Welcome to World War Wednesday, a weekly dive into the continuous, thirty-year epoch of global conflict from 1914 to 1945. Here, I strip away popular myths to analyze the dynamics of industrial warfare, institutional behaviors, and the ideologies that shaped the world we inherited.

The Westphalian system of international relations established the modern understanding of sovereignty, but it also created a problem regarding accountability among states. If sovereigns are truly sovereign, who can judge them?

In the 20th century some American commentators mocked the idea of war as a police action, but they revealed their lack of understanding of the Western heritage: any war that was not for conquest could carry this connotation. Thomas Aquinas explicitly links war to a judicial action both in the right of the sovereign authority to wage war and in the denial of private persons to make a war because the private individual could appeal to their domestic law courts for settling a problem or filing a complaint. War was for when you could not do that, when a king wronged another realm, you called for the knights.

There were exceptions. Prior to the Reformation, all Western Europe could make use of canon law. If there was a dispute that touched on matters of faith and morality, princes could appeal to Rome and ask the Pope and his curia to mediate. Kings often invoked the Church in treaties between one another, which elevated them to covenants which could bring in the religious authorities if someone breached an agreement. While arbitration was an option, so was resorting to the battlefield. Even regarding domestic matters, there was a responsibility of a ruler to act against a fellow prince who was internally oppressive. Italian scholar Alberico Gentili (1552–1608) and Dutch scholar Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), both considered to be “fathers of international law” upheld the view that princes could in fact judge princes, which was counter to an absolute claim of par in parem non habet imperium: a sovereign could act against another ruler when that leader violated natural-law such as by being a tyrant or committing an atrocity.

After the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) the right to intervene in cases of domestic oppression fell by the wayside and wars of ambition became more prominent and less religiously inflected. Secular did not equal more peaceful, and you had fewer guardrails. However, the Great War challenged the sovereign immunity principle, and the Second World War overturned it.

The problem was this: is losing the war and merely being made to stop sufficient punishment for someone who has done great harm? Should they continue to live in their palace? Or in a comfortable mansion in exile, leaving behind the ruined lives of others?

For example, should Kaiser Wilhelm II be tried as a war criminal?

For many, the principle of sovereignty argued that if Germany was a sovereign state, then its emperor could not have his actions audited as an individual after the fact by the victorious powers. Germany was beaten and his dynasty overthrown; that was enough.

The second time around, after the Holocaust, the Nanjing Massacre, and other atrocities, a consensus developed that letting the men who ordered those horrors retire in comfort as defeated warlords was unacceptable. However, what made such judgements ethical given the understanding of sovereign immunity? What right did the Allies have to put the Nazis on trial? Were the trials in Nuremburg and Tokyo nothing more than victor’s justice, and did such justice have any moral authority?

To solve that dilemma the Allies created institutions and internationally agreed understandings around human rights and atrocity such as the Genocide Convention (1948) and Geneva Conventions (1949). Furthermore, the UN’s International Law Commission formalized the justification and reasoning behind the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal into the Nuremberg Principles (1950). The concept that individuals exercising sovereign authority could be held to account by the rest of humanity was carried forward decades later with the creation of the International Criminal Court.

But at the end of the First World War, the question was opened and unsettled. In the history of the world wars, the German Kaiser remains the exception.1

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Welcome to the Monday Memo, where I explore the world’s enduring dynamics; grounded in first principles, philosophy, character, and statecraft, rather than passing fads.

The French celebrate/remember/lament Bastille Day tomorrow. This occasion is always one of unique reflection for me as an American scholar as the French Revolution is linked to the American Revolution and yet so very different. It has many more shades of gray, but where it is black and white, the contrast is stark.

The American Revolution may have been inevitable in the sense that some sort of constitutional showdown would have to occur between the colonies and parliament, especially as the colonies steadily increased in population relative to the mother country. They could not indefinitely maintain the old English constitution in the colonies, and the imperial aspirations of parliament in one empire, without either one beating the other or a rupture. They chose rupture. France was different. The French are always different.

France needed reform not revolution. The problem was a failure of means and will. But first, let’s spin the globe backwards two thousand years or more.

In 215 BC, the Second Punic War against the legendary Carthaginian general Hannibal threatened the survival of Rome. The Roman Republic passed an emergency measure called the Oppian Law to restrict public displays of wealth by women. This law was strict. It capped the amount of gold a woman could own, banned purple fits, or rather garments, and outlawed women riding in horse-drawn carriages within the city—except for religious festivals—to ensure all resources went toward the national security crisis. Two decades later, after Rome had won the war and was vastly wealthier, a crowd of women flooded the streets of the city demanding repeal of the Lex Oppia. This uproar prompted a debate where the losing side made points that still matter even if at the time they tried to apply them to the wrong situation.

Prudence should govern how principles dictate policy.

When the Roman Consul Cato the Elder defended keeping the Lex Oppia in 195 BC, the immediate issue at hand was women demanding the right to wear gold and purple. However, the subtext was Roman values against the structural misallocation of a society’s resources. When wealth is concentrated in non-productive, competitive ostentation, it drains the resources necessary to sustain roads, legions, and the public good. Cato feared that these things would undermine the Roman virtues of self-control and discipline. Fair enough so far as it goes, however he had the wrong target; Roman women were not the origin or principal cause for concern for those problems. Cato lost the debate and the law was repealed because the emergency was over and there was no reason to deny Roman women their ability to style and adorn themselves in a patriarchal society where they were denied other means of honoring themselves, which was the argument of the Tribune, Lucius Valerius that helped bend the government toward the women’s plight.

A critical distinction exists between the treats and benefits of a prosperous society and the pathology of luxuria, the insatiable desire for extravagance and excess where elites hoard resources and a political economy separates having wealth from public obligations. It is opposite of the Roman virtues of frugality and thrift. Cato had a good principle and a wrong application.

Going back to the 18th century, there was a cost of forgetting the link between means and obligation. In the divergent paths of eighteenth-century France and Britain the relationship between their crowns and nobles tells the story. The British nobility was taxed. Their French rivals had some of best tax exemption plans in history. As a result, when Britain faced crises it not only had a sophisticated banking system, but it could also make long-term fiscal plans for taxing of the wealthiest men in the kingdom. France, not so much.

An absolute monarchy that barely taxed the nobles could not compete with a limited monarchy that could put its hands on cash in a hurry. France did not have to go through a revolution; it needed to learn the lesson of the Roman Republic and the British aristocracy: wealth that cannot be put to the use of society when it is needed is ultimately an unsound investment because if the society goes down all the protections required by wealth evaporate with it. Romans knew that if the Carthaginians sacked Rome, they would carry all the wealth away they could carry. Better to beat them and kick them out of Italy. The British realized that it was better to share the financial burden of the state if that was what it took to share political power with the Crown. But when France faced the crises of the late 1780s the fiscal house was a mess and public order itself became an unfunded liability.

When a political elite finds itself in a big mess, the solution will often be expensive, and they have to choose whether or not to pay the cost of cleaning it up or the cost of failing to do so.

But the cost will be paid. Either to the women of the forum or to the poissardes, the women fishmongers of Paris who on October 5th, 1789, marched on Versailles to demand the king return to Paris and do his job.

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A lot happened this week but I’ll try to be concise.

• Mamdani is up

• Platner is out

• Talarico is the future

• The Iran war is back on

• Canada is critical

• Fútbol is life

America hasn’t faced choices like this since the 1910s featured Teddy Roosevelt versus Wilson versus Eugene V. Debs.

The United States faces distinct pathways forward that will determine not only its domestic policies but also whether American politics will lead to a healthier engagement with a robust and competitive world.

Zohran Mamdani, the new Mayor of New York City, represents a progressive, Democratic Socialist new way. His is the politics of reform through active government that promotes its activity—a government that realizes that it must not only address problems but be seen to do so, and thus subverts the cynicism that too often excuses lazy politics. Translating that beyond New York City will require adopting the energy of his approach if not the same solutions, as no city in America is like New York. His opponents are in the unattractive position of hoping he somehow fails while he is delivering voters what they seem to want.

Graham Platner represented what many Democrats thought was the rough, blue collar White male populist pathway to countering MAGA. Before officially withdrawing his candidacy for the U.S. Senate in Maine following a series of controversies, Platner campaigned as an outsider against the “oligarchy.” His rhetoric, critical of corporate power and the political establishment, resonated with a segment of voters desiring systemic disruption, though his campaign ultimately collapsed under the weight of personal scandals. It has now gone up in flames but there was smoke for quite sometime. The Democratic Party will have to do soul-searching to determine how Platner was able to come from nowhere and defeat an incumbent governor in a landslide primary win, but also why so many party leaders were attracted to a candidate who had worrying signs that he had not only failed to move on from his past problems but that those problems were far more severe than they already appeared to be.

In Texas, however, the Democrats may face their greatest test with James Talarico’s campaign for the U.S. Senate. Talarico offers a pathway of institutional reform paired with religious progressivism. Talarico explicitly grounds his politics in his Christian faith while sharply critiquing White Christian nationalism. Can the Democratic Party tame its aggressive, anti-religious chattering class to make room for candidates like Talarico outside of Texas? This will be required to restore enthusiasm among Latino and Black Americans, as well as first generation citizens voters who are far more likely to be religiously committed than white Americans who support the Democratic Party. If the Democrats want to be a big tent party that can challenge the structurally advantages of the GOP in the South and Midwest, they will need more Talaricos.

In foreign affairs, America faces three brewing foreign relations crises that threaten to further weaken its standing and influence abroad. The first is that the war with Iran is back on. A superpower that cannot terminate wars at will with a supposedly weaker state is no longer a superpower but merely a major power with a grudge it cannot settle.

The second issue, and long-term the most important, is that Canada continues its pivot to Europe with the purchase of up to a dozen submarines from Germany and its entry into the Eurovision contest. Looking back, no historian of strategy will count undermining the relationship along the world’s longest peaceful border as a win. America defanged Europe after the Second World War. That gap in European history is over, they are rearming, establishing new relationships and through Canada, the EU may become a hard-power competitor for the US in the Western Hemisphere.

And finally, there are few major religions embraced with extreme fervor like international football, aka soccer. While the U.S. media has largely moved on from the controversy of the President of the United States contacting officials at FIFA regarding a player on the U.S. team receiving a red-card suspension, the rest of the world has not. Folarin Balogun, the US star player, was officially sanctioned for what is known as “serious foul play.” According to rules in place since the 1970s, that meant an automatic ban from playing. While in theory FIFA can suspend the punishment, when it did so after the US president involved himself, it was the first time it had actually used that power.

Two things happened: the world cheered when Belgium battered the U.S. 4-1 in their July 6 game, and FIFA’s reversal of the ban publicly angered the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), the body that organizes the European qualifying tournaments that determine which of its national teams advance to the FIFA World Cup and acts as the continental confederation under FIFA to basically run soccer. It is the sort of incident that sticks with the populations of other countries and creates lingering resentment.

Don’t touch the temple of fútbol.

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REMEMBER THE FIFTH OF NOVEMBER

The Great War, now more commonly known as the First World War or World War One, ended on Nov 11, 1918. American units first suffered combat casualties on November 3, 1917, in Bathelémont, France. With combat operations lasting just over one year and with victory achieved, why were Americans frustrated and ready to be done with President Woodrow Wilson and the Democrats?

Americans were tired of Woodrow Wilson’s antics of making everything about him and his supporters during the war. He violated the civil liberties of Americans who questioned the war. He looked the other way as German Americans were targeted for persecution. He continually expanded his mandate from defending the USA from the Germans’ threat of supporting Mexican fantasies of reconquering Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, to transforming the political order of Europe. The Democratic Congress passed the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, but enforcement went far beyond what most Americans were willing to live with, and too many became victims of overzealous prosecutions.

However, the United States has a safeguard that many democracies lack: the Founding Fathers made it impossible for the federal government to cancel elections during wartime.

October 1918, the last campaign of the war raged on, bloody and brutal, and yet across the Atlantic, it was campaign season for the midterm Congressional elections scheduled for November 5.

The Democrats had controlled Congress since 1912, and with victory in the war an almost sure thing, it looked like nothing could stop them from riding a patriotic wave.

The Republicans had a plan: give the American people a clear choice. While the troops were in combat and driving the Germans back across the Rhine, the Republicans offered the American people the chance to say no.

No to the League of Nations.
No to the Wilsonian paranoid national security state.
No to the Fourteen Points rather than total victory over Germany.
No to the waste and mismanagement of the wartime economy.

After being very cautious about attacking Wilson—because he was a wartime leader and they feared appearing to undermine the commander-in-chief during a declared war—the GOP capitalized on Wilson’s inability to stop making everything about his personal agenda.

On October 25, 1918, Wilson exposed himself to the American people.

Wilson attempted to gaslight the American people into voting for a Democratic Congress by attacking a vote for the Republicans as undermining the war effort without claiming that doing so was unpatriotic, while definitely implying that doing so was unpatriotic.

It was the opening the Republicans needed to be bold in their alternative plan. With ten days until the election, they could do what an opposition party should do: offer the people a clear and honest alternative. The American people were swayed by the idea that the French and British Empires or the Germans would change their response to American firepower due to the Democrats losing control of Congress. And they were not convinced that divided government would interfere with the constitutional separation of powers. They were convinced, however, that the Republicans would restrain Wilson’s narcissistic impulses to put himself and America at the center of problems they did not want.

There were early signs to be concerned about the peace. The wartime economic boom had just started and would be over after only one year. The Democrats had no plan for how to handle the transition back to a peacetime economy and the industrial job contraction. The GOP reminded people that Wilson had run in 1916 on the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War.” But it was Wilson’s meddling in Mexico in 1914 and 1916 that made the Zimmermann Telegram a plausible threat to begin with. “Unprepared” was the Republican accusation: Wilson and the Democrats were unprepared for the war and were unprepared for the peace. The American people needed to return power to the natural party of government since the Civil War: the party of Lincoln.

They did.

And in 1920, the Republican presidential candidate Warren G. Harding went a step further and promised the voters a return to pre-Wilsonian “normalcy.”

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I hope everyone had a memorable 250th celebration of the Declaration of Independence. Not everyone felt in the flag-waving mood as the US has had a very up-and-down couple of years. However, Saturday’s anniversary is not the only historically significant date coming up. Over the next six years there are a few events that are worth organizing additional commemorations. Chin up, America.

It is good and healthy to keep festivals local and parties on the block. For the events I will list, I hope you take inspiration and think of ways you, your friends, and neighbors can organize events and get togethers around things worth remembering.

Next year, 2027, is the 250th anniversary of the Union. The “united States of America” declared independence from the King of Great Britain together, but as independent states. In the Declaration, the word “united” was an adjective, describing that the former colonies were together in their endeavor to fight and defeat George III. The following year is when their delegates agreed to the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, a document that read in its first article:

That is when our name became official, where “united” became a proper noun. The Second Continental Congress adopted the Articles of Confederation on November 15, 1777. The first state to ratify it was Virginia, not Delaware by the way; Delaware is not and never has been the first state because the Union was created in 1777 and not 1787. Virginia proposed Independence, and Virginia ratified the Articles first on December 16, 1777. Both July 4 and November 15, 2027, are excellent days to hold events and parties. And December 16, 2027, too.

2028 is a big election year, but February 6 will be the 250th anniversary of France joining the Glorious Cause. The two treaties of Franco-American alliance were signed on February 6, 1778. This would be the time to tap into your local Sister City networks and connect with the French. Citizens of both nations should not let this moment slip by. When the Kingdom of Spain joined the war against Britain, it was because of their alliance with France and the 1779 Treaty of Aranjuez between those two kingdoms of the Bourbon dynasty. Thanks to France, the British Royal Navy had to fight two world-class opponents simultaneously, which also required the deployment of British land forces to secure other British territories from Franco-Spanish invasion. By dividing the attention of Britain and its allies, the French gave the Americans the boost needed to win in North America. Vive la France!

2031 is the final one I’ll mention because, as a Virginian, I have to end with the 250th anniversary of Yorktown, October 19, 1781. The joint Franco-American victory forced British Prime Minister Lord North to realize he had failed, and the war was unwinnable. If you can, you should visit Virginia in 2031 and head directly to the Historic Triangle of Jamestown, Williamsburg and Yorktown, all within 25 miles of each other. However, the heart of this message is: do something locally. 340 million people should be able to come up with innovative ways to celebrate their local life as part of this country that is the size of a continent. Mark the occasions at home. There is so much to America that we cannot contain it in Washington, Philadelphia, Boston, or New York. Whether you are in Virginia or Hawai’i, the Spirit of 1776 has to be felt in your community and embraced locally.

National cohesion is a bottom-up process.

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Thomas Jefferson got the Christian part right the first time. Let me explain.

The Enlightenment intellectual knew what Christianity truly taught, and that he was a hypocrite. He talked about liberty but held slaves in captivity. So was the king, George III was the chief enslaver and ruler of the most powerful human trafficking empire of the 18th century. He was also Supreme Governor of the Church of England.

People often say that American slavery should be seen in the light that the Founders were “men of their times” the problem is they knew it was wrong.

When Jefferson submitted his draft of the Declaration to Congress, the part about the King inciting slaves to rise against their enslavers originally read:

he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

Jefferson made sophisticated and self-damning arguments. First that British enslavement of Africans was incompatible with the plain readings what it meant to be a Christian monarch, was rather the behavior that Christians historically condemned infidels for. Second that the Crown and Parliament claimed the right to force the colonies to permit slavery whether they wanted it or not, and finally that it was the height of hypocrisy to ask some slaves to rise up against their enslavers after you first enslaved them while Britain wanted to keep and expand slavery elsewhere.

George III was no Abraham Lincoln.

But neither was Jefferson. The only place the word Christian appears in the Founding documents is in the unedited condemnation of slavery which the Continental Congress made Jefferson cut from the final version of the Declaration of Independence.

Perhaps if Congress had stood for liberty with consistency Jefferson would have had the courage to live out his convictions. Others may have followed the example of George Washington. Maybe America would be 100 years farther along our journey to be a more perfect union.

But Jefferson put opposition to slavery on the table, and no delegate could claim ignorance. We cannot claim societal ignorance. That is a gift of history. Jefferson exposed his own hypocrisy and contradictions, so now we can dedicate ourselves to reconciling them and rejecting injustice.

We can live out the promise that all people are created equal.

Happy Independence Day.

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Americans get things done.

From around the globe, World Cup fans have visited cities across America from Atlanta to Boston to Dallas to Seattle and Philadelphia, and more. Many have expressed shock at their reception, air conditioning, and the beauty of our metropolises. There is a continent sized country outside of the politics in Washington, D.C., and our foreign guests have come away with a newfound appreciation for the American people.

The classicist Victor Davis Hanson once said that America’s advantage was that it was always better than the alternative. I have adopted it as a truism in my work because history has proven him correct. Millions of immigrants left countries, often where they were demographic majorities, to be newcomers in the USA because it offered them more than their native lands. However, as Americans prepare to celebrate the 250th year since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, do Americans still feel that their country is better than the alternatives or do they feel stuck? We celebrated the 200th after Vietnam and Watergate when many Americans felt low and questioned what was worth celebrating; and we got through it. We will get through this era too.

The arc of history does not bend toward morality and justice on its own, Americans from 1776 to now have grabbed history and bent it to their will.

Maybe, the true test of any political union is not found in the grandiosity of its founding myths but in the material reality of how its citizens view their system, their lives, and their prospects. We live in the present and not the past no matter how much we may celebrate it. As the United States observes its 250th anniversary, the domestic mood about the state of the Union is strikingly downbeat. This stands in sharp contrast to the sentiment across the Atlantic, where despite mounting economic concerns, citizens of the European Union increasingly view their institutional framework as a vital source of stability and security.

Data from recent surveys reveal a profound divergence in national pride, institutional trust, and systemic optimism between the two unions.

In Europe, the EU is increasingly seen as a protective shield against global volatility. A June 2026 Eurobarometer survey indicates that 75% of Europeans regard the European Union as a place of stability in a troubled world, a rise of eight percentage points since late 2025. While 58% of Europeans express pessimism about the future of the world at large, their faith in the European Union’s internal mechanisms remains resilient; 59% report satisfaction with the functioning of democracy within the bloc. Critically over 70% want a more powerful EU.

Conversely, the American public feels deep institutional alienation on the eve of its semiquincentennial. A June 2026 Gallup poll reveals that extreme national pride has collapsed to a 25-year record low, with only 33% of adults reporting they are extremely proud to be Americans. Now, I wish that Gallup had defined “extremely proud” as something more than the top level choice out of five options but it still merits consideration.

According to the Pew Research Center, 69% of Americans are dissatisfied with the direction of their country, and 59% believe its best years are entirely in the past.

However, many Americans feel hope about the future. The United States has always been the country of the future: the next big thing. If Americans are dissatisfied about the present but hopeful about the future, that means they believe that change is possible and likely to come. This points to a reserve of American energy waiting to be unleashed. And that is a flashpoint, Americans who are unhappy now but also focused on the future equal a population that is motivated to right the ship of state. And that is the natural American position, not simply optimism but the drive to make it happen.

We do not need to calculate. We need to grasp with both hands and flex.

Keep bending and Happy Independence Day.

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Receipts

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20260629IPR46203/eu-wide-survey-an-insecure-world-raises-high-expectations-on-the-eu

https://news.gallup.com/poll/711938/american-pride-falls-year-record-low.aspx

https://www.pewresearch.org/2026/06/12/on-the-countrys-250th-anniversary-the-american-people-are-in-a-sour-mood/

In a world of kings, lords, commoners, and slaves, George Washington is decidedly a commoner. This is a film about becoming and belonging. He is not the George Washington, he is Mr. Washington, the little brother of Captain Lawrence Washington. Lawrence is the man George looks up to, he has been away, educated in England and fighting for the crown in the Caribbean. Their father has died, while George’s stern mother will take charge of him, Lawrence’s new cause is to lift up his kid brother and help him become a man.

George Washington’s struggle is ironically a proxy for the American story. The discrimination he receives as a “colonial” or “provincial” and the disrespect to his face is clear. The concern Lawrence has for George’s ambitions, and fear that the class system will dash his hopes parallels the concern of older Black Americans in the 20th century for the ambitions of Black youth. Is the new world really new? That question is at heart of freedom struggle, and the film shows the audience the tension. Showing rather than telling is a strength of the film. Slavery is seamlessly weaved into the story, as it should be. In 1750s Virginia slavery was normal and accepted, oppressive yes, and still accepted. The film portrays it that way, the indifference to the fate of the slaves is clear and also appropriately unremarked upon. Which I think will be more be provocative to audiences, who often struggled to see themselves in the position of the slaves. Americans understand casual indifference.

However, this also a coming-of-age through war film. War on the frontier is not Whites versus the Indigenous, no, the movie shows the reality: there were multiple sides. Europeans versus Europeans versus Indigenous versus Indigenous. The Seneca leader, the Half-King has his own agenda and why shouldn’t he? It is his land and he knows his opponents view it as their land. He will do what he must and that may mean helping the young inexperienced man from Virginia. The French are determined to destroy British power in the Ohio Valley, and they will without hesitation kill George Washington and his Virginians to do it.

The presence of the class system is pervasive. I enjoy movies from this period and wish we had more because the colonial era was when America was a society with old world concerns and struggles. An America of nobles and warriors, and one where the Virginians have to wonder, “if we are the inferiors, why are we being sent to frontier?” Virginia is already a century and half old by the time of the French and Indian War, and George Washington’s men are pulled from the traditional British lower classes and do not share his ambition, however they have pride in their dominion. And they know that George is like them, a commoner from Virginia, but one who clearly wants to be seen as the equal of the British. And the question lingers, why? The story is one about answering the questions of youth, learning from failure, and growing into your identity. It is about both accepting and shaping your fate.

George Washington must become a mature son of Virginia before he can be the father of an American nation.

The battle scenes are violent without being gratuitous and while there is light romance it is nothing beyond the PG level. The PG-13 rating is because of the war scenes and sense of danger. Parental discernment of course, but there was not much to keep families with older elementary school kids from seeing it if you were planning an outing.

The acting and cinematography flow so that the characters fold into the period and the scenery of old Virginia. Hopefully the heat does not keep audiences from the theater. I recommend Young Washington for your Independence Day weekend viewing pleasure.

Young Washington stars William Franklyn-Miller as George Washington, and John Foss as Lawrence Washington. With Mary-Louise Parker as Mary Ball Washington, Ryan Begay as the Half-King Tanacharison, Ben Kingsley as Virginia Governor Robert Dinwiddie, Andy Serkis as British General Edward Braddock, and Kelsey Grammer as Lord Thomas Fairfax.
It was written and directed by Jon Erwin.

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How we mishandled the cotton gin was a failure to cultivate a mindful approach to technology. We should learn from our mistakes in how we handle the future of AI and advanced robotics.

The first Americans made too many optimistic assumptions about the political economy of the new nation. They assumed slavery would just go away because it was a new age and it was an institution of the past that seemed inefficient. Then we assumed technology would solve the issue.

We are at a historic turning point as significant as the first Industrial Revolution. One of the major components of that revolution in the United States was Eli Whitney’s 1793 development and promotion of the cotton gin. This technology possessed the potential to solve the American demand for captive African labor. Because one laborer could suddenly process cotton seeds at a minimum of ten times the previous speed, the economics of the system could theoretically have been reoriented away from slavery. Profits could have increased while sharing the wealth with freed Africans as hired workers, providing a technological exit from an inherently oppressive system. If they were not going to end slavery because it was wrong, because they feared losing their ill-gotten gains, then the cotton gin was an out. This is not simply a counterfactual; rather, contemporaries assumed the opposite of what happened: many people at the time believed the cotton gin would reduce the need for enslaved people. That expectation was not simply naive; rather, they missed where the labor bottleneck shifted. The gin only solved the seed separation problem. Whitney had hoped his invention would reduce the labor needed to process cotton but there was a prior process. Picking. So, the cotton gin increased the incentive for more laborers to harvest it, since picking — not ginning — was now the limit on what you could do. Mechanical harvesters would not exist until the 1930s. So, the desire for slave labor exploded. Slaveholders became wealthier, more powerful, and absolutely determined to prevent any limitations on their control of the enslaved workforce.

Will AI unleash greater productivity and shared wealth, or deepen inequality and empower an oligarchy surveilling and controlling the rest of society? The generative systems currently being built possess the capacity to accelerate human capability, democratize access to knowledge, force institutions to become more responsive, and amplify talents across all backgrounds. Alternatively, they can make already-unequal systems flawlessly exploitative and nearly impossible to challenge. This trajectory will not be decided by the technology itself. The choice should not be left exclusively to the people and organizations controlling its development. Society should challenge their values, judgment, and intentionality.

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North America can be defined two ways: the countries north of Columbia, or as the United States of America and Canada. Geographically the first way is used to divide the Western Hemisphere in two as North and South America rather than the traditional America or Americas. This second definition isolates the old mainland British colonial empire, distinguishing it from the societies southward that traced their political heritages to Spain and Portugal, and recognizing the Caribbean as a diverse mosaic of mixed heritages.

During the Great War while Canada contributed blood and treasure to the fight in Europe the United States was busy asserting its hegemony over the Western Hemisphere with interventions in Mexico and the Caribbean.

In the mid-eighteenth century, it was unclear which of these areas would dominate the new Enlightenment Age but British America was not the clear leader.

New Spain/Mexico and Brazil slipped behind the Anglo-Americans. A massive domestic birth rate and lower mortality rates propelled the United States past its rivals. By 1900, the contest was settled. The United States began treating the hemisphere as its backyard.

When Mexico fractured into civil war in the early twentieth century, American involvement grew by degrees. Civil wars naturally generate factions desperate for outside leverage to crush their domestic rivals. From the borderlands of Nogales entreaties were made. On August 20, 1913, José M. Maytorena, the Governor of Sonora a Mexican state, dispatched a urgent telegram to Washington:

Americans however had little interest in getting involved in Mexico’s internal problems. With Europe consumed by the Great War after 1914 the Western Hemisphere was left entirely to American devices. Yet, the American public remained deeply ambivalent about empire. Earlier annexations of the Philippines and Hawai’i had generated major blow back and protests. It led directly to the formation of the American Anti-Imperialist League, which included prominent figures like Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie, and William Jennings Bryan. African Americans also supported their goal of opposing empire such as Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington. These Americans argued fiercely that ruling foreign populations without their consent violated the fundamental democratic principles of the U.S. Constitution. Likewise the average citizen had no desire to conquer or annex or intervene in foreign lands. Content within their own borders, the public mood was one of insular satisfaction rather than isolationism. As Booker T. Washington spoke for many Americans when he said in September 1898:

As the First World War broke out in Europe, the driving force behind America taking on other people’s problems was not the American people, but the singular figure in the White House: Thomas Woodrow Wilson, the new president. Wilson was a strange, volatile mix of Progressive technocrat and unrepentant Southern reactionary. The first Southerner elected to the presidency since the Civil War, he carried old ideas about racial hierarchy and power to Washington, masking them in the high-minded language of institutional reform and progressivism. He moved quickly to impose his vision at home, beginning with the resegregation of much of the federal civil service.

Overseas, Wilson channeled his rigid Southern Presbyterianism into a moral mandate to police the hemisphere. Long before he deployed American troops to Europe in 1917, he used the military to project American hegemony into Mexico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, while keeping the US in Nicaragua.

Argentina, Brazil, and Chile worked to limit American intervention in Mexico, but Wilson’s America was on the move whether the American people or the republics of the Western Hemisphere wanted it or not. While he would promote self-determination for European peoples, he did not apply that to the countries he deemed inferior. The US would rule the Dominican Republic until 1924 and Haiti until 1934.

Wilson demanded absolute personal loyalty to him from his subordinates and refused to be restrained by tradition or Congress in his pursuit to remake world order. But as a PhD political scientist, Wilson’s autocratic tendencies were presented with academic sophistication and high-minded moralism. He broke the rules with erudition. The consequences of his paternalist need to solve other people’s problems would still be long lasting and awful.

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Josiah was eight years old when he began to reign; he reigned thirty-one years in Jerusalem. His mother’s name was Jedidah daughter of Adaiah of Bozkath. He did what was right in the sight of the Lord and walked in all the way of his father David; he did not turn aside to the right or to the left.
—Book of Second Kings Chapter 22: verses 1-2

Then the king directed that all the elders of Judah and Jerusalem should be gathered to him. The king went up to the house of the Lord, and with him went all the people of Judah, all the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the priests, the prophets, and all the people, both small and great; he read in their hearing all the words of the book of the covenant that had been found in the house of the Lord. The king stood by the pillar and made a covenant before the Lord, to follow the Lord, keeping his commandments, his decrees, and his statutes, with all his heart and all his soul, to perform the words of this covenant that were written in this book. All the people joined in the covenant. —Second Kings 23:1-3

The American Revolution began as a debate over the power of the British Parliament over the British colonies in America. The colonies thought they had an Ace up their sleeve: the king.

Before they declared independence, the Continental Congress was not a sovereign legislature, it was a meeting of delegates who were effectively ambassadors from their colonies to the other colonies. Like the UN General Assembly in miniature. America’s leaders were mostly of British descent—before 1776 they were proudly British—and in their tradition the king had a duty to resist a bad parliament. Parliament itself was a creation of the crown, and the supreme constitutional authority in England had been the “King-in-Parliament” and it was the constitutional relation of the English Monarchy to parliament that was retained with the creation of the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707. The colonies likewise inherited the relationship of the English Crown to their respective settlements. And the argument articulated by Virginia and her sister colonies was this: we have relationships with the Crown that are free and independent of parliament.

The powers and responsibilities of the English Crown began with the Dark Age/Late Antiquity history of the Christian Anglo-Saxon kingdoms that unified into England under kings Alfred the Great, Edward and finally Athelstan who became the first king of a unified English realm in AD927. From that period to the Reformation, the concept of the monarchy evolved out of the politicking, rivalry, accommodation and compromises of royal families, the nobility, the Church, and people.

Over centuries, political power was negotiated, power was challenged, power was redefined; however, the constants were the Crown and the Church. The contests over power and jurisdiction produced agreements, obligations and eventually principles. British Protestant political theory grew out of that history and became “tradition”. The postmodern idea that the Bible’s support for government authority found in Romans 13 means that those in executive power can do as they please and everyone else must do whatever the leader says, without limit, is something that medieval European popes, nobles, and the educated commoners would find appalling. Support for arbitrary executive power is anti-tradition. Self-government is hard, being ruled is easy, but the British Protestant political tradition chose the difficult path of liberty, and that was a product of a long historical process. Before they could call the king a tyrant, they first had to have the idea that there were things that the king could not do.

In light of which, one might say that King George III would have known when to back off if he had read the position overview. Alas no one sent him the LinkedIn job description that highlighted he needed to have base knowledge of the English Constitution, and the kings of Israel.

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Americans traditionally view the transition from late May to July as the shift from spring to summer. Unofficially Americans count the last Monday in May, Memorial Day as the beginning of summer, and it works as the beginning of a season of needed intentional reflection as we celebrate commemorate 250 years of declaring the colonies free of King George III.

After Memorial Day—which was established to honor the loyal Union soldiers who died in the Civil War— comes June 6th when we remember Operation Overlord’s 1944 D-Day landings in Normandy when we fought alongside the British Commonwealth including Canada, and thirteen days later Americans celebrate the end of slavery and the Civil War with Juneteenth recognizing the announcement of liberation in Galveston, Texas on June 19, 1865.

However, we have only one Independence Day and the journey to July 4, 1776—when Americans decided to leave the British Empire and ultimately be sundered from the empire loyalists in Canada—needs retelling. June holds many important foundational dates for the USA with dual commemorations of the creation of the Continental Army in 1775 and the official adoption of the Flag of the United States in 1777, both on the 14th. And on June 16, 1775, the forty-three year old George Washington of Virginia accepted his appointment as commander of the Army.

However, the story of independence shifted into high gear on June 7, 1776 when Richard Henry Lee of Virginia introduced a resolution to the Second Continental Congress calling for independence from King George III. It was this resolution that was passed on July 2, 1776; the Declaration of Independence drafted primarily by Thomas Jefferson, also of Virginia, was the rhetorical justification for the resolution. And on July 4, Jefferson’s document as edited by the other delegates was passed by the Continental Congress and so Americans celebrate Independence on the Fourth and not the Second of July. John Hancock of Massachusetts as President of the Continental Congress, and Philadelphia resident Charles Thomson a Scots-Irishman—originally from the Glenshane Pass in County Derry—serving as Secretary of the Continental Congress, were the only men who signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4.

This year, as America faces persistent division, scandal, and international troubles, it is both harder and more important that Americans, and other democracies think seriously about the meaning of these events. The story still matters. The reasoning matters. An organic law is one that establishes the foundational framework of order for a government. It is the bedrock on which all other administrative rules, civil codes, organization and statutory laws are built. In the United States, the Declaration of Independence is the first organic law, the one that established the ends for which government exists. Americans should be proud that millions of people around the world are inspired by their declaration.

It matters that the Founders were motivated by British tradition and their knowledge of the ancient classics including the Bible. It matters that they took their knowledge and experiences and then debated and argued; and ultimately agreed to a common statement of sovereignty. The Declaration of Independence’s principles remain paramount because it was a compromise and edited document not in spite of it. It was the consensus, the thing they were willing to die for, together. Its authority is sacrosanct because the newly established states had to consent in unison.

Despite their hypocrisies on matters such as slavery, they declared human equality in the same document where they confessed to treason. If they lost, they would be executed, and in the meantime the best trained army in Europe would hunt them. It was a risk and a promise, one Americans can still hold themselves to, and one that has determined the fate of North America for a quarter of a millennium.

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Israel needs better advocates, and its advocates need a better behaving client.

Flashpoints this week:

1) Israel’s Diaspora Minister is attacking America engagement with Iran in a way reflects badly on Israel

2) The US Senate is considering Senator Jackie Rosen’s (D-NV) Jewish Security Act, backed by Senator James Lankford (R-OK) that looks like the policies MAGA accused DEI of being

Back in 2011, the intelligence forecaster George Friedman wrote The Next Decade: Where We’ve Been . . . and Where We’re Going in which he identified how Israel was changing into an unconstrained state that would create problems for the United States by attempting to create new facts on the ground that were different from what it had agreed to do. He argued that while a balance of power would lead to stability, the Israelis did not want a balance and so the interest of the US and Israel were going to misalign, and the best bet was for the United States to quietly distance from Israel in order to create the least disruption. He also predicted that the US would have to make a distasteful deal with Iran. He did not have a crystal ball. Rather he abided by something I teach my foreign policy students: A great power gains nothing by fantasy and self-deception; you have to accept the facts as you know them not as you wish them to be. What he predicted ultimately was that if Israel did not moderate it would alienate America and Europe and simply weaken itself.

Salvaging the US-Israel relationship means Israel will have to ask for less, give America space, and draw less attention to itself by reining in the settlers, implementing transparent policies supporting the establishment of a Palestinian state, and taking earned criticism on the chin. A failure to do so is simply going to provoke a rupture with a fed-up American electorate.
It does not have to go that way.

In a recent Washington Post1 op-ed, Israel’s Minister of Diaspora Affairs, Amichai Chikli, accused Turkey of destabilizing the region through occupation, military overreach, and ideological expansionism. While the charges may be legitimate, they also describe, with uncomfortable precision, Israeli conduct in the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and Lebanon. Chikli further warns against empowering a volatile post-Khamenei Iran — while omitting that it was Israel’s own military campaign that reshaped killed the Iranian leadership in the first place. You cannot light a fire and then complain about the smoke.

It would have been wiser for Chikli to write nothing at this moment. American passions are running dangerously high — not just on the left, but among the traditional conservatives who form the bedrock of the 45/47 President’s coalition. A person to note is Rod Dreher. He should be read carefully by anyone trying to understand where that coalition is headed. He introduced J.D. Vance to a national audience. His Benedict Option challenged a generation of rightwing political-religious thought. He has an uncanny ability to put his finger on the pulse of the anxieties of traditional, right-leaning White Americans who fear national decline and distrust foreign entanglements — and he has called the Iran war America’s Suez moment.2

The analogy is to Britain’s 1956 humiliation over the Suez Canal: a once-dominant Western superpower allies with the Israelis against one of their Muslim country rivals, overreaches, fails, and the world sees the much weaker regional adversary emerge stronger from the confrontation.

Dreher asks plainly how America is better off for having fought this war and concludes that it is not and states that by 45/47’s own war aims, the United States failed, and that this constitutes a betrayal of the President’s core promise to keep America out of foreign wars. “This is a humiliation of immense strategic and historical consequence,” he writes — and he says so as someone who wanted Trump to win.

That many find Dreher controversial is beside the point: he provides a window into the worldview of normie-conservative Americans who backed Trump but now feel genuinely let down. The center-left was already opposed to this foreign policy misadventure. If the trad-right is now peeling away, what remains is a MAGA core that may constitute no more than a quarter of the electorate.

Dreher and those like him will hold the American president accountable.

However, many others, unlike them will simply blame Israel.

All of which makes Chikli’s op-ed not merely ill-timed, but actively counterproductive, because an Israeli minister using the US capital’s paper of record to attack the US administrations plan to end a war that the American people do not want is unnecessarily provocative.

On the domestic front, the Jewish American Security Act — S. 4576, co-led by Republican James Lankford threatens to reopen the DEI culture war. It mandates, for example, an antisemitism coordinator inside the Department of Education, and authorizes the Secretary of Education to contract out work for antisemitism sensitivity and awareness campaign. Which seems like the vision of “DEI bureaucracy” the MAGA/GOP have spent a decade alleging had infiltrated the federal government and was favoring Black Americans and other racialized minorities over and against White people. The bill is a gift to the opponents of anti-DEI efforts who argued that the opposition to DEI was never principled.

None of this is good politics when the American people are become increasingly skeptical of Israel and of the claims that opposition to Israel automatically equals antisemitism. These developments are flashpoints because they will harden the divide between Israel-critical Americans and the shrinking number of Israel-affirming Americans while also creating additional turmoil in the Democratic Party between Israel-aligned Jewish activists and the increasingly assertive social justice activists who argue that American and Democrats have their priorities backwards. For the GOP this may divide MAGA from the Christian-Zionists supporters of Israel, but the divide within the Republican Coalition will also be generational.

Younger Gen-Z Christians generally do not see Israel as a priority for their faith or politics despite being in most other ways conservative American voters.

The bill’s supporters might answer that the documented severity of antisemitic violence justifies the specific response. They are not wrong about the documentation. And I have argued that antisemitism is suicidal ideology that destroys the practitioner.3 The FBI recorded the highest number of anti-Jewish hate crime incidents in its institutional history in 2024. The Anti-Defamation League documented 9,534 antisemitic incidents that year — a 344 percent increase over the prior five-year average. The bill would make it the policy of the United States government “raise awareness of and educate the United States public about the history of Jewish Americans, the Holocaust, and antisemitism in all of its forms and manifestations;” however, the conservative movement made arguments that is was very much not the business of the federal government to ensure that everyone knew the history of white supremacy and racism in the USA when opposing DEI remedies for non-Jewish communities that were said to be experiencing documented, historic, and ongoing discrimination.

I am concerned that this is only going to create resentment on the right and the left due to allegations of favoritism and hypocrisy. Racism and religious bigotry are blights on society, but Americans need one policy for everyone, not selective identity priorities.

Two decades ago, I was an undergrad, a leader with the America Israel Public Affairs Committee told me, “they mess up in Jerusalem just as bad and as often as they do in Washington.” He was right.

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As the USA became a world power to rival the mighty European empires, the other countries were pulled into the unofficial financial empires of the French, British and Germans. European investments built infrastructure in Latin America and bought influence. However, with investment came dependence. The British in Argentina built railroads, but their purpose was to get Argentine resources to the sea to be sold to the British.

Like the rest of the world’s economic relations, the ties between Europe and the Americas were blown apart by the war. The Atlantic Ocean went from being the highway of trade to a battleground. In South America tensions had been rising for years between the Southern Cone powers of Argentina, Brazil and Chile. All three built up their navies. However, the Brazilians had a thought: what if the three of them teamed up rather than plotted against one another? In the decade before 1914, despite some setbacks, the three powers grew closer. There was urgency to their mission: American power.

The United States conquered what remained of the Spanish Empire in 1898. Earlier back in 1895 when the British disputed with Venezuela over the border with Guiana, US Secretary of State Richard Olney declared that:

It was the feared Spanish prophecy come true.

The Americans were that powerful: by 1910 the USA nearly matched the industrial output of Britain, France and Germany combined.

Geopolitically, the biggest winner of the American Revolution was King Carlos III of Spain. However, allegedly his ambassador to France, the Count of Aranda who negotiated the end of the war for Spain, felt uneasy about the win. It passed into legend that Aranda—or someone forging his name on a document after the fact—wrote that:

In the 19th century the Prophecy of Aranda articulated the fear Spain and Latin America felt about rising American demographic and industrial strength. A fear made real in 1914 because the Great War removed any European counterbalance to US power. While there were pros and cons to European involvement in Latin America, without them, the region would effectively be under American fiat.

Argentina, Brazil and Chile were shook when in April 1914 the new American President Woodrow Wilson, an aggressive racist with global ambitions, occupied Veracruz in Mexico. The three South American states offered to mediate and urgently hoped to avoid a war that would lead to the conquest of Mexico by the United States. Niagara Falls, Canada was chosen as a neutral site with the Canadians playing host but Britain and Canada did not formally participate in the talks. It worked the A.B.C. powers pulled off the Niagara Falls Peace Conference of May 1914. The American colossus was contained, for now.

Then the Great War broke out in July.

The A.B.C. powers moved to solidify their alliance. A year after their triumph at Niagara Falls they announced the Pact of Non-Aggression, Consultation, and Arbitration establishing a framework between them to resolve future conflicts that could not be settled through standard diplomacy or existing arbitration agreements. It mandated that all such disputes be submitted to a new, Permanent Commission—based in neutral Montevideo, Uruguay—for a thorough investigation, while strictly binding all three nations to peaceful military relations for up to one year while the commission drafted its report.

It seemed like a breakthrough to create new counterweight to the Americans in the absence of the Europeans: a fraternity of South American republics.

However, domestic partisan calculations and lingering territorial ambitions killed it. Only the Brazilian Congress ratified the pact and the effort failed.

They could not predict that the result of the First World War would make the American colossus even mightier, and they would be evermore under the dominion of Uncle Sam.

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Hi readers,

I have been fortunate to have benefited from diverse intellectual ecosystems, and met thinkers from across the political spectrum both in the US and abroad. This has allowed me to understand rival perspectives but also has provided real food for thought. Ideas that I recall sometimes years later and have an aha moment.

The AI boom and potential bust is here, and one thing I am seeing everywhere is the dislike of AI writing. Even if you cannot tell with certainty that writing if generative, there is a feeling that more writing looks off, or is otherwise not as pleasant or clear to read as say a decade ago. I get the temptation to blame large language models, but I also think those models have been trained on bad habits that existed long before the public heard of ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini.

Writers, especially students, are trying too hard to conform to modern trends rather than learning the mechanics of writing, expanding their experiences and knowledge, and then writing what they know from the heart. There is a rat-a-tat-tat abrupt and underdeveloped tendency that AI tends to replicate. However, this is a stilted and stifled human problem.

When I was younger I had a conversation with the conservative intellectual Alan Keyes, a former Reagan ambassador, and he said something that I later realized was quite insightful, especially now. He said modern writers act like they are allergic to long sentences, however, a sentence is supposed to contain the complete thought or idea. So why not just make it as long as it needs to be?

And now I get why it is better to not arbitrarily make short, stabbing lines of prose. Complete the thing and let the reader sit with it and decide what they want to make of your writing. Concise writing means avoiding the unnecessary text, it does not mean it has to be cutoff before the point is made.

Let your pen flow.

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I want to assess the Iran Deal in detail but due to traveling for a conference I will only highlight the final point of the 14 point memorandum between the United States and Iran: “The final Deal will be endorsed by a binding UNSC resolution.”

For much of the last decade, the MAGA movement has promoted the view that the Untied Nations, NATO and the rest of the post-1945 world order was irrelevant to modern geopolitics, and that—contrary to evidence or the fact that the postwar order was designed by Americans—it was somehow harmful to the interests of the American people. And now, the final point of the memorandum to end the failed conflict with the Islamic Republic of Iran explicitly calls for the United Nations Security Council—requiring the approval of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China—to guarantee the peace deal.

And the US administration has agreed to this.

Agreed to a deal which includes Iran retaining ballistic missiles as a non-negotiable self defense concern. Meaning the right of Iran to these weapons will be guaranteed by the great powers of the UN Security Council.

The reversal this represents requires a bit more time than I can give at the moment. Yet it is significant. The US has ceded ground both in the region and in the international system, with no sign that something has been gained.

Everyone country in the world noticed. They cannot unsee it.

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Hello readers. I am currently attending a conference, so the longer essay I have planned about Normandy will come later, perhaps next week, but I wanted to revisit the movies I wrote about last week. Based on comments and the polls, I will review them in the following order this month:

1. The Exception, about Kaiser Wilhelm II in exile.

2. The King’s Choice, about the Norwegian monarchy’s response to the Nazi invasion.

3. Emperor, about the American investigation into Hirohito.

4. The King’s Speech, about George VI’s personal struggles on the eve of war.

5. Royal Night Out, about the British princesses celebrating the end of the war.

For newer readers, I’ll let you know that when I watch a historical movie, I am not viewing it for the purpose of nitpicking the historical details. I’ll point out problems if I think they are misleading to the point of giving you a wrong impression of reality; however, I will not dismiss a film just for taking liberties. Here is what I care about: does the film help make the actual history more interesting to an audience that does not know the story? That’s the point.

My reasoning is that as I am a historian, I am capable of giving you the story behind the story. I do it every week, and I am grateful for all of you take time to read my substack. Historians around the world research the reality and we do not need Hollywood to teach the real history. However, if Hollywood makes a movie that drives interest in a topic, then historians and museums are better off. If they make a movie that is bad or fantastical to the point that no one cares about the reality, well, that’s awful.

However, the example I like to give is Mel Gibson’s Braveheart.

That 1995 film is wildly inaccurate in important parts. But, it has the saving grace of being a movie that was so good that people who had no idea who William Wallace was, and had no reason to care, were actually interested in the story of the First War of Scottish Independence, a medieval conflict that defined English and Scottish relations from the 1290s to the 1320s. A 600-year-old war became a lightning rod; Scottish politicians latched onto it to support their campaign for devolution. That’s an important film.

Most movies about major events are not going to have a Braveheart-sized impact. Yet, if they can help a modern audience visualize the past in a way that makes them care to know more, then I think historians should be grateful, and we can be tough and endure a few inaccuracies for the sake of art. If anything, those inaccuracies can give us something to talk about.

I do not think a snobbish approach to history serves us well.
History is for everyone, and if these films open you up to learning a bit more, then all the better.

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Hi readers. Today I will keep it short, as I have not had access to my computer, but I wanted to follow up on a few items from the last couple of weeks.

First, I have heard from a few of you about a lack of celebratory feeling surrounding the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Second, my pieces on the American spectacle on Friday, and the need for the liberal arts, which was the focus of last Monday’s post, also gained some traction.

I will address them all in additional subscriber posts this week, because here is what I have learned from you: you want a plan for the summer to help you get through these difficult days and the tendency to catastrophize. You are asking, “What can we do right now?”

I get it, and I hear you. You want a weekly memo that offers both philosophy and actionable steps, much like last year when I wrote about libraries.

Well I stand by that suggestion.

Yes, you should go to the library.

You should meet friends there.

You should plan family outings at the library.

I stand by the idea that it is good to have a place to go and build community where no one expects you spend money.

I’ll share other ideas like this in the days ahead has I am uploading podcasts and responding to your comments and messages. Keep them coming.
Also The Exception won the Substack and Facebook poll for my next history movie review so stay tuned for that. I will keep future polls exclusively on Substack so I can track them more easily.

But for today let me end by urging you go to the library this summer and hopefully meet some of your neighbors in the stacks and shelves.

You have heard it said “Go Touch Grass” but I say unto you “Go Flip Pages.”

Happy Monday, and happy reading.

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The world is watching America, but hesitating to bet on it. Americans have lost their mystique and that is an expensive asset loss. As North America watches the NBA finals, and the Globe tunes in for the World Cup, the United States is the center of attention. This coming Sunday, on Flag Day which coincides with the anniversary of the United States Army and the 1946 birth of the current US president, many will watch as the White House transforms into an arena for the Ultimate Fighting Championship, an event so shocking and notable that hardly anyone is talking about the actual fighters.

And yet there is another spectacle, one all the world cannot help but wonder after, the transformation of America itself. The world does not view the USA as it once did and many Americans are unaware of why this is important.

First the Western world is rearming. Short term thinkers have pushed for a Europe with teeth but such folks forget that America defanged Europe after 1945 for its own good and ours. Europeans have proud military traditions, and a provoked Europe can build itself into a superpower rival just across the Atlantic, with its own agenda. When America guarded Europe it gave America a say in European affairs. Soon Americans will find that they no longer have a seat at the table.

The top minds of the world used to flock to the United States as students. The advantage to the American people was two pronged:

1. They often stayed in the USA, so their brainpower went back in the US economy.

2. When they returned home they were now influenced by American ideas and carried fond memories of the United States back with them. This gave us business and diplomatic advantages over our competitors.

Foreign student enrollment is down around 20%. Overseas Business leaders now sneer at American claims about the rule of law and conduct themselves accordingly. They and their governments placate American officials but are building capacity to be able to ignore the US. And more often than not they look to China as a more reliable partner. However, China cannot top the US in drawing attention to itself. Take the war against Iran:

Population

• USA—350 million

• Iran—90 million

  • USA is 4x larger

Economy nominal GDP

• USA—$32,000,000,000,000 ($32 Trillion)

• Iran— $300,000,000,000 ($300 Billion)

  • USA is 100x larger

To the world the war should not be going as it is. In the past when the US sent an aircraft carrier against another country it was game over. Three different carriers were rotated in and out for Operation Epic Fury. The claims of a ceasefire, when they are still firing, is treated by the insurance industry as a polite diplomatic fiction, but worth their money? That’s the tell.

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