When the first few months of the full-scale war in Ukraine passed and it became clear the conflict would last years rather than months, a popular subject in political commentary in Ukraine was the need to adopt the Israeli model of steel porcupine—a small state that defends itself by building vast defensive and offensive military capability, making any attack too expensive in money and human lives—maybe with a nuclear bomb or two down the line.

At the time, it seemed impossible—it takes too long and costs too much. But Kyiv has created its own steel porcupine.

A Strategic Decision

Four years down the line, instead of being a security recipient, Ukraine acts as a security donor, acquiring allies in unexpected corners of the world. Instead of closing down and becoming entirely self-reliant, Ukraine chose to open up and make other countries reliant on what it can offer—drone know-how in the Middle East and the U.S. bases there, a defensive wall between Europe and the threat from Russia, and any future benefits Europe will enjoy once the Ukrainian ballistic programme comes of age.

Instead of the traditional steel porcupine, Ukraine has developed an inverted form—it shoots quills not at its enemies but at its allies, injecting them with a protective layer of technology. Not many have noticed, however, that this ensures Ukraine receives not just protection from the allies to whom it now becomes more valuable, but also offers Ukraine a level of control unlike that of many other countries. Due to the nature of the arms business, Ukraine will have a say on who will or will not be allowed to use its technology, even when produced in joint ventures. Ukraine is advancing its defence deals very strategically, at exactly the right time and place for maximum effect. Considering how strategic its actions on the foreign affairs front have been, this seems to be a deliberate plan a long time in the making. If you already have a lot of responsibility, you might as well go and get yourself great power.

How Did We Get Here?

Without the war in Ukraine, drone warfare would still be in its infancy, military procurement would still consider tanks and infantry fighting vehicles a better investment than a drone wall, warships would still sail the Black Sea without a care in the world, and there would still be no defence against the full complement of U.S. and European missiles (Russians have since learned to counter HIMARS and developed responses to ATACMS as well). Estonia’s decision this month to suspend a €500 million infantry vehicle order and redirect the funds entirely to drones and air defence, citing lessons from Ukraine, shows how fast procurement thinking has shifted.

The powers that be decided not to right the wrong when Russia invaded Ukraine, and now large sections of their military technology are slowly turning obsolete. These same powers now have to adjust to the new world of warfare, and the only country that knows how it works is Ukraine.

Why Ukraine is Unique

Ukraine is uniquely positioned to throw a wide defensive tech net over its allies, and not just because it is the only active battlefield capable of testing and fine-tuning any weapon under the sun. Take Russia—it has similar access to battlefield conditions, and yet not many countries are queuing up to buy Russian-made modern drones. In fact, their most successful models are Iranian Shahed drones. Russia needed Iran to set up the production lines and train the operators—and this is the extent of their international drone programme.

Ukraine, in addition to being highly innovative and resourceful, also designed a procurement system almost entirely devoid of bureaucracy—arms developers work directly with military units, which means there is no lag between development and the front line. War is about the survival of the fittest—only the best military tech companies remain on the market. The decentralized drone development model bypasses the layer where traditional corruption lives—when a military unit orders directly from a developer, the middleman is removed entirely.

We also often forget that the Ukrainian military sector did not just appear out of nowhere—it was well established and indeed formed the basis for the Soviet arms industry.

Ukraine’s Yuzhnoye Design Bureau in Dnipro designed and built the SS-18 Satan—the most fearsome nuclear ICBM in the Soviet arsenal, capable of carrying ten independently targeted warheads across 10,000 kilometres while releasing decoys to defeat radar. After 1991, Ukrainian engineers continued maintaining the remaining Satans in Russian silos until 2014, when Kyiv stopped all cooperation. The stockpile is ageing without the maintenance that kept them viable, and nobody knows if they would fly or explode if launched. Russia has been attempting to replace the Satan with its own design, the RS-28 Sarmat, for the past 20 years—and despite having a working Ukrainian-designed model at their disposal, has achieved exactly one successful test launch out of six attempts, one of which destroyed the test silo entirely. Ukraine built it. Russia cannot even replicate it.

How the Arms Trade Actually Works

International arms deals are controlled first by national interests and only after that by financial considerations.

Since defence is a matter of national security, defence companies cannot just sign agreements with other companies or states—they need permission from their government. The same applies to the purchasing side: the country that owns the underlying technology, not the company producing military goods, decides which other country can purchase the specific equipment, even if it is manufactured elsewhere and another party foots the bill.

The U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) ensures only specific defence articles reach very specific markets. Those markets require authorization from the State Department, not merely a commercial agreement, to sell or even gift them to a third party. This is a foreign policy instrument as much as a trade one.

Almost the entire European defence industry is criss-crossed with U.S. technology and requires re-export licences as a result. In practice, the United States decides who can and who cannot buy weapons that contain its technology, regardless of where those weapons are manufactured or who paid for them. There are countries with their fingers in several defence pies, but none more so than the United States.

When former Warsaw Pact members began transferring their Soviet-era weapons to Ukraine at the start of the full-scale invasion, Russia objected on the grounds that the original re-export licences had belonged to the Soviet Union. The problem was resolved on the basis that Ukraine, as a Soviet successor state, held the same standing as Russia over equipment that had once been part of the shared arsenal.

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The system in place is essential to Ukraine’s ability to sell weapons. Every country that signs a weapons manufacturing or sales contract with Ukraine must guarantee that the technology will not end up in Russian hands, or the hands of any Russian-affiliated state, under any circumstances. That means there is a long list of countries banned from acquiring Ukrainian weapons.

Ukraine is, in effect, building its own version of ITAR. The same architecture that keeps its technology out of Russian hands also gives Kyiv a say in who gets to defend themselves with it. Every cooperation agreement embeds Ukrainian technology into another country’s defence architecture, and every embedded system requires a Ukrainian licence to transfer further. The United States spent decades getting to that position. Ukraine is acquiring significant leverage over international arms markets in a few short years. Kyiv is too smart not to realize what they are building.

Re-export Licence as Diplomacy

Ukrainian weapons systems are not just a financial mechanism and an alliance-building exercise. They offer Kyiv foreign policy instruments very few countries have. By being an undisputed leader in the battlefield drone ecosystem, Ukraine as a monopolist of sorts can send geopolitical signals through its defence cooperation agreements.

The ten-year defence cooperation agreements signed in the Middle East send a pointed message to Washington from both sides: Ukraine indicating it has serious leverage, and Middle Eastern countries demonstrating that the United States is not the only player in the area. Ukraine also now has leverage in other areas—it can make sure its new partners do not accept Russian ships laden with stolen Ukrainian grain, unlike Israel, which has accepted several shipments.

Zelenskyy’s meeting with President Ilham Aliyev in Gabala on April 25, his first visit to Azerbaijan since the full-scale invasion began, was held just 100 kilometres from Russia’s border. The six defence cooperation agreements signed there send an unmistakable message to Putin: Russia’s influence in the South Caucasus is finally over, while Kyiv’s has just begun.

A good example of what successful arms deals look like for Ukraine is its cooperation with Turkey. Ukraine supplies the engines that power Turkey’s most advanced combat drones—Baykar’s Akıncı and Kızılelma were developed with Ukrainian-made Ivchenko-Progress engines, earning the Kızılelma the nickname “a Turkish bird with a Ukrainian heart.” Turkey, in turn, supplies Ukraine with Bayraktar drones and Ada-class corvettes currently under construction for the Ukrainian navy, and is building a Baykar manufacturing plant outside Kyiv. It is therefore not surprising that Turkey used its considerable influence over the UN-recognized Libyan government to allow Ukraine to establish a military presence on the Libyan coast, from which Ukrainian naval drones have since hunted Russian shadow fleet vessels in the Mediterranean.

A different kind of example is Switzerland, which in 2022 refused re-export permissions for Swiss-made Gepard ammunition Germany was trying to send to Ukraine, blocked Denmark from transferring Swiss-made Piranha III armored vehicles, and blocked Spain from re-exporting two Swiss-made anti-aircraft guns. The Netherlands responded by stopping all Swiss arms purchases. The policy cost Switzerland its reputation as a reliable defence partner across Europe at precisely the moment Europe began the largest rearmament programme in its history.

Not Bad For a Country With No Cards

While an obvious take-away from the arms deals Kyiv is currently signing is that it has emerged as a global security provider, the real outcome is the permission architecture Ukraine is embedding into the global arms industry as we speak, and the power that architecture affords on the global scene. Ukraine is increasingly holding the strings to a global defence network that will operate without Washington’s permission.

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This also acts as the other side of security guarantees for Ukraine. The lamentable demise of the rules-based order and the loss of the United States as the global sheriff means no written guarantees will work. There is almost no scenario in which Ukraine would trust them. Ukraine can rely on its own military, and now it will also be able to rely on its defence industry being too valuable for allies to walk away from. By becoming indispensable to the global security landscape, Ukraine can spread its influence far wider than anything Russia can achieve.

While Israel turned itself inwards and made itself hard to kill, Ukraine turned outward and made itself too important to abandon. In the process, it is acquiring a lot of control over global security. It did not ask for this task, and it still has hard times ahead. But it found a way to protect itself by protecting others.

Ines Burrell is a geopolitical analyst and political risk consultant based in the UK. Born in the Baltics, with a degree in International Relations from the University of Exeter, she writes and gives live commentary on European security and Russia.

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Trapped in an accelerating downward spiral of us/them polarization, it can feel as if there is no way out. In democracies, when things go badly, the prospect of an upcoming election ordinarily can be a source of hope. However, as we learn from country after country, when those who fuel polarization also control the levers of state power, the next election can become empty, trumped by an emerging competitive authoritarian reality.

But experience elsewhere shows that the descent into authoritarianism can be reversed—as in the example of South Africa. In 1948, many centuries of white minority rule culminated in the accession to power of an explicitly ethno-nationalist political party. By the mid-1980s, the country seemed to be hurtling towards a devastating race war. Yet, within a few years, the world witnessed its “miracle” transition to constitutional democracy. A quarter century later, the country became entwined in a very different doom loop—a predatory president increasingly was wielding an ethno-populist political discourse as a weapon for subverting checks and balances, and accelerating state capture. But, again, the country was able to step back from the brink.

While on the surface the two episodes are very different from each other, they share some similar underlying patterns. Leadership mattered in both—indeed South Africa’s transition from apartheid often is depicted as a near-unique leadership-driven miracle. But in both episodes, the ground for change was prepared less by leadership than by the interplay between civic activism on the one hand and, on the other, the willingness of a subset of social and economic elites to look unflinchingly at the abyss opening up ahead. Exploring this interplay offers useful insights into the urgent question of how to break the spell of polarization in the United States.

Resistance to apartheid set the first South African episode in motion. As of the late 1960s, the country’s black majority had been cowed into subservience. Nelson Mandela and others who had campaigned against apartheid in the 1950s and early 1960s were in jail. The African National Congress had been forced into a seemingly ineffectual exile. But a 1976 uprising in the township of Soweto, led by high school students in defiance of their parents’ caution, marked the beginning of a new phase.

By the early 1980s, civil society, trade unions, and religious organizations had coalesced around a mass movement, the United Democratic Front (UDF)—and international clamor against apartheid had evolved from scattered activist initiatives into a broad-based global campaign for corporate divestment from South Africa. Even so, it was not resistance alone but the way in which elites engaged in response that led to apartheid’s demise.

In polarizing environments, elites can respond in radically different ways. One response deepens polarization, hardens lines of opposition, and accelerates the downward spiral. The demise of Weimar Germany is a notorious example of the consequences of elite miscalculation. There, the center did not hold. In the wake of the 1929 economic crisis, street violence between the Communist Party of Germany on the left and Nazi brownshirts intensified. Many right-wing (non-Nazi) political and business leaders—among them Alfred Hugenberg, media and manufacturing magnate and leader of the German National People’s Party (DNVP)—rejected participation in centrist political coalitions. In January 1933, Germany’s conservative political leadership made the fateful decision to appoint Adolf Hitler as Chancellor (even though in November 1932 the Nazi Party had won just 33% of the vote). “I have the confidence of Hindenburg! In two months, we’ll have pushed Hitler so far into the corner that he’ll squeal,” said power-broker Franz von Papen. That is not what happened.

A very different elite response is to look for ways to break the spell of us/them polarization. In both episodes explored here, key segments of South Africa’s elites took this latter course. Rather than avert their eyes, they looked squarely at the unfolding reality, reset their calculus as to the benefits and costs of inaction, and acted boldly to head off disaster.

Polite elite opposition to apartheid had long been part of South Africa’s political landscape, but subsequent to the 1976 Soweto uprising elite opposition increasingly moved beyond the bounds of white politics within which it had been contained. Influential actors within the corporate establishment came out in support of the legalization of trade unions for black workers and the easing of restrictions on urbanization for “undocumented” South Africans. In 1985, a few leaders from the commanding heights of business broke the prohibition on contact with the exiled African National Congress. Some leaders within the influential white Afrikaner Broederbond (an organization that, dating back at least to the 1930s, had played a key role in laying the groundwork for white ethno-nationalism) began questioning the status quo. Subsequently, an increasing stream of Afrikaner intellectuals, technocrats, and independent-minded politicians initiated dialogue with ANC leaders, not only with the still-jailed Nelson Mandela, but also with senior exiled leaders. While each of these was an incremental re-positioning not a decisive break, cumulatively they widened the political space, and made a negotiated transition possible.

A sequence of indelible moments followed: The February 1990 announcement by South African prime minister F.W. de Klerk that all political parties would be unbanned and Nelson Mandela released. Mandela’s 1993 television address to the nation that helped keep the transition to democracy on track in the face of the assassination of a major ANC leader. The joyful scenes that accompanied the country’s first democratic election in 1994. Mandela’s swearing in as president. Each of these offer a vivid display of heroic leadership. But that leadership did not happen in isolation—the interplay between civic mobilization and elite response prepared the ground.

In 2009, a quarter century after South Africa’s inspiring transition from apartheid to democracy, Jacob Zuma became the country’s president. Over the next few years, under the guise of a populist anti-elite agenda, he systematically began dismantling checks on the capricious, personalized use of political authority. He placed loyalists at the heads of the country’s prosecutorial apparatus, tax authorities, and other state-owned entities, used them to manipulate procurement and other decisions—and framed all of this as part of a broader mission to weaken the stranglehold of “white monopoly capital” on the (still massively unequal) economy. Things looked increasingly dire.

But Zuma was stopped in his tracks. What again made the decisive difference was the willingness of a strategically-positioned subset of elites to confront the mounting risks and, at considerable personal and political cost, mobilize to change course.

Senior leaders within the African National Congress, appalled by the direction in which Zuma was taking the country, overrode lifetimes of loyal struggle and party solidarity, spoke out publicly against Zuma, and organized to oppose his attempt to install his preferred candidate as successor. In November 2017, Cyril Ramaphosa, a central protagonist in the crafting of the constitution in the 1990s, won an intra-party electoral contest by a hairs-breadth, and became party leader—and then decisively won the 2019 national elections. Though things haven’t been easy since then, the state capture project was brought to a halt.

In both South African episodes, the spell of us/them polarization was broken via a sequence that began with resistance, and was followed by a reset by a strategically important set of elites—neither early resisters nor unshakably loyal to the incumbents—who saw where things were heading and became increasingly willing to try and move things in a different direction. Then came a hinge moment where the combined efforts of civic mobilization and semi-insider elites unleashed a far-reaching cascade of positive change.

Where is the United States along this trajectory? Civic activism has taken hold—in the courts, in the streets of Minneapolis, in thousands of “No Kings” protests across the country. But the impersonal, rule-based economic and political institutions that have long underpinned America’s thriving economy and free, open, and (mostly) stable society continue to erode—and so far the elite response has fallen short.

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America’s elites are, of course, not uniform. At one end of the spectrum, a subset has embraced culture wars as a way of shifting the focus of American political discourse away from questions of economic fairness, with the influence of this group recently being buttressed by tech sector elites chafing at the prospect of greater regulation. At the other end are liberal elites who have long supported progressive economic and social policies, with culture wars of their own. In between is an ambivalent-but-acquiescent middle group of corporate elites, wealthy individuals, and right-of-center political insiders who have chosen to interpret what is unfolding as politics as usual. They risk sleepwalking their way into disaster.

Key to what comes next is the interplay between civic mobilization and the response of ambivalent-but-acquiescent elites. An approach to mobilization that fights fire with fire would almost surely accelerate polarization, further weaken the center, and nudge elites towards acquiescing to so-called “strongmen” promising stability. By contrast (as in the two South African episodes), an approach to civic mobilization that builds alliances and articulates a vision of a thriving inclusive society is more likely to encourage ambivalent elites to resist the lure of us/them polarization. And their speaking out could in turn help set in motion an “ideational cascade” that draws in a critical mass of disengaged voters who had been inclined to dismiss accelerating polarization as political theater.

How far down does the United States’s downward spiral have to go before a turnaround? In South Africa’s struggle against apartheid, it took determined mass mobilization and an imminent threat of implosion for semi-insider elites to recalibrate the costs and benefits of going with the flow. By contrast, South Africa’s 2010 elites had already been primed by their struggle against apartheid to look into the abyss and take action—and could do so by leveraging the authorizing environment provided by the constitutional order they had helped create.

At least for now, the United States’s constitutional rules of the game still hold open the possibility of a rapid turnaround. However, their resilience will imminently be tested by the upcoming midterms—not so much by the results themselves as by the surrounding dynamics. Worryingly, it is easy to envisage an accelerating downward spiral of efforts to subvert access to the polls, disputed results, and street violence, culminating perhaps in the siren song of a call for decisive state action as the way to restore order. But if a critical mass of hitherto ambivalent-but-acquiescent elites put their weight behind free and fair midterm electoral processes—and if voters decisively repudiate us/them politics—then an immediate electoral escape route may still be possible. A presidential election two years later could then provide a platform for a necessary far-reaching conversation about renewal.

The United States’s current crisis did not arise from nowhere—any durable reset will require grappling with the far-reaching imbalances and frontier challenges that have accumulated over decades. These include: rising economic inequality; a widening cultural and social divide between big cities and smaller towns and rural areas; new technologies; transformed geopolitics; and climate change. Added to this is the massive cross-cutting task of reforming the public sector so that it works again.

But before any of the deep-seated structural issues can be addressed, first things must come first. We must break the spell of polarization—and this calls for an inclusive approach to activism, one that skillfully balances urgency and hope. We can pay the price of letting go of comfortable illusions now—or pay a far greater price later. Which is it to be?

Brian Levy teaches at the Luskin School of Public Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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When the United States declared that it was going to start its own blockade of the Strait of Hormuz as a solution to the Iranian blockade, most commentators concluded that it is a very dangerous high stakes gamble, and some took it for just another symptom of the insanity that Washington has been exhibiting so profusely.

While there are ample reasons to find many of Donald Trump’s foreign policy moves objectionable, this might be the case where some refuse to see the logic simply because they no longer expect to see one. In reality, far from being random, the U.S. blockade of the Iranian blockade does in fact make sense—and what is more, it has the potential to solve the problem in a way that military means alone could not.

How Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz

Following the start of the U.S.-Iran war at the end of February, Iran first threatened to, and then actually did, close the Strait of Hormuz. Unlike closing land routes, where you can physically obstruct a narrow strip of land, closing the roughly 9km wide shipping lane requires a whole host of measures.

Iran achieved the desired result by declaring it had mined the strait and started collecting tolls—though the question of whether it was physically mined remains.

For context, Iran operates its own shipping corridor through Hormuz. This is used to export its oil, import goods, and allow transit to ships that paid for such passage. It stands to reason that this corridor has not been mined—they needed it unobstructed. Whatever mines Iran laid, they could not have touched the northern corridor running close to its own coast—the route via Larak Island.

Part of the international fairway (the route commercial shipping uses) runs along the Omani side of the strait, not the Iranian side. Mining it comprehensively would have required Iran to send minelaying vessels into waters approaching Oman’s territory in broad view of everybody when hostilities were already in full swing. It would be very difficult to imagine that the United States and allied surveillance would have missed it or, worse, allowed it. All we have to show for the mining activities is Iran’s word, and that’s not worth much these days.

Reports suggest that instead of vast minefields, a few dozen mines were laid in waters Iran could physically reach. Some reports indicate Iran even forgot to map the mines. As a result, all indications are that it was not the mines themselves that closed the Strait of Hormuz, but rather the idea of the mines and the impact the idea had on shipping insurance markets.

In effect, the vessels in the Persian Gulf are trapped there not because Iran does not let them pass through, but because of self-grounding—they are worried that they might not get through.

Don’t bullshit the bullshitter

The United States decided to call Iran’s bluff by sending two destroyers on a mine-clearance mission. On 11 April 2026, the USS Frank E. Petersen and USS Michael Murphy—two guided-missile destroyers—transited the Strait of Hormuz for the first time since the war began, operating in the Persian Gulf as part of what CENTCOM described as a mission to ensure the strait is fully clear of sea mines, before transiting back through to the Gulf of Oman. As expected, they transited the route without any damage, demonstrating there was a way through the strait.

However, for the ships to start using the fairway, more incentive was needed. And this is where the blockade of the blockade comes in. It is not intended to stop all traffic coming from the Persian Gulf; it is intended to stop the traffic coming from Iran or via Iran. Ships that transport oil from Iran would be stopped or turned back by the U.S. Navy, as would those that obtained permission from the Iranian side and paid tolls by calling at Larak. The vessels waiting in the Persian Gulf were thus given a choice—pay Iran a toll of up to two million dollars and then potentially be stopped by the U.S. Navy, or go past the Oman coastline and pay nothing.

An argument might be made that the United States would not be able to stop any Chinese ships since attacking Chinese vessels would constitute a serious escalation. However, information indicates that Rich Starry—a U.S.-sanctioned Chinese-owned tanker, formerly named Full Star and owned by Shanghai Xuanrun Shipping—turned back within minutes of approaching the chokepoint on 13 April 2026, the first day of the blockade. According to some reports it transited the following day, but it was not plain sailing.

Additionally, even if Chinese vessels are happy to pay Iran for the use of their fairway, there is no rational reason for other countries to do that if there is an alternative.

Starving the Guard

Alongside depriving Iran of any toll money and opening the shipping lanes, this move effects a complete economic blockade of Iran.

Over 90% of all imports and exports going in and out of Iran use the Strait of Hormuz. Whatever land routes they have via Pakistan and Turkmenistan cover only a small portion of goods, and railway capacity is insufficient for any meaningful transportation of crude oil. Iran does have one pipeline bypassing Hormuz entirely, the Goreh-Jask line, completed in 2021; however, its capacity is minuscule.

By cutting Iran off from its oil revenues and also from any imports it needs for domestic purposes, the United States is effecting a complete economic stranglehold. As Iran’s oil exports slow, its onshore storage fills up. With approximately thirteen days of spare capacity, Iran must then begin shutting its oil wells. Restarting them is technically demanding, expensive, and risks permanent oil well damage.

Based on accounts from Iranian commentators, the situation in Iran is increasingly unstable. The power conflict between the IRGC and more moderate elements is not imagined, although the Revolutionary Guard currently holds a monopoly on physical violence. This, however, can change if the economic situation deteriorates further—a position held by Pezeshkian’s moderate government, although it holds no visible power. There are already food shortages, cash machines have been out of order for months, and wages are going unpaid with increasing frequency. Unlike Russia, where unpaid wages are not sufficient cause for popular displeasure, Iranians are already unhappy. Suppressing popular dissent with a well-fed IRGC is one thing, but when your own guard starts grumbling, the regime becomes considerably less stable.

What the United States is trying to achieve

Washington may hold out for the maximum goal—regime change as a result of economic collapse—which might or might not happen. As is the way with revolutions, changes happen incrementally and then all at once. If the regime collapses, many will say they saw it coming. If it does not, they will say it was never going to fall. In any event, several revolutionary factors are already in place, the most important being popular dissent, the power struggle between hardline and moderate wings, and possible economic collapse, which operates differently in fractured societies than in cohesive ones. Iran is most certainly the former.

The alternative is to inflict economic pain and cut Iran off from its revenue, in hopes of forcing it to the negotiating table. What remains unclear, however, is who would negotiate from the Iranian side. As it stands, the power is in the hands of the IRGC, yet the only side willing to negotiate is the moderate government, as shown by the recent negotiations in Pakistan, where Iran was represented by Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf. Neither holds any authority over the IRGC commanders running the war. The problem is not only that the moderates lack a mandate, but that being seen to negotiate at all places them at personal risk. At the same time, their participation in negotiations might be an IRGC ploy. Diplomacy, it would seem, has its own minefields.

Unlike purely military pressure, this move gives Washington two possible outcomes. While achieving political goals with military means alone might not work, cutting the enemy off from its funds in addition to inflicting military losses could cause sufficient strife within the Iranian regime and force a result that seemed impossible before.

Whether Washington holds out for the full house or takes the bird in hand, the blockade gives it options. And not bad ones.

All of this, of course, is contingent on this being a deliberate strategy, and on Washington being able to stay the course.

Ines Burrell is a geopolitical analyst and political risk consultant based in the UK.

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What’s going on? How can this be? When will it end?

These were the questions my wife and I, as Americans, were asked, explicitly or implicitly, on our recent trip through Europe. A bafflement we shared, unable to provide answers.

But as we made our way from the Netherlands into Belgium and France, another theme emerged.

When we said we were traveling to Normandy, what we encountered instead was gratitude—and a lingering affection.

A Frenchman born in 1946, as was I, told us how he grew up with the stories of D-Day and the Americans who came to liberate his country. That they came not for land or treasure, but for a belief that crossed oceans and connected continents. He spoke of a gratitude for America that he and others of his generation have carried throughout their lives—and of how difficult it has become to hold on to that sensibility in the face of so much that now undermines it.

We heard versions of this again and again. We carried those sentiments with us to Omaha Beach.

Walking it at low tide, in a strong cold wind, shivering as we tried to imagine men desperately traversing that long, exposed expanse from the waterline to the bluffs. To reach a shore that offered no respite. To pass the bodies of fallen comrades. To move forward with no safety until victory and no assurance of victory.

The scale of the undertaking is well documented—the thousands of ships, the coordination across nations, the rapid construction of artificial harbors. But what is striking is how perilous each and every step was. Every spot holds countless individual stories of bravery and courage, valor and ingenuity. Standing before a concrete bunker, with its heavy artillery and narrow slits for machine guns, was to wonder how such positions were taken, one by one. A quiet pastoral bridge, now serene, was once the site where hundreds died to contest it.

We visited the American cemetery, where stark rows of crosses and stars extend over more than nine thousand graves, yet are only a fraction of those who fought and died. It is profoundly moving. It reminded me of Lincoln’s words at Gettysburg—that they gave “the last full measure of devotion.”

Like many of our generation, we grew up with the stories of an America that went from the beaches of Normandy to the streets of Berlin, and on parallel paths across the Pacific—so many bloody, terrible miles—to defend freedom. It instilled in us a sense of a nation that had fulfilled a great purpose in the world, and which reflected something essential back onto itself. It made us proud.

The contrast between the America remembered at Normandy and the America of today is not subtle.

I have no doubt that the men and women who have since gone to Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan were equally brave. But how differently those wars sit in our history. How often we have squandered the treasure we possess as a nation—our youth—sent to fight by leaders sitting safely at home in wars shaped by lies, misjudgment, and arrogance.

And now, Iran.

Standing in a place like Normandy is to confront the sad question: not whether Americans remain capable of courage and sacrifice, but whether the country can still pursue a cause worthy of them. The feelings expressed by our French friend and his compatriots become nearly impossible to sustain, eviscerated by a country that elected and enables a man whose conduct is destroying the very fabric of the nation, and the values of liberty and fairness that once—for all our flaws—commanded respect abroad and pride at home.

There is a nausea-inducing contrast between the quiet valor and dignity of the leaders and soldiers who put their lives on the line for the ideals that shaped D-Day and beyond, and the hollow bravado of Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump who talk as if they were continuing the great tradition of D-Day while defiling it with their arrogance and foolishness. And the utter failure of politicians, many of whom are veterans, to unite in a loud protest to this foolish, expensive, and deadly use of our military.

Driving through the countryside, we saw landscapes dotted with wind turbines rising above fields and farms. Their presence suggests societies making long-term choices, grounded in a recognition of shared stakes and future consequences. There is a willingness to confront reality rather than deny it.

From this distance, it’s even more striking how awfully Trump and his sycophants have treated our nation.

Even abroad, people speak of the midterms, expressing a wistful hope that some measure of stability might be restored. But there is also a recognition of how much damage has already been done, and how uncertain any repair may be.

At the cemetery above Omaha Beach, the graves are aligned with a precision that suggests order, intention, and care. Each marker represents a life that ended in the service of something its bearer believed was worth the cost. The scale of that loss is almost impossible to absorb.

What is easier to grasp, however, is the gulf between that clarity and the actions of a nation now so far removed from what the men and stories of D-Day represent.

For now, we reside in limbo.

What’s going on? How can this be? When will it end?

Robert M. Herzog is a novelist and essayist, and the author of A World Between and Views from the Side Mirror: Essaying America.

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The elections in Hungary have concluded, and the opposition with Péter Magyar at the helm has achieved a historic win. Voters seized the chance to steer Hungary back towards the rest of Europe.

However, even before the elections, it was evident Magyar’s Tisza Party could not simply run with a liberal and pro-European message. Magyar was working with exactly the same society that Viktor Orbán was. And the eggshells Magyar had to walk on indicate that Hungarian foreign policy, which is what concerns Europe most, might be less an extension of Fidesz and Orbán than an extension of the society itself.

While the internal conflicts, slippage of the rule of law, and corruption were used to entice disillusioned voters, the four cornerstones of Hungarian foreign policy—the Hungarian diaspora, as well as relations with Ukraine, Russia, and the EU—were handled with conspicuous caution by the opposition, though with one notable exception—relations with Russia. If anything, the treatment of each of these subjects by Tisza in this election tells us a lot about the electorate they have inherited from Orbán, and how foreign policy in Hungary might change or not change now that Orbán has finally been dethroned.

Why, exactly, were these matters so important to Orbán and Magyar? Or rather, why are they so important to the Hungarian electorate?

The Gold Mine of Diaspora

In 2010, at the start of his second term as the prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán devised a way of increasing his voter base—by amending the Citizenship Act so that Hungarian citizenship was given to ethnic Hungarians who lived outside of Hungary. In doing so, he created an entirely new electoral class.

A brief historical detour is in order. In 1920, after the end of WWI and as part of the Treaty of Trianon, the Hungarian borders of what was once the Austro-Hungarian Empire were rearranged. Although the lands Hungary lost were majority non-Hungarian, the borders cut through ethnically mixed territories, leaving approximately a third of ethnic Hungarians on the wrong side. At the same time, the lands passed to neighboring and newly-created states dominated by the region’s other main ethnic groups. By once again siding with Germany, this time in WWII, Hungary regained some of its former lands, and then promptly lost them, finding itself once again on the wrong side of history.

Through the Citizenship Act, which was adopted in 2011, the descendants of these ethnic Hungarians were offered and granted Hungarian citizenship in countries where dual citizenship was permitted, and then a year later acquired voting rights. These were people who had never lived in Hungary, had owed no allegiance to Hungary for decades, and who often had different cultures and customs through their integration into different societies. What they did have, however, was a feeling of gratitude to Viktor Orbán for giving them a sense of belonging.

This proved to be a master stroke for Orbán—he acquired his own private electorate. And Péter Magyar attempted to turn it. In May 2025, he made a pilgrimage to the Romanian town of Oradea, walking 310 kilometers in 11 days, ostensibly in response to Orbán’s endorsement of George Simion in the Romanian presidential election, which ethnic Hungarians in Transylvania read as a betrayal.

In late December 2025, Slovakia passed a law making it a criminal offence to publicly question the Beneš Decrees—the post-WWII measures that imposed collective guilt on ethnic Hungarians and Germans, stripping them of property and citizenship. Orbán stayed largely silent, his alliance with Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico making confrontation inconvenient—and besides, ethnic Hungarians in Slovakia cannot acquire Hungarian citizenship without surrendering their Slovak one, leaving Orbán with no electorate there to protect.

Magyar seized the opportunity, participating in various protests and capitalizing on Orbán’s conspicuous silence on the plight of ethnic Hungarians in Slovakia.

What is telling is that by framing Orbán as insufficiently committed to the diaspora, Magyar was actually addressing Hungarians inside Hungary—since there were no votes to acquire in Slovakia. He referred to Slovakia by its historical Hungarian name, Felvidék, signaling a nationalist view of Slovakia that his electorate would recognize. It was an appeal, in other words, to the common resentment of a lost empire.

Even if Magyar managed to flip any of the diaspora vote, they will continue to support the same message as before—indeed, the only message that links them to Hungary: a connection to a time and place long gone.

A Country in Want of an Enemy

Viktor Orbán framed his electoral campaign as though his actual opponent was not Magyar but Volodymyr Zelenskyy. His name and likeness appeared on many posters, and there was even a dedicated Twitter account counting the number of times Orbán had complained about Zelenskyy that day.

Orbán’s obsession with Zelenskyy and Ukraine is overblown. However, judging by Magyar’s response to Zelenskyy’s sardonic attacks—claiming, with Orbán, that “no foreign leader can threaten any Hungarian,” the subject is a sore one. While Magyar may not have the same antipathy to Ukraine as his opponent did, that might be immaterial, since the Hungarian electorate shares the anti-Ukrainian sentiment. According to a 2025 Policy Solutions poll, half of Hungary’s electorate considers Ukraine dangerous, 64% oppose EU accession for Ukraine, and Zelenskyy ranks as one of the most disliked foreign leaders in the country, level with Putin.

Unlike the fraught shared history with Poland, where centuries of oppression and reprisals left wounds on both sides, Hungary has no comparable grievance to explain its hostility toward Ukraine.

What exactly has Ukraine done to Hungary to warrant such animosity?

All roads in this case lead to Trianon. As a result of the post-WWI land transfers, Hungary in 1920 lost what is now Zakarpattia to Czechoslovakia. It briefly recovered Zakarpattia at the start of WWII and then lost it again to the Soviets, who annexed it by assigning it to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1945. Ukraine had no say over the transfer—they were themselves under Soviet occupation at the time.

Yet this piece of land, which before the full-scale war was home to some 150,000 ethnic Hungarians alongside roughly one million Ukrainians, still seems to be the bone of contention, at least on the Hungarian side. While all other countries in Eastern Europe seized the opportunity to move away from Russian influence and to face the future, Hungary turned to face the past.

When Orbán discovered the additional stash of voters in other countries, he approached ethnic Hungarians in Ukraine as well. As with Slovakia, Ukraine did not allow acquired dual citizenship. The Hungarian government offered Hungarian passports to Ukrainian citizens of Hungarian ethnic origin and encouraged them not to declare the passport to the Ukrainian authorities. Ukraine was not happy. A consul was expelled. And Hungary, naturally, blamed Ukraine.

Then came 2014: the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbas. Ukraine was at war and needed to think of its security. Since ubiquitous “Russian speakers” were quite literally the raison d’état of the invasion, the proportion of Russian speakers had to be reduced to discourage any further attempts to “save them” from being Ukrainian. Ukraine did in 2017 what the Baltic states did only after the start of the full-scale war—they banned state education in Russian after grade five across Ukraine.

Russians were not an indigenous national minority—they were settled across Ukraine throughout the Soviet period as part of a deliberate russification policy, as occurred with other countries under Soviet occupation. Many Ukrainians were russified in the process, but that did not make them Russian. In Crimea, the Soviets deported almost the entire indigenous Crimean Tatar population in 1944 and took over their homes and lands.

However, the ban—intended to restrict the spread of the Russian language and its associated ideology under wartime conditions—unfortunately affected real national minorities. Ethnic Poles, Slovaks, and Hungarians were all affected.

Poland and Slovakia attempted to address the issue through diplomacy. Ukraine had its hands full, and the Russian language was a serious cause for concern when it came to national security. And Poland and Slovakia remembered who the real enemy was.

Hungary, however, did not. Instead of taking the high road, they decided to hassle Ukraine as much as possible, knowing full well that it would not change the overall national policy. But Hungary’s campaign fueled the sense of collective resentment, much to Orbán’s political benefit.

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When the full-scale war started in 2022, Hungary accepted Ukrainian refugees, but very soon started pitching for the other side—they vetoed EU decisions on weapons supply and financial help; blocked Ukraine accession talks and all but represented Russian interests in the EU; and, as recent revelations have revealed, essentially spied for Russia in the EU.

Resentment towards other neighboring countries, like Romania and Slovakia, had to be managed in the interest of accessing EU funds. After all, they had to work together on a daily basis. Ukraine, however, was an outsider—a country worse off, looking in through a window from the cold. In other words, a perfect target.

When Grudges Extract Tolls

The third defining element of Hungarian foreign policy has been Russia. While most other Eastern European countries with an experience of Russian occupation have moved as far away from Russian influence as possible, Hungary took a different path. And this choice was one of the weakest elements of Fidesz policy.

They had to reconcile the memory of abuse at Russian hands and the Soviet role in sealing their territorial losses after WWII—conveniently blamed on Ukraine—with the corrupting influence of Putin’s Russia on their own leadership. While Hungary clung to Russian energy resources, the rise of kleptocracy within its own state was too obvious to ignore.

The diverging logic of alignment with Russia has therefore been the one policy element that the opposition was able to latch onto. Following a series of leaked phone calls between Orbán’s team and Russian officials (and yes, the timing of their disclosure cannot be incidental, although the source has not been disclosed), Magyar openly declared treason and called for an investigation.

Despite Orbán’s attempts to force collective amnesia on his people, historic memory once again proved to be stronger. The Hungarian electorate has no love left for Russia. While a significant minority, polling at around 29%, remains amenable to Russia as a counterweight to Brussels, the overall picture is one of historic resentment rather than affinity. It just so happens that they have an equally negative view of Ukraine.

The Due That Is Not Due

Hungary’s interactions with the other EU countries have been anything but positive. While outwardly parroting the value of democratic governance, Hungary has tried to replace the principle of majority rule with the rule of minority—after all, a whole bloc of countries being held hostage by one country is anything but democratic.

It is therefore curious why a country that has so much objection to everything its European neighbors do is not interested in leaving the EU and going it alone or within other alliances. And the answer is simple—financial interests.

The EU provides the biggest potential source of prosperity available to Hungary as a landlocked state in modern Europe. It is not quite clear how they intend to access this prosperity while simultaneously destabilizing the whole EU structure. But overall, the European Union and its funds are treated as their due. Perhaps they consider it compensation for the suffering inflicted by the post-WWI settlement.

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This is very different from the rest of Eastern Europe, which also sees European funds as their due, albeit for a different reason—Eastern Europe has never quite gotten over the sense of betrayal at being handed to the Soviet sphere at Yalta in 1945. However, the other former Warsaw Pact countries decided to transform this sense of betrayal into a drive to achieve a better life for themselves and others. Hungary, on the other hand, seems to want to extract rents without offering much in return, or at least, that is the signal its political class consistently sends to its partners.

It is therefore unsurprising that Tisza’s angle was pro-European in rhetoric, transactional in substance, and aligned with Fidesz on migration and sovereignty. Even the 2035 energy timeline suggests a government adjusting its EU commitments to what its electorate will accept—the funds, but not the obligations.

Reading the Meter

Magyar has won. What he has inherited is another matter.

In his election campaign, Péter Magyar found genuine opposition to Fidesz only where the electorate allowed him to—on the question of Russia. All other elements—the power of diaspora, dislike of Ukraine, and the transactional approach to the EU, are broadly the same as under Orbán.

It is evident that Magyar did not believe the electorate would be responsive to any meaningful change on these subjects. Since a large portion of the electorate he needed to win the elections would not respond to a different message, he positioned himself accordingly.

Perhaps as younger urban voters, currently the engine of Tisza’s support, become a larger share of the electorate, more open policies will find their way into Hungarian society. But at the moment, the opposition’s message indicates that Hungary is still driven by past grievances caused by the loss of imperial power.

For those in Europe hoping that April 12 marks a turning point, the message from the campaign trail is sobering: you may have got a different government in Hungary, but you will still have to work with the same Hungarian society.

Ines Burrell is a geopolitical analyst and political risk consultant based in the UK.

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The death of Lionel Jospin on March 22, aged 88, has reopened familiar debates about the French left. Some hail the Socialist who, as France’s prime minister, brought Communists and Greens into a pragmatic governing coalition between 1997 and 2002, and see it as a template for the future. Others argue that the rift between radicals and moderates is now deeper than ever, making any such alliance a mirage. Jospin has been given credit for his stewardship of the economy and his signature social policy, the 35-hour week. For critics, the dream of France working less and maintaining its rank among nations has been conclusively crushed. These are legitimate arguments. But this article sets them aside to examine something on which there is near-universal agreement: Jospin’s moral character, or rather, the legend of it.

When he was alive, Jospin was widely regarded as the most honest president France never had. Words like “probity,” “sincerity,” and “honor” tripped off the keyboards of journalists who wrote about him. Much was made of his Protestant background (why Catholics, Jews, or Muslims should inspire less trust was never explained). After his greatest setback—his elimination in the first round of the 2002 presidential election, eventually won by Jacques Chirac—he was praised for withdrawing from politics. “Jospin is a man of principles who does not deceive himself and acts on his convictions, even at his own expense,” the veteran analyst Alain Duhamel wrote in a recent series of political sketches.

In death, he has been virtually canonized. “Jospinism was above all the ethics of a man,” declared Le Nouvel Observateur. He “refused to separate ethics from politics,” wrote Le Monde. The right-wing channel CNews faithfully compiled the tributes heaped on him by political friends and foes alike: “rectitude,” “a model of integrity,” “an exemplar of hard work and exacting standards.” Lost in the encomia, or discreetly relegated to a footnote, is the fact that Jospin led a political double life for decades on his way to the top—and lied about it repeatedly once it was exposed.

“We live at the mercy of certain silences,” Henry de Montherlant wrote. For Jospin, the silence was broken in June 2001, four years into his prime ministership. An elderly revolutionary Marxist, Boris Fraenkel, revealed that in 1964 he had recruited Jospin into the Organisation Communiste Internationaliste (OCI), a cloak-and-dagger Trotskyist group dedicated to infiltrating key institutions. Jospin, then a student at ENA, an elite school for bureaucrats, was quite a catch. “We didn’t have any énarques in the movement then,” Fraenkel told Le Nouvel Observateur. “It was a unique chance to penetrate the upper reaches of the civil service.”

In 1970, after five years as a diplomat, Jospin became a university professor. More interestingly for his revolutionary handlers, Jospin—codenamed “Michel”—decided to join the Socialist Party (PS) the following year. OCI leader Pierre Lambert, an imperious guru who kept a personal grip on every tactical move, gave his blessing. The PS had just been relaunched by François Mitterrand with a programme of “rupture with capitalism,” and having a mole on the inside was an opportunity not to be missed. Jospin, Lambert later acknowledged, “went into the Socialist Party with my consent” and “had a particular job to do.”

The operation was a ringing success. “Michel” rose through the ranks of the PS. By 1979, he was Mitterrand’s second-in-command, running the party by day and discussing the revolution in cell meetings by night. He hid his clandestine activities even from his wife. By the turn of the 1980s, he was easily recognizable by his owlish glasses and frizzy hair, and rumors about his Trotskyist connection began to circulate. His response: people must be confusing him with his brother, an avowed OCI member. Although Jospin became PS leader in 1981, and a cabinet minister in 1988, the press looked away. In 1995, when he seemed well-placed in the presidential race, Le Monde mustered the curiosity to ask him if he had ever been a Trotskyist. He flatly denied it, once again sheltering behind his younger brother.

Six years later, now prime minister, Jospin was finally cornered. Both Fraenkel and Lambert had gone public and the game was up. In June 2001, he rose in the National Assembly to deliver what passed for a confession: “It is true that in the 1960s I took an interest in Trotskyist ideas and established relations with one of the groups of this movement. This was a personal, intellectual and political journey of which I have no reason to be ashamed, if that is the right word.”

This masterclass in evasion warrants close scrutiny, as every word is carefully chosen to blur facts without lying outright:

• In the 1960s: This conveniently ignores credible reports that he remained an OCI operative well into the 1980s, and more than a decade of entryism within the PS is airbrushed out;

• I took an interest in Trotskyist ideas: This sounds like a case of youthful intellectual exploration rather than a structured clandestine activity, complete with a codename and deliberate double membership;

• I established relations with one of the groups: The indefinite article deepens the fog. The OCI is not named—as though he had vaguely frequented one club among many others;

• A personal, intellectual and political journey: The three-word formula dilutes a political commitment into something resembling a voyage of self-discovery;

• Of which I have no reason to be ashamed, if that is the right word: The final rhetorical caveat allows him to both distance himself from his own formulation and reinforce it. He does not merely deny shame—he questions whether shame is even a relevant category.

In France, Trotskyism—an anti-Stalinist strand of Marxism dedicated to permanent revolution—is not the quaint ideological relic it might seem elsewhere. Among baby boomers, former devotees rose to prominent positions in politics, the media, and the civil service. Many have worn their past affiliation with pride. The late Socialist senator Henri Weber was a notable exception: “Permanent revolution, what a load of balls!” he once thundered. Jospin, who had belonged to a particularly conspiratorial branch of the brotherhood and traded on an upright public image, was not capable of such plain-speaking.

In 2010, Jospin had a chance to come clean. After an inconclusive flirtation with the presidential race three years earlier, he was well and truly out of politics. Two journalists approached him to take stock of his career. In the resulting TV documentary and book—both entitled Lionel raconte Jospin—Lionel may have told Jospin’s story, but he dodged all questions about “Michel.”

“I was first a Trotskyist and a Socialist, then the Trotskyist faded before the Socialist,” he said, not mentioning that he was a Trotskyist long before joining the PS and neglecting to specify when he left the OCI. Most analysts place the final break in 1988, when he became education minister.

No one is accusing Jospin of corruption or attempted subversion. By the standards of French leaders, his record is honorable. At first, his secret revolutionary identity was a way of managing an inner tension: in the late 1960s, the budding diplomat felt out of place climbing the career ladder in de Gaulle’s France while the country’s idealistic youth was rebelling in the streets. In the 2010 interview, Jospin described his OCI membership as an “antidote” to the risk of “conformity.”

But the dynamic of the double life gradually reversed itself. He continued to play the undercover agent without believing in the cause; it was his open life—a life in which he made a real difference—that became his true self. His first wife put it plainly in 2002: What had begun as a conviction had become a constraint, and eventually a prison. Jospin was a decent man whose past had caught up with him.

But to then make him out to be a paragon of probity—that is a step taken with remarkable ease in the only Western country where at least two rival Trotskyist candidates stand in every presidential election. One of his eulogists (ironically, one of the journalists who had first unmasked him) went so far as to write: “Jospin was never more sincere than in his double life, never more honest than in his secrecy. Never more free than in his contradictions.”

Mendacity elevated to the highest form of sincerity! To understand that, to quote the late Madeleine Albright in a rather different context, “you have to be either a genius or French.”

Henri Astier is a London-based journalist who writes for French- and English-language publications. He writes the Substack Out of France.

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On February 14, 2025, President Donald Trump established the National Energy Dominance Council, a cornerstone of his “all of the above” energy strategy. What followed instead was a large-scale shift away from renewables: Trump killed Inflation Reduction Act subsidies, canceled green energy projects, and rescinded remaining clean energy Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act funds. The president has allowed climate politics to obscure the goal of true energy dominance. Now, in the midst of the Iran war—an energy shock of its own making—America is feeling the consequences.

China, on the other hand, is building the energy infrastructure of the future. In 2025 alone, Beijing built nearly nine times more energy capacity than the United States; this includes: ~10x more solar power, ~15x more wind power, ~21x more coal/natural gas, and infinitely more nuclear since the United States built none. If the race for chips is a national security issue, so is the race for energy, and the United States lacks a strategy.

While Beijing is still heavily reliant on oil, it is pursuing the “all of the above” policy that America has failed to realize. In doing so, it is building an energy fortress and reducing its reliance on maritime oil and gas imports. Xi intends to eliminate strategic vulnerabilities and ensure that the CCP will never be vulnerable through its global supply chains.

One of the centerpieces of this drive for energy security is a revolutionary nuclear technology pioneered by the United States at Oak Ridge National Laboratory: Molten Salt Reactors (MSRs). MSRs are a type of nuclear power plant that uses liquid, heated salt instead of water to cool the system. In most designs, the radioactive fuel is dissolved directly into this liquid salt, meaning the coolant and the fuel flow together as one mixture. This approach allows the reactor to operate at much lower, safer pressures than traditional water-cooled reactors while generating electricity more efficiently. America abandoned the program; China has since revived it. China is currently the only nation with an operational thorium-fueled MSR, the TMSR-LF1 project in Gansu province.

While these reactors are not yet ready for full commercialization, the national security implications of thorium MSRs are massive. Thorium is an abundant byproduct of Chinese mining operations; Beijing is largely able to bypass the global uranium market and onshore its supply chain for nuclear power. China has enough thorium to power itself for potentially thousands of years without relying on large inputs of unstable uranium.

MSRs have other benefits; they can be built anywhere. They do not require massive amounts of water for cooling or pressurized water systems. They can be deployed in the Gobi Desert, where TMSR-LF1 sits, or they can be deployed in mountain caves, safe from kinetic strikes in a conflict.

Finally, these reactors are orders of magnitude safer than uranium nuclear reactors. MSRs cannot “melt down” in the traditional sense; in a breach, the salt simply drains into a separate tank and solidifies. This passive safety system prevents MSRs from becoming liabilities in the event of a natural disaster.

China’s massive energy infrastructure build serves many purposes, but Beijing is explicit about its intentions with respect to AI. Beijing has codified a state-level effort called “Eastern Data, Western Computing.” The effort moves the energy and data centers to the western portion of the country, i.e. the deserts, caves, and mountains, while providing services to the eastern coastal cities. In China, the state coordinates the utility and the tech firm as a single national unit.

If China is able to scale modular reactors and data center builds to power AI while America allows partisan politics, permitting issues, and regulatory instability to stymie its energy goals, the U.S. lead in advanced chips may become irrelevant.

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China currently dominates the entire supply chain of solar energy equipment exports and wind energy components. It is now racing to become the primary exporter of nuclear technology. If Beijing is able to commercialize MSRs and Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) first, they may be able to set the standards for the technology and corner the global market for critical energy infrastructure.

The military applications of China’s energy infrastructure are similarly seismic. Miniaturized MSRs can be used to power ships and submarines. These smaller MSRs could quadruple the endurance of nuclear powered vessels while increasing their safety and lowering their maintenance. Additionally, the Chinese are reportedly planning to deploy SMRs in the South China Sea to power the militarized islands they’ve been building there. This would protect them from supply chain disruptions caused by blockades and other sea lane closures in event of a conflict.

Beijing’s energy advantage is structural; centralized leadership allows the CCP to coordinate utilities, technology firms, and capital allocation to achieve its goals. The United States has no equivalent mechanism. America’s energy infrastructure relies on private investment, where capital flows towards stability and financial incentives. The United States is providing neither for green energy.

The United States has made acquiring and learning to produce high end chips a critical national security goal. Yet it is still blind to the next bottleneck: producing enough energy to power them. Securing high-end semiconductors and keeping them out of Beijing’s hands is a critical theater of competition, but it isn’t the only one. A million Blackwell chips are strategically irrelevant if you lack the domestic power capacity to run them.

The United States has for years struggled to build enough energy capacity. Energy companies and AI firms have been mired in regulatory gridlock and multi-year lead times for grid connections. American grids are managed by a patchwork of state-level authorities, often with different rules and regulations. The lack of cohesion makes cross-country transmission lines a minefield where cost-allocation disputes frequently derail energy projects essential to national security.

At the national level, Democrats and Republicans can’t agree on what the country should build. The result is chronic whiplash in incentives and regulatory structures, creating a hostile environment for long-term investment. America must find the political will to build domestic clean energy to reduce its reliance on global oil markets. The Iran war oil and gas shocks should be a wakeup call that this is unsustainable.

To his credit, President Trump signed four executive orders aimed at quadrupling U.S. nuclear capacity to 400 GW by 2050. The Department of Energy (DOE) established a program to have at least three advanced reactors operational by July 4, 2026—an ambitious goal it is unlikely to meet.

The administration has heavily prioritized portable nuclear solutions. In February 2026, the military conducted its first airlift of a 5-megawatt microreactor to Utah as part of a push to deploy localized power for data centers and military bases independent of the civilian grid. Despite these efforts, the current administration does not provide stability, which is a precondition for investments that will take years to pay off.

Energy is the ultimate precursor to all other forms of national strength: energy to power factories, energy to power military equipment, energy to power digital infrastructure, and now energy to power artificial intelligence in all its forms. China has recognized this reality and is meeting the moment; the United States must do the same before the gap becomes unbridgeable.

Shahn Louis is the founder of Anansi Strategic Intelligence LLC, a Washington, D.C.-based geopolitical risk firm. A former senior intelligence analyst with experience across the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community, he specializes in China analysis and East Asian regional dynamics.

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In my last piece, I set out the current challenges to democracy across the globe. It will be difficult to mount a credible response to this united front of despotisms without meaningful help from the U.S. government, but it’s by no means impossible. Despite the Trump administration’s closure of USAID and the dismantling and drastic down-sizing of the democracy-support infrastructure that was created over the last four decades, the principal institutions that comprise this field still exist, along with a far-reaching community, both here and abroad, of pro-democracy practitioners, activists, and advocates working in civil society NGOs, independent media platforms, universities, foundations, and other institutions. This community also has allies in many government ministries, development agencies, and multilateral organizations. It is a resource that can be tapped into and mobilized.

The Prague-based Forum 2000, which was created by Vaclav Havel and Eli Wiesel in 1996, is exploring the possibility of building a new global movement to fill the vacuum created by the U.S. withdrawal from efforts to advance democracy internationally. The organization issued the Prague Appeal for Democratic Renewal in 2017, a statement signed by almost 500 intellectuals and activists declaring that “liberal democracy is under threat, and all who cherish it must come to its defense.” The Appeal was followed by the creation of a worldwide International Coalition for Democratic Renewal (ICDR), which is the nucleus of a potentially much larger coalition of democracy organizations and activists. The non-governmental ICDR is also looking into the possibility of establishing a formal partnership with the inter-governmental Community of Democracies (CoD), a global coalition of states headquartered in Warsaw that is dedicated to promoting and defending democracy worldwide.

The CoD was an initiative of U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Polish Foreign Minister Bronisław Geremek, who took the lead in organizing the CoD’s founding assembly in Warsaw in 2000. Though the CoD was able to create a Democracy Caucus in the UN, and a UN Democracy Fund (UNDEF) that continues to operate, it was never able to fulfill the hope that Albright had placed in it. President Biden bypassed the CoD entirely when he organized his Summit for Democracy, which itself had little impact; and when Senator John McCain ran for president in 2008, he proposed creating a League of Democracies without ever acknowledging that such a league already existed.

The key question today is whether an effort should be made to revive and reform the Community of Democracies in an entirely new political context, in which democratic governments would take their own initiative and not follow the United States, and adding the weight of governmental commitment to a global nongovernmental support coalition for democracy. A regenerated CoD could be one of the possible new coalitions that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney spoke about in his Davos speech earlier this year when he talked of “middle-power” governments forming “different coalitions for different issues” that would have “the capacity to build a new order that embodies our values, like respect for human rights, sustainable development, solidarity, sovereignty, and territorial integrity of states.”

A first step would be for Forum 2000 and the CoD, working in cooperation with Canada and possibly other governments committed to developing a new democracy agenda, to establish an international commission of leading democracy specialists, activists, and practitioners to examine the lessons learned over four decades of aiding democracy, the last 25 years of which coincided with a period of continuous democratic decline. The commission should also fashion a credible and realistic strategy for a new global coalition for democracy.

One critical issue that will need to be addressed is how to engage countries and organizations from the Global South in the leadership of a new coalition. A recent report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace cautions that some of the larger Global South countries like India and South Africa have long considered democracy assistance from Western countries and middle powers a form of “imperialistic” intervention, and that some of the smaller democracies from the Global South, many of which have benefited from democracy assistance over the years, would be more likely to play a positive role in a new coalition. Another source of engagement from the Global South would be the very substantial community of activists who have been at the forefront of struggles for democracy and would have a great stake in the success of a new global coalition.

Another important issue would be how to involve the United States in the new coalition at a time when official U.S. policy and some of the ideologues driving it would not favor such an initiative. It’s very significant that the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) has been able to survive the attempt by the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to destroy it. It was the NED’s founding in 1983 that launched U.S. democracy assistance, and though it received only a relatively small part of total U.S. democracy funding after the government entered the field in the 1990s through USAID and the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL), it was always the flagship U.S. democracy institution and the center of a vast network of democracy activists and intellectuals in the United States and around the world.

Remarkably, its budget has not been cut, and though the administration impounded much of its funding for months during 2025, it was still able to make over 1500 grants totaling $271 million to support groups advancing a comprehensive democracy agenda of countering the ideological influence of authoritarian regimes, supporting freedom of expression and digital activism, combating corruption, fostering democratic governance, and advancing democratic rights and freedoms. The World Movement for Democracy, the NED’s global coalition of democracy activists, was placed on hold during this period of crisis when the focus has been entirely on strengthening the grants program, but the activist networks NED has built over decades are still there and can become part of a new international democracy coalition.

A new coalition could also engage NED’s party, business, and labor institutes that had to close many offices last year after losing USAID and DRL funding, but which still remain vital and globally networked institutions. The International Republican institute (IRI), for example, sent missions to observe the recent elections in Moldova, Cote D’Ivoire, Bangladesh, Ecuador, the Philippines, and Iraq—programs described in NED’s current Annual Report. One of the programs of the National Democratic Institute (NDI) has mobilized a coalition of youth groups in Nigeria to shape constitutional and electoral reforms in the wake of the flawed elections in 2023. The Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) worked with local economists and civil-society groups in Bolivia to block two nontransparent deals that would have given state-owned companies from China and Russia disproportionate control over the country’s strategic lithium industry. And the Solidarity Center helped agricultural, garment, and palm sector unions in Guatemala and Honduras protect their ability to organize and fight for decent wages and working conditions, thereby reducing the economic pressures that fuel outward migration.

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NED’s large bipartisan support base in the Congress is potentially an important political ally in the United States for a new international democracy coalition and offers a useful bridge to the current administration. The IRI board is chaired by Alaska Senator Dan Sullivan, who was preceded in that role by his friend John McCain, one of America’s leading democracy advocates. Lindsey Graham, Joni Ernst, and Tom Cotton are other Republican senators who sit on the IRI board, and Marco Rubio had been a board member before becoming the Trump administration’s Secretary of State and National Security Advisor. He had also been one of NED’s core supporters in the Congress and would likely welcome a new pro-democracy coalition. Not least, Robert C. O’Brien, the last and longest-serving National Security Adviser in the first Trump administration, is also a member of the IRI board. Aiding democracy abroad, of course, also enjoys great support among Democrats, who voted unanimously in favor of NED’s budget.

There are other private U.S. democracy institutions and research centers that could play a leading role in a new international coalition. These groups include Freedom House, which since 1973 has produced the world’s leading survey of political and civil rights; the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which under the leadership of Thomas Carothers has produced influential analytic studies of democracy promotion; and the Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford University, which is home to leading democracy scholars like Larry Diamond, Francis Fukuyama, and Michael McFaul, and also manages the Leadership Network for Change, which brings together almost 2,000 scholars and activists from around the world who are alumni of several practitioner programs based at Stanford. The Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush presidential centers in Atlanta and Dallas, respectively, also have very substantial democracy programs and could be valuable partners of a new coalition.

In addition to mapping out a strategy for building a coalition of democratic states and nongovernmental institutions from both the Global South and the world’s established democracies, a planning commission would also need to identify the principal democracy challenges that would need to be addressed. The first is how to support the struggle for freedom against the world’s dictatorships. These regimes not only repress their own populations, but seek to aid illiberal leaders and parties elsewhere and also to divide and weaken established democracies and fragile developing countries through disinformation campaigns and other tactics. Supporting dissident and opposition forces in repressive dictatorships, and countering the autocracies’ malign interventions in other countries around the world, will need to be a priority for a new pro-democracy coalition.

A second priority will be aiding democratic groups in a wide range of hybrid or semi-authoritarian countries and backsliding democracies where a protracted battle is underway between liberal and illiberal forces. The former use whatever tools they have to defend rights and keep the political space as open as possible, from protest and even flawed electoral processes to international pressure and support. The latter systematically constrict freedom of expression, human rights, the rule of law, and fair electoral competition behind a front of captured or compromised democratic institutions. Effective political, technical, financial, and moral support to democrats will have to be adapted to the specific circumstances of each battle and responsive to the needs of the local actors. What is essential is that the activists should know that they are not alone.

The world has changed drastically in the nearly fifty years since President Reagan delivered his Westminster Address, above all in the third area of priority, which is what Reagan called “the competition of ideas and values.” The ideological battle is much different today than it was during the Cold War, when the U.S.-Soviet rivalry dominated global political debate, but it does exist, and fighting it effectively is of critical importance.

The speech delivered last December by Jørgen Watne Frydnes at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony honoring María Corina Machado was a model of how to fight this battle today. “Democracy is more than a system of government,” he said. “It is also the basis for lasting peace [and] the most effective system we have to prevent violence and conflict.” When the history of our time is written, Frydnes said, it won’t be the names of the autocrats that will stand out, but those of fighters like Andrei Sakharov, Nelson Mandela, and Maria Corina Machando “who stood tall in the face of danger” and whose resistance “can change the world.”

As powerful as the speech was in defending democracy against its authoritarian opponents and their apologists, it actually presented only part of the argument that needs to be made in favor of democracy. As Maya Tudor notes in the Journal of Democracy, scholarship shows that in addition to promoting peace, democracy also delivers better health and education and greater prosperity. It’s associated with longer life expectancy and lower rates of infant and child death. It provides more years of schooling across regions and time periods and more rapid and less variable levels of economic growth. Tudor didn’t mention the economic comparison between the two Koreas, one democratic and the other totalitarian, but it’s telling that the per-capita GDP in South Korea, which was smaller than the GDP in North Korea until the mid-1970s, now exceeds it by more than 55 times.

These are among the functional advantages of democracy, and there are others. There’s also the principle of freedom, which Reagan called “the inalienable and universal rights of all human beings.” Speaking at Independence Hall in 1861, Abraham Lincoln said that he “never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence [...] which gave liberty, not alone to the people of this country but, I hope, to the world, for all future time.” It is the principle of freedom and democracy that is being challenged today and needs to be defended.

Following President Trump’s first phone call in his second term with Russian President Vladimir Putin, a glowing report appeared in Russia Today describing the new U.S. policy toward Russia as being “more pragmatic, stripped of the pretense of universal values.” But for Americans, supporting freedom and democracy is not a pretense. It is part of our identity as a country. An opinion survey conducted last year by the Ronald Reagan Institute found that continued funding of programs that aid democracy abroad is a policy that “resonates” with over 70% of the American public, not only because such programs are seen to combat extremism and mitigate threats to the United States, but because they also strengthen freedom, protect religious liberty, and aid dissidents in authoritarian countries.

A turnaround of the current U.S. policy is inevitable. In the meantime, building an international freedom coalition will keep the groups active in this work connected and moving forward, and it will make it possible for the United States to hit the ground running when the time comes to reengage. Whether it will be possible during this interim period to reverse the democracy recession is less clear. But establishing that as a goal will kindle a new spirit of hope—and that’s no small thing.

Carl Gershman retired in 2021 after 37 years as the founding president of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), where he oversaw the NED’s grants programs in Russia, China and some 100 other countries.

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The last half century has seen the greatest reversal in the prospects for democracy in the world since the modern experiment in democracy was initiated 250 years ago by the American Revolution.

During the last quarter of the twentieth century, democracy expanded more than ever before, with the number of democracies in the world more than doubling from under 30 percent of all countries to over 60 percent. Samuel P. Huntington famously called this the “Third Wave of Democratization,” succeeding two earlier waves triggered by the American Revolution and the Second World War. Huntington saw five drivers of the third wave—a legitimacy crisis in many authoritarian countries; rapid economic development that raised education levels and the size of the middle class; the liberalization of Catholic doctrine following the Second Vatican Council, which made the Church a pivotal defender of democratic rights throughout most of Latin America, as well as in Poland, the Philippines, and other Catholic-majority countries; a greater role by external actors in promoting democracy, above all the United States and the then-European Community; and the contagious effect of democratic breakthroughs that Huntington called “snowballing.”

Huntington’s wave theory of democratization included the understanding that the consolidation of a democratic system after a period of dictatorship is a difficult process, and that some of the newly democratic countries might revert to autocratic rule in what he called a likely “reverse wave.” He noted that each of the preceding democratic waves had been followed by such a reversal, the first in the 1920s and 30s with the rise of fascist and communist totalitarianism, and the second from the late 1950s to mid-1970s when many newly independent or democratic nations fell to military or executive coups.

Although he couldn’t discern the nature and scope of another democratic reversal, he saw many possible reasons it could happen, among them governance and economic failures, a process of “reverse snowballing” if a number of new democracies shifted back to dictatorship, the weakening of democracy in many countries if a major nondemocratic state greatly increased its power (he mentioned China in this context), and the rise of various forms of authoritarianism in response to changing political and social conditions, from militant nationalism to religious fundamentalism to virulent populism.

A third reverse wave did, in fact, begin at the start of this century, spurred by the 9/11 attack on the United States and the growing threat of terrorism that led many governments to take security measures curtailing individual liberties. Other developments that fueled the crisis and steady decline of democracy included the backlash against the U.S. intervention in Iraq; the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004 that led the Putin government in Russia—followed by many other governments—to pass laws tightening controls on NGOs and international democracy funding; the global financial crisis in 2008 that shook the confidence of U.S. and other Western leaders; the geopolitical resurgence of authoritarianism led by Russia and China; the backsliding of many new democracies; and the rise of illiberal democracy and populism in many established democracies, including the United States. Freedom House has charted 20 consecutive years of declining political and civil liberties in the world as a result of these developments, and the Swedish democracy-monitoring group V-Dem says that this reversal has “wiped out” all the advances in global levels of democracy that were made over the last 35 years.

This third reverse wave is especially worrying for three reasons. First, it’s more protracted than the earlier reverse waves, with V-Dem noting that the current “wave of autocratization has been going on for at least 25 years and shows no signs of cresting.” It has also raised doubts for the first time about the durability of long-established liberal democracies in the West, including the United States, where illiberal populism has made significant gains. Finally, while the United States has been the leader of efforts to defend and advance democracy globally since President Ronald Reagan gave his Westminster Address to the British Parliament in 1982—in which he called for the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)—it has now abandoned democracy promotion and is dismantling, or trying to dismantle, all the soft-power institutions that have been the bedrock of American assistance to people abroad striving to build democratic societies. It is therefore reasonable to ask if the fight to advance democracy in the world is doomed, or whether there’s a way for this effort to continue in the absence of support from the U.S. government.

The fight is certainly more difficult than it’s ever been since the end of the Cold War, and there has already been a pronounced democratic regression, as we have seen. But it’s crucial to stress that the battle for democracy has by no means ended, even if the U.S. government no longer supports it.

During the past year, for example, Gen Z youth-led protests erupted against corruption, economic distress, and ineffective government in Nepal, Peru, and Madagascar where the governments fell, as well as in Indonesia, Morocco, Kenya, and the Philippines. The protests followed upon earlier youth-led uprisings that toppled corrupt and abusive governments in Sri Lanka in 2022 and Bangladesh in 2024. Different issues sparked the outrage that led to these uprisings—a social media ban in Nepal, intense anger in Indonesia when MPs were given a housing allowance ten times the minimum wage, crime and corruption in Peru, poverty and police brutality in Kenya, water and electricity failures in Madagascar, and the embezzlement of $17.6 billion in the Philippines that was designated for flood relief projects. In Morocco crowds took to the streets chanting “No World Cup, health comes first,” having been galvanized by the deaths of eight women in an abysmal maternity ward in the city of Agadir at a time when the government was spending over $5 billion in preparation to co-host the World Cup in 2030.

Already, these movements have strengthened citizens’ rights and government accountability. The Atlantic Council has reported that because of such citizen pressure, six of the seven countries where these protests occurred score well above their respective regional averages in an index that measures the protection of civil and political rights. Erica Chenoweth has argued that the Gen Z protests, which are mostly leaderless and decentralized, could be an antidote to global democratic backsliding if they develop the capacity to channel their momentum and influence into formal institutional politics.

A different arena of contestation pits Russia, Iran, and China—the world’s three leading autocracies—against three smaller countries whose existence they threaten: respectively, Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. Jaroslav Kuisz and Karolina Wigura have written that the preservation of the sovereignty of each of these smaller countries is “a matter of global significance.” If that sovereignty collapses or is significantly eroded in any of these three countries, they note, it would have profound implications, not just for international law, alliance credibility, and what is left of the post-1945 liberal international order, but for the security of Western Europe, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific—and therefore for the United States as well.

For obvious reasons, democracy is not the paramount issue for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan—sovereignty is. Still, it is important to note the extraordinary political impact that the wars being fought by Israel and Ukraine have already had. Israel did not retaliate against the October 7 attack by Hamas and go to war against Hezbollah and Iran for the purpose of creating conditions for political change in neighboring countries. But a by-product of the fighting, Robert Lerman has argued, has been the creation of “the space necessary for the transformation of the region.” Its severe weakening of both Hezbollah and Iran contributed significantly to the fall of the murderous Assad regime in Syria following a devastating civil war in which 580,000 people were killed. The long process of recovery in Syria has now begun under a new government that has been able to unlock over $28 billion of investment and international reconstruction aid, in addition to encouraging the return of millions of refugees, beginning the difficult process of building a stable and ethnically integrated country, and becoming part of a new coalition to stabilize the region.

In Lebanon, Israel’s degradation of Hezbollah’s leadership and military capability ended a political deadlock that made possible the election of a new government committed to restoring state authority, disarming Hezbollah (which retains significant influence), and making reforms needed to attract aid and investment to rebuild the country. Not least, the dramatic blows that Israel delivered against Iran starting in October 2024 weakened the Islamic Republic’s military capability and political legitimacy, setting the stage for the current joint attack by Israel and the United States. While the outcome still remains uncertain, Saudi pressure on Trump to stay the course against the Islamic Republic could lead to the epochal fall of an odious regime that murdered tens of thousands of protesters in January and poses a grave threat to regional stability.

Putin’s rule in Russia has also become more precarious as a result of his disastrous aggression in Ukraine. Stephen Kotkin has argued that the survival of authoritarian regimes is always uncertain because they suffer from a “debilitating incapacity” stemming from overreach and corruption. Putin has emphatically demonstrated that incapacity. The so-called special military operation that was supposed to have conquered Ukraine in weeks if not days has now entered its fifth year due to the entirely unanticipated Ukrainian resistance. As documented in a new report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, “Russia is paying an extraordinary price for minimal gains” in Ukraine, and popular support for the war has significantly declined. Russia’s economy is suffering from unsustainable war spending, major labor shortages, growing inflation, and a shrinking sovereign wealth fund that has been cut by more than half to cover budget deficits and war costs. Alexandra Prokopenko writes in The Economist that “Russia’s economy has entered the death zone.” It’s also extraordinary that 325,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in the four years of war, a number that exceeds by nearly 22 times the losses suffered by the Soviet Union in its decade of war in Afghanistan. As Putin well knows, it was Moscow’s debilitating failure in Afghanistan that precipitated the collapse of the Soviet Union, which he called “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the last century. The consequences of Russia’s even more costly failure in Ukraine will inevitably affect the stability and legitimacy of Putin’s regime.

The Xi regime in China has not yet acted on its threat to attack Taiwan, but it, too, has grave vulnerabilities. Its core weakness is economic stagnation, which constitutes a serious threat to the stability of the regime. This danger was foreseen by the late Communist Party general secretary Hu Yaobang, who was removed from power in 1987 for warning that unless the country’s economic modernization was accompanied by reform and democracy, it would lead to political convulsions. Ironically, it was the outpouring of public mourning for Hu following his death in 1989 that morphed into the freedom protests that erupted in Beijing and 400 other cities across China. Those protests were crushed, but the aspiration in China for a more open society endures, along with the regime’s resistance to reform and opening.

Conditions in China today are far more volatile than they appear, and another political convulsion like Tiananmen Square is not unthinkable. The current economic slowdown has been accompanied by a surge of strikes by workers protesting against unpaid wages, excessive and uncompensated overtime, and poor working conditions. The underground house church movement has also surged to over 100 million Christian believers who are resisting the communist dictatorship’s interference in their worship. In addition, political resistance erupted in 2022 against the draconian zero-COVID lockdown in the form of the White Paper Protests, the most significant revolt since Tiananmen Square. The uprising occurred just a month after a dissident named Peng Lifa, later called the “Bridge Man,” hung banners from a busy overpass in Beijing with slogans reading “We don’t want lockdowns, we want freedom,” “We don’t want lies, we want dignity,” and “We don’t want to be slaves, we want to be citizens.” He was immediately arrested, but his demonstration set off solidarity rallies in 31 Chinese cities and at over 350 universities around the world, and the subsequent White Paper Protests broke out in over 50 cities across China, forcing the regime to call off its zero-COVID policy.

That wasn’t all. When people trying to break the regime’s tight censorship sent videos of the demonstrations to an overseas Twitter account named “Teacher Li Is Not Your Teacher,” the account’s manager, a Chinese art student in Italy named Li Yeng, posted the videos for the whole world to see, including tech savvy people in China using VPNs. The number of his followers quickly jumped to 1.6 million, and he became what Yaqiu Wang of Freedom House called “the aggregator” of independent and often politically sensitive information, something that is “very scary to the authorities … he has a kind of power that nobody else has had in the past.” According to the organization Human Rights in China, initiatives linked to Li now advance public-interest projects on worker exploitation, youth unemployment, and freedom of expression. It believes that digital activism in China is now capable of “challenging the #CCP’s Panopticon.”

This brief survey of some of the battles that are taking place today to expand rights, fight corrupt and unaccountable governments, and resist the aggression and arbitrary power of the world’s leading autocracies, shows that there are significant opportunities to make democratic gains despite the sustained reverse wave. In addition to promoting such openings, pro-democracy governments and nongovernmental groups need to respond to the increased strategic collaboration of the world’s leading autocracies.

Carl Gershman retired in 2021 after 37 years as the founding president of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), where he oversaw the NED’s grants programs in Russia, China and some 100 other countries.

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The most important fact in Iran right now is not what the regime says about Mojtaba Khamenei’s health; it is what the regime has not revealed. After the February 28 attack that killed Ali Khamenei, the Islamic Republic appointed his second son, Mojtaba, as the third supreme leader on March 8.

However, since the war began, Mojtaba has neither appeared in public nor delivered a televised speech. He has not released even a recorded audio message to the Iranian people. Even his first remarks as supreme leader were read by a television presenter. Although Iranian officials claim that Mojtaba is well and directing the war, many, including President Donald Trump, believe he is injured, and some think he may be in a coma.

That leaves one basic question at the center of Iranian politics today: If Mojtaba is wounded, incapacitated, or even in a coma, who is making the decisions? Who wrote his first message?

The Islamic Republic is not in a normal succession moment. It is in the middle of war, leadership decapitation, and an unprecedented crisis of command. In such a situation, the person with the title does not automatically assume power. Instead, power goes to the people who can communicate, coordinate, survive, and remain hidden. Mojtaba may have been elevated to preserve continuity after his father’s death, but continuity on paper is not the same as control in practice. If the new supreme leader cannot speak to the public, cannot appear before elites, and cannot reassure the system through his physical presence, then his position becomes vulnerable to capture by those operating around him.

Some may say the answer must lie with the visible civilian and semi-civilian leadership, figures such as President Masoud Pezeshkian or Judiciary Chief Gholam-Hossein Mohseni Ejei, who are still alive. After all, these are the men the public see. Pezeshkian and Ejei appeared recently at a Quds Day rally in Tehran, and have been the public faces of the state since Ali Khamenei’s death.

But that visibility is exactly why they are unlikely to be the real wartime decision-makers. If Israel or the United States can locate targets through public appearances, speeches, and open movement, the men standing before cameras are not the safest to manage sensitive military and security decisions.

Public figures have political value: They can signal continuity, calm internal audiences, and provide a formal face for the state. But in wartime Iran, the people likely making the hardest decisions are those who are not visible.

The real center of gravity is probably elsewhere, inside the hidden security apparatus around Mojtaba and, more importantly, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The answer lies in the regime’s structure of power, which Mojtaba helped to build and shape. As the second most important man in his father’s office, the Bayt, he was aware of the underground tunnels, secure networks, and institutions through which the regime exercised power, formally and informally.

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The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, established in 1979 as the clerical regime’s bodyguards, has since the 1990s become the most important organization in the Islamic Republic. Ali Khamenei repeatedly treated the Guard as the central pillar of the regime’s survival. The organization strongly pushed for Mojtaba’s elevation and has tightened its grip over wartime decision-making despite major losses in its command structure. Even if Mojtaba is alive, the structure around him is likely already moving toward direct Guard control.

If that reading is correct, the people who matter most are not the politicians seen in public, but the less-visible security actors who have remained in the shadows since the war began. This includes Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, the parliamentary speaker who has a long Revolutionary Guard background; Ahmad Vahidi, the new Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander; Hossein Nejat, commander of the Guard’s security command; and Majid Khademi, the head of the Guard’s intelligence organization. Not all their roles can be confirmed directly in real time, especially when wartime reporting is incomplete, but the pattern is clear. The men with the guns, secure communications, and underground networks will make decisions in Mojtaba’s name if he cannot.

That would mean the Islamic Republic has moved one step further in its long transformation from clerical authoritarianism to security guardianship. Mojtaba’s succession was a sign that the system no longer cared much about public legitimacy, clerical stature, or even revolutionary symbolism. His possible incapacity would push the same process even further, effectively reducing the supreme leader from a decision-maker to a figurehead. The title would remain clerical, but the rule would become more military- and security-based.

All of this helps to explain why the regime’s behavior has become so rigid and escalatory. A hidden chain of command dominated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is far less likely to compromise, de-escalate, or test a diplomatic opening. The men around Mojtaba are not pragmatists; they are hardliners shaped by intelligence work, internal repression, missile doctrine, and survivalist thinking. They do not see war as a reason for moderation, but as proof that only coercion, ideological discipline, and regional escalation can save the system.

In authoritarian systems, silence is never neutral. Iran’s silence strongly suggests that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ security commanders are already making the most important decisions and Mojtaba’s rise means something darker than dynastic succession: It means the final masking of military and security rule behind a cleric’s name.

Saeid Golkar is a senior nonresident fellow on Iran Policy at the Council and the UC Foundation associate professor in the department of political science at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Previously, he held research and teaching positions at Stanford University and Northwestern University.

This article was originally published by the Middle East Forum.

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The conflict in Iran has been remarkable above all for one thing: almost nobody is willing to claim any agency in it. Not the Gulf states who have been attacked over something none of them did, not the global community reeling from the oil crisis they did not vote for. With the lone exception of Ukraine, who has once again bitten its tongue and sent help when it was needed, most countries are either hoping that the problem will go away, limiting their response to defensive measures only, or thinking that by making Donald Trump clean it up, he will learn a lesson.

On paper, all these actors want the same thing—the Strait of Hormuz open, the oil flowing, and the Iranian regime’s habit of shooting projectiles at unrelated parties brought to an end.

So why don’t they get involved?

For the Gulf states, any involvement with the U.S.– and Israeli-led attack on a fellow Muslim state means problems down the line as well as some loss of face. After all, some of these states are yet to sign an official peace agreement with Israel. At the same time, there are only so many missiles and drones one can afford to shoot down over one’s own oil fields and civilian populations without retaliating.

As for the usual U.S. allies… well, there aren’t really any left. After Trump tried to abscond with Greenland, threatened Canada, and all but sanctioned Europe, to say nothing of the wrecking ball he took to NATO or his curious faith in Putin’s peaceful intentions, the problem is not that nobody wants to deal with the United States. It’s that nobody can afford to deal with the United States—they know they will end up with a political bill for everything, and yet somehow will still be responsible for the failures. Plus, Trump will demand that they thank him for it.

Does Europe have to get involved?

If Europe does not participate in some form or other, and Trump achieves a result he can sell as success (spectacular or reasonable), Europe will be relegated to the table of irrelevances. This would only work well for Europe if their plan is to be irrelevant. Few would dispute that the current POTUS has a propensity for vindictiveness.

Meanwhile, if Trump fails, Europe will never hear the end of it. It will be designated as the party responsible for any and all failures, and as the ally that did not turn up. Europe will pay with higher tariffs, accelerated attempts to break up the EU, and American withdrawal from NATO commitments. And Ukraine will almost certainly be used as a showpiece—despite being the only one who turned up when the call went out for support.

Then again, it is almost certain that Trump will seek revenge even if he succeeds. So, Europe will pay the price whatever the outcome.

What’s more, as the two ballistic missiles fired at the island of Diego Garcia show, Iranian missiles have the potential to reach much further than the immediate vicinity in the Middle East. Some Gulf states were quietly minding their own business, and they were still attacked by Iran. Targeting Europe might be an easy decision for Iran to make. Europe might not have the luxury of waiting this one out.

Finally, although Europe is not at war at the moment, it is actively planning for such an eventuality. According to most estimates provided by European intelligence services, Russia could start a major war in Europe within just five years.

Considering this, it might be useful for Europe to weaken the adversary by weakening its allies. Recently, Russia lost Syria and Assad, Venezuela and Maduro. The loss of Iran and its mullahs might not just reduce its capabilities, but also lower Russia’s standing in the world.

Two approaches to the Middle East

But if Europe and its allies want to shape events according to their own needs, they would still have to overcome the problem of an unreliable Washington—including future administrations should the issue remain relevant for some time. We cannot really assume that the next administration will be substantially different—after all, roughly half of the U.S. population voted for the current one, and they haven’t gone anywhere.

The United States is not the only party with a dog in this fight. The Gulf states have one, too. Even if the Strait of Hormuz is unblocked while the Iranian regime stays, then they, their economies, and their infrastructure will continue to be sitting ducks whenever Iran wants to exercise its newly discovered leverage over the region. Being the only irrational actor in an otherwise sane neighbourhood can offer remarkable benefits, as shown by Russia—you get to keep what does not belong to you while everyone else hopes that you will not want even more of what does not belong to you.

Besides, the Gulf states are the only ones for whom Trump has a healthy dose of respect (we could add Russia, but that respect is decidedly unhealthy). If Europe offered its support directly to the affected Middle Eastern states, as opposed to the United States and Israel, it would tip or at least stabilize the balance of power, and it might just keep Trump in check. Furthermore, that would legitimize European efforts while raising questions about U.S. actions.

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On top of that, Europe has a direct line to the only country that has real experience dealing with the kind of threat the Gulf states face—Ukraine. And while Trump might want to cut off his nose to spite his face, people in the Middle East are far shrewder. They might realize that Ukraine is not just capable of helping them protect themselves, but also of clearing enemy positions without putting boots on the ground should there be a need for it—albeit for a price.

Something for everyone

While all actors have slightly different aims, at least a version of them can be achieved by arranging their involvement in a slightly different configuration than usual—by assisting the Gulf states.

The United States and Israel would get the assistance they need without having to admit they asked for it. Trump’s daily pronouncements contradict each other by design—which means he can accept help without ever having formally requested it.

Europe would both demonstrate agency and have a very good defence against the supporters of Iran who control part of the political narrative. Countries whose governments question Israel’s right to exist would not be allied with Israel—they would be allied with the Gulf states. So, most of the voters should be, if not happy, then at least not outraged.

And the Middle East would benefit the most from this setup if it helped to solve the crisis.

Potentially.

Ines Burrell is a geopolitical analyst and political risk consultant based in the UK. Born in the Baltics, with a degree in International Relations from the University of Exeter, she writes and gives live commentary on European security and Russia.

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This article is part of an ongoing project by American Purpose at Persuasion on “The ‘Deep State’ and Its Discontents.” The series aims to analyze the modern administrative state and critique the political right’s radical attempts to dismantle it.

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As New York Times reporter Michael S. Schmidt wrote last fall, “We are now seeing how a truly unshackled Trump uses his power.” Outsiders have been asking: Are there any guardrails in the political system to rein in his use of power?

Back in 2019, Trump said, “I have Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” That’s not quite what the Constitution in general—or Article II on presidential power in particular—says. But it is what Trump believes, and it certainly is the way he has acted, from sending troops into American cities to starting a war in the Middle East without talking with anyone but the Israelis.

After more than a year of Trump 2.0, we can begin to see the patterns of power and the effectiveness of the guardrails. The courts are beginning to define “that’s too far” lines, but they’ve been slow and late to the game. On the other hand, Congress has been AWOL. And, in addition, the Trump administration has been working hard to shackle one of Congress’s most powerful oversight arms, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO).

Trump himself doesn’t mention the “unitary executive” approach to presidential power (the idea that the president has sole power over the executive branch of government) that lies at the core of his “I have the right to do” pronouncement. But he and his top officials have certainly embraced it. He believes that Article II of the Constitution gives him the power to decide what happens to anything within the reach of the executive branch, with authority unchecked by the Article III branch, the courts, or the Article I branch, the Congress.

The courts have begun to prove him wrong. But challenges from the legislative branch have been tepid, at best. And that’s why the most recent assault on the GAO is so concerning.

Tired of Winning... in the Courts?

In his 2026 State of the Union Address, the president said, “We’re winning so much that we really don’t know what to do about it.” But the courts increasingly have had other ideas.

A judge threw out the administration’s attempt to subpoena Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell’s records for remodeling the Fed’s headquarters. Other judges tossed the indictments for former FBI Director James B. Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. A grand jury refused to indict six Democratic members of Congress, whom the Justice Department wanted to prosecute for sedition. In 1985, New York Judge Sol Wachtler said, “Any good prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.” Except, it seems, in the especially weak case against the lawmakers. Then, in February, the U.S. Supreme Court tossed out Trump’s tariffs in a 6-3 decision that found Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, both nominated by Trump himself, joining the majority.

Trump has had an increasingly poor Article III batting average, although several big cases are yet to be decided. Challenges are pending before the Court: on state mail-in ballot deadlines, limits on the ability of marijuana users to own guns, an effort to roll back birthright citizenship, and the debate over the president’s power to dismiss appointees to independent regulatory agencies. A couple of decisions could pull the balance of powers significantly back from the executive branch.

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For now, though, the Trump administration has had several bad months in the courts, but aside from the decision on tariffs, the courts have been more of a slow roller-coaster brake in some areas than an anti-lock braking system keeping the president’s power in check. It has taken litigants a long time for the ponderous process to produce results, and dealing with fundamental questions like the balance of powers, one case at a time, is a very hard way to restrain Trump’s ambitions.

No Worries about Losing... in Congress

Article I of the Constitution, on the other hand, has barely proved more than a speed bump. The Democrats have managed to stage a couple of partial government shutdowns, but these have become so routine that they’ve lost much of their leverage. On presidential appointments, Trump has largely had his own way. Last summer’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act rolled the administration’s Year One agenda into, well, one big, beautiful bill.

Otherwise, Congress increasingly is where legislation goes to die. After the least productive Congress in recent memory at the end of the Biden administration, Congress is now on course to beat its own dismal record. That means Congress isn’t a place for originating or debating big, new ideas. Nor is it a place for killing them, since the administration—especially Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought—has found endless creative ways of running government without the inconvenience of passing policies through Congress.

A blizzard of executive orders has completely transformed the civil service system, including making it far easier to fire just about anyone. The OMB has gained policy control over independent regulatory commissions like the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission by requiring the agencies to send all their proposed rules through the OMB for approval before they can be issued. The OMB has gotten budgetary control over these agencies, and the president gave the Department of Justice the power to “provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch.” Trump has blown past all the modern records for the number of executive orders issued by year—more than twice as many on average as any president since World War II, and more than five times as many as any president after Reagan.

Trump’s actions have directly challenged the role of Congress in defining the scope of the agencies and the authority that their heads can exercise. Traditional constitutional practice has held that Congress sets the scope of decisions for the agencies. The Trump administration’s position has been that, once Congress passes a law creating an executive branch agency, a program managed within the executive branch, or designating money to fund them, it is the president’s power to decide just what the agency can or must do. This is a dramatic weakening of the balance of powers, but from Capitol Hill there has been nary a squeak.

Perhaps most importantly, the administration has asserted that it has the power to decide not to spend money that Congress has appropriated. (It’s worth remembering that appropriations are laws that Congress passes authorizing agencies to spend money on particular programs—and that, as legislation, the president signs them before they can take effect, so appropriations already carry the president’s assent.)

From the OMB’s point of view, it’s fine for Congress to approve the spending, and even for the president to sign off on the spending… but the administration has no responsibility to spend the money it agreed to. There were squeaks on Capitol Hill about these impoundments, including for the Head Start program, infrastructure projects, grants at the National Institutes of Health, incentives for electric vehicles, and FEMA funds for emergency shelters and food services.

Congress’s watchdog for these projects is the GAO, and the agency issued a series of reports calling out the White House in 2025. In a finding last September, the GAO wrote dryly, “Unless Congress has enacted a law providing otherwise, executive branch officials must take care to ensure that they prudently obligate appropriations during their period of availability.” The “take care” phrase is no accident; a foundation for the administration’s claims about the executive branch is Article II of the Constitution, which says the president “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” The GAO was setting up a debate over just what “take care” means.

The report went on to note that the “GAO’s role is [...] to protect congressional prerogatives,” and that FEMA’s decision not to spend the money, at the behest of the OMB, violated the Impoundment Control Act, put in place after the Nixon administration to prevent executive branch decisions that undermine the decisions of Congress.

From “Green Eyeshades” to Management Leverage

The GAO dates from 1921, when Congress decided it needed an agency to keep a better eye on the growth of government spending and debt following World War I. For the next 45 years, the GAO (then known as the General Accounting Office) checked government spending to make sure it was legal. It became known as the government’s “green eyeshade” agency, because its legions of accountants reviewed expenditures to make sure they were within the law.

After World War II, it became clear that the sheer volume of government spending could not possibly be overseen from any single legislative branch agency. The GAO began a broader monitoring not only of spending but also of programs. Then, as part of the post-Watergate reforms, Congress in 1974 transformed the budgetary process, including a crackdown on the impoundments that Nixon had been exercising, and broadened the GAO’s role as well. The agency brought in experts in areas ranging from public health to transportation and in processes from public policy to information technology.

Its policy role continued to broaden. In 2004, Congress changed the GAO’s name from the General Accounting Office to the Government Accountability Office. The GAO’s role shifted to focusing more on ensuring government accountability by exploring how government’s management could improve.

The GAO might be known mainly by insiders, but its work has become famous for its reports on the background of major news stories and segments on magazine shows like 60 Minutes. Last year, for example, the show featured analysis by the GAO on the amount of fraud in federal spending every year.

Since 1990, it has produced a “high-risk list” of programs especially prone to waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement. In 2025, the GAO reported nearly $759 billion in savings thanks to its work. For anyone interested in understanding how government really works—and how to get a handle on fraud—its detailed reports are must-reads.

Kneecapping the GAO

The GAO’s work has been impressive, but its work during the Trump administration on fraud and highly risky issues has produced only pushback. When it came to the Head Start money, the Department of Health and Human Services replied, “HHS did not impound Head Start funds and disputes the conclusion of the GAO report.” The department dragged its heels in responding to the shutdown of NIH grants. One of the curiosities of Elon Musk’s DOGE work, in fact, was its failure to focus on the GAO’s ready-made list of targets that would offer substantial reductions in fraud and increases in real savings.

Congress might have the power of the purse, but agency heads won’t spend the money if the OMB locks the purse back up. Congress might want to cut fraud, but it won’t succeed by ignoring the biggest targets like Medicare and Medicaid.

What is the recourse? Groups seeking to challenge the administration’s actions can file suit in court and use the GAO’s findings as evidence. Some have done so, but no group has succeeded in winning a case against impoundment. The GAO itself could sue, but its former head, Comptroller General Gene Dodaro, called such a suit a “last resort.”

With the end of Dodaro’s term in December 2025, the “last resort” became “no resort,” and the administration has been in no hurry to select a new comptroller general. A 1980 law provides that a commission of ten members of Congress recommends at least three potential new comptrollers to the president, who then gets to nominate one of them, subject to the Senate’s confirmation, for a fifteen-year term. That has put the GAO into a holding pattern, led by acting comptroller general Orice Williams Brown. Without a permanent head—and with the kind of new comptroller general the administration wants very much open to debate—the GAO has been very careful not to pick a fight with the administration.

The OMB’s Vought has taken advantage of the vacuum to push back even harder against the GAO in particular and Congress in general. In early March, he sent a memo to all the heads of executive departments and agencies asserting that previous government policies “have overly deferred to the direction and priorities of external agencies,” especially the GAO. Its views, he said, “are not binding on the Executive Branch.”

The GAO points to the law that says “a decision of the Comptroller General [...] is conclusive.” The OMB reads the law narrowly; it agrees that the GAO’s opinions are indeed binding, but only narrowly, on matters of accounting and the settlement of accounts. Otherwise, the OMB argues, neither Congress nor any of its agencies have the constitutional power to dictate how agencies interpret the law. (It’s a peculiar point of law, however, that the president gets to name the head of a major congressional agency.) As a result, the OMB contends, the GAO’s opinions are only advisory. And consistent with recent court decisions, the OMB concludes, the proper forum for deciding what the law means is the courts, not a legislative agency.

Unbalancing the Powers

For Constitutional experts—and fans of American history—the “unitary executive” debate is a truly interesting one. When we step past the broad debate to the particular tactics of how the Trump administration is using it to reshape American constitutional government—if we put clothes on it and take it outside in bright sunlight—the implications are stark.

The courts have put the brakes on Trumpism, but they have had only limited effect, in part because the courts decide one narrow case at a time, and they take a long time doing it, especially when a case goes all the way to the Supreme Court. That has given the administration a lot of flexibility to move fast on many fronts. There’s simply no way that the administration’s opponents can keep up or win enough legal challenges fast enough to significantly slow down the march of executive power.

The Constitution gives Congress much greater potential, but that requires Congress to use the power the Founders gave it in Article I, and there is no sign that the Republican majority has any intention of allowing that to happen. Congress has created a powerful policy arm in the GAO, which has proven it can move at something close to the speed of Trump. Led by Vought, however, the Trump administration has decided it can just ignore the GAO’s decisions and reports and reinforce that stand by refusing to appoint a new comptroller general. The GAO’s decisions can provide the fuel for court challenges, but that requires someone to bring a case, and groups interested in challenging the administration have often been outflanked and outgunned.

There will be endless debates for generations to come about how Trump has transformed America and its government. But the exclamation point on the shifting balance of powers will likely come from Vought’s moves to squash the role of the GAO and, in the process, defang one of the most important checks on the president’s power.

Donald F. Kettl is Professor Emeritus and Former Dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy. He is the author, with William D. Eggers, of Bridgebuilders: How Government Can Transcend Boundaries to Solve Big Problems.

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In Washington, Iran policy has become a party reflex. A decision by one administration is rejected by another administration—even when the facts on the ground point in the same direction. The instinct is understandable. The enduring trauma of the 2003 invasion of Iraq looms large in every debate. But Iran is not a talking point, and this moment is not about party loyalty. It is about whether the United States is willing to confront a regime that has treated violence, aggression, and hostage politics as its core identity for nearly five decades.

Since coming to power in 1979, the Islamic Republic has defined itself as anti-American and anti-Zionist, building an ideology of exporting the Islamic revolution beyond rhetoric. Tehran learned it could undermine the international liberal order without engaging in a direct conventional war by investing in proxy networks, missiles, and drones—using them as tools for negotiation and escalation. At home, Iran developed a secretive nuclear program and used repression as a means of governance.

Iran’s history demonstrates why the weakening of the regime’s coercive center matters so much in this moment. With Ayatollah Ali Khamenei dead, and his son Mojtaba Khamenei elevated to the role of supreme leader, the Islamic Republic enters a moment that could quickly become a legitimacy crisis. A regime built on coercion is most vulnerable when its chain of command is disrupted, rival power centers stop coordinating, and the aura of inevitability that kept elites loyal begins to fade.

Today, there are humanitarian, security, and economic cases for pursuing regime change in Iran. The Islamic Republic has become increasingly repressive since it overthrew the Pahlavi monarchy in 1979. Its use of repression is not accidental or sporadic; it is systematic and entrenched. For years, Iranians have endured cycles of mass arrests, torture, executions, and deadly crackdowns on protests. Between January 8 and 9, the regime killed thousands of its own citizens for taking to the streets and demanding change. This is not an authoritarian state that sometimes oversteps, but a modern security autocracy that uses fear as a core tool of governance. And a regime that normalizes mass violence should not be treated as a legitimate political authority.

For years, Iranians have endured cycles of mass arrests, torture, executions, and deadly crackdowns on protests.

Throughout the years, Iran has remained a persistent challenge to U.S. national security—regardless of which party occupied the White House. Washington’s inability to manage the country is not a partisan assessment, but a reflection of the Islamic Republic’s strategic posture and methods of building power. For decades, the Islamic Republic has established a regional model that depends on ongoing tension and crises. It does not aim for a final resolution; instead, it seeks leverage. This leverage is derived from multiple fronts, proxies, and calibrated escalation, which keeps the region on the brink of wider conflict while forcing the United States and its allies into a constant cycle of crisis response.

The regime has worked to weaken U.S. influence in the Middle East not only with rhetoric but through policy. It has armed and funded proxy groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon, supported attacks on U.S. military bases, and used missiles and drones in an attempt to expel the United States from the region. It has engaged in hostage-taking and coercive diplomacy to extract concessions and deter external pressure, and undermined U.S. credibility among allies by casting the United States as an unreliable security partner. All of this has been done to eliminate U.S. influence in the Middle East. The regime’s intent has never been to simply resist U.S. policies, but to reshape the regional order—constraining U.S. power, weakening U.S. partners, and making Iran’s influence the prevailing reality.

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Since the United States and Israel launched their coordinated attack on Iran, the Islamic Republic has attacked more than seven Arab countries in the region, including Oman and Qatar—longstanding allies of Iran’s ayatollahs that regularly tried to shield Iran from the United States’ rage. While a different Iranian regime would not solve every regional problem, it would remove the central engine of organized destabilization. A post-Islamic Republic government led in the interests of the Iranian people would focus on solving domestic problems instead of pursuing revolutionary expansion, and the region could move toward agreements that are unrealistic under the current leadership. Iran could join a new security architecture—rather than sabotage it—by normalizing relations with its neighbors, including Israel, and joining frameworks like the Abraham Accords.

Economically, Iran is a major country with significant market potential across sectors, including energy, infrastructure, aviation, technology, and consumer goods. Under the current regime, these opportunities have remained largely unrealized due to sanctions, mismanagement, corruption, and political unpredictability. Even after the 2015 nuclear deal, American companies were kept out of the country. A different Iran could reintegrate into global markets, which would open new trade and investment opportunities, reduce volatility in the Persian Gulf, and promote more predictable shipping with less disruption from proxy warfare.

While the humanitarian, security, and economic cases for military intervention have been frequently raised, there is a fourth reason that many analysts have understated: the geopolitical chain reaction. The Islamic Republic is part of an informal axis of authoritarian cooperation. Tehran’s networks connect to Moscow’s revisionism, Beijing’s anti-liberal worldview, Pyongyang’s proliferation model, and a broader coalition of nations that learn from each other’s coercive tactics. As such, a successful democratic transition in Iran would not only impact coordination between authoritarian regimes but also potentially strengthen global democracy by challenging the narrative that authoritarian repression is a viable long-term strategy.

Of course, none of this means the United States should act recklessly. Regime change should not and cannot be a slogan. The objectives of military action must be clear and limited, the risk of escalation must be planned for, and civilian harm must be minimized. Most importantly, any path toward regime change must prioritize Iranian agency. The United States can help in this process by creating conditions that make the regime’s coercive system less effective while expanding the opposition’s space for organization.

The fundamental question today is not whether Iran is a threat but whether American decision-makers will remain constrained by partisan perspectives in the face of a regime that is harming its citizens, destabilizing its neighbors, and challenging international norms. Washington’s Iran policy should be grounded in human rights, liberalism, democracy, regional stability, national security, and economic opportunity—and treated as both a strategic and a moral issue.

Saeid Golkar is a senior nonresident fellow on Iran Policy at the Council and the UC Foundation associate professor in the department of political science at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Previously, he held research and teaching positions at Stanford University and Northwestern University.

This article was originally published by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

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In 2003, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi agreed to dismantle his nascent nuclear weapons program in exchange for the West’s promises of sanctions relief and integration into the international community. Less than a decade later, in 2011, he found himself hiding in a drainage pipe with his golden pistol after NATO forces bombed his convoy. Gaddafi was dragged out of that tunnel by NATO-backed Libyan rebels, beaten, and executed for the world to see.

In Pyongyang, Kim Jong Un was taking notes. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, the West treated Kim Jong Un’s father, Kim Jong Il, as a comic book villain: a cognac sipping madman who reportedly claimed to have invented the hamburger and shot 38 under par on his first ever round of golf. The madman narrative about the safari suit-wearing cult leader was comfortable for the West: it allowed them to dismiss him as a relic of the past, a man stuck in time with a starving population destined to depose him.

That comfort is now gone when it comes to North Korea, and with it comes an indictment of the entire rules-based international order. The Kim dynasty has been vindicated—not morally, not ethically, but strategically. As the global security architecture of the post-Cold War era fractures under the weight of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, China’s expansionist ambitions, and America’s reckless and illegal international military interventions, the Kims’ absolute refusal to denuclearize looks more and more sensible by the day.

Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein attempted to follow the nuclear approach, but his nascent program was systematically dismantled by foreign strikes and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). He was left exposed when America invaded in 2003 and was killed in 2006. Gaddafi surrendered his weapons in 2003 and was killed in 2011. In 1994, Kyiv signed the Budapest Memorandum, surrendering the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal in exchange for security assurances from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia. In 2014, it lost Crimea when Russia illegally annexed the region. Since 2022, it has been fighting a war for its existence—one that continues today without any signs of ending.

Iran, too, agreed to stall its nuclear program in 2015, then three years later the United States pulled out from the agreement, later bombed Iran’s nuclear sites, and is now brazenly conducting a regime change war. Nicolás Maduro never had nuclear weapons; he is likely wondering, from his jail cell in New York, how things would have gone if he did. Perhaps his successors in Caracas are thinking about whether they could get them now. Cuba knows they must be next—what will they do to ensure their own sovereignty?

This is not to oversimplify things; North Korea is the outlier here. Most nuclear aspirants never make it past the window of vulnerability—the period where nuclear capabilities are advanced enough to provoke intervention, but insufficient as a credible deterrent. The two main pathways to a nuclear weapon—thousands of centrifuges spinning at supersonic speeds or spent nuclear fuel reprocessing—provide little concealment. The large industrial footprint is nearly impossible to hide from modern thermal and satellite surveillance. And once the bomb is complete, aspirants face a second immense technical challenge: miniaturizing it and mastering the delivery vehicle.

Great powers are strongly incentivized to preemptively strike these nascent programs politically, economically, and kinetically. The great tragedy of the 21st century is that Pyongyang’s success has shown that, while the cost of trying to acquire a nuclear weapon is high, the cost of failure, as seen in Baghdad, Tripoli, and Kyiv, is existential.

Kim Jong Un is living proof, untouched despite a raft of sanctions, a starving population, and increased U.S.-Japan-South Korea unity against his country’s aggression.

The Kim dynasty understands something that eluded the architects of the liberal rules-based order and their autocratic enemies alike: In a world of laws and norms, there is no better security guarantee than a nuclear weapon. Conventional strength is a “might makes right” game, but nuclear weapons are the great equalizer. Pyongyang understood this before the rest of the world, and paid an unbearable cost to prove it.

The Kim dynasty, short on cash and with few options to acquire more, chose to pay in human lives. Hundreds of thousands have died in the kwan-li-so death camps, where guards rape and murder prisoners for sport. Millions more have suffered from stunted growth due to malnutrition and starvation. The Kims used the North Korean people as fodder to maintain their own cannon, hollowing out the core of their country to reinforce the walls. They turned 26 million people into a sacrificial offering, and the 21st century rewarded them for it.

The tragedy is not that the Kims are monsters; those are everywhere. The tragedy is that the international order, ostensibly designed to make nuclear weapons unnecessary, failed so spectacularly that the monsters ended up being right. The Ukraines of the world that trusted the system now find themselves begging for aid to defend themselves, while the Russians can take territory without ever fearing a B2 bomber over Moscow.

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If the lesson of the Kim dynasty is that the only guaranteed security is a nuclear weapon, then every rational state can and should acquire one, provided they can survive the inevitable attempts by the status quo powers to crush them before they reach criticality. Already, a majority of South Koreans believe their country should obtain a nuclear weapon, citing fears of North Korean aggression and doubts about America’s nuclear umbrella. Saudi Arabia has promised to pursue nuclear weapons if their rival Iran gets them.

For the autocrats that can’t afford to get nuclear weapons, Kim has a solution for that, too: starve the people to feed the bomb. This is nothing short of a catastrophic outcome, yet it is the future the world built through our failures.

In the 1990s, Kim Jong Il was a laughingstock to the world. In 2026, his son looks right at home. Not because he has turned over a new leaf, but because the world has. The leaders of the United States, China, and Russia all subscribe to his worldview; Europe is too divided to speak with one voice.

This is a cause for mourning and deep reflection. Not because the Kims deserve sympathy; they deserve none. But because a world in which the Kims are vindicated is a world in which things like sovereignty, diplomacy, and the idea that nations can resolve disputes without the threat of annihilation are revealed as fictions.

The Kim family bet against civilization. And as of today, civilization is losing.

Shahn Louis is the founder of Anansi Strategic Intelligence LLC, a Washington, D.C.-based geopolitical risk firm. A former senior intelligence analyst with experience across the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community, he specializes in China analysis and East Asian regional dynamics.

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Among his critics, reactions to Donald Trump’s second presidency seem to fall into two broad categories. The first contextualizes the current moment within America’s political history by studying previous episodes of political turmoil and conflict. The second tries to understand it through the experiences of other countries that have seen their leaders entrench themselves and embrace an expansive understanding of their power.

Anecdotally, the former mindset seems more common among Americans, including many leading intellectuals. The United States, after all, is a big country, and takes considerable and justified pride in its exceptionalism. For people born and brought up firmly within American political culture, it is only natural to try to answer questions about America’s present primarily by using its past as a framework.

Conversely, one can expect transplants to the United States and outside observers—even sympathetic ones—to be less inclined to see America as an island unto itself, whose success and endurance are a natural default. Rather, it might come to them naturally to juxtapose the American experience against that of other countries.

A representative of the first camp, Yuval Levin, my colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, has argued that by the standards of modern presidencies, Trump’s has been less transformational than the bombastic headlines and delirious media cycles suggest. Yes, the southern border has been closed, and immigration enforcement has escalated dramatically. Extraordinary foreign policy moves have been made in global theaters from Gaza through Iran to Venezuela. Yet, Levin argues, “Trump has signed fewer pieces of legislation than any president in the modern era.” His executive orders are almost as ephemeral as his Truth Social posts, waiting to be rolled back by the next Democratic administration.

Furthermore, U.S. history itself is complicated, “a union of liberal and illiberal forces,” as the George Mason University economist and polymath Tyler Cowen puts it. Trump can be seen as a continuation of this mixed, complicated set of political traditions. Even the undisputed heroes of the American story—think Lincoln or FDR—were abusers of civil rights and put the U.S. constitutional system under stress. “Certainly, we are returning to some bad and illiberal behaviors of the past,” Cowen argues, “and it is right to be concerned. Yet this seems to be more a feature of the ebb and flow of American politics than a decisive turn away from liberalism.”

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A focus on American history alone, clear-eyed as it may be, risks breeding a certain complacency. America may seem to contain multitudes, but its political history is only a narrow subsection of the human experience. The United States has seen a lot throughout its existence and its political institutions have survived and adapted. Today, despite ill-advised and irresponsible policies, the nation remains a powerhouse of economic vibrancy and innovation unparalleled in human history. It faces few immediate external threats. Thanks to its massive internal market, it can expect to thrive even if the rest of the world struggles economically.

Despite these undeniable strengths, however, the United States is just a nation composed of fallible, flawed human beings. It may be a big, successful, and powerful one, but it is not immune to challenges commonly observed in other democracies—especially those that share some of the specific characteristics of the American system of government.

That is precisely where a comparative perspective can be helpful, even if it leads to a set of conclusions that are considerably more “hair on fire” than what one may be able to conclude by judging America’s turbulent present solely by the standards of its (frequently turbulent) past.

One simple observation, visible on indices of democratic quality and the rule of law, is that parliamentary democracies, monarchies, and republics tend to perform better than presidential and semi-presidential systems. In fact, parliamentary systems tend to be more stable and are, on average, associated with better economic outcomes.

While the United States may have dodged the pattern for a long time, it is not unthinkable that it will eventually run out of luck. Just a few months before Trump’s descent down the golden escalator, Matt Yglesias suggested that the U.S. system might fail just like its various clones, most prominently in Latin America.

He pointed to the gridlock that emerges when the executive and legislative branches are controlled by different factions. Because of the separation of powers, there is no formal way of negotiating conflicts between them. In a situation of extreme polarization, what ensues are irresolvable stand-offs and constitutional crises. This scenario, frequent during the Obama years, may materialize again following a possible Democratic takeover of Congress this fall. What is even worse, however, is that the United States has also witnessed a gradual erosion of the legislative branch, opening the door to executive aggrandizement—a path that canonically leads to democratic decline.

The fact that Trump’s rule by executive decree might be reversed by his successor is no consolation. There is a term for a form of government in which incumbents serially abuse executive power yet can be occasionally voted out and replaced by another faction: competitive authoritarianism. While different from outright dictatorship, it still tends to yield poor outcomes—and it represents very much a departure from the constitutional architecture envisaged by the Founding Fathers.

Likewise, even if Trump has neither a long-term agenda nor a path toward an effective consolidation of power, he and his ilk are inflicting enormous damage on the United States. Judging by the experience of other countries, including those that have fought off authoritarianism, the path to recovery will likely be long and difficult.

If Viktor Orbán is voted out of power this spring—a big if—it would be foolish to expect Hungary to immediately switch to being a well-functioning liberal democracy. It is more likely that his successor will discover a plethora of ticking policy bombs, cadres of Fidesz loyalists across the public administration, and oligarchs banking on Orbán’s return. Even if the next government does address such challenges effectively, the tools it has will likely be illiberal (purging public administration of Fidesz loyalists, cracking down on Orbán-friendly business interests, etc.). As a result, the now-broken norms of political behavior are more likely to perpetuate in their brokenness instead of being glued together in a moment of national kumbaya.

It is hard to see how it can be otherwise in the case of the United States. Many norms have been broken of late—norms surrounding corruption and conflicts of interest, integrity of federal criminal law, and the peaceful transfer of power. Consider, for example, Trump’s immediate reaction to the Supreme Court’s recent tariffs ruling, calling the majority justices “unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution.”

Inflammatory rhetoric aside, for ten months the federal government was collecting revenue—amounting to $200 billion—from tariffs that were illegal. While the Court is to be applauded for pushing back against the administration, Trump has now simply invoked a different statute—using a similarly novel and expansive interpretation—in order to continue with his favorite tariff policy, still without authorization from Congress.

Perhaps his effort to collect tariff revenue without Congress will eventually be thwarted by litigation. Yet even then, the United States will have reached a point where it appears perfectly acceptable for an administration to do illegal things, knowingly, without much in terms of political or other repercussions. Barring a fundamental shift in public opinion and political culture, how does one come back?

Well, perhaps a major cultural shift is the only thing that can help. After all, comparative work suggests that incumbent entrenchment works best when backed by public opinion—which is why “populist discourse increases support for executive aggrandizement by framing the president as the genuine representative of the people and by portraying institutional opposition as corrupt.”

While the base of Trump’s support appears fanatically solid, it is limited and declining. Nor has his effort gone far enough to derail and divide the opposition or render their work inherently fruitless. There is still a possibility of flushing the Trump phenomenon out of the system and restoring a commitment to broad political liberalism, as envisaged by those who founded the nation 250 years ago. However, the fact that the United States has muddled through with some success in the past is not a guarantee that it will do so again. And, if anything, the awareness of the possibility of failure, informed by the experience of less fortunate nations around the world, might help generate the sense of urgency that the current moment demands.

Dalibor Rohac is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a columnist at American Purpose.

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The assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Iranian regime’s longstanding supreme leader, marks the most consequential rupture in the Islamic Republic since 1989. For nearly four decades, Khamenei stood at the center of Iran’s political order. His power was not only constitutional but also ideological and, most importantly, coercive. He presided over the gradual transformation of the Islamic Republic from a revolutionary theocracy into what can be described as a theocratic security state, in which clerical legitimacy and security power became deeply intertwined. With his death, the system has lost its anchor. With the massive missile attacks against the regime, the question now is not only who will eventually replace him, but who will govern right now in this moment of uncertainty.

Formally, the answer appears straightforward. Under Article 111 of the Iranian constitution, a three-member interim council assumes the duties of the Supreme Leader until the Assembly of Experts selects a successor. That council now consists of President Masoud Pezeshkian, Judiciary Chief Gholam-Hossein Mohseni Ejei, and Ayatollah Alireza Arafi. Technically, this body exercises the Supreme Leader’s powers, supervising the armed forces, overseeing key appointments, and maintaining continuity in state authority.

On paper, the composition of this council reflects institutional balance. Pezeshkian represents the executive branch, Ejei embodies the judiciary and the security-oriented legal apparatus, and Arafi provides clerical legitimacy and ensures that the transition remains anchored in the religious establishment. The arrangement projects constitutional order and political stability; it signals that the Islamic Republic remains in power despite the tumult, and that it has the necessary mechanisms to manage succession and avoid chaos.

In reality, however, constitutional formality and political power rarely coincide in the Islamic Republic. Over the past three decades, real authority has increasingly shifted toward a security-elite coalition that operates beyond the state’s visible architecture. The institutions that matter most are not only those named in the constitution, but those that control coercion, intelligence, and elite coordination—meaning that the formally-named trio is not the ultimate authority.

Behind the constitutional council stands a more consequential alignment centered around three power-brokers: Gholam-Hossein Mohseni Ejei (the only one of the three to also serve on the official interim council), Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, and Ali Larijani. This is not a legally defined body, but an elite security and political nexus that reflects where decision-making power has accumulated over time.

Ejei is more than the head of the judiciary. He has long been a central figure within Iran’s intelligence and prosecutorial networks, with a career rooted in repression, surveillance, and the management of dissent. His presence guarantees that the security institutions remain unified and that any sign of fragmentation is quickly contained.

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Ghalibaf, as Speaker of Parliament and a former commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), bridges the military and political classes. He represents the bureaucratic and managerial face of the security state. Ghalibaf understands the Revolutionary Guard’s internal logic and maintains relationships across the more conservative factions. In a succession crisis, such networks are more important than formal titles. He is well-positioned to coordinate among parliament, the Guard, and other power centers, preventing institutional paralysis.

Larijani occupies a different but equally significant role. As the former IRGC commander and speaker of parliament, with deep roots in the clerical establishment and extensive experience in national security, he functions as a power broker among elite factions. As the secretary of the most important security body, the Supreme National Security Council, Larijani is adept at navigating the complex terrain between ideology and “pragmatism.” In a system where consensus among elites is essential for survival, his ability to mediate and align interests has become central. With influence lying in networks rather than constitutional power, he does not need a formal seat in the interim council to shape his preferred outcomes.

The distinction between the technical council of Pezeshkian, Ejei, and Arafi and the more substantive alignment of Ghalibaf, Larijani, and Ejei reveals an important feature of the Islamic Republic’s evolution: Over time, the regime has become less dependent on charismatic clerical authority and more reliant on institutionalized coercion and elite coordination. Khamenei’s personal dominance masked this shift, but his death exposes it.

If the regime survives this transition, it is unlikely to move toward liberalization. On the contrary, the logic of succession under pressure tends to favor securitization. In the absence of a leader of Khamenei’s stature, the system will rely more heavily on collective elite management and on the security apparatus to deter both internal dissent and external pressure. The IRGC and its allied institutions will not allow instability to open space for popular mobilization. Repression, surveillance, and centralized coordination are likely to intensify rather than diminish.

The Assembly of Experts will eventually select a new Supreme Leader—yet the identity of that individual may matter less than the structure that surrounds him. The future leader will inherit a state in which real power has already shifted toward a consolidated security elite. He may hold the title of Supreme Leader, but he will operate within a framework shaped by the very figures who managed the transition.

Khamenei’s death so far signals a moment of reconfiguration. But the formal institutions continue to function and the security elite remains cohesive. The key question is whether this coalition can maintain unity under mounting U.S. and Israeli attacks and domestic and international pressure. If it does, Iran will likely emerge from this crisis, not weaker in coercive capacity, but more openly defined by it.

Saeid Golkar is an associate professor of political science at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga, a senior advisor at United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), and a writing fellow at the Middle East Forum.

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Last night, Vice Admiral Fred Kacher was removed as Director of the Joint Staff. The move comes while the United States is actively debating military strikes against Iran—a time when stability and expertise are paramount. For over a year, the American national security apparatus has been systematically decapitated: generals have been fired, intelligence directors have been removed, and top uniformed lawyers have been dismissed.

It all sounds like a story we’ve heard before.

A few weeks ago, Beijing confirmed that Zhang Youxia, the highest-ranking military official in China and a long-time confidant of Xi Jinping, had been purged from the Communist Party. The news sparked the predictable, feverish rash of Western analysis: Is Xi losing his grip? Is the People’s Liberation Army in a death spiral of corruption? And, most urgently, does a decapitated military command make a Taiwan invasion more or less likely?

The first two were the correct questions to ask of an adversary. But it is past time America had the courage to ask them of itself.

For the last year, mirror-image purges have unfolded within the United States and Chinese military and intelligence communities. While the justifications differ—Beijing cites “discipline and corruption,” while Washington cites “loyalty and bureaucracy”—the structural result is identical. Of course, the stakes for those affected remain vastly different: in the United States, a purge usually means an early retirement with full pension, healthcare, and a potential board seat; in China, it often entails trumped-up charges, the seizure of all personal assets, and a disappearance into the black hole of the prison system.

Yet while the individual outcomes vary, the institutional damage is the same. Donald Trump’s purge of the American national security apparatus has been as far-reaching and strategically destructive as Xi Jinping’s. While Xi’s actions are hollowing out the PLA’s readiness, the United States is delusional if it thinks its own house remains in order.

A score check, courtesy of the tracking done by Jordan Schneider and various other outlets, reveals the scale of these purges. Both superpowers have now removed their highest-ranking military leaders. In China, it’s Zhang Youxia; in the United States, it was the unceremonious firing of General CQ Brown, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, barely weeks into the new administration.

The decapitation has not stopped at the top. It has extended to the service chiefs and the theater commanders who actually manage the mechanics of war. Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the Chief of Naval Operations, was relieved of duty in a move that stunned the Pentagon. In a chillingly similar move, Xi Jinping purged PLA Rocket Force Commander Li Yuchao, the man responsible for China’s nuclear and conventional missile deterrent.

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Further down the organization chart, the scale becomes even more alarming. In April, the U.S. Director of the National Security Agency (NSA) was ousted after a whisper campaign from political activists. In August, the Trump administration purged the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) following a disagreement over the agency’s assessments of the strikes on Iran. Even the legal guardrails have been dismantled: last February, all three service JAGs, the top uniformed lawyers responsible for ensuring military orders comply with the Constitution and international law, were replaced in a single afternoon. Meanwhile, Xi has purged two consecutive defense ministers and five out of the seven members of the Central Military Commission.

Both leaders are effectively telling their respective forces the same thing: professional expertise is a liability, and dissent is a firing offense.

The cognitive dissonance in the current discourse is staggering. If the expert consensus is correct that these purges are catastrophic for Chinese decision-making and have decimated the PLA’s readiness, what should be made of the American mirror image?

The public is told that the PLA is a “paper tiger” because its commanders are chosen for their fealty to the Party rather than their tactical brilliance. Yet, somehow, the expectation remains that the U.S. military will remain the world’s most lethal fighting force even as seasoned combatant commanders, like Admiral Alvin Holsey at United States Southern Command, are forced into early retirement for daring to question the legality of specific kinetic operations. American intellectuals and military leaders mock the yes men in Xi’s inner circle, while their own Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, explicitly clears the decks of any officer who might offer a roadblock to the commander-in-chief’s impulses.

The dissonance is irreconcilable. A military that prioritizes political purity over professional competence is a military that has already begun to lose the next war. While Trump was able to conduct a targeted raid against Nicolás Maduro, the United States lost seven Reaper drones, two fighter jets, and burned through one billion dollars to achieve a stalemate against the Houthis in Yemen.

In China, the purge of Zhang Youxia points to a president who no longer trusts his own generals to tell him the truth about Taiwan’s defenses. In the United States, the purge of the intelligence community points to a president who views objective reality as a personal insult. Both leaders have created a feedback loop where the only information reaching the top is the information they want to hear.

The result is a dangerous new reality. Trump’s purges have made him more erratic, more willing to use force as a political performance, and less considerate of long-term strategic outcomes. When a leader removes principled skeptics from the Situation Room, America doesn’t get a more efficient military; it gets a more reckless one.

The United States spent decades arguing that the strength of the American system was its apolitical military and its robust, independent intelligence. This was framed as the primary advantage over the CCP. That advantage is currently being set on fire in the name of domestic political vendettas.

If the PLA is indeed a mess because of Xi’s paranoia, America should not be celebrating. It should be terrified. When two nuclear-armed powers simultaneously purge their best thinkers and replace them with loyalist ideologues, the world is in for a rough ride. The United States is no longer just competing with China for regional dominance; it is competing to see which country can destroy its own military institutional stability first.

The score is currently tied. And in this game, nobody wins.

Shahn Louis is the founder of Anansi Strategic Intelligence LLC, a Washington, D.C.-based geopolitical risk firm. A former senior intelligence analyst with experience across the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community, he specializes in China analysis and East Asian regional dynamics.

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January 2026 will be remembered as the month the Islamic Republic tried to break Iranian society’s political spine through mass violence and fear. More than one million people poured onto the streets across the country, demanding the regime’s downfall. The state responded with overwhelming force. Rights groups and international reporting describe killings on a scale that reached into the thousands during the peak days of the crackdown, alongside mass injuries and arrests. The regime treated public assembly as an existential threat and acted as if it were at war with its own population.

Among those targeted were university students. Student networks say at least 130 students were killed in connection with the January uprising. The youth were not on the margins of Iran’s street politics. They were again at its center.

On campuses, repression was not limited to bullets, arrests, and prison vans. It also moved through paperwork. Authorities forced universities into silence by closing dormitories, shifting exams online, and dispersing students across cities and provinces. The goal was not only to punish but also to interrupt the protest movement’s most persistent engine: organized youth living, studying, and mobilizing in dense social spaces.

Faced with unrest, the state returned to a familiar tactic: mass arrests of students and emptying campuses. Multiple universities in different cities announced online classes, online final exams, or dorm evacuations. Some outlets inside Iran framed these steps as routine “management” during an exceptional period. But the operational purpose was dispersal. Reporting in higher education media also described campus shutdowns and dorm evacuations as protests spread.

This is a distinct phase of repression. After killing, injuring, and arresting students, the next move is repression by memo and circular. It does not replace the rifle but aims to reduce reliance on it by hindering concentration and coordination. The regime understands that the university is not simply a physical space, but a social infrastructure built on networks, trust, and shared political language. A dorm isn’t just a building; it’s a vibrant community where information circulates rapidly, enabling collective action. Closing dormitories alters this pattern of dense living.

Yet January also revealed the limits of this strategy. Students continued to organize even as campuses were hollowed out. Pro-opposition outlets reported joint student calls for coordinated action in mid-February, including a nationwide strike on February 17 and 18 to commemorate those killed and to express solidarity with families seeking justice. Although the specifics of these calls may not be externally verifiable, their importance lies in what they indicate: connectivity remains intact, and student politics continue to exist.

The most revealing feature is the form of struggle that is emerging. The university is being pushed online, yet student contention is adapting to an online and semi-clandestine environment. The regime wants remote exams and empty dorms to produce isolation. Students are using the same conditions to build safer channels: encrypted groups, decentralized coordination, and dispersed actions that are harder to decapitate. When open protest becomes too costly, political life does not disappear. It shifts into low-visibility spaces. In authoritarian systems, that shift is often a bridge to the next wave, not the end of the previous one.

To understand why this keeps happening, January 2026 must be placed in the context of Iran’s post-1979 history.

The Islamic Republic emerged from a revolution in which universities had already become centers of opposition. From the earliest days of the new state, the regime treated campuses as both a resource and a danger. Universities produce skilled labor and future administrators, but they also concentrate young people with time, grievances, and the capacity to organize. The state wants modern education without political autonomy. This is the classic authoritarian dilemma: modernizing the country while preventing the university from becoming an opposition headquarters.

The Islamic Republic tried to manage this dilemma through repeated cycles of control. It shut down universities during what it called the “Cultural Revolution,” purged faculty, redesigned curricula, and built loyalist structures inside campuses to police student life. Over time, it combined direct repression with quieter methods: disciplinary committees, ideological screening, control over appointments, and selective rewards for loyalty. It also dramatically expanded higher education, producing millions of students while seeking to neutralize the political consequences through surveillance, co-optation, and ideological management.

These measures produced periods of containment, but they never solved the problems. Student politics reemerged across decades, from the late 1990s through the 2009 Green Movement and later protest cycles. By 2026, the tone hardened further. For many students, the horizon is no longer reform within the system but dismantling the regime itself. Students openly called for regime change, including support for restoring the Pahlavi monarchy. Whether one agrees with that direction or not, it signals a deeper point: A growing segment of the young no longer sees the regime as negotiable. They see it as irredeemable.

This demand is not romantic, nor is it simply nostalgic. It has social roots. Iran is a young society living under heavy political repression amid collapsing life prospects. Degrees do not translate into stable futures for many graduates. Mobility is blocked by corruption, patronage, and an economy shaped by security institutions and politically connected networks. For millions, education has become a promise that ends in unemployment, exclusion, and humiliation. When the university stops functioning as a social and political ladder, it becomes a staging ground. Students become politically dangerous not because they are inherently heroic, but because they are trapped.

That is why the move to close campuses and shift exams online is so telling. It reveals fear of student concentration. It reflects awareness that universities remain among the few places where collective identity can still form despite censorship. The state can shut gates, empty dorms, and move exams to screens. But it cannot remove the university from society, because the university is embedded in it.

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For nearly five decades, the Islamic Republic has tried to domesticate the university through purges, ideological policing, and now digital dispersal. January 2026 shows that it still cannot. A regime can force quiet for a season, arrest thousands, and kill on a massive scale, but it cannot permanently solve the contradiction it created: mass higher education inside a political order that offers young people domination without a future.

The conclusion is not that repression is ineffective, but that repression cannot address the underlying conditions that continuously generate dissent. The university is still breathing in Iran because the forces that politicize it are still alive. Since 1979, the regime has treated campuses as a danger to be contained. January 2026 suggests that containment is no longer enough, and that dispersal is the new language of fear. Students, in turn, are learning how to turn dispersal into a new kind of collective life.

Saeid Golkar is an associate professor of political science at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga, a senior advisor at United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), and a writing fellow at the Middle East Forum.

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When wildfires tore through Los Angeles County last year, millions of people reached not for a government alert, but for a nonprofit app called Watch Duty. Emergency managers had it open in their operations centers. Tanker pilots and dozer operators checked it between runs. Families at their kitchen tables watched its maps to judge whether they had hours, minutes, or seconds to leave. Official channels existed, of course, but the information they offered was too old and fragmented to be helpful in the moment of encroaching danger. In practice, one of the most basic public-safety functions in fire country—timely, intelligible information about where the fire is and where it’s headed—is now being performed by a civil-society organization that didn’t exist a few years ago.

If that feels jarring, I get it. Real-time warning in the face of an advancing fire sounds like an obvious thing the government should do: high stakes, large scale, life and death. Yet when the smoke rolls in, the provider people actually trust to get the job done is a volunteer-driven nonprofit that listens to radios, watches public cameras, and pushes out clear, verified, usable information. One could interpret this as a solution born of bureaucratic failure, and in one sense it is. More importantly, though, it’s an object lesson. In a liberal society, even in a moment of crisis, government is not the only arena in which important public challenges can be overcome.

In my own research on post-disaster recovery, this lesson asserted itself repeatedly. Businesses, neighborhood associations, congregations, and ad hoc volunteer networks routinely solve problems that governments struggle to handle: housing people in the days after a disaster, restoring livelihoods, rebuilding not only physical spaces but the texture of neighborhood life. The point is not that government is useless. It is that different forms of social coordination—government, markets, and civil society—have different strengths. When we treat government as the default solver of every problem, we miss opportunities to get important things done better and faster.

That lesson matters, not only for disaster response, but for liberal democracy.

It’s no secret that public trust in our governing institutions is plummeting. In 1964, 77 percent of Americans said they trust the federal government to do the right thing “almost always” or “most of the time.” In September 2025, that number was 17 percent. That trust gap is more than a messaging problem. Many Americans feel that “the system” just isn’t working for them. Even amid long-run growth, the cost and complexity of the basics—housing, healthcare, education, energy—has made everyday life feel like a rigged obstacle course. Rules intended to make the world cleaner, safer, and fairer have accumulated into compliance thickets where delays and regulatory roadblocks become the default and nobody is clearly accountable for results. And when everyday experience teaches broad swaths of citizens that “the system” can’t deliver, we shouldn’t be surprised that strongman populism becomes the dominant political force.

This line of critique is now firmly established in our public discourse. In housing, Matt Yglesias and the broader YIMBY movement argue that housing crises aren’t inevitable. They are the predictable result of rules that treat population density as a social ill and make homebuilding more complicated, time-consuming, and expensive. In their book Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson widen the lens. Layer enough mandates, reviews, and process checks, and the public interest turns into a recipe for permanent shortage of housing, energy, infrastructure, even basic scientific and commercial innovation. In Recoding America, Jennifer Pahlka shows the same pattern from inside government. Hierarchy, cumbersome procurement processes, and risk-aversion reward cautiousness, punish delivery, and freeze government in a perpetual state of technological backwardness. In Why Nothing Works, Marc Dunkelman describes the political end-state as a “vetocracy,” where everyone has a say, no one owns the outcome, and the easiest move is “no.”

Out of this discourse, a rough consensus has emerged around both the diagnosis and the needed course correction. Our governing systems, built to prevent mistakes, have also learned to prevent progress. And this creates a vacuum into which strongman and authoritarian politics rushes in. If we want to restore public trust in liberal democratic institutions, we must make them worthy of that trust.

That means at least two things. First, the government must stop getting in its own way, and in ours, when problems need solving—by pruning back needless veto points, modernizing procedures, and clearing the thicket of rules that make it easier to block than to build.

Second, where government does have a proper role, it must have the capacity to do that work well. It must have the talent, information, and institutional agility to deliver critical services in ways that citizens perceive as clear, fair, and humane.

As someone trained in the public choice tradition of political economy, there’s a lot I admire about this turn in our discourse. Public choice scholars have long warned that when government gets in the way of solutions, or fails to provide clear, general, and transparent rules of the game, it will not be trusted for long. The new emphasis on unblocking “yes” in critical areas like housing, healthcare, and clean energy is a welcome shift, as is the insistence that citizens should expect government to perform well the things it promises to do. If citizens are to buy into the liberal democratic project, they need a sense of certainty about what government services they can in fact rely upon.

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That said, what tends to drop out of view in this conversation is a systematic account of which things government should take on as its responsibility, and which are better left principally to markets and civil society. As a classical liberal, I have a general concern about the size of government. But, in this context, my concerns are less about size and more about scope. Of all the important things that need to be done, what should we be asking government to do? If we don’t have a way to properly define the scope of government action, the emerging emphasis on abundance and state capacity risks becoming an agenda that expects too much from government. Worse, it risks devolving into a campaign designed to overpromise and underdeliver. When disappointment returns, as it will, the crisis of confidence will be even deeper, not shallower.

We need a mental framework that helps us sort what we should and shouldn’t be asking government to do. Before we say “there ought to be a public program for this,” this image should flash in our minds:

We should ask four basic questions. Is the project under consideration essential? Is it big? Is it simple? And is government, in the world as it actually is, comparatively capable of taking on the tasks we assign to it?

In what I call the EBSACC filter—Essential, Big, Simple, and Comparatively Capable—it’s worth noting how much work that little word “and” is doing. Unless the answer to all four of these questions is “yes,” we should default away from expecting government to take primary responsibility for its provision and instead look first to the coordinating capacities within markets and civil society.

Is it essential?

Identifying the “essential features of a functioning society” could be the focus of a rich philosophical seminar. But its purpose here is not philosophical; it’s basic housekeeping. It forces us to ask, before anything else, whether a given project is anywhere near the front of the line. One need only consider lavish subsidies for professional sports arenas and bespoke tax breaks crafted for a single corporate headquarters to recognize that this question doesn’t get asked often enough.

Of course, doing so will not sweep away the forces of cronyism from our politics. But nor should we be resigned to those forces. Among the most important roles policy advisors and citizens can play is to remind the government to refrain from doing the unimportant. Every non-essential project the government takes on consumes fiscal and administrative capacity that cannot be used to deliver truly essential public services.

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In addition to calling out obvious boondoggles, the “essential” filter disciplines against the impulse that says, “If it truly matters, surely the government must provide it.” Look around. Food, clothing, shelter, medical services, childcare, eldercare, mentoring, and the mutual support that holds communities together are all, arguably, essential. But most of these essential things, most of the time, are provided privately, through a combination of markets and civil society. That pattern of non-governmental provision is so familiar that, often, we just don’t see it.

None of this means that the government has no role where essentials are concerned. But it does mean that “This is essential,” is not, by itself, an argument for public provision.

Is it big?

Among the projects we consider essential, which are of a scope that individuals, households, and local communities cannot manage on their own? Maintaining a highway system that moves goods and people across a continent, building flood defenses for an entire river basin, coordinating a public-health response to a fast-moving pandemic—these are all obvious candidates. But again, not all projects that are both essential and big require government provision. In fact, most do not. Insurance risk pools, large-scale manufacturing, and transcontinental shipping are just a few of the big things that markets provide.

Here we must acknowledge the critical role that government plays in all this: enforcing a rules-based order that has businesses fulfilling their promises to their clients, employers honoring their commitments to employees, and drivers respecting the rights of their fellow travelers along the highway, and so on. That acknowledgement is itself a lesson for liberal democracy. When we’re narrowing the set of things that the government must do, we should focus on those big and essential things that create the conditions in which people are well positioned to exercise their agency, collaborate, and solve the problems that are within their capacity to solve.

Is it simple?

“Simple” is likely the most counterintuitive filter. Our impulse is to say, “When it comes to our most complex challenges, wouldn’t we want the most powerful institution to take them on?”

Not necessarily.

Development economist William Easterly offers a helpful way of thinking about this. He asks why, given many good intentions and decades of international development aid, the West had failed to end global poverty. Foreign aid, he observed, is like a cow. Cows can do many useful things. They can provide a poor family with milk, butter, cheese, and more cows. But we shouldn’t expect the cow to win the Kentucky Derby. If we ask foreign assistance to put cash in the hands of expectant and new mothers, it can do that. Premature births and infant mortality will fall. But as soon as we ask foreign aid to do something as complex as ending global poverty, we’re asking it to do the wrong thing.

Generalizing Easterly’s point, the more elaborate, the more complex, the more complicated the project, the less likely it will be that government is well-situated to achieve success. We saw this in the Covid-19 pandemic. When the first vaccines were made available, the impulse was to ensure that the rationing scheme was optimally designed to get the vaccine into the arms of those at greatest risk, based on criteria like health history, comorbidities, and socio-economic status. This approach tracked with the best advice coming from the public health community at the time.

But it proved far more complicated in practice, which left valuable vaccines on the shelves unused for weeks at the height of the pandemic. In hindsight, it would have been much more effective to ration according to a single simple criterion, such as age, which could have been easily verified with a driver’s license. A key lesson here is that when asking government to do something, you should ask it to do the simplest possible version of that thing.

None of this is to suggest that complex problems can’t be solved, nor that government has no role in solving them. On the contrary, as the abundance and state capacity discourse suggests, government has a critical role to play in ending wicked problems like homelessness and climate change, by removing compliance barriers that stand in the way of solutions emerging within markets, civil society, and government itself. The removal of such barriers has the doubly beneficial impact of tapping capacity within households, businesses, and communities and freeing up government capacity to take on the pieces of the challenge it is best positioned to take on.

Is government comparatively capable?

In the face of our most complex challenges, fully-formed solutions rarely present themselves from a single source. Pieces of a solution emerge over time, from different, often unexpected quarters. In a pluralistic society, with multiple arenas of social coordination, that’s an advantage. It means that we can break a challenge down into its constituent parts. And when we do, we should only be asking government to supply those elements for which it is comparatively capable.

Disaster settings are instructive on this point. In the wake of catastrophic flooding, for example, the government is well-positioned to pump flood waters out from low-lying areas, clear mountains of debris from roadways, and protect evacuated neighborhoods from would-be looters. These are important but simple tasks that individuals cannot do on their own, and for which government has the resources, equipment, and authority to perform well. When it does those things quickly, it unlocks the capacity of everyone else. Residents can re-enter and begin repairing their homes. Businesses can reopen. Employees can return to work. And voluntary groups can move supplies where they are most needed.

Comparative capability, in other words, is not a veto on government action. It is a design principle. It tells us to look for the critical but simple enabling pieces that the government is best positioned to provide, and to provide them in ways that tap—rather than replace—the agency and capacity of individuals, businesses, and civil society organizations.

Bringing it back to trust

The Watch Duty story is one small example of this principle at work. Wildfire safety in the American West is an essential, big, complicated challenge. Within that challenge, there are crucial tasks that public agencies are, arguably, better positioned to perform: forest management on public lands, funding and training fire crews, maintaining a network of detection cameras on which others rely.

But when it comes to the complicated task of turning raw information into clear, verified, real-time alerts that reflect local conditions, a lean, private non-profit has proven itself to be the more effective provider. Rather than resisting this fact, as they did early on, official firefighting authorities should be welcoming the capacity Watch Duty is freeing up.

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That is the pattern a liberal democracy should want to reproduce. Even if we succeed in making government more technically capable, we will not rebuild trust by asking it to do more. We will rebuild trust by becoming more candid about what work properly belongs to government at all—and by designing institutions that concentrate public effort on the essential, big, simple tasks they can do well, leaving space for solutions to emerge from other domains.

An EBSACC-shaped government would still be busy. It would maintain order, uphold rights, provide core infrastructure, prepare for pandemics and disasters, establish and enforce easy-to-follow rules that keep people safe, and clear the way for solutions—in housing, healthcare, energy, and so on—to be discovered and built. But it would also be recognizable for its restraint, frank about the many essential aspects of a good life that are better provided elsewhere, and focused on doing its own part in ways that empower rather than displace the agency of self-governing citizens.

If we want people to trust liberal democracy again, we must create the conditions by which our governing institutions make fewer promises and keep the promises that they do make, leaving room for the other dimensions of a liberal society to do their work.

Emily Chamlee-Wright is the president and CEO of the Institute for Humane Studies.

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This article is part of an ongoing project by American Purpose at Persuasion on “Abundance in America.” This series aims to analyze the challenges hindering growth and development, as well as how to build a coalition around abundance.

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In the United States, the “abundance agenda” has emerged as a rallying cry for revitalizing economic dynamism: streamlining regulations, accelerating infrastructure, and unleashing innovation to deliver widespread prosperity. This approach recognizes that liberal democracy falters when it fails to provide tangible progress, breeding resentment and populist backlash.

Europe, meanwhile, faces a parallel crisis. Persistent shortages in housing and infrastructure are eroding public trust, fueling the rise of far-right parties. As of early 2026, with economic growth sluggish at around 1% EU-wide and populist momentum showing no signs of abating, an abundance-oriented strategy—one that is centered on pro-growth policies and targeted deregulation—offers a path to reclaiming liberalism’s promise of opportunity for all.

Europe’s shortages are structural failures that exacerbate inequality and alienate voters. Housing affordability has deteriorated sharply over the past decade, with average house prices rising by more than 60% EU-wide since 2010 and rents surging by 30%. In high-demand cities like Berlin, Paris, and Amsterdam, young professionals and lower-income families spend upwards of 40% of their disposable income on housing, far exceeding the EU average of 9% for energy poverty alone.

Building permits—a key indicator of future supply—have plummeted since 2021, declining by around 20% across the EU by 2024, with steeper drops in Germany (43% between 2021 and 2024) and Austria (over 40%). The COVID-19 aftershocks, high financing costs, and regulatory bottlenecks have compounded this, leaving an estimated housing demand gap of 925,000 units in 2025.

This stagnation is also reflected in infrastructure. Europe’s energy transition, while ambitious, has exposed vulnerabilities: grid congestion, delayed transport projects, and underinvestment in utilities have driven up costs and slowed deployment. For instance, per-kilometer rail construction in Germany and Portugal is cheaper than in the United States, but cross-border delays and regulatory complexity persist.

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The European Commission estimates that 82 million households—about a third of the EU’s total—are overburdened by accommodation costs, while competitiveness is further hindered by broader infrastructure gaps in clean energy and transport. These shortages are not evenly distributed; urban “magnet cities,” where demand outpaces supply, bear the brunt, leading to overcrowding and social strain.

This scarcity mindset has become fertile ground for populism. Across Europe, housing and infrastructure frustrations are increasingly linked to right-wing and even far-right gains. Research from the Progressive Politics Research Network shows that dramatic rent increases and affordability crises erode support for center-left parties, pushing voters toward anti-establishment alternatives. In regions where house prices stagnate or fall relative to national averages, lower-income voters turn to populist right-wing parties, which exploit these issues by blaming immigrants for resource competition.

For example, in Germany and the Netherlands, centrist governments faced backlash in the 2025 elections over unmet housing promises, while far-right groups like Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV) gained traction by tying shortages to migration. Studies confirm this pattern: soaring rents correlate with up to 6 percentage point increases in far-right support in affected areas, from Greek islands during the 2015 refugee crisis to urban France today.

The parallels with the United States are striking. There, housing shortages in coastal cities and infrastructure delays have fueled discontent, contributing to populist surges like Trumpism. In both contexts, perceived scarcity breeds zero-sum thinking: “There’s not enough to go around, so outsiders must be the problem.” Europe’s version is more insidious, interwoven with the continent’s migration debates and post-pandemic recovery.

As UN experts warned in 2024, failing to address housing risks amplifying far-right narratives, turning a social crisis into a political one. In Ireland, far-right actors have explicitly linked housing shortages to immigration, creating resonant narratives amid persistent structural issues. This dynamic threatens liberal democracy’s core: when institutions fail to deliver basics like shelter and reliable infrastructure, citizens lose faith, opening doors to authoritarian appeals.

An abundance agenda for Europe must confront these failures head-on, prioritizing pro-growth strategies that reduce barriers to building and innovation. The EU’s first-ever Affordable Housing Plan, unveiled in December 2025, marks a promising start. Structured around four pillars—boosting supply, mobilizing investment, enabling reforms, and supporting the vulnerable—it aims to slash red tape, unlock public funding, and address short-term rental companies like Airbnb, which exacerbate scarcity in tourist hotspots.

The plan accelerates from 2026, proposing revisions to state aid rules for broader housing support and a Pan-European Investment Platform, potentially saving billions in speculative pressures. By earmarking €19.6 billion from the Recovery and Resilience Facility for affordable housing, it signals a shift toward results-oriented governance.

Deregulation, thoughtfully applied, is key. Europe’s “vetocracy”—layers of permitting, environmental reviews, and local vetoes—has stifled progress. Streamlining these without sacrificing standards could accelerate deployment: for housing, it would mean faster approvals for modular construction and repurposing vacant spaces; for infrastructure, simplified EU-wide tenders for green energy grids and transport. Some national examples show promise in this area: Germany’s proposed €500 billion fund for grids, transport, and defense aims to boost state capacity, while Denmark’s model of centralized planning has mitigated some shortages. Pro-growth reforms should balance environmental goals with speed—e.g. earmarking more carbon market revenues for the Social Climate Fund, expected at €65 billion from 2026-2032, to support vulnerable households in transition.

Critics warn of a race to the bottom, but abundance liberalism isn’t neoliberal deregulation; it’s about enabling building while upholding rights. As EU Commissioner Teresa Ribera emphasized in 2026, high standards in green and digital sectors drive competitiveness, not hinder it. By fostering innovation ecosystems—e.g. through the New European Bauhaus for sustainable design—the EU can create jobs in construction and low-carbon tech, countering populist zero-sum frames. This requires €363 million in annual savings from regulatory simplification, as per the 2025 chemicals omnibus, extended to housing and infrastructure.

Comparatively, Europe’s mixed systems—which enable, for example, stronger national planning in Nordic countries than would be possible under U.S.-style localism—offer advantages. Yet without action, stagnation persists: ING forecasts only 1.5% construction growth in 2026, after flatlining in 2025. An abundance approach could flip this and deliver optimism.

Europe’s shortages are not inevitable; they stem from regulatory inertia and underinvestment. By embracing pro-growth deregulation—streamlining permits, mobilizing funds, and prioritizing abundance—liberal democracies can reclaim the narrative from populists. This isn’t just economic policy; it’s a defense of liberalism itself, ensuring it delivers not just rights, but results. As 2026 unfolds, the time for bold reforms is now. Failure risks more than economic lag—it endangers the open society Europe has built.

Jesper Steenstrup Vogelius is a Danish political consultant based in Copenhagen.

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