationalists were in charge of the south of Ireland, but Healy’s official status reminded everyone of the oath allegiance to the Crown that was the price of the independence treaty. The anti-treaty faction, who lost the brief Irish Civil War 1922-23, hated the office, and never let good manners get in the way of their hatred.

As long as the governor-general existed, Irish laws required symbolic royal assent. Following the Statute of Westminster (1931), Ireland became a dominion with its own relationship with the crown and the British cabinet in Westminster lost influence over the Irish governor-general. Unlike other dominions like Canada, the many in the Irish government wanted to eliminate the monarchy altogether. As a result of Imperial Conference of 1930, it was declared that the appointment of goverors-general should rest solely with the Commonwealth nation concerned. And this would give the Irish republicans a chance.

In the Great Depression election of 1932, Fianna Fáil—the party of the defeated civil war anti-treaty faction—led by the American born Éamon de Valera, won control of the lower house of the Irish parliament, the Dáil. As new president of the Executive Council, de Valera sought to break the link with the king and establish a functional republic. To this end he began a campaign of targeted disrespect against the incumbent governor-general, James McNeill.

McNeill was a nationalist who had helped draft the Free-State constitution and had collaborated with Michael Collins. It did not matter. It did not matter that when de Valera won the election, McNeill did not force him to come to the governor-general’s office for the swearing in and instead went to de Valera. The de Valera’s government set out to degrade the office. Things came to a head when at a diplomatic function Mr. McNeill showed up and members of de Valera’s Executive Council immediately walked out. McNeill complained to de Valera that this behavior was unacceptable, de Valera demurred but would not apologize. McNeill then formally published his communications with de Valera about the incident against de Valera’s wishes, de Valera then asked the king to dismiss McNeill and the king, who was likely exacerbated by de Valera picking a fight with a fellow Irish nationalist, put together a compromise: McNeill would retire in November 1932; he was already scheduled to retire at the end of the year anyway. All that from de Valera and it only got him an extra month. Mean Girls of the Great Depression the Dáil edition

To further reduce the office’s prestige, de Valera appointed Domhnall Ua Buachalla, a 1916 uprising veteran, as the new governor-general. Mr. Ua Buachalla lived in a modest house, avoided public duties, and refused the ceremonial trappings of the Viceregal Lodge. By making the office invisible, the government rendered the crown’s representative as irrelevant as possible to Irish life political life. Then King George V died in 1936, and the British crown was rocked by the scandal that the new King Edward VIII was carrying-on with a married woman named Wallis Simpson, who was still married to her second husband. And the king wanted to marry her.

The royal family was appalled. The Church of England could not stand for the flouting of marriage vows. British security agents had evidence that Simpson was too friendly with the representatives of Nazi Germany. The final blow to Edward came when the prime ministers of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa told the British prime minister they could not accept Wallis Simpson as the wife of the monarch, and de Valera joined in with the calculating proviso that for Ireland it would be impossible to accept Simpson, because as a Catholic country the government did not recognize divorce. That was it the king would have to abdicate. And de Valera seized the moment. The British needed him because under the terms of the statute of Westminster, any change to the Crown required the unanimous consent of the realms to keep unity. London could no longer tell them who their king was.

If British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin wanted Edward VIII gone for good, he needed to prevent an Irish breakaway. Otherwise, Edward would still be king in the Irish Free State with his younger brother soon to be George VI reigning in Britian; no one in Britian wanted the headache of a split Crown. Politically this made it hard for the other realms to object to the changes de Valera made to the role of the monarch in Ireland.

In December 1936, De Valera passed two laws making Ireland de facto a republic for domestic issues. First, he amended the Free State Constitution, removing all mention of the king and abolishing the office of the governor-general. Then his government passed the External Relations Act which 1) recognized the abdication and 2) kept the Crown but restricted the king to nothing more than rubberstamping international treaties and recognizing diplomatic credentials. At home it was if the monarchy did not exist.

All of this helped with the project de Valera had worked on all year, a new Irish Constitution. It would formally transition the country from the “Free State” to simply Ireland and with the indigenous name Eire also official. Irish Gaelic would be the official language alongside English. The same went for indigenizing the names of the officers of the state. This included the new office of prime minister, or Taoiseach, which de Valera meant for himself, and to replace the governor-general, he created the very republican sounding office of president of Ireland, the Uachtarán na hÉireann.

Where before de Valera wanted degradation, now he needed gravitas, he needed a president with statue, someone to elevate this brand-new office and make the people take notice. With the enthusiastic support of the opposition party Fine Gael led by his old rival W. T. Cosgrave, they selected a Protestant academic, Douglas Ross Hyde. A celebrated linguist from an Anglican family, Hyde was the first president of Conradh na Gaeilge, the Gaelic League setup to revive the Irish language. No better way to divorce the crown than to make a protestant the stealth chief of state of a Catholic country, something unconstitutional in Britian.

The king was still king, but Dublin was not calling anymore.

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We keep waiting for a civil war that looks like a map of red versus blue. What we have is messier: a necrotic web of private grudges. It is no longer a “political divide”; it is a brawl over status and the purpose of politics. We are being strangled by small ideas rather than torn apart by big ones.

And many remember all too well the past before becoming American.

From my work on race, and on the Troubles in Northern Ireland, I know one of the worst things a society can do is let resentments lay buried and simmering. We have to be open about disagreements.

Tracking the online fights across the spectrum of social media has revealed critical shifts in perception about what matters in American politics and what is going wrong. The tone of criticism of the federal government is changing. Critics are developing arguments against both the state’s operation and its operators. In both the GOP and Democratic camps, there is a belief that for many political players, the American present is merely a staging ground for the Old World’s unfinished business. The discontented charge that the USA has imported wounds and expected them heal in the melting pot, but that pot has instead become a pressure cooker for diaspora vendettas. When a Los Angeles deli becomes a proxy for the streets of Tehran, or a South Florida primary turns on the unreconciled accounts of 1959 Havana, foreign policy ceases to be seen as legitimate. Instead, it is viewed as a neighborhood brawl not with fellow citizens debating the national interest but with descendants—and sometimes survivors— of foreign tragedies, tending ancestral fires that will never warm America but can burn.

From the anxieties of pro-Israel Jewish American activists over the security of Israel, Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s interest in the Cuban regime, and the Iranian exiles seeking a reckoning with post-shah Iran, to the Americans outside of what they see as tribal grudges, the national cul-de-sac looks like the race track for every outsider grievance left over from the 20th century.

The new neighbors are irking the old timers.

The result is a profound rage and a new “othering” that attracts strange bedfellows. In recent Virginia elections, Democrats defeated the Republicans because the GOP team did not run on kitchen-table issues: immediate, everyday concerns that directly affect your wallet, health, and quality of life. In 2024 voters reacted against the Biden administration over the perception they were not focused on domestic concerns. Now guilt has switched sides with the GOP in control of all three branches of the federal government, but the anger is bipartisan. There is a real risk that the loud diaspora politics of the Trump-47 era will supercharge the xenophobic “real Americans” rhetoric—those whose families historically have no other “home”—and win converts from others who feel like background characters in someone else’s conflict. This is the potential birthplace of a new angry nativist coalition including not only old “heritage” Southern and Northern WASPs, but also white Catholics, and many non-white minorities. Folks more interested in keeping the price of gas low in America than they are about turning off the lights in Cuba whose national energy grid collapsed today.

It is a slow-moving revolt against a political class that appears to have forgotten which country it governs and expects Americans to move on from elite scandals. Such policy differences are fair game; each American can advocate for different approaches to foreign policy or alternative national priorities. However, calling such policy differences bigotry is self-defeatingly provocative as we found during the height of Ibram X. Kendi phenomenon. Today, Americans have lost the ability to see nuance, making our disputes ugly. It is leading us to dark places, but our government is not led by those with the maturity to shine a light or lead us out of the tunnel of despair and anger.

This may not have immediate political consequences because the feelings of being left behind exists as a divide contained within both major parties. The fights will occur in the primaries, but we will still see the red versus blue fights in November. However, the social consequences are likely to felt sooner. If main-street America feels that kitchen-table issues are being thrown aside to accommodate the world’s vendettas, the reaction will not be a polite tolerance but a new national animosity that we do not need. Traditionally, Congress was the place where intractable debates were settled, often loudly, but the problems were put on the floor. Now Congress is absentee, and presidential unilateralism and social-media mob rule have filled the void with a web of antagonism.

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Western factoid: The biogenic theory, or biotic theory, posits that petroleum and natural gas are formed from the remains of ancient marine organisms, like plankton and algae, buried under layers of sedimentary rock. Over millions of years, the combination of intense heat and high pressure chemically transforms this organic matter into the liquid and gaseous hydrocarbons we extract today. So, oil is a “fossil fuel.”

First a return to an older story. Ten months later, after some White South Africans “fled genocide” are others heading back to South Africa?

Reuters is reporting that White South Africans are returning home, going back to the country committing “genocide” against them. First, because there is no genocide, it was a lie all along, and second, because the grass is not greener in the USA where the streets are no longer paved with gold. The shootings of US citizens by I.C.E. in Minnesota, high cost of living, and American mass shootings are cited as the reason that White South Africans are reclaiming their citizenship, many after spending decades abroad.

I wrote about the evidence there was no genocide in South Africa back in 2025.

Date to Watch: March 31

March 31-April 2, 2026, US President Donald John Trump (aged 79) is to meet with China’s paramount leader, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping (aged 72). What happens in the Middle East war with Iran will likely determine the agenda and reception of 45/47 in China. If the meeting is called off it will be a major escalation of tension between the world’s most militarily powerful country, and the world’s greatest manufacturing power.

Oil and the Economy

American Allies in Europe are upset that the Israeli-America Iran War’s shock to the oil market has led to the US lifting some sanctions on Russian oil. Additionally, while after-the-fact rationales for the war have included weakening China due to that country’s dependence on Iran and others in the Middle East for helium and petroleum, China can get strategic resources from Russia. Additionally, the People’s Republic of China imports roughly 70% of its oil, and over 90% of that is seaborne. The current conflict in the Middle East has made Russian oil the most valuable potential asset to add to Beijing’s portfolio. Russia intends to increase Liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) exports to China by 40% this year. Any increase in Russian revenue will be funneled into the war against Ukraine—Europe’s primary strategic concern.

Israeli interests and European priorities are not aligned.

For years, Qatar supplied over 80% of China’s helium. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has effectively cut this supply line. Russia’s Amur Gas Processing Plant (GPP) in Eastern Siberia is nearing full capacity. It is now the largest helium production facility in the world, designed to process 42 billion cubic meters of gas a year. China is the world’s second-largest user of helium, largely because of its massive semiconductor fabrication plants. Helium has the highest thermal conductivity of any gas. In chip making, it is used to conduct heat away from silicon wafers during the manufacturing process, preventing them from warping or cracking. If harming China was indeed the goal of the war against Iran, then Israel may have revealed its intention to join the US in anti-China actions in September when Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, accused China of trying to “politically blockade” the Jewish state. This accusation prompted China to publicly note that it was “concerned” that Israel saw China’s actions that way. China will likely be wary of Israel in the future and may—in classic Chinese style—seek subtle ways to retaliate.

You know that colorful chart of elements hanging on every chemistry classroom wall? The one with the squares and letters that most of us just used as a giant cheat sheet to pass 10th grade. It was invented in 1869 by a man named Dmitri Mendeleev. He’s the father of modern chemistry. Yes, he invented the periodic table you learned in school. He helped establish the first oil refinery in Russian history for the Romanovs. But he also had a deep Tsarist scientific secret that shapes Russian policy today: he said oil was not a fossil fuel. Then during the Cold War, the USSR took that secret. And ran with it.

That’s the Friday Flashpoint for this week, additional analysis for member subscribers below.

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Without this moral clarity, Ireland’s behavior for much of the 20th century seems inexplicable. But in context Irish policies are not that unexpected. The Irish truly suffered under the British Empire after the mid-17th century when the Puritan government dispossessed the Irish landholders and practically enslaved Irish POWs.

By the time we get to the period of World War One the Irish were both experiencing new prosperity and better able to resist the British. Britain was a Protestant state, which in and of itself is not a bad thing except they wished to rule Ireland rather than leaving Ireland to the Irish and allowing them to be a Catholic country. This chosen contradiction brought the British trouble because to maintain control of Ireland they had to disenfranchise Catholics and then later abolish the Irish Parliament altogether and force them to vote as part of the British Parliament in Westminster where they could always be outvoted by the English, Scottish, and Welsh who were overwhelmingly Protestants.

The 1800 Acts of Union created the “United Kingdom” and was the moment the British government decided that the “Irish problem” could be solved by simply erasing the Irish political identity. By dissolving the Parliament in Dublin and merging it into Westminster, the British ensured that Irish grievances were no longer a matter of local justice, but a footnote in an imperial ledger.

The lack of political independence caused the Great Hunger (an Gorta Mór). Phytophthora infestans is the mold that created the Potato Famine from 1845-49, but that is not why it was so devastating. The problem is that great a disaster usually requires organized responses which are most effectively managed by government authorities. Politics is the ultimate test of human organization. Because the British ruled Ireland, the force of government was directed to British priorities and not to Irish survival. The Irish understood this and hated it. If they had their own state, they could take care of themselves and make the laws and policies needed to facilitate relief. Consequently, Irish nationalism only grew as they watched loved ones die or emigrate.

Belatedly, nearly 80 years later the British realized that abolishing the Irish Parliament did not and would never solve the root cause of their problem with the Irish. For decades a debate raged over granting the Irish home rule, meaning giving them a parliament, this time with democratic representation for Catholic men. The British finally came to their senses after a crisis in 1912 and the government was working on a bill for Irish Home Rule in the summer of 1914 when something in the Balkans stole their attention. The Great War broke out, and the British government suspended the implementation of Irish Home Rule if “this present war has not ended” meaning no Home Rule while the Great War was fought, but if you think the war will be over by Christmas, perhaps that was not such a big deal. This was not a good move when the other side did not trust you.

The Irish Americans watched and remembered. And when Britain went to war in 1914, many were ambivalent about the prospects of supporting the empire that had oppressed their grandparents and still denied liberty to their ancestral island.

On the one hand, many Irishmen fought in the British forces, and they wished their fellows well and a safe return home. On the other, many wondered if a victorious Britain would ever let Ireland have home rule, let alone independence. On both sides of the Atlantic the Irish had good reason to demand a redress of grievances from Britain.

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Thomas Sowell in his 1996 book The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy made the case that many political disagreements stem from a fundamental clash in anthropology: the constrained versus the unconstrained view. A “constrained” view sees human nature as inherently flawed and fixed, leading to a politics of checks, balances, and tradition. An “unconstrained” view sees human nature as malleable and perfectible, leading to a politics of social engineering and radical reform.

I would add that it matters what it is that you believe constrains people in a society or what makes them unconstrained. If man is a political animal to use the often quoted Aristotelian language, then the nature and ecosystem of that beast matters. Hobbes, Locke, and especially Smith have perspectives, which are often thought of in terms of worldviews and systems, but I argue we should focus more on the idea of what humans are and therefore all politics really begins with anthropology.

The handbook Christian Democracy: Principles and Policy Making, produced by the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung a German think-tank, explains that Christian democracy—the ideology that built democratic Germany after World War Two—approaches politics from a unique perspective:

The spiritual and political foundations of Christian Democracy are rooted in the troika of the social ethics of Christian churches, the liberal tradition of the enlightenment, and the nurturing of civic values where the smallest social unit is understood to be the family. Christian Democracy’s founding belief is the Christian view of humanity. Thus, in such a belief, every individual is considered unique and must be treated with dignity.

This was the right ideology to repudiate Nazism and build a future for the free Germans. And it matters that the East Germans missed out and went from 12 years of Nazism to 45 years of Soviet Communism, which accounts for their lingering dysfunction: three generations of broken anthropology.

And if 21st century America has broken anthropology then we will have a politics that cannot resolve its contradictions. America has always had disagreements, and we should not look at our past as some fantasy period without conflict. Rather, the Americans had a good-enough, and commonly-understood-enough anthropology that matched their political system so that when Americans had problems, most of the time they could reach a resolution, and then move on to the next problem.

So if you have a situation when you are led by an elite with bad appetites, who lack humility, and so driven by bad anthropology that they cannot distinguish between themselves and the common good, you will have a system that is not only unresponsive to public needs, it will not even understand how or why it should respond.

People glorify the marches and sit-ins and learn the wrong lessons about how America solved the problem of legal government-mandated racial segregation and exclusion.

Stop for a moment and imagine the Civil Rights Movement of the 1940s-1960s in an America that lacked a common moral language and anthropology.

Would it have worked?

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What I try to do on Fridays is notice when something occurs in U.S. or World politics that shifts the trajectory of our country or the global system.

America is suffering from a growing web of antagonism, much of which can be laid at the feet of a new elite who are disconnected from American tradition and from the American people. If the argument is that unique American traditions led to a stronger, more stable, wealthier society than the old world, then the departure from those traditions will likely have the opposite result. That gets me to the Israeli-America Iran War.

The current war, which is being called in some cases, the 3rd Gulf War, is not desired by two-thirds or more of the American people. Only the War of 1812 began with this kind of public skepticism, and even then, President James Madison at least made the case to Congress. Fox News says that “America is divided”—which has become the popular line for both the Democrats and the Republicans to use whenever the case is that most Americans disagree with their positions. Saying “divided” is a way to avoid confronting the fact that the American public actually can reach a consensus, and it is often not what the bipartisan elite wants to hear.

Most polls do not show a divided America, most polls show a country that does not want to fight a war with Iran and that most Americans consider Iran an annoyance but not an existential threat.1 Many now wish that Barack Obama’s deal with Iran was still in place. Americans do not like that the US attacked while Iran was negotiating; Americans did not like it when the Japanese did it on December 7th, 1941.

You can try to persuade the American people and maybe they reject your arguments, but they historically resent it when they are not consulted and things are just done to them. They will not simply rally around the flag and analysts like Nate Silver were noticing this as early as 2014.2

And then there is this: On September 10, 2001, the total U.S. National Debt was approximately $5.67 trillion. Today, the U.S. National Debt is approximately $38.9 trillion. Now, while the debt was not added at a uniform pace, that is still adding an average of $1 trillion every 9 months for a quarter of a century!

The Chosen—But Not By Us—War

Almost as important, the wars in the Middle East after 9/11 shaped the mindsets of a generation of Americans, both those who served and those who did not serve. The wars, the bailouts, the lack of accountability all rewired the millennial brain and Gen-Z’s viewpoints were heavily impacted by the social dysfunction of the government. You cannot evade 25 years of American memory. This is why there is no rally around the flag moment.

Long-term, if a majority of Americans conclude that the Israeli cabinet has more of a say over whether America goes to war than they do, they will not have a positive opinion of Israel. This is not a complicated concept, and we can see the breakdown in both the Democratic Party and increasingly in the GOP. This is a concerning development, one that did not need to happen, the Constitution is clear, and it does Israel no good to be linked to anti-Constitutional behavior by a particular president no matter the party that president leads. The conventional wisdom was that Israel always benefited from being a values-based bipartisan partner of the USA. There is no indication that the conventional wisdom was wrong.

The coalition assembled by 45/47, which we call MAGA, began as a constitutionalist and nationalist rebellion against the GOP status quo of George W. Bush, which it seemed the establishment was determined to force them to accept through his brother J.E.B. Another Bush presidency was not going to give the GOP rebels what they wanted: border control, reduced government spending, and an end to foreign entanglements in the Middle East. Many excused Trump’s failures in his first administration by blaming the old guard GOP that occupied much of his administration. That is not the case this time and what MAGA has seen over the last few months is the direct opposite of an America First policy or constitutional conservatism.

I think too many on the right have adopted the Democrat Party’s caricature of MAGA as merely angry voters who can be appeased by “owning the libs.” That is a convenient belief that misses the point that while many like chaos, many others genuinely were simply frustrated conservatives who were willing to give Trump a chance to address their concerns in a non-traditional way. In their view, the classic GOP of the Bush family failed repeatedly to respond to the party base. The failure of Trumpism will lead to another reaction, one that looks set to give the Democrats control of Congress and make some old GOP strongholds more competitive. Whatever the GOP evolves into is probably being determined in the fights over the “Epstein class” and the new Middle East War.

Other notes from me this week

My latest essay for the Institute on Religion & Democracy is a dive into a major signal I’ve been tracking: the decline of 19th-century dispensationalist thought among younger American Protestants.

By listening to the conversation shift toward sacramental traditions and the rise of postliberal critiques, we can see that the most significant consequence of the dispensationalist decline is the collapse of the theological firewall that historically shielded the relationship of conservative Protestants with Jewish Americans and Israel.

Read it here

I also had a great time getting to speak with Aaron Renn on his podcast where we discussed how to think about race in America. You can find it here.

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We are treating the digital record like a spreadsheet when we should be treating it like an excavation site. Here is why the future of cultural intelligence belongs to the historian.

In the corporate world, “social listening” has become digital bookkeeping. We treat the ocean of human discourse as a series of data points to be harvested and indexed. We track keyword spikes and viral memes with breathless urgency. We assume that if we just had a better algorithm, we could finally predict the “next big thing.”

But this approach is fundamentally flat. It prioritizes the événementielle—the short-term event, or “narrative history”—while ignoring the tectonic shifts occurring beneath the surface. To understand where culture is heading, we do not need more data. We need a better lens. We need the historian.

The tools have been here all along, but we missed them in the noise: the Annales School.

The Annales historians deliberately deviated from traditional 19th-century history. They moved away from the log of kings and battles and toward a totalizing view of the human experience. Between the world wars, French historians such as Marc Bloch, Fernand Braudel, and Lucien Febvre sought to blur the boundaries between history and the social sciences. Arguing that understanding the present required integrating geography, sociology, and collective psychology, they developed a framework that viewed society as a complex organism functioning across multiple layers of space and time.

The Annales toolkit offers a way out of shallow “now-ism.” By treating social media as a primary source archive rather than a marketing dashboard, we move toward a forensic analysis of culture. This approach is problem-oriented history applied to the digital age. We do not just ask what is happening; we ask why the current environment allowed it to happen.

This shift to a better approach starts with a return to Source Criticism. This analysis is the forensic evaluation of a record’s origin, reliability, and intent. Source Criticism consists of two distinct operations: external criticism, which verifies the authenticity and origin of the artifact, and internal criticism, which analyzes the author’s bias, perspective, and specific context. With our contaminated digital environment, Source Criticism is the essential filter that turns raw data into actionable insights.

We know bots and biased records saturate the online ecosystem, which makes the historian’s skepticism all the more vital. Most platforms’ algorithms assume volume equals consensus or trends. A historian knows better. Just as medieval records often reflected only the nobility, the digital record can be skewed by a vocal minority. By applying this criticism, we can identify the missing perspectives to compile a clearer profile.

The engine of this approach is the Histoire des Mentalités (History of Mentalities). Standard insights tell us what people say; the study of mentalities tells us how they think. Every digital subculture has its own “mental equipment” (outillage mental). It is the set of linguistic tools, metaphors, and psychological structures that dictate which ideas stick and which are discarded. When we map these worldviews, we stop reacting to a 24-hour news cycle. We identify the cultural logic that makes a behavior feel inevitable to its participants.

Furthermore, the historian’s analysis provides the necessary depth of the Longue Durée. This long-term perspective focuses on resilient structures that impact culture rather than the shifting sands of the moment. In this view, most of the impact on history occurs at a scale where foundational habits and tensions remain stable for decades or longer, gradually changing rather than shifting spontaneously.

In that case, many social conflicts or entertainment trends that we think are new are actually modern versions of older antagonisms and affinities. By recognizing these continuities, we can distinguish between noise and a fundamental vibe shift. This skill is the difference between reacting to a meme and anticipating a movement.

The answer to how to cut through the dense social media jungle is merging historical rigor with data analytics, allowing us to move from being merely data-informed to fully culturally fluent. In an era when we write our global narrative in real time, the most valuable researcher is the one who can synthesize the scraps of the present into a narrative of the future. The future of cultural intelligence lies not in code, but in the enduring structures of the human mind.

Data is the text; history is the context.

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