On this day, May 29, 1453, the Christian Emperor Constantine XI, son of the Emperor Manuel II of House Palaiologos, fell in defense of the Empire of the Romans. The invading forces of the Sunni Islamic Turkish Sultan Mehmed II of the Ottoman dynasty sacked Constantinople, now known as Istanbul.

Thus ended the history of the lineal Roman state that had survived in republican and imperial forms since 509 B.C.

A North American Dilemma, Data > Vibes

The United States and Canada have been linked since the first foundations of Jamestown in 1607 to the English adventurers of Cuper's Cove, Renews, and Bristol's Hope, and Scotland’s settling of Nova Scotia. The societies developed in tandem and in competition, sometimes friendly, often not, and until the Cold War focused Americans on global concerns, Canada was understood to be a critical relationship by Americans. That is no longer the case. Having taken it for granted that the United States could bully Canada, a mistake not made since 1815, the Americans have ruptured a relationship with little gain to show for it.

The Canadians however have almost accidentally wound up with a democratically elected technocratic government that values data over social media vibes.

Yesterday, the Canadian Prime Minister and leader of the Liberal Party, Mark Joseph Carney, delivered a concise presentation of his strategic plan to the Economic Club of New York.12 The Economic Club of New York is where power goes to be heard. It is where American and global leaders take the stage before the people who actually move markets, making their case in the one room where a well-placed word can move billions in capital. You go there to sell them on your vision.

First some data of my own to add to the conversation: approximately 18% of humanity speak English conversationally as a first or second language and an additional 5% speak French.

Carney’s vision is to make a bi-national Canada the new land of opportunity for a world whose aspirational youth and top minds are typically educated in English and/or French. A Canada viable not only economically, but also one capable of defending itself just as Ukraine has proved against Russia, and indirectly competing with the mother countries of Great Britain and France. However, Canada is being presented as the only logical destination for capital and brains interested in North America. Carney’s few words stood out and Americans should consider them with seriousness:

Carney did not arrive at the Economic Club to reminisce. He arrived with a diagnosis:

Today, the world is undergoing a rupture. Led by the United States, technological change is accelerating. The U.S. is transforming all its commercial relationships. The world is becoming more divided and dangerous. Canada recognized these developments earlier than most, and our response reflects the core lesson we have taken from these tectonic shifts: We have to take care of ourselves and be true to ourselves.

His diagnosis was followed by a data-backed prescription:

We have introduced a Productivity Super-Deduction giving Canada the most competitive tax rate for new investment in the G7 – half the G7 average, and four percentage points below the United States.

His language went to the financial heart of the issues:

We are catalyzing one trillion dollars of investment in Canada over the next five years – in energy, transportation, data, and defense.

When the United States said it wanted assertive allies, it should have been more circumspect. People do not like to be pushed around, and smaller powers with a sense of identity can decide to assert themselves against you. That is what Canada is doing.

Then came the passage that should concern every serious person in Washington: how Canada now positions the GE Hitachi BWRX-300

The full analysis continues below for Supporting Subscribers.

Subscribe now

Read more

After the fall of the House of Habsburg and the disintegration of their empire, what was now called Austria was a broken rump. Four million Austrians were forcibly transferred to the rule of their Italian, Czechoslovak and Serbian-ruled Yugoslav neighbors as a result of losing the Great War. These persons were denied the right of self-determination to remain Austrian and be led by Vienna, or to join the new German republic governed from Berlin; instead, they were made minorities in states that had seized their lands. The almost 7 million Austrians left were vulnerable, left with so little arable land to farm that some feared that the state was not viable. Yet it limped on for eight years before tensions between the religious right, the radicals and the social democrats exploded.

As in Germany, there was paramilitary violence throughout the 1920s by groups that rejected the Versailles settlement and its ban on Austria unifying with Germany, and targeted social democrats and workers’ groups. However, the Roman Catholic Church was much stronger in Austria and for a time this acted as moderating influence on the conservative elements of society. Yet, some of the groups that might appear to be aligned with conservative interests were actually far more radical and merely shared a dislike of the social democrats and communists. Then, in 1927 the political equilibrium of Austria was shattered by a breakdown in law and order.

In the small border town of Schattendorf, on January 30th, gunmen opened fire on paramilitary members of the SDAP, the Social Democratic Party of Austria. In the shooting they killed a Croatian war veteran, a child, and wounded five others. It was quickly known that the killers were members of the Frontkämpfervereinigung Deutsch-Österreichs, the Frontline Veterans’ Association of German-Austria.

Earlier that day the right and leftwing paramilitaries had got into an altercation when the rightwing decided to provoke the left by holding a paramilitary meeting in a social democratic town. The left responded and the shooting happened when three Frontkämpfervereinigung members barricaded themselves in a home and opened fire on passing leftist Republikanischer Schutzbund (Republican Protection League) members. The ideology of Mussolini’s trenchocracy—the idea that hardened rightwing veterans of the First World War trenches had the right to do as they pleased and remake the rules of society—had come to Austria with bloody intent.1

The ex-Austrian nazi, Walter Riehl rushed to defend the shooters. Austrian law and order were deteriorating; the authorities were less than enthusiastic about enforcing the law against violent paramilitaries who were anti “the Left.” Corruption for the right cause. Then on July 14, the obviously guilty murderers were acquitted.

The result was the Wiener Justizpalastbrand, the Vienna Palace of Justice Fire.

The acquittal ignited an immediate general strike that paralyzed Vienna. The next day, a furious working-class crowd gathered in the Ringstraße, the boulevard encircling the city-center, after being pushed away from other targets by police. Armed with stones and convinced that the courts were practicing partisan class justice (Klassenjustiz), the demonstrators targeted the Palace of Justice, as the symbol of a corrupt legal system. They breached the building and began smashing and breaking. And then the building burned. The mob which began ransacking the palace without a plan may not have intended to burn the building, however, when it went up in flames and as the building became fully engulfed, the rioters enthusiastically sabotaged hydrants and harassed the firefighters, making the conflagration worse.

While the moderate Social Democrats tried and failed to de-escalate the chaos, the Vienna Police Chief Johann Schober decided to suppress the revolt. Going around the mayor and the city government that refused to call in the army for aid, he simply armed the police with military rifles and ordered them to fire into the crowds, leaving around ninety demonstrators and half a dozen police officers dead. The blow to the prestige of the courts and to the credibility of the left helped the rightwing paramilitaries slowly build their power as Austria moved into the dangerous 1930s. Austria had many problems that they could not blame on Hitler and the German nazis, though later, they tried.

If this essay was worth your time, the heart button below costs nothing and means a lot. And if you’d like to support more writing like this, becoming a paid subscriber keeps it coming.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Editor’s Note: As this piece was being finalized, Pope Leo XIV issued a historic apology for the Holy See’s role in legitimizing slavery, calling the Vatican’s record a “wound in Christian memory.” No pope had previously acknowledged to this extent the role of the papal bulls that gave European sovereigns explicit authority to subjugate and enslave non-Christians. The timing is striking. The Catholic Church’s first American pope, whose own family history includes both enslaved people and slave owners, has now confirmed the central premise of this essay — that the transatlantic slave trade began as a Catholic enterprise and that Christian institutions bear a specific and non-transferable moral accountability for it. Pope Leo’s apology is precisely the kind of reckoning that the severity of grace demands. I have add the parts of his encyclical addressing slavery at the end of this post.

Yesterday, hundreds of millions of Christians celebrated the birth of the Church on Pentecost Sunday and the initiation of their mission to go into all the world and make disciples of Jesus of Nazareth. In much of the West however, the importance of that event seems to have less and less impact on the thinking of the religion’s more right-wing adherents, especially in how they engage with politics and history. They seem intent to offer their countries a cheap grace. As a scholar, I find myself rather perplexed by self-described traditional Christians in America—and in the UK and Canada—embracing the relativist postmodern and secular rhetorical attempts to defend the “West” by intellectuals and academics associated with the contemporary right.1 Systems tend to contain their own logic, and I am interested in how different groups take their claims about themselves seriously or not.

Take for example British peer, Professor Nigel Biggar’s project ‘Ethics and Empire’ to rehabilitate imperial history. For a Reverend Canon and ethicist, his rhetoric is surprisingly defensive of the European imperial legacy in a manner that undercuts the traditional Christian abhorrence of atrocity and promotion of peace. Unfortunately the imperial past cannot be separated from slavery. Elevated to the House of Peers in 2025, Lord Biggar is a noted scholar, but in terms of political engagement he occupies a vacant middle ground between old traditionalism and an anti-traditionalist, defensive, guiltless and consequenceless “anti-woke” disposition made for a British right desperately craving the shameless, aggressive energy of post-2016 American populism. That the post-Christian right embraces it is unsurprising, what is intriguing is his popularity among self-proclaimed traditionalist conservatives. What are they conserving?

Biggar recycles the attenuated argument that Africans enslaved Africans, selling them to varied buyers, such as Romans and Islamic sultans for millennia. Consequently, he posits that in assessing the unique and compact history of the transatlantic slave trade perpetrated by the post-medieval, Christian powers, one should instead expand their scope and time scale by a factor of ten to consider the purported 5,000 year history of slavery in a continent 43 times the size of Texas rather than focus on the sui generis 400 years of the triangular trade in coastal West Africa. On this issue Biggar’s insight is rather limited. Africans did not enslave Africans for there was no such thing as an “African.” There were distinct kingdoms and empires and tribes, like in Europe, but even more divergent given that Europe was formerly “Christendom.” The category is all wrong, rather like saying that the First World War was the Europeans killing their own people until the Ottomans got involved and confused things. The common attempt to portray the Great War as a “European” civil war is as wide of the mark as is Biggar’s temporal expansion of the slavery question. The European and African sovereigns and republics possessed conscious separate identities so that a French attack on German trenches was no more treason against the Third Republic or “Europe” than the Dahomean conquest of the Kingdom of Whydah was against “Africa.” No one would dare tell an Irish person that their historic oppression by the English came at the hands of “their own people.” Biggar’s argument gains traditionalists nothing against their detractors.

The full analysis continues below for Supporting Subscribers.

Subscribe now

Read more

At times it is astounding the degree to which the main American news networks are disinterested in major events unfolding in other countries that could have major consequences for the United States. Canada is the most important neighbor of the United States, and in many ways the most important foreign relationship for the US. Yet, for the vast majority of American citizens, Canadian politics is opaque—that is, if they consider Canada at all. However, Canada is in the middle of important debates over how to engage the United States during the remainder of Donald John Trump’s time as president. A pressing question is the relationship of Canadian conservative parties to MAGA and to the Wexit (Western Exit) secessionist movements within Canada.

Alberta, one of the three prairie provinces of western Canada, is led by a Conservative Party divided over whether the province should remain Canadian. Marlaina Danielle Smith, the premier—the prime minister of a Canadian province—leads the United Conservative Party, holding 48 out of the 87 seats in the Legislative Assembly, the parliament of the province of around four million people. Smith is trying to keep her job by placating secessionists who believe that the oil-rich province is being exploited by the Canadian federal government.

These Albertan separatists imagine they could become an independent petro-state with low taxes and survive off their oil exports. Some of them envision joining the United States as the 51st state because of differences between the American and Canadian social-welfare states and the way they do federalism. They think America would be a better deal. There are enough separatist influences in conservative politics to potentially bring down Smith’s governing mandate, so she has devised a way to keep them happy without angering the over 70% of Albertans who polls show want to stay in Canada. Alberta is in for an exciting summer.

Smith has announced a two-option, non-binding independence question for October 19, 2026.

Should Alberta remain a province of Canada or should the Government of Alberta commence the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada?

This will be part of a broader referendum that has fractured support among her own conservative base while uniting Canadian nationalist critics against her. In a move that seems like she is copying former British Prime Minister David Cameron’s approach to the anti-EU members of his party regarding the vote on Brexit, Smith has called the referendum and announced she will actively campaign for Option One—to remain in Canada—this pleases no one and did not work for Cameron, though currently the Wexit movement does not have the appeal of Brexit. Her plan is to use this referendum on several questions as a cudgel to beat the Canadian federal government into renegotiating the position of Alberta in the Canadian Confederation and fiscal framework. The idea is that if she has democratic support for her challenge to the federal government, Prime Minister Mark Carney will find it hard to resist the United Conservative Party’s demands.

If Smith’s gamble backfires, the consequences will not stop at the border. The structural shock to the American electoral map would be permanent—and the constitutional mechanism to achieve it is far simpler than Americans realize. Below the fold for paid subscribers: the congressional seat math, the Texas loophole, and the forgotten Founding era scheme to ease Canada into the American Union.

Subscribe now

Read more

From July 1914 to May 1915, the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s war against Serbia was joined by Germany and, later, the Ottomans on the Austrian side. On the Serbian side stood the Russian, British, French, and Japanese Empires, along with Montenegro, joined in May 1915 by Italy. Belgium also fought as an independent coalition member against Germany. The strategic reality for Austria-Hungary and its allies was one of increasing encirclement against a growing alliance.

However, the way countries sourced their strategic resources for their militaries was actually destroyed by the war itself.

Prior to the conflict, the major empires maintained interconnected trading relationships that supplied natural resources for their home industries, including weapons and war materiel production. Yet, during the war, the old trading system was divided into rival blocs. The Russians were cut off in the Baltic Sea by the German navy, and the Ottoman fleet at the Bosporus Strait trapped Russia’s warm-water capability in the Black Sea. This left the often-frozen northern routes as the remaining points of sea trade for the tsar.

Likewise, the Germans found it hard to access their African colonies due to French and British power on the continent. The neutral Americans, as was their tradition, attempted to make money by trading with everyone; but the Europeans were facing shortages and seeking workarounds to their limited options. Ultimately, by going to war and severing critical trade routes, the belligerents effectively self-sabotaged their own supply chains.

The First World War rapidly evolved into an industrial war of attrition that would not be over by Christmas 1914. As a result it triggered a desperate, insatiable demand for weapons, munitions and fuel. Attacks were direct not just against political capitals but against regions rich with natural resources, the kind you want to take from the enemy. Germany’s invasion of Northeastern France gave it control of half of the French coal and iron supply. Holding those resources, exploiting them for the kaiser and denying them to France were as important as attempting to advance on Paris.

Concurrently, anxiety over oil supplies led the British to launch campaigns against the Ottomans in Mesopotamia to secure the Persian Gulf resources in what is now Kuwait and Iraq. Because the great powers had previously functioned within a largely free-trading global ecosystem, the war forced a rethink of their economic strategies. Faced with potential shortages of critical materials, the warring governments aggressively intervened in their market-economies. Operating at different levels of intensity and penetration into the private sector, this unprecedented war-statism created specialized state administrations designed to control, ration, and distribute raw materials.

Consequently, the world watched as European leaders blew up their system and sought to profit as best they could to both advance their positions, but also to avoid losses from the disruption of trade with Europe as much as within Europe. Global markets for raw materials temporarily shifted in the direction of the non-European nations and neutral territories, particularly in decolonized Latin America and East Asia. Those economies initially suffered from the sudden collapse of international finance and trade caused by the war absorbing European capital, but they soon saw a massive boom in the export of vital wartime commodities. Europe wrecked the global economy but the world adjusted, it was Europe that was left with the bill.

Yet, the biggest winner would be the United States of America, who alone among the great powers remained at peace, while its geopolitical rivals spent their men, money and material on a war that continued to drag on into 1915.

Leave a comment

Share

After Sunday’s demoralizing rally, it is clear American Christianity—especially Protestantism—is currently engaged in a severe Kirchenkampf—a structural church struggle against the co-opting of religion by corrupt institutional players. We saw this manifested on the National Mall, where yesterday’s “Rededicate 250” rally mixed partisan ambition with Evangelical language under the guise of a national rededication, one the President of the United States did not even attend: he sent a video of himself reading the Bible and went golfing instead. Central to this crisis is the doctrine of the “Flawed Vessel.” This transactional teaching argues that “divine appointment” insulates leaders from moral accountability, instructing the faithful to tolerate—or cover up—obvious corruption under the guise of spiritual utility.

In his 1828 dictionary, Noah Webster defined demoralization not as a mere loss of morale, but as the systematic subversion of a population’s moral principles. The modern deployment of the flawed vessel narrative serves precisely this purpose: it corrupts public morality so thoroughly that open corruption is no longer recognized as a disqualifying crisis. To achieve this compliance, political apologists routinely rewrite biblical history, transforming cautionary tales and targeted historical actions into immunity for elite misconduct if the leaders align with their political or social tribalism.

The invocation of these ancient narratives to protect modern leaders deliberately deceives the public about the nature of American political sovereignty. Public officials are temporary trustees of public power, not divinely anointed monarchs, and evaluating their fitness for office is an inescapable constitutional duty. To excuse elite corruption by claiming contemporary leaders are merely “men of their times” is an act of ethical surrender. It reveals a society that ultimately prefers to identify with institutional power at any cost rather than with the legitimacy that comes from being a just leader. History establishes that this trajectory has never ended well.

To expose the problems with the doctrine of the flawed vessel, today’s podcast cross-examines three ancient narratives—and their modern misuse—using the biblical text, applied history, and political realism.

Share

Leave a comment

Read more

At the beginning of the year, I wrote that American policymakers were mired in “wishcasting”—the act of substituting objective analysis with the daydream of desired outcomes—particularly regarding the United States’ standing relative to a resurgent China.1 At the end of 2025, that wishful thinking met reality as the People’s Republic of China established itself as a $41 trillion economy in terms of purchasing power parity. The PRC also ran up a record one-trillion-dollar trade surplus while the MAGA-led US was forced to retreat on tariffs. This shift is the background for POTUS’s state visit to China, where the pageantry of the People’s Liberation Army set the stage for China’s debut as America’s equal, something the USA has not faced since the fall of the Soviet Union. Yet even that historical comparison falters. The Soviet population advantage relied on the imperial domination of the non-Russian republics whose dedication to Moscow varied. The Chinese challenge is structurally different.

The Chinese dragon is not the Russian bear.

America’s new “equal” outnumbers the entire United States by several hundred million with their core Han Chinese population, and the Chinese economy is larger than the American economy, something the Soviets could never achieve.

If these two nations are equals, China is the first among equals, marking the first time the United States has slipped to the number-two position since before the First World War.

The American president stood in Tiananmen Square for the 21-gun salute that might as well have been announcing the arrival of the Chinese era. Almost two hundred years since the British humiliated China in the First Opium War, China is Great Again.

Chinese social media users and political commentators frequently use the shorthand "Chuan" for Trump, often pairing it with the name "Jianguo." A name often given to children born during the founding era of the People’s Republic, Jianguo translates literally to "building the nation." By combining these into "Comrade Chuan Jianguo"—Comrade Trump, Nation Builder—Chinese political commentators online are sneering as they cheer the effects the American president’s policies are having on making the nation great again. The nation in mind is China, not America. After 480 days back in office, America is more disliked, isolated, divided and struggling militarily than any time since the 1960s, and 100 times more in debt. 980 days left.

For the American president who turns 80 in one month, the visit is seen by some as an attempted diversion from domestic problems of his own making: soaring inflation and the humiliation of Operation Epic Fury’s failure to defeat Iran, a country that should be no match for the USA.

The American president has choked global energy supplies and forced Washington into a position of pleading supplication: the United States of America is begging for help with the Strait of Hormuz. But an insulted and threatened Europe has no reason to help, neither does Canada, and America’s other allies are not in a position to do so, even if they were so inclined. Africa is busy building internal strength to insulate from the shocks of the West. The world blames America for the energy and food crisis, and this makes China look better.

Of course, Chinese President Xi Jinping said that “The great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and "Making America Great Again" can go hand in hand.” He has no reason to pick a fight with the Americans. That might wake them up. Rather, it is better to flatter them and let them run home claiming they have resolved tensions. Give the Americans a warning over Taiwan, knowing that the Americans may be irrational and choose to fight over Taipei’s autonomy from the mainland. In which case Iran has shown the limitations of American power projection and defense production capacity. America is famished of war, and China’s stockpiles are high. If America chooses non-confrontation, China will be glad, and that would likely be better for America in the long run as it needs serious reform and restoration. However, if the bellicose POTUS chooses confrontation, China will be ready and America likely will not be. Xi has little reason to interfere with America, no incentive to be cowed by it and every intention of allowing the American leadership the outlet to inflict their domestic policies on the American Union.

China can wait while America rots, by choice.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Receipts

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2026/05/14/trump-does-not-appear-to-have-the-upper-hand-in-his-talks-with-xi_6753459_23.html

https://www.dw.com/en/chinas-new-rules-give-the-west-a-new-headache/a-77075741

https://www.economist.com/china/2026/05/04/china-thinks-america-is-declining-but-still-uniquely-dangerous

https://www.ft.com/content/d555a25b-9373-4dab-9cf3-44de9b52df1b?syn-25a6b1a6=1

The facts of the case are damning of the 1930s: the Axis was a coalition of the willing. During that decade, debates over “right” and “left” were secondary to a shared hunger for territorial revisionism and revolutionary change. There was no ideological firebreak against imperialism.

Romania was Germany’s most significant military ally on the Eastern Front. It did not join because it was forced; rather, it fought for the same reasons as Germany: to recover territory it had lost. If that meant joining Hitler, the Romanians were on board. Heading west we run in Hungary, led by Admiral Horthy, the betrayer of the last Habsburg emperor, the Blessed Karl of Austria, last King of Hungary. Horthy ruled Hungary was clearly a revisionist and revolutionary power. Its primary goal was the reversal of the Treaty of Trianon where they lost the lands they ruled under the Habsburg empire to the non-Hungarian minorities who got their own countries after World War One. The Hungarians dreamed of restoring a 19th-century imperialist ethnic hierarchy in a 20th-century world of national self-determination; the Axis was to be Horthy’s vehicle for doing so. And finally Bulgaria wanted to turn the clock back to 1913 and the Second Balkan War. They joined Hitler to take back the lands they believed were robbed from them in the 1910s by Greece and Yugoslavia.

And yet, perhaps the most important example of the 1930s black hole that vanished ideological barriers was Joseph Stalin’s decision to join the Nazi invasion of Poland—before launching his own wars to redraw Eastern Europe in the shape of the old Russian Empire only shaded a Marxist red. By supplying the German army’s invasions of Western Europe from the summer of 1939 to the summer of 1941—almost two years—the Soviet Union was the most important material ally and supporter of Nazi Germany. The Soviets helped Germany start a war that would turn genocidal and kill tens of millions, only to become the greatest victims themselves.

It was a decade where the option for tyranny was a freely chosen European phenomenon. When the pursuit of national grievance or revolutionary utopia was allowed to supersede the sanctity of the individual, the result was a functional convergence of the so-called right and left. The heirs of Lenin, the monarchists of Bulgaria and Romania, the treasonous autocrat of Hungary, and the original fascists in Italy too, all saw in Hitler’s mania an opportunity for themselves; one that was too hot to ignore. And they all burned.

Share

Leave a comment

Academia was hit hard last week, and it confirms something I have been thinking for about a year: analog tools are not archaic relics; they are essential fail-safes. Everything is fast, immediate and now in the digital world, however, pencil and paper offer a needed friction that simply slows things down. Denken mit der Hand—a philosophy championed by the German stationery house Leuchtturm1917 whose notebooks I love—highlights the cognitive link between tactile movement and intellectual clarity. Lately, many of my best essays began as ink on a page before reaching a Substack draft. Writing by hand forces me to think longer.

This principle extends to the classroom. I have made a gradual transition, a switch where grading by hand is more than a preference; it is a superior method of engagement. While transferring handwritten feedback to a online learning management system is a tedious chore, the act of writing forces a level of critical focus and reflection that typing sometimes shortcuts. Furthermore, these physical records serve as a safeguard should cloud systems or college servers fail.

Analog tools provide essential operational redundancy. Perhaps, digital tools work best when cemented by old foundations and traditions.

There is no future in being a Luddite but neither should we become techno-extremists. Integrating these two worlds ensures that my work is a better considered and frankly easier logistically. Pen and paper are still easier to travel with than a computer and do not require outlets. And the new recycled rock paper from the Australian company Karst—which is highly water resistant—shows that tech can also breathe new light into ancient inventions. Most importantly, they save you the headache of a total work stoppage when systems fail. And perhaps, as my students move into a world increasingly defined by fast AI like Anthropic’s Claude, we need the natural brakes of the cognitive load of writing to ensure our LLM-powered systems remain safe, steerable, and well-considered.

Share

Leave a comment

Welcome to Friday Flashpoint where I analyze and expose important historical and social developments impacting America in the world

There are many events I could cover this week from the on-again, off-again cease fire between the US president/Israel and Iran. Or the just announced cease fire between Russia and Ukraine out of respect for the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany and part of World War Two which begins May 9 is set to expire on May 11. Or I mention the Virginia redistricting failure while the Republican Party in the South moves at breakneck speed to do what it was known they would do, and eliminate as many minority-majority —and by extension mostly minority represented — Congressional districts. But I think the spat with Germany is more important. Europe is still moving away from the US and is rearming itself, even if the Germans are hesitant to embrace reality. However, Germany cannot run from history or from the present geopolitical reality.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said that Iran is humiliating the United States,1 and new reports are coming out that the American people have been deceived about the extent of the damage inflicted on American assets. Additionally the Strait of Hormuz remains closed at the will of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, a consequence of Israel’s regime change by decapitating the inept older generation of leaders. The Young Peacocks of Iran want to strut upon the wreckage of America’s martial reputation. Some Germans are angry at Merz for speaking the truth.

They are wrong.

The German political establishment is currently haunted by a ghost—the specter of an Atlanticism that died a year ago. Member of the German Parliament, MdB2 Roderich Kiesewetter’s recent criticism of Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s straight talk is a symptom of profound strategic delusion. Kiesewetter is a member of Merz’s ruling party the Christian Democratic Union and he thinks the solution to getting on America’s good side is for Europe to play nice and convince the Americans they are good security partners. However, to suggest that Europe can buy “relevance” in Washington through a “fair burden-sharing arrangement” is more than a policy disagreement; it is self-deception born of a lack of national confidence.

Mr. Kiesewetter operates on a 1995 system in desperate need of a 2026 update. In the current American landscape, burden-sharing is not a ticket to the high table of Western statecraft. It is the rent required to avoid eviction from the security architecture. The current American federal CEO does not view European defense spending as a collaborative strategic investment; he views it as a mandatory contract for American hardware. To believe that purchasing a fleet of F-35s earns Germany a partnership is to mistake a vendor-customer relationship for a diplomatic alliance.

Europe must be clear-eyed about the nature of the current US administration. The American hegemon is currently consumed by a domestic agenda focused on settling internal scores and erecting trade barriers against its own allies. When a superpower turns ravenous with such ferocity, it stops looking for partners. It looks for compliance. If that is not forthcoming, it simply looks away or roars to see who flinches.

Furthermore, the lethargy of the American opposition—the Democrats’ peculiar silence regarding escalating foreign policy threats against Greenland or Canada for instance—has not gone unnoticed, least of all by the Canadians. The Western alliance is witnessing a Washington that is too transactional and uncivilized to care. In this vacuum, seeking relevance through traditional channels is a fool’s errand. America needs an opposition party that can articulate an opposing foreign policy. In the meantime Europe should operate as if the American position will not change simply with a switch in governing party. The French get this, the Germans need to wake up.

Perhaps the most uncomfortable truth for Berlin is not the US president’s policies, but his persona. German commentators have spent years dismissing the POTUS’s behavior as “New York” eccentricity or Manhattan boorishness. This is a psychological defense mechanism. It allows the German elite to externalize a leadership style that is actually a mirror of an unreformed German nature. The proud grandson of German immigrants is the mirror of their pasts.

The president’s uncompromising will to humiliate, his patriarchal dominance, and his allergic reaction to multilateral consensus are not Americanisms. They are atavistic Germanic traits. German elites are agitated by the current POTUS because they recognize in him the archetypes they have spent 80 years trying to legislate out of existence. By labeling him a “New Yorker,” Berlin avoids a reckoning with the fact that it is being pushed around by the old version of itself.

Winston Churchill famously remarked that the Germans were “always either at your throat, or at your feet.” Today, the world needs Germany on its feet—and speaking clearly, without the customary diplomatic throat-clearing.

If Mr. Merz backs down to the out-of-date Atlanticist wing of the CDU, he ensures that Germany remains a strategic object—a piece on the board to be moved by others. If he grovels and apologizes to the American leader in an effort to avert the withdrawal of additional US troops from Germany, Merz will lose respect in Washington and be under greater threat from the neo-fascist adjacent Alternative for Germany (AfD), the party supported by the US vice president. The AfD deliberately rejects the German culture of guilt and shame over the Nazi regime; many younger Germans are ready to be a more assertive country. Merz could show German youth how to do this constructively. But the old establishment must get out of his way, and he must take up the challenge. Furthermore, this US administration respects foes far more than compliant friends. Respect in 2026 is not granted to those who follow the rules; it is reserved for those who command enough regional power to change them.

Europe must get tougher if it wants to be a force for good. Germany needs to adapt.

A force for good still requires force. As part of gaining this force, Germany must grow up. Mr. Merz’s straight talking is not a diplomatic lapse—it is the first sign of a necessary, albeit painful, maturation of the German state.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

The consolidation of European and colonial racial regimes in the early twentieth century was characterized by a profound and deliberate global exchange of legal mechanisms, ideological justifications, and administrative techniques.

In the interwar years, the American example spread across the seas, as educated and “civilized” regimes sought formal regulations to enforce their racial hierarchies through law, codified in both the dictatorships and the so-called democracies. America’s Jim Crow South was the model. But not only Jim Crow, between the late nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth century, the United States served as the example of a functioning racial hierarchy, providing a blueprint for citizenship based on blood, the internal deportation and territorial confinement of indigenous populations, the criminalization of “interracial” families, race-based immigration restrictions, and the clever disenfranchisement of undesirables.

Leaders built the foundation of the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901 on the clear goal of keeping a "White Australia." This policy was more than a local answer to Chinese migration; it was a planned move to build a "British race" stronghold based on and joined with other "white men's countries," mainly America. During the 1901 debates on the Immigration Restriction Bill, Alfred Deakin—the first attorney general and second prime minister—said that Australians would be "unpardonably neglectful of our obligations" if they failed to "lay to heart" the "never-to-be-forgotten teachings from the experience of the United States." For Deakin, the American Civil War was a warning of the problems White men faced when they left non-whites into their democracies. Americans have taken a rather different lesson from their civil war. Australia’s first prime minister, Edmund Barton, shared Deakin’s viewpoint and they borrowed language policies first tried in California to exclude the Chinese from Australia.

The British Empire’s South Africa was not far behind Australia.

While the term apartheid (separateness) officially applies to the South African era after 1948, this rigid time frame misleads, as its leaders built the South African state on exclusion from the beginning. The South Africa Act of 1909 denied black African peoples the right to sit in Parliament. While a few black African men in the Cape Province retained a restricted franchise, the White government spent the next three decades trying to scrap this exception. The Mines and Works Act (1911), often called the “Color Bar Act,” legally kept skilled mining jobs for whites. It ensured that Black South Africans remained a source of cheap, unskilled labor and stopped a Black middle class from growing through industrial labor. The Natives Land Act (1913) was perhaps the most crushing pre-1948 law. It banned Black people from buying or leasing land outside named reserves, which at first made up only 7% of the country’s land. This was the model for the later “Bantustans.” Then, the Representation of Natives Act (1936) dealt the final blow to voting before the formal apartheid era. It moved Black voters in the Cape from the main list to a separate, powerless one where they could only pick three white members to the House of Assembly.

It was almost Dixiecrat in its efficiency.

Moving on to the Third Reich reveals a curious connection to the State of Arkansas. Heinrich Karl Krieger was a German lawyer who in the early years of the Nazi regime was an exchange student at the University of Arkansas where he studied American Indian Law, concluding that "Indian Law" was race law, it was a system that created a unique extra-constitutional legal domain where rights were determined by bloodlines.

Furthermore, the Nazi assessment of the Southern solution to the "Negro problem" in the United States was incorporated in their initial efforts to solver their Jewish problem. However, they also felt that America could ironically be too harsh as the one-drop rule was impractical for Germany where the Ashkenazi Jewish population had emerged in central Europe in the medieval period was much more integrated than the African American population of the South. In the end, the Nuremberg Laws took a more "moderate" rule for who was Jewish. The treatment of Americas original minorities, the Indigenous and the African Americans were examples the Nazis pulled from to create their regime of terror.

Far from the Nazis being the innovators, they were only the last in a series of Western governments copying the segregationist and exclusionary policies of the Americans. Because racism and eugenics were common, the first cruel acts of the Nazis often went without comment. Stripping Jews of their rights and citizenship was not necessarily odd to a foreign audience. Why should a Tennessean who lived under Jim Crow, or an Oklahoman who farmed stolen native land or sacked North Tulsa in 1921, care if the Jews of Germany had no state? It is morally odd to expect the average White American to be angry with Germany for what America was itself doing before 1939. Were they supposed to oppose early proto-Apartheid and White Australia as well?

However, in the New Dealers, slowly, all too slowly, the spirit of 1776 would awaken, and trouble the imitators across the seas. It was darkest before the dawn. The Second World War would be a messy reckoning.

Share

Leave a comment

It is finals week so I will keep this a bit shorter than normal.

Perhaps my favorite lesser known Abraham Lincoln speech is the one he gave in 1859 in Wisconsin where he laid out his vision for America to fight classism and educate the working classes. This was Lincoln gearing up for a fight and at his most encouraging. Lincoln had lost the US Senate race in Illinois the previous the year, and after his notable debates with Stephen Douglas, people began to talk about him as a presidential candidate.

Lincoln was not resting on his laurels. In Wisconsin he decided to wake up his party—the new Republicans—and his country regarding capital, labor, and the mud-sill theory threat.

Lincoln challenged the mud-sill theory that society required a reliable and permanent underclass that would serve as the “mud-sill of the elite who would create civilization on the backs of others. Lincoln countered that this was unnatural because each person had hands and a head which were created to work together for the individual and not a collective. He envisioned a progression where a penniless beginner works for wages, saves a surplus to buy tools or land, and eventually becomes an employer. Social mobility was a packaged deal of true liberty.

Lincoln was opposing a corrupt oligarchy that was usurping the institutions of the USA to make them more compatible with slavery. In doing so he asserted the value and worth of the working class and their labor:

It seemed hard to oppose them, and they had just won the Dred Scott verdict a few years earlier, but Lincoln knew that speaking out and displaying opposition were weapons against the “inevitability” of the Southerners, the idea that they would impose their will on the whole country. By intellectualizing manual labor and promoting the fluid movement from wage-earner to employer, Lincoln transformed a period of judicial defeat into a rhetorical foundation that empowered a new citizenry to dismantle the very institutions of oppression that the Supreme Court sought to protect.

We can all learn from Lincoln’s ability to endure setbacks at the Supreme Court and beyond. He went on the save his country and free millions of slaves. Let’s keep this in mind as a little encouragement to start the week.

More to come on Lincoln and his opponents in context.

Share

Leave a comment

In a partisan 6-3 decision, Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court struck down Louisiana’s revised congressional map as an “unconstitutional racial gerrymander”, ruling that the Voting Rights Act (VRA) did not require the state to create an additional majority-minority district. The Court majority added that while complying with Section 2 of the VRA can serve as a compelling state interest, the statute must be narrowly construed to prohibit only intentional racial discrimination rather than mere disparate impact, ensuring minority voters receive the exact same electoral opportunities that naturally result from a state’s neutral redistricting criteria. The fatal flaw in the Court’s logic is history: the criteria in the impacted states cannot be blindly presumed neutral.

The Roberts Court writes fiction.

Justices have long abused the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments because they dislike that the Reconstruction Congress and States used their Constitutional authority to grant more power to Congress to enforce racial equality. The amendments abolished slavery and what are termed the "badges of slavery"—the conditions imposed on slaves that would not be imposed on a free (White) person.

These amendments granted sweeping political power to Congress when the States ratified them. Congress—which then included the input of the States because the state legislatures, and not the People, then elected the US Senate—has the full authority to determine what is appropriate because the People and States are both represented in Congress. The Supreme Court has intruded into a political matter while claiming constitutional grounds. They are lying, radical, and revolutionary; they are not conservative.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 and its 1982 amendments exercise the exclusive powers of Congress, explicitly granted by the states from 1865 to 1870. Those who wrote them knew the stakes, having just defeated the slaveholder rebellion of the so-called “confederate states of America”, and knew what they were doing.

John Roberts and Samuel Alito, whom George W. Bush appointed, do not like to think about race. They should move. This is America; we cannot wash away history. The Constitution is our history. The right to vote cannot be abridged because of race. Justice should be blind; Mr. Roberts and Mr. Alito wish she were a battered and concussed amnesiac, too. Tennessee and Alabama now want to redraw their districts to create more seats for the Republicans, and somehow these districts will wind up splitting areas that heavily Democratic and—for reasons the Supreme Court refuses to know—heavily African American, the descendants of the slaves. People who claim to know the original meaning of the Constitution apparently cannot know history if race is involved. They prefer it that way.

During oral arguments, Mr. Roberts claimed that the Louisiana district in question looked like a snake. Irrelevant. His aesthetic judgments are improper and have nothing to do with the question. Louisiana sued to protect the maps it designed. The supposedly “conservative” Supreme Court has told the state that it cannot have the maps it wants. By striking down Louisiana’s congressional map, the court sacrificed state sovereignty, statutory text, and historical reality to judicial preference. This is not conservative jurisprudence. It is magisterial revolution.

The Constitution of 1787 vests the authority over redistricting in the States unless Congress modifies it. Redistricting is a political act, historically and constitutionally left to the political branches which does not include the Courts. And there I think lies the problem. Justices do not like being told they have no say and no role, they do not like being reminded that Constitutionally they are the weakest branch. It is time to wake them up from their fairy tales and remind them.

Actually, Louisiana was arguing to keep their map, while the Court’s majority presents themselves as reliving Louisiana of a burden. Louisiana Senate Bill 8 was a political move to navigate their partisan desires and demographic reality in Louisiana, which maps onto partisan alignment. The Louisiana legislature, exercising its Constitutional right, designed the map to protect specific Republican incumbents—a legal, non-justiciable objective under Rucho v. Common Cause. Yet federal judges intervened, second-guessing the legislature’s motives and overriding its political calculations.

The court essentially punished Louisiana for complying with a lower court order that said they had to redraw their map; Louisiana Republicans redrew the map and protected their incumbents, which the Supreme Court previously said they could do way back in 2019 with Rucho v. Common Cause. Federal judges nullifying a state’s political map because they find the district lines insufficiently “disentangled” from race is the breed of judicial overreach actual conservatives have spent half a century fighting.

Justice Elena Kagan is the Constitutional conservative in this case. The power to decide this matter lies with Congress, and Congress had already decided. The Roberts Court is a renegade magisterium and America needs a thoroughgoing reformation.

To hear my full breakdown of the Reconstruction Amendments and how Congress can strip the courts of this power by reclaiming the redistricting process, listen to the next episode of the podcast coming tomorrow or Sunday.

Share

Leave a comment

The Great War began when Austria-Hungary declared war on the Kingdom of Serbia on July 28, 1914. Then on the 1st of August the Russian and German Empires joined. Two days later the French Republic enthusiastically joined the war it had been waiting for. This sealed the fate of the Kingdom of Belgium ruled by King Albert I of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.1 However, the German response to the Belgian invasion brought in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland along with the rest of the British Empire reigned over by King George V, also of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. Tiny Montenegro joined the day after the UK, driven by a desire to support Serbia and Russia. At this point it was all the others against Austria-Hungary and Germany.

It became worse for the Central European empires when the Empire of Great Japan declared war on the Germanic powers on August 23, 1914.2 French diplomacy had actually managed to encircle Germany, however a cornered beast fights desperately and the Germans outfought and encircled the Russians at the so called “Second” Battle of Tannenberg, nearly destroying the entire Russian 2nd Army.

Germany successfully extended the front when—after British provocations—they convinced the Sublime Ottoman State and Caliphate to declare war on the Entente Powers, choking Russian trade through the Black Sea and threatening the position of Britain in the eastern Mediterranean. There the war sat until May 1915, when the Sacred Egoism of the Kingdom of Italy won out and they declared war on their former allies Austria-Hungary and Germany, adding another front.3

The House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha rose from a minor German duchy to a pan-European power by 1914. This ascent resulted through strategic marriage diplomacy and the shifting geopolitical needs of emerging nations. The rise started in Belgium. Following the Belgian Revolution of 1830, the new kingdom sought a neutral, diplomatically connected monarch and the Coburg family fit the requirements. Respected but from a weak small country they were thrilled to have a member sit on the new throne. However, the new King Leopold I wanted more and the dynasty established a foothold in Britain through the 1840 marriage of Leopold’s nephew Prince Albert to Queen Victoria; when she died their son took the throne in the name of his father’s house and the Coburgs added Britain to their official domains. However, there was a third Coburg realm, far in the East.

After the Russo-Turkish War the Ottomans were forced to recognize a new autonomous Bulgarian principality in 1878, formally still part of the Ottoman Empire. The new Bulgarian Grand National Assembly met the next year to elect a prince and, like Belgium and Greece before it, chose a minor German royal—Germany was fractured for so many centuries it had an over-supply of families that could claim “highness” rank—and they elected Alexander of Battenberg. However, he forgot he owed his position to Russia and when he tried to embrace liberalism the Russian Tsar-backed coup and Alexander’s army overthrew him. So the Grand National Assembly met again in 1887 and this time elected Ferdinand of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha-Koháry branch. His first cousin once removed, Queen Victoria’s response was “him?”

She did not think he had it in him. So much for family support.

The now “Prince” Ferdinand I wasted no time and was not going to lose this chance. He reconciled with Russia, converted his son from Roman Catholicism to Eastern Orthodoxy—Pope Leo excommunicated Ferdinand for this—and rebuilt the army. He both centralized power in the hands of the prince while also carefully respecting the liberal nature of the Constitution. Skillfully he played this game for twenty years until in 1908 he felt himself strong enough to declare legal independence from the Ottomans and to elevate himself from prince to king, styling himself Tsar Ferdinand I.

Ferdinand was adventurous, the first royal to fly in a plane. He did not, however, appreciate a jest from his second cousin once removed, the German emperor. In 1909, Ferdinand visited Germany, staying at the New Palace in Potsdam near Berlin, and when he was leaning out of a window, Kaiser Wilhelm II came up from behind, snuck up on Ferdinand and slapped his bottom! The joke unlike the one good imperial hand did not land.

Wilhelm laughed, Ferdinand was incensed! He did not think it was funny at all. So he gave the kaiser a serious slapback by hitting him where it hurt: giving a major arms contract to the French instead of Germany. He later had a spat with Franz Ferdinand of Austria at the funeral for King Edward VII of Britain, although this was him be prickly rather than having a good reason to mad. Kaiser Wilhelm, however, should have kept his hands off the royal bottom just as should have stayed out of Belgium. At this point France probably had a good chance to woo Bulgaria if backed by Ferdinand’s British cousins. And yet, after the Second Balkan War, Ferdinand was not too keen on Serbia.

However, by 1915 both sides of the Great War wanted Bulgaria. The Ottomans were defending Constantinople and the government of the British Coburgs wanted their cousin to attack the Ottomans from the west. Ferdinand wanted Macedonia, but Serbia would not agree. The British and the French offered him lesser prizes from the Ottomans; it was an insult if they needed his army so badly. Cousin Wilhelm had a better deal—no hard feelings after all—just join the Central Powers, attack Serbia, and take Macedonia if you want it. And if he was willing to fight the British and Belgian Coburgs…

On October 11, 1915, the Tsardom of Bulgaria, on the orders of His Majesty King Ferdinand I, attacked the Kingdom of Serbia.

Share

Leave a comment

Read more

The world has stopped playing along with America’s reality TV style governance. No one is laughing with the Americans. Even The Drudge Report news aggregator highlighted a countdown banner for the end of the 47th presidency.

Perhaps the trickiest transatlantic relationship is between the administration of Donald John Trump and his ancestral country, Germany. The president has made much of being German, or rather German-American, and often mentions his pride in his origins. The Germans themselves are bemused by the kinship. To most of the German public, Mr. Trump represents an American caricature of the very traits—narcissism, militarism, and racial chauvinism—that they spent 80 years trying to excise from their own character.

When people think of the villains of the 20th century, around the world they will point to the Germans. In the Great War, it was the Kaiser; in the Second World War, it was Hitler. This history made Germans sensitive to criticism, resistant to asserting leadership, and hesitant to criticize the State of Israel due to the Holocaust committed by the Nazi government that ruled Germany and Austria.

As a result, the Germans embrace the principle of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the "struggle to overcome the past." Comparisons of the American president and his movement with Hitler and Nazism are especially touchy for Germans and their government. Every violation of norms by Mr. Trump provoked strong feelings but muted reactions in Berlin. Germany depended on NATO for defense , as the alliance structure allowed it to sheath its military power within a multilateral system. This curtailed the temptation to become a great military power and the risks that would follow .

However, that is changing.

Between the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the American threats against Greenland, Germany has been forced to reckon with the need to match its firepower to its economic power. With the rise of the anti-establishment, anti-immigrant and anti-Vergangenheitsbewältigung Alternative for Germany(AfD) party, the German federal government feels a need to demonstrate that it is done being passive. The German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, leader of the Christian Democratic Union party, must counter the rebelliously assertive AfD by presenting a Germany that is strong, within the bounds of memory policy.

This assertiveness now includes an unprecedented attack on the American administration. The closing of the Strait of Hormuz, created the opening. The United States has been so damaged by POTUS’s Iranian adventure that Germany feels empowered to publicly criticize the US, accuse it of having no strategy, and declare that Iran is winning the war and humiliating the United States in the process. In the past no German leader would have take such a stance against Trump. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard is to shrinking America’s stature.

By using the word “humiliated,” Merz is not just critiquing a policy failure in the Middle East; he is performing a public decoupling. He is signaling that Germany will no longer play the role of the quiet, repentant junior partner to a superpower it views as strategically adrift and rhetorically volatile. The “struggle to overcome the past” has entered a new phase. Germany is no longer just defending its history from its own ghosts; it is now defending its legacy of democratic rebirth. The era of muted reactions is over. Berlin has decided that the only way to avoid being humiliated along with Washington is to speak the truth, regardless of the offense it gives.

Germany, for the first time since the Second World War, has a military budget almost the size of France’s and Britain’s combined; it is now the world’s fourth-largest. Only the United States, China, and Russia spend more on their forces. The next thing Merz will likely do is seek to make Europe comfortable with German leadership, and he can do that by articulating a European strategy for mutual thriving in the midst of the Iran war impacting fuel. Such a development would be in defiance of the lack of a strategy by the USA. By openly speaking of American failure, Mr. Merz has changed the permission structure for Europe.

The old world is ready to challenge the new again.

Share

Leave a comment

The post 9/11 era is definitively over.

1. America cannot do to Iran what it did to Iraq and Afghanistan. The world sees, and middle powers will seek to imitate Iranian tactics in war and public relations. Much of the world bought George W. Bush’s claim that Iraq was a threat and joined the “Coalition of the Willing.” The current coalition is just Israel and America.

2. Europe is prepared to fund a war against Russia regardless of what the United States thinks. Europe was never a vassal, it was an ally. People have just learned the difference.

3. Israel is going from a bipartisan darling,to a pariah and possible scapegoat for administration failures. Their former advocates like Mike Huckabee are the wrong people for the job.

4. Democrats are done allowing Republicans to play fast-and-loose with the rules and are willing to use extraordinary procedures to respond. If this development causes the Republicans to moderate and reverse course it will be long overdue.

The Strait of Hormuz —is it open or is it closed?

Despite much boasting, social media posting, and more boasting, the United States, the world’s most powerful country, cannot enforce its will on Iran’s new military leadership. Russia and China are watching.

My fear was that the United States, by letting Israel kill Iran’s aging leadership, would replace out-of-touch clerics with Gen-X warriors who have been waiting for their shot. Iran’s days of launching perfunctory and half-hearted retaliations are over. The resurrected Iran wants to fight, avenge, and win. And to close or open the Strait at will.

The American vice president will not return to the Pakistani capital to restart talks. His standing in America continues to fall; if he tries to distance himself from POTUS’s adventures in the Middle East later, few will believe him.

On the MAGA religious front, more faith commentators are criticizing Doug Wilson, a “Christian nationalist” philosopher aligned with the administration. My question is why now? What’s happening in

Europe

The fallout from the Hungarian elections is that the EU can now back Ukraine with loans. With a united Europe, the long-term war favors Ukraine.

The contest looks like this: Russia has a population of 146m versus the European Union’s 450.6m people. Russian GDP ranks fourth in the world at $7.14trn when adjusted for purchasing-power parity (PPP); for the EU it is $30.68trn PPP. Russian military spending is $186.2bn; the EU’s combined budgets equal $424.3bn. Europe’s problem was that its power was checked by a lack of urgency and unity. That era is over.

Israel/Palestine

A city in Gaza is voting this weekend. Yes, it is only one locality, Deir al-Balah, but still this is a major development. Will the elections be secure and free? The last elections of any kind were held in 2006: Hamas won.

No Gazan under 39 has ever gotten their say about who governs them. Doing my part for peace, over the last year I have hosted three joint Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking talks on campus. The lack of Palestinian democracy comes up every time. Palestinians are sick not being asked—by Hamas, Fatah, and Israel—what they actually want.

Israel may not realize it, but it needs peace as much as the Palestinians. American support for Israel is cratering. The Democratic Party base has completely reversed its position, and Republicans will not be far behind as the anti-war faction begins to assert itself.

The Commonwealth Technicality

The Commonwealth of Virginia went to the polls and it was as close as I thought, but the Democrats won the vote to gerrymander Virginia’s Republicans into likely winning only one Congressional district in 2026. Now I think that the Republicans actually could win an additional seat if they picked a candidate with nuance and a focus on kitchen table issues and who could appeal to moderates while reassuring conservatives so they turnout to vote.

However, a Virginia circuit court in Virginia has overturned the voters, presuming to order the officers of the Commonwealth not enforce the vote, and the case will head to the Supreme Court of Virginia. The Democrats may lose the case on the technicality regarding the language of the amendment and the process they used to authorize an early referendum.

Trying to rig control of the House of Representatives a year before the midterms is partisan corruption. Texas Republicans should never have done it, and it was arrogant to suggest that Democrats should not respond. There is no principle that says when someone changes the rules in the middle of the game you have to play along.

This is not over.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Today, many Americans are not thrilled about the prospects of celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. I get it. Many look back at 1976, recalling the lingering feelings of angst and weariness from Vietnam and Watergate that were a shadow over the country. You feel the duty to celebrate but may not feel it. Others have instead looked back to 1926 and the sesquicentennial during the Roaring 20s, and the confidence projected by President Calvin Coolidge, longing for such days. What is lost in the messy feelings of today is that the celebration of the 150th anniversary of the Declaration was also the beginning of the sesquicentennial of the Revolutionary War itself. Americans will have more to remember and celebrate over the next few years. I have my eye on 2031.

In late 1930, in the midst of the Great Depression, President Herbert Hoover faced a deteriorating economy and the loss of Republican control of Congress. And yet, 1931 was on the horizon. The president and Congress knew they could not pass on the duty to preserve American history, especially the important Yorktown Battlefield. The next year the country would celebrate General George Washington’s final major victory of the war, where he trapped and besieged the main British southern army under the command of General Lord Cornwallis. Supported by the Royal French Navy and Army commanded by the admiral Comte de Grasse, and the French Special Expedition commander-in-chief, Comte de Rochambeau. This battle forced British Prime Minister Lord North to see that the king’s cause was hopeless, and the Americans could not be denied. You may not feel 2026 right now, but think, what will you do to make America ready for 2031, Yorktown 250?

On December 30th, 1930, Hoover signed a proclamation putting into effect Congress’s July 3rd act creating a national colonial monument in Virginia to help preserve and build infrastructure to serve the public’s access to Williamsburg, Jamestown and the Yorktown Battlefield. I have included the text below. Remember it was the Depression; the times were bleak, millions struggling for work. And still, Americans determined to remember their origins, celebrate their heroes, and what they stood for. But who knew that America would be on the cusp of the New Deal in just two years, transforming the republic into a government capable of fighting the greatest war in history barely a decade later?

Share

Leave a comment

See also

If anything defines the American political identity it is the Declaration of Independence and the war that enforced it. The ups and downs, vices, and virtues, and contradictions of the Revolutionary period established America’s unique cultural outlook. It defined parameters of the American civic tradition.

Earlier this year I wrote two essays that I keep thinking about. The first was about the need to end wishcasting1 and the second was that America is no longer an experiment and Americans need to recover their confidence.2

There are many things that were wrong about American during the Founding era, however those things were not the Founding itself as an either an idea or deed. Surrendering the moral arguments of the Founding creed, because of the hypocrisy of the 18th-century is a mistake because it plays into the hands of the authoritarian and frankly anti-American impulses of the post-liberals.

Post-liberals argue that the principles of 1776—specifically individual autonomy and the 18th-century Enlightenment-influenced idea of natural rights—are fundamentally flawed. They contend that by making the “unencumbered” individual the primary unit of society, the Founders stripped away the “thick” communal and religious ties that are necessary for human flourishing.

In response to these developments, I think Americans need to be bolder about confronting to what is in fact an anti-American philosophy.

In reality, the Founders did no such thing as sowing the seeds of social unraveling. Second, the post-liberal assertions mirror the complaint that the rebel slavocracy of the “confederacy” made about individual equality resting on wrong premises, that were a weak foundation for a society.

To make this comparison plain, I will quote the middle of the “Cornerstone Speech” by the rebel vice-president, Alexander Stephens. Earlier in his March 21, 1861, speech, Stephens argued that the rebel constitution was a refined evolution of the American system. He claimed it kept what the rebels thought were essential liberties while fixing perceived structural failures regarding tariffs and federal spending. He presented this new framework as a “decidedly better” regime than the original 1787 settlement. However, he then switched to expounding on the philosophy behind secession and the rebel movement, picking a fight with Thomas Jefferson and the Founding Fathers in general. I have put some phrases in bold for emphasis.

He continued…

To Stephens, the Founders were on the “wrong side of history” and to the anti-slavery Unionists, the Founders were on the “right side of history.” These viewpoints were incompatible. The reason I have quoted this to emphasize—as Frederick Douglass did— that the principles of the liberal Founding were good and in contradiction to the oppression of the day. Alexander Stephens recognized this; he had to reject the principles of the Founding Fathers regarding liberty and rights. The post-liberals are not proponents of the slavery system of the 1861 rebellion. However, like the rebels, they recognize that their project is in actual conflict with the principles of the American nation. By claiming that the founding principles of American liberalism are fundamentally wrong, the 21st century’s “new right” has placed itself outside the American tradition and adopted a mindset of intellectual secession. To rebuild the American house on a foundation rejected by Founding Fathers, they have shown themselves willing to tolerate the political vandalism of the republic. It is time to evict them.

Share

Leave a comment

Get more from Albert Russell Thompson in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Israel’s ceasefire with Lebanon and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz by Iran are major world events. So is the South Korean president’s pointed criticism of Israel. He compared the country to imperial Japan—a reference to Japan’s obsession with strategic buffer zones. Japan once conquered Korea to establish protection against European colonizers; Koreans still remember their oppression. Comparing Israel to Japan is the harshest possible criticism from Seoul; it is like the Irish accusing another country of being like the English.

The bigger news is the escalating attacks by the American administration on Pope Leo XIV, the first American to serve as bishop of Rome. Pope Leo comes from a foundationally Protestant country. Although Pope Benedict XVI was German, Germany has a long Catholic history where the two branches of the faith have had parity for years. Leo understands the distinction between religion and the state in America, and he has not crossed that line. He has instead been exceptionally clear on morality and Christian teaching.

In his Palm Sunday Homily he said that:

This provoked rage from the American president and his supporters.

The pope quoted Isaiah 1:15. The book’s first chapter describes the Kingdom of Judah in rebellion against God. Those who attack the pope by arguing he was out of step with the tradition of “just war” argue from ignorance or incompetence. Neither is excusable if you plan to attack the Roman pontiff.

The Book of Isaiah begins with a vision received by “Isaiah, son of Amoz.” In it, God lists specific moral complaints against the kings and people of Judah. He charges them with corruption and compares them unfavorably to cattle. While Pope Leo quoted verse 15, the following verses explicitly list how to reverse God’s judgment:

Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your deeds from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow’s cause.

Because they are not listening, God offers a brutal indictment in verse 23:

Your princes are rebels and companions of thieves. Everyone loves a bribe and runs after gifts. They do not bring justice to the fatherless, and the widow’s cause does not come to them.

Judah is denounced for oppression, injustice, and “cozying up” to criminals. Because they are “full of blood”—driven by violence—God says:“Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen.”

In context Pope Leo is clearly saying more than our religiously uninformed media understood. He selected a verse from an anti-corruption passage to argue that God will not hear the prayers of corrupt leaders who wage war in his name. Why would he? The attacks on the pope by US administration supporters center on the idea that their prayers would not be heard because of their waging of war and they responded by citing wars were people did invoke God in the past such as the Crusades, and therefore missed the point. The reason the prayers would not be heard is because of the corruption and an unjust war is a manifestation of the corruption. This is a serious implication from the head of the world’s largest religious sect, numbering 1.4 billion. Leo quoted from Isaiah chapter one, and the context of that chapter is unambiguous.

The moral challenge from Rome to America, and the political challenge from the administration to Republican Catholics, puts them in a tough spot. They will have to choose. 127 years later, American Catholics must again answer Pope Leo XIII’s challenge “What is Americanism?”

“From the foregoing it is manifest, beloved son, that we are not able to give approval to those views which, in their collective sense, are called by some “Americanism.” But if by this name are to be understood certain endowments of mind which belong to the American people, just as other characteristics belong to various other nations, and if, moreover, by it is designated your political condition and the laws and customs by which you are governed, there is no reason to take exception to the name. But if this is to be so understood that the doctrines which have been adverted to above are not only indicated, but exalted, there can be no manner of doubt that our venerable brethren, the bishops of America, would be the first to repudiate and condemn it as being most injurious to themselves and to their country. For it would give rise to the suspicion that there are among you some who conceive and would have the Church in America to be different from what it is in the rest of the world.” —Pope Leo XIII, 1899, Concerning New Opinions, Virtue, Nature and Grace, With Regard to Americanism

In 1899, Leo XIII wrote that the Church could not approve of “Americanism” if the term meant that the order, obedience, and discipline of the Church in America should be different from that of the Church in the rest of the world. If the vice-president or others wish to claim that the new Pope Leo XIV is wrong to criticize their conduct and rhetoric regarding the war on Iran, they must first understand his message.

Share

Leave a comment

Refer a friend