This article is brought to you by American Purpose, the magazine and community founded by Francis Fukuyama in 2020, which is proudly part of the Persuasion family.

Earlier this month, Amnesty International asked Britain’s charity regulator to review the status of 117 organizations whose views on sex and abortion it dislikes. It received the public thrashing it deserved. But the threatened libel campaign now being bankrolled against it risks converting a victory for counter-speech into a cautionary tale—one in which debates over first principles are decided by ruinously expensive litigation rather than the free battle of ideas.

On July 8, Amnesty published a report with the ominous title: “A growing threat: the anti-rights movement in the UK.” It included a list of organizations “whose aim is to restrict human rights,” and recommended that the Charity Commission review the charitable status of groups that “advocate for the removal of human rights protections, target minority groups, or promote disinformation and harmful practices.”

Who were these organizations so intent on undermining the basic rights of Britons? Islamist terrorists? Neo-Nazis?

No. Amnesty’s purported “anti-rights movement” consisted of 117 groups, many of which oppose abortion, defend the importance of biological sex, or argue that sex-based distinctions should remain legally relevant in contexts such as prisons, sports, medical treatment, and services for victims of sexual violence. It also accused twelve of the listed groups of promoting abusive “conversion practices” to change someone’s sexual identity—practices which Parliament may soon criminalize with up to five years in prison.

Most controversially, those branded “anti-rights” include Beira’s Place, a center for biological women located in Edinburgh providing support for victims of sexual violence. Apparently, Beira’s Place’s position on sex and gender (it excludes trans women) matters more than its work protecting the rights of Scotland’s most vulnerable women.

Amnesty’s report was met with a furious backlash from several of the targeted groups, and from the author J.K. Rowling, who founded and financed Beira’s Place. Under fire from an incredulous public and mounting media scrutiny, Amnesty temporarily removed its report pending an internal review. Amnesty then expressed regret that the report had been uploaded without proper review and referred itself to the Charity Commission as a serious incident. However, Amnesty has not convincingly explained which specific parts of the report it regrets or finds inaccurate.

In many ways, it was a perfect example of how such debates should play out in liberal democracies. Amnesty publishes a report containing some questionable logic, flawed methodology, hyperbolic conclusions, and a stunningly hypocritical recommendation that dozens of lawful groups with whom Amnesty disagrees face the denial or loss of charitable status. The targeted groups answer with criticism and counterspeech that wins vocal public support. Amnesty is forced to retreat, taking shelter behind opaque PR jargon that only further exposes the incoherence of its own conception of human rights.

Yet winning a victory in the court of public opinion did not appease the offended groups, nor J.K. Rowling, who has now offered to fund libel lawsuits against Amnesty. These legal threats were cheered on by a vocal chorus of social media users baying for blood in gleeful anticipation that the cost of litigation might force Amnesty to shut down.

But by threatening to sue Amnesty, the offended groups are snatching defeat from the jaws of victory—and significantly undermining the very principles that allowed them to criticize Amnesty in the first place.

For years, individuals and groups in the gender critical space have—rightly—charged that the views of the most vocal LGBT+ activists and their allies have hardened into orthodoxy, leading to cancellations of people daring to question them in academia, media, and cultural institutions. Hate speech laws in Western democracies have threatened persons espousing views that some may find offensive, but which reflect mainstream understandings of biology and are held by many ordinary people. Accordingly, free speech became a rallying cry for many gender critical activists. On July 26, Rowling herself invoked precisely this principle of reciprocal freedom:

Trans women aren’t women, and if that hurts your feelings, be grateful you live in a society where you are just as free to espouse gender ideology as I am to speak the truth.

But as happens so often in these debates, the opportunity to legally punish an opponent for their opinions was too seductive to stay principled for Rowling and her allies.

Many will insist that there’s a difference between hate speech and libel laws—and that, therefore, the threat of a lawsuit against Amnesty isn’t a violation of free speech principles. But for that distinction to matter, libel must be defined narrowly and enforced within a legal system that resists its weaponization through ruinous costs and protracted proceedings. English libel law falls short on both counts. It is claimant-friendly and extremely costly, and is far less protective of speech than American law. In fact, England has become a favored destination for those wanting to use defamation proceedings to wear critics down with expense and delay.

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More importantly, the question at the heart of the matter—whether a group is “anti-rights”—depends on subjective opinions that should be firmly protected by freedom of expression, no matter how offensive to the group or person.1 Rights language does not eliminate political disagreement. It relocates political disagreement into questions about who holds a right, what that right includes, and how collisions between rights should be resolved.

J.K. Rowling’s position on gender affirming care leaves no doubt that conceptions of rights can clash. In 2024 she posted the following on X:

There are no trans kids. No child is ‘born in the wrong body.’ There are only adults like you, prepared to sacrifice the health of minors to bolster your belief in an ideology that will end up wreaking more harm than lobotomies and false memory syndrome combined.

If any lawsuits financed by Rowling succeed in establishing that Amnesty’s conception of rights is defamatory, it would narrow the very space that shelters her own views. The beautiful and frustrating characteristic of a free society is that no one ever gets the final word, and that the remedy for old orthodoxies—including ones concerning identity and rights—is counter-speech, not new orthodoxies hardened by law.

For this reason, Rowling should hope Amnesty’s opinions are protected, too.

Jacob Mchangama, a contributing writer at Persuasion, is the Executive Director of The Future of Free Speech and the author of Free Speech: A History From Socrates to Social Media.

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In honor of Dorothy Fields’ birthday, we are republishing Francis Fukuyama’s 2021 tribute.

Dorothy Fields, arguably the greatest American songwriter and lyricist of the 20^th century, was born on this day in 1904. While her name may no longer be familiar, the songs that she wrote with composers like Jimmy McHugh and Jerome Kern—tunes like “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love” or “I’m in the Mood for Love”—became the foundation of the Great American Songbook, jazz standards, and would be familiar to anyone who has visited a bar or lounge anywhere in the world over the past 75 years. President Obama’s inaugural address in 2009 included the phrase, “Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America”—words taken directly from “Pick Yourself Up,” the song Fields wrote with Jerome Kern for Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in the 1936 movie Swingtime.

Dorothy Fields was born into a prominent show business family. Her father, Lew Fields, was a Jewish immigrant from a shtetl in Poland who as a teenager started a hugely successful vaudeville comedy act with Joe Weber known as Weber and Fields. He went on to become an actor, writer, and big-time producer of Broadway shows; in addition to Dorothy, two other Fields siblings, Herb and Joe, made substantial careers in show business. Dorothy grew up in the febrile artistic environment of Broadway during the teens and twenties, and then decamped (with much of her family) to Hollywood in the following decade after the Great Depression as the rise of film undermined the Broadway business model. Her childhood friends and mentors included Oscar Hammerstein II, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Lillian Russell, and Bert Lahr, and she would eventually come to know and work with virtually every big Broadway and Hollywood star up until her death in 1974.

Dorothy Fields’ first great collaboration was with songwriter Jimmy McHugh. Her lyrics were typically witty, colloquially American, and romantic rather than sexual:

Gee, I’d like to see you looking swell, baby
Diamond bracelets Woolworth’s doesn’t sell, baby
Till that lucky day you know darn well, baby
I can’t give you anything but love.

I had always thought that this was the perfect Depression-era song, with the boyfriend lamenting the fact that he was broke, but it was actually written in 1927, before the stock market crash. The diction is from an earlier era—no one uses words like “gee” or “swell” any more, and I imagine few people under the age of 40 have ever heard of Woolworth’s. But that’s what it means to write popular music: you are embedded in the popular culture, and in tune with what ordinary people are thinking and feeling. The boyfriend scheming and dreaming of a day when he might be rich expressed an American optimism that runs through many of Fields’ other songs, like “I Feel a Song Coming On,” or “On the Sunny Side of the Street.”

Many of Fields’ best-known songs were the ones she wrote with Jerome Kern for a series of Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movies, like “The Way You Look Tonight” from Swingtime, or “I Won’t Dance” from Roberta.

See the more recent version with Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga:

In my view, Swingtime was the greatest of the Astaire-Rogers collaborations, but I wonder whether it will ever be shown again in a theater, since it contains “Bojangles of Harlem,” a Jerome Kern tribute to the African-American performer Bill Robinson, which Astaire dances in blackface.

In this moment, when immigration and American identity have become such fraught populist issues, we might consider how popular music has contributed to that identity in the 20^th century. Much has been written about how quintessentially American musical forms like the blues, jazz, rock and roll, and hip-hop were largely the creations of African-Americans that were culturally appropriated by white musicians from Elvis Presley to Eric Clapton.

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However, the Great American Songbook—which covered the period from the teens through the 1940s—was indelibly influenced by second-generation children of Jewish immigrants like Dorothy Fields. There were Protestant Midwestern songwriters, of course, like Cole Porter and Hoagy Carmichael (both of whom hailed from Indiana), but the great majority of artists were Jews: George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Oscar Hammerstein II, and on and on. One of the most popular songs of the 1930s was “Bei Mir Bist Du Shein,” a tune taken from a Yiddish production written by Jacob Jacobs and Sholom Secunda. Here it is in a contemporary performance by the Hot Sardines:

These writers and artists began incorporating the African-American experience into the story, as well as the experiences of the many ethnicities that had arrived in the first great immigration wave brought to an end by the 1924 Reed-Johnson Act. Compared to the straight-laced Protestant sensibility that characterized a lot of American popular music in the 19^th century (a sensibility that brought the country Prohibition in 1920), these artists assimilated a more diverse experience regarding sexuality, drinking, drugs, and race, thereby deepening and, in subsequent years, universalizing it.

National identity is built around formal institutions like constitutions, laws, flags, anthems, and the like. But it is also built around shared memories and traditions. Popular music has always been one of the defining features of American life, exported around the world and indelibly linked with Americanness. In this respect, Dorothy Fields was one of the great architects of what it means to be American.

Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University. His latest book is Liberalism and Its Discontents. He is also the author of the “Frankly Fukuyama” column, carried forward from American Purpose, at Persuasion.

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This article is brought to you by American Purpose, the magazine and community founded by Francis Fukuyama in 2020, which is proudly part of the Persuasion family.

“We are a nation of political tears; we are a nation that, with these same tears, creates floods and shatters the dams that stand in the way of Islam.” So declared Iran’s first supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. For Khomeini, crying was never merely shedding tears. In his revolutionary interpretation of Shia Islam, mourning for Shia imams is more than a private emotional act; it is a public form of mobilization to turn a dispersed community into a massive, organized political force.

This is the logic behind the Islamic Republic’s massive funeral for Ali Khamenei, which concludes today. The regime is not only burying a former supreme leader but, more importantly, trying to convert his death into a staged affirmation of authority, legitimacy, and transnational Shia leadership. Through orchestrated processions, black banners, ritual lamentation, foreign delegations, and ceremonies extending beyond Iran into Iraq’s Shia holy cities, the regime seeks to present Khamenei not only as the leader of the Islamic Republic, but as the symbolic head of a wider Shia ummah. That is why the banners all over Iran and Iraq called him not Iran’s supreme leader, but the ummah’s martyr leader “Qaed Shahid Ummat.” Ceremonies are planned across Tehran, Qom, Iraq, and Mashhad, with major logistical mobilization for mourners.

The geographic arrangement here is interesting. Tehran represents the state; the city of Qom represents clerical authority; the Iraqi cities Najaf and Karbala represent the sacred geography of Shia memory; and Mashhad, where Khamenei is to be buried, links the leader to Imam Reza, descendant of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, and to a sacred geography through which the Islamic Republic tries to present state authority as Shia authority. By moving the funeral through these spaces, the regime is trying to inscribe Khamenei into the sacred map of Shiism.

This matters because Shia political identity has long been organized around the memory, mourning, and martyrdom of their imams. The annual lamentation for Imam Hussain, the third Shi’i imam, was the turning point in the formation of Shia Islam, and distinguishes Shia communal life from many Sunni traditions, particularly those orthodox and Salafi currents that view excessive shrine-centered devotion and ritual lamentation with suspicion—sometimes even as religious innovation or shirk. Understanding this distinction, the Islamic Republic has used mourning not only to separate “the faithful” from enemies, but to create a disciplined public that appears emotionally unified and ideologically mobilized.

Khamenei’s funeral is therefore designed to send two messages simultaneously. First, the message to Shia communities in the Middle East is that Khamenei was not only Iran’s ruler but also the defender of the Shia cause from Lebanon to Iraq, from Yemen to the Persian Gulf. But more importantly to foreign governments, the message is that the Islamic Republic remains powerful, mobilized, and socially rooted despite war, sanctions, and succession uncertainty. From the regime’s point of view, this is an opportunity: the mourning and tearful crowd becomes a referendum on the regime’s popularity and legitimacy.

This is especially important because the regime no longer trusts the ballot box as a reliable source of legitimacy. Elections in the Islamic Republic were never free or fair, but since 2005 they have become increasingly engineered, narrowed, and emptied of meaningful competition. Participation in recent elections has declined; fewer than half of eligible voters cast ballots, widening the gap between the state and society. In this context, the funeral procession serves as a substitute for electoral legitimacy, with the regime filling the streets through a combination of ideology, reward, and repression.

This is the street show of authoritarian legitimacy, in which the regime will point to millions of mourners and say: look, the nation is with us. It will present organized crowds as spontaneous love, logistical mobilization as popular devotion, and ritual participation as political consent. It will use the camera, the drone shot, the black-clad procession, and the choreographed lament as proof that the Islamic Republic remains the authentic voice of Iran and the Shia world. It’s an art that the Islamic Republic has mastered.

This “street show” can also be used in negotiations with Washington and can enable Tehran to continue negotiations with the image of a regime strengthened by martyrdom rather than weakened by succession. The regime will use the funeral to counter the narrative that the Islamic Republic is a collapsing regime begging for concessions—and to claim that the Islamic Republic remains popular and strong even after 40 days of bombardment and the death of its leadership.

This is likely to impress some Western audiences, particularly those who often confuse mobilization with legitimacy and mistake crowd presence for genuine consent in authoritarian regimes. They will interpret tears as devotion and religious symbolism as social unity. But inside Iran, many understand how the Islamic Republic manufactures participation through state institutions, public sector networks, mosques, the paramilitary Basij, transportation systems, schools, municipalities, and welfare organizations. To be clear, it doesn’t mean the crowd is meaningless, but it’s not an expression of national free will either.

This is what separates Khamenei’s funeral from Khomeini’s in 1989, when I was just a kid. I vividly remember thousands of Iranians mourning in the streets of Tehran. However chaotic, that funeral emerged from a revolutionary generation that still contained deep reservoirs of genuine belief and love for Khomeini and his ideology. Khomeini was popular; he was the founder of an Islamic revolution, a religious authority, and a charismatic leader. Ayatollah Khamenei, by contrast, died as the leader of a repressive, corrupt regime that left behind nothing but economic decline and social alienation.

This does not mean that all mourning is fake. Khamenei still had real supporters among ideological loyalists, families of the security forces, clerical networks, parts of the older revolutionary generation, and transnational Shia movements that benefited from Iran’s patronage.

But the central political fact is that the regime needs the ceremony to appear larger than its actual constituency. That is why the regime has tried to transform an Iranian loyalist funeral into a transnational Shia one.

But beneath the surface of a country covered in black banners, and chest-beating displays of loyalty, there are millions of youths who are alienated from clerical rule and have repeatedly protested against the ayatollahs. Behind the fabricated image of a popular regime is a regime that increasingly relies on repression and spectacle because it cannot attain genuine consent.

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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Crimea was the opening shot in Russia’s war against Ukraine. The region was snatched at the country’s most vulnerable moment, just after a popular revolt and without a functioning government. Twelve years on, however, it is Ukraine that holds the stronger position—and Kyiv now intends to turn the tables on the Kremlin. Suddenly, Crimea could change the fate of the war.

Unless Russia very quickly finds a response, the only way the Kremlin keeps Crimea is to sue for peace—and even that option is closing.

The Imperial Bug

To see why Crimea can decide the war, we first have to understand two things about it: what it means to Russia, and what it takes to hold the peninsula. Unlike other countries, where national purpose now rests on the prosperity of a people and its cultural and scientific achievements, Russia never moved beyond empire. Its most prolific leaders—Peter I and Catherine II—were named “the Great” for conquering new territory. Sevastopol has been the home of the Black Sea fleet since Empress Catherine’s reign. It is where the Crimean War was fought and where the Soviet Union’s most celebrated siege took place in the Second World War. In 2014, Putin justified the annexation by calling Crimea “sacred land” and invoking Chersonesus, where Vladimir of Kyiv was baptised—a civilisational claim.

However, Crimea was never Russian land. Its indigenous people are the Crimean Tatars, a Turkic people with their own language and culture. After Catherine annexed the peninsula in 1783, Russia set about cleansing them from it; a century and a half later, in May 1944, Stalin deported almost the entire Tatar population to Central Asia and resettled Crimea with Russians and some Ukrainians. The Tatars were allowed back only as the USSR collapsed, and since 2014 they have been persecuted again—their language and culture suppressed, their literature banned under extremism laws, the people themselves jailed on fabricated terrorism charges.

Colonial Myth and the Logistical Reality

After Stalin’s death in 1953, Khrushchev attempted various reforms, including redrawing internal borders. In 1954, Crimea was handed to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. At the time the change was purely administrative—it was all the USSR. When the Union collapsed, that internal border became an international one.

The transfer made logistical sense. Crimea has limited resources of its own. Everything it needs to sustain modern life, water included, was supplied from the mainland—which was Ukraine. Delivering it within one administrative district and budget was simpler than routing it around several.

In every war fought over Crimea across the centuries, no power has held it without also holding the mainland. Without the supply routes, those defending the peninsula from within invariably failed and abandoned it. In the Crimean War, the Russians held Sevastopol for eleven months, then gave up the city once their supply ran out, scuttling their own fleet as they left. In 1944, the Germans lost the peninsula the same way, once the Red Army cut them off and trapped them against the sea. This is why Crimea could not sit within Russia and had to belong to Ukraine.

As a result, Russia built a land corridor to Crimea along the Azov coast. The failed Ukrainian counteroffensive of 2023 was meant to take back that corridor and with it liberate Crimea. When it did not, Ukraine settled in for the long game.

Plans Within Plans

Two strategic decisions explain the situation in Crimea. First, early in the war Ukraine poured a large share of its limited resources into unmanned forces and drone technology. Second, Kyiv pushed weapons decisions down to unit level and gamified combat. Units choose their own weapons by task and performance; a weapon that is not good enough is not picked, which drives development without the kickbacks and cronyism of central procurement. And every kill now earns points to spend on more weapons.

This in turn let Ukraine pursue a long-term plan to destroy Russian front-line and rear logistics.

As early as the end of 2022, Ukraine began a campaign against Russian air defence. Unlike the “genocide against the artillery,” as Russian war bloggers called it, this one was not flashy, and it took a few years to notice. Where the radars and systems destroyed in Crimea—the S-400s, the Pantsirs, the Tors—had once been replaced, by 2026 their numbers had finally shrunk. And because Ukraine could now reach Moscow, what remained was sent to reinforce the defenses around the capital rather than to replace the dwindling cover over Crimea.

As the drone programme and the system behind it matured, Ukraine began striking deep inside Russia, with oil storage and fuel production particular targets. The resulting shortage is spreading slowly across Russia and is acute in the border regions and the occupied parts of Ukraine.

Alongside the long-range strikes, Ukraine has built a fierce mid-range capability reaching 150 to 200 km behind the front—essentially the whole logistics path. Russia’s capability here has not improved. The advantage is considerable: it has become almost impossible to supply the front with anything, fuel above all. Ukraine has meticulously destroyed the rail and road links running through the occupied territories along the Azov coast.

Every land route in and out of Crimea is now inoperable or severely disrupted, leaving the Kerch bridge as the only way to supply it—and the obvious next target.

Ukraine has also struck the thermal plants and the cables carrying electricity to Crimea. Before the annexation, the peninsula drew power from the Ukrainian grid and water through the North Crimean Canal. In 2019, Russia built two thermal plants to replace the grid, but they run on gas piped from Russia—and that supply, too, has now been interrupted by Ukraine. Planned blackouts are already in place in Sevastopol.

Decay and Acceleration

Ukraine’s upper hand rests on several things at once. Even if Russia developed its own mid-range strike capability—difficult, for a centralized and corrupt system that does not reward ingenuity—that would not conjure back the air defence destroyed over Crimea, nor rebuild the bridges and railways leading to it. Although Russia can continue the war for a while, it cannot keep Crimea supplied, nor easily improve its defenses. Quite the opposite: the peak of its defensibility has passed, and from here it will only worsen. On their own, none of these developments would have been catastrophic for the Kremlin. Together, they have created a situation in which too many things are happening at once. Meanwhile, Ukraine is only gaining strength: its defence industry is among the fastest developing in the world, and it has secured EU funding for the next two years.

Without fuel, the Russian military cannot move, cannot run the generators that power its command posts, and cannot keep its drones in the air. The Dnepr Grouping holding the line in Zaporizhzhia and Kherson will run out of supplies and become sitting ducks, exactly as in 2022, when relentless strikes on Russian logistics made the right bank of the Dnipro untenable and forced the retreat from Kherson. Crimea will then become the poster child of the modern blockade.

If Russia cannot find an answer to Ukrainian drone advances (soon to be joined by ballistic missiles) that its air defences are ill-equipped to stop; cannot find alternative supply routes to Crimea and the territories around it; and cannot pause an economic collapse driven by record military spending, falling energy revenue, and shortages of investment and manpower—then it cannot sustain its forces in Crimea and the areas around it. Without supplies, the Russian army must withdraw or be destroyed where it stands.

The Irresistible Force and the Immovable Object

In these circumstances, the only way the Kremlin keeps Crimea is if Kyiv stops attacking it. Under the Biden administration, Ukraine depended heavily on U.S. supplies—and therefore on American goodwill. Donald Trump, having stopped all aid and sold weapons to Ukraine only through the NATO-backed Prioritised Ukraine Requirements List program, under which allies buy U.S. weapons for Ukraine, now has very little leverage. Washington can withhold the air defence missiles, but it would have to own the resulting civilian death toll, and even then, it would not touch Ukraine’s offensive capabilities.

Before the change of administration in Washington, Ukraine insisted on ending the war only when all its territory was liberated. After Trump returned to power, it reluctantly agreed to halt the fighting along the current battle lines. Not many remember that this was a compromise on Ukraine’s part—and one that bore no fruit. The longer Ukraine degrades Russian logistics around Crimea, the less reason it has to offer any compromise at all.

At some stage, Ukraine will change the offer from stopping at the battle lines to letting the remaining troops flee Crimea. If Russia wants to keep Crimea—for however long—it must give up its claim to the rest of Ukraine and stop the war while Ukraine still allows it to. That would be the prudent thing to do. Then again, if Russia acted prudently, it would never have invaded Ukraine in the first place.

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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Not so long ago, the distinction between America’s market-based economic model and its main alternatives—or rivals—looked reasonably clear. Before 1989, there was the sclerotic shortage economy generated by Soviet-style economic planning. More recently, there was Europe’s “cuddly” capitalism, and China’s state-run version of it—all standing in sharp contrast to America’s “cutthroat” variety.

Reasonable people could dispute the relative merits of European and American versions of capitalism, but most would agree that the Chinese model, lacking democratic accountability, suffered from serious flaws—notwithstanding China’s impressive growth record. Those included picking economic winners and losers, the exercise of state and party control over “strategic” firms, the fuzzy line between the national interest and the balance sheets of leading corporations, and a lack of inhibition about deploying nominally private assets in pursuit of government policy.

Those flaws were real, which is why it is so disconcerting to see the rise—largely under the radar—of an American version of state capitalism. Yes, there is the gaudy, scandalous self-dealing of White House envoys such as Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, obscuring the difference between private interests and official government policy. There is Trump’s exercise of arbitrary power in setting tariff rates, or extorting the private sector as a precondition for clearing regulatory and antitrust obstacles set by the federal government.

America’s drift toward state capitalism, however, is deeper and more lasting than just Trump’s idiosyncrasies and corruption. The return of industrial policy into “strategic” sectors was a hallmark of the Biden presidency. And while the amount of norm breaking during Trump’s second term is an aberration by any standard, it would be a mistake to dismiss all of the precedents it has set as flukes to be rolled back by a future Democratic administration.

Consider Trump’s oftentimes confusing policies on semiconductors, mangling long-term strategic consideration in pursuit of short-term revenue objectives. In April 2025, the administration banned the export of Nvidia’s China-bound H20 processor on national-security grounds. By August, it had reversed itself—on the condition that Nvidia and AMD hand Washington 15 percent of their China revenues in exchange for the licenses.

By December, the more powerful H200 processor—roughly six times the H20—was cleared for “approved” Chinese customers, this time with the government taking a 25 percent cut. The same export controls Washington spent a decade building were undone—for an arbitrary fee. A bipartisan bloc in Congress, alarmed that the H200 would hand Chinese AI labs a meaningful lift, scrambled to block the sale—in the end, the deal was blocked by Beijing after finding a domestic alternative.

The effective export tax is ineffective in preventing the chips from falling into the hands of our adversaries—and it may well end up being unconstitutional. Unless courts rule against it forcefully, future presidents will enjoy a new tool of discretionary power over the private sector.

The Intel case brings America even closer to explicitly state capitalist territory. In August 2025, the government took a 9.9 percent stake in the chipmaker—433.3 million shares at $20.47, an $8.9 billion investment—by converting unpaid CHIPS Act grants and Defense Department “Secure Enclave” money into equity. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s logic was simple: the government should get an equity stake for its money.

For now, the holding is passive, with no board seat. The deal has also been wildly profitable on paper: after Intel’s shares surged, the stake was worth roughly $36 billion by the spring—one of the most lucrative investments in the history of the federal government. Washington also pocketed a five-year warrant for another 5 percent of the company, exercisable if Intel ever ceases to control a majority of its foundry—a hedge designed to keep the chipmaker’s manufacturing arm American. Setting aside the cast of characters populating this administration, one could easily imagine a Democratic president deploying similar tools in pursuit of more or less well-defined national security goals.

The Department of Defense has also become the largest shareholder in MP Materials, operator of America’s only rare-earth mine, with a roughly 15 percent position wrapped in price floors and offtake guarantees. The Department of Energy took stakes in the lithium developer Lithium Americas. The Pentagon also took 10 percent of Trilogy Metals, tied to an Alaskan mining project the Biden administration had blocked. A wave of pre-revenue rare-earth startups followed. By April 2026, the running total had reached $20.9 billion across fifteen deals—the largest federal push into strategic industry since the Second World War, according to the Council on Foreign Relations—with the administration reportedly eyeing dozens more.

Again, there is (or could be) a national security logic to these moves. China’s threat to choke off rare earths is real, and the war in Iran exposed how fragile the supply chains have become—for everything from magnets to interceptor drones. A government that lets its adversaries monopolize the inputs of modern defense is failing at its job. And there is an old American tradition—from the transcontinental railroad to Operation Warp Speed—of the state midwifing industries the market alone would underprovide.

Yet what risks emerging, especially in the light of America’s rule-of-law crisis, is a system in which access to the American market, export licenses, and capital itself, will run through political favor—especially beyond a certain scale.

Conversely, one must worry about the outsized power of the enormous private sector institutions that undergird the ongoing technological transformation—and with it the future of our democracy. Nvidia is the largest company in the world, valued at more than $5 trillion, followed by Alphabet (Google), Apple, and Microsoft.

SpaceX, freshly public at a valuation north of $2 trillion, runs the satellite network on which the Pentagon increasingly depends. Can the U.S. government, and American voters, tolerate a situation in which our basic technological infrastructure and some critical functions of the federal government depend on, and generate profit for, a narrow segment of gargantuan private actors?

There is no clean exit from the problem of concentrated economic power in frontier industries that are laying the groundwork for the economy of tomorrow. For free market conservatives, this may seem like no problem at all—at least in theory. In a reality of flawed political institutions, however, concentrated economic power is bound to translate into exactly the kind of corruption and kleptocracy that we see flourishing under the second Trump administration. It should also give one pause that SpaceX’s float on Nasdaq was preceded by an agreement to modify the exchange’s underwriting and index rules in SpaceX’s favor—a highly unusual step, which speaks to how far removed we might be from a world of unadulterated free markets.

The political left, meanwhile, will want to treat compute as a utility, as the railroads and the power grid were before it. Under both extremes, the substantive outcome risks being the same—once-innovative industries transformed into lazy, rent-generating incumbents, whether under private or government ownership.

Managing the ongoing transition successfully will require transparent, durable rules, as well as impartial anti-trust enforcement. What America does not need are nationalizations, heavy-handed statism, or a series of opaque, deal-by-deal shakedowns negotiated by whoever holds the pen. But laying down rules of the game for the economy of tomorrow, as neutral and economically efficient as possible, is no mean feat under America’s broken politics.

At the same time, continuing on the default trajectory leads nowhere good. A U.S. government that owns a tenth of a critically important company it regulates is not a neutral umpire. A White House that is able to grant or withhold 25 percent export waivers wields a lever over Silicon Valley that no federal statute ever conferred. The temptation to use such leverage for ends that have nothing to do with national security—a flattering headline, a campaign contribution, a rival punished—is precisely the temptation the rule of law exists to constrain.

Forget Trump and Trumpism: America’s biggest challenge in the next generation is to avoid the entrenchment of a system of state capitalism with U.S. characteristics rather than Chinese.

Dalibor Rohac is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, an advisor at GLOBSEC, and a contributing editor at American Purpose.

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In 2025, the Trump administration scrambled scientific research by turning off the tap of funds. Among those to be shut down were clinical trials for promising treatments for cancer and dementia. In the National Institutes of Health alone, the administration terminated nearly $4 billion across 2,300 grants.

The Trump team reluctantly began restoring funding and then, in March, a federal appeals court ruled that the administration’s action was arbitrary, capricious, and likely to produce “irreparable harm.” The administration has responded by counter-attacking with a proposed regulation, published on May 29, that would take decisions about research grants out of the hands of scientific experts and give ultimate control to political appointees.

The scientific community is in an uproar, with funding having stopped, then started, and now threatened. One survey found that, among researchers receiving part of the $40 billion in funds distributed every year by the National Institutes of Health, more than half found their pipeline disrupted. More than four out of five younger researchers are worried that the cuts could destroy their careers.

The administration’s new proposal threatens even more damage in the future.. In a field where success only comes through the long term, the future would suddenly be unpredictable.

It is not enough to say that just some projects would be affected. All would be. And not just now. But forever—even as the tastes and values of new political appointees change.

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The proposal runs to 108 pages and covers every agency making grants to researchers. Wading through it all requires superhuman patience or an unlimited budget for legal billing. Still, let’s compare the current process with the key points of what the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) proposes.

Currently, the grant process across most of government works in a similar way. The agency posts a notice that it’s going to make grants on a particular problem and gives a deadline for applications. Agency staff members screen the proposals when they come in to ensure that they fit the basic requirements of the program. The agency staff then sends proposals out for peer review, and the reviewers score each proposal. The agency staff then sorts the applications by score and generally makes grants in order of the ranking until the money runs out. Successful grantees work on the projects, make regular progress reports, and submit to financial auditing. They continue work until the end of the grant period and, with luck, science blooms.

The new OMB proposal, on the other hand, goes down a very different road—paved by a series of reports from the right-wing Heritage Foundation, which contend that the federal government had developed a “leftwing funding apparatus,” which “only employs progressives.” The OMB initiative seeks to defund “a woke policy agenda” that runs against the Trump administration’s plans.

The most important parts of the Trump administration’s new proposal are:

• Peer scientists would still do reviews and rankings, but political appointees would make the final decisions. They could overrule the experts on which projects have the most merit. The decisions of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and the rise of his Make America Healthy Again movement show how some research get canceled and new, sometimes offbeat projects take their place. Instead of building systematically, scientific research would careen from administration to administration, in a way that would inevitably harm America’s place in the research world.

• Once a project starts, political appointees could shut it down at any point, including ‘‘‘for convenience’ whenever it determines that termination is in the government’s interest.” Any new administration could come in and shut down any—and all—existing grants by using the “for convenience” clause. Important work requires sustained effort, and no researcher can keep a lab going if the spigot is turned on and off. Moreover, much medical research requires double-blind studies over several years. Researchers worry whether they can ethically enroll patients in a study if their trial can be quickly shut off.

• Grantees couldn’t use federal funds to attend conferences, unless the funding agency explicitly approves the trip. Scientists shake out the bugs in new projects and share their findings with others at conferences. They often come back with ideas for new projects and improvements for old ones. This would end with the new rule. Cross-fertilization of work would dry up.

• Grantees can’t use grant funds to pay publication costs in professional journals. A little-known development in the recent past has been the charge that journals make for publishing articles. Articles are often available online (eventually) or through university libraries, but in fast-moving fields researchers need “open access,” or immediate free distribution to readers. For the Journal of the American Medical Association, the cost ranges from $4,000-$6,000. The leading journal in public policy, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, charges $3,960. Grants now often pay these charges, but if that ends, an important avenue for quick access to important new work would shut down. Few researchers can pay these fees out of their own pockets.

• All grant recipients will be required to take part in the E-Verify program, which employers use to track whether workers are eligible to work in the country, and ensure that everyone paid with the funds does as well. This could make it much harder to hire the advanced researchers from other countries that are essential to many labs.

Draining the Gold from Science

The proposed rule promises “Gold Standard Science,” without defining how it would get there. Researchers themselves worry that the rule will be anything but. The editors of the New England Journal of Medicine bluntly wrote, “We know that what counts as gold-standard science can be determined only by peer review conducted by experts in the field—the current system.”

Moreover, the editors said, “When science becomes politicized, everyone loses.” The American College of Surgeons posted that the proposed rule “threatens to devalue surgeons’ scientific expertise,” while the American Physical Society, collaborating with more than two dozen other professional associations, said that “the proposed changes would fundamentally alter the practice of science in the United States.”

The proposed rule is open for public comment until July 13. OMB has already collected tens of thousands of comments, and the wheel on the comment counter is rapidly spinning upward.

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Boosting the President’s Powers

Stretching beyond the worries of scientists, the proposed rule is part of a broader Trump administration strategy emanating from OMB. It flows as well to efforts to rein in control of federal grants to state and local governments and turn more federal civil servants into at-will employees.

The basic principles are the same: a foundational belief that the radical left had taken over the federal government and was spending public money to advance woke causes; a desire to shrink the federal footprint, both financial and administrative, across the government; and tactics to pull control of programs and money out of the hands of career experts and give it to political appointees—who can more directly steer who does what and who benefits.

So OMB’s proposed rule on research is important in its own right. But it’s also part of the Trump plan to magnify the president’s powers. Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution says, “he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Trump takes “he” personally: he views “faithfully executed” in terms of his own policy goals, not what the law says. In fact, that clause imposes a duty on the president to implement the laws that Congress has enacted, not create his own law independently through Executive Orders.

This draft rule ought to be opposed by every scientist and responsible citizen.

Donald F. Kettl is author of The Right-Wing Idea Factory (2026). He is also Professor Emeritus and Former Dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy.

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As the Ukrainian military continues destroying refineries across Russia, and Moscow responds by targeting random gas stations in eastern Ukraine, the war threatens to spill over into neighboring Belarus—the Kremlin’s only ally in Europe. Whether the conflict will eventually escalate depends on Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko—an autocratic leader who has so far managed to keep his country out of direct involvement in the war in Ukraine.

When Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy issued an ultimatum to Lukashenko demanding that Minsk remove Russian signal relay equipment installed on communications towers in the regions bordering Ukraine, it was a clear indication that Kyiv—emboldened by the recent successful strikes on Russia’s key energy infrastructure—was ready to raise the stakes. On June 19, he gave the Belarusian president one week to comply.

“If he doesn’t remove the equipment, we will,” Zelenskyy stressed.

As an experienced politician, Lukashenko undoubtedly took Kyiv’s threats seriously. On June 24, Zelenskyy announced that Russian drone signal boosters in Belarus had been switched off, and that communications equipment that Ukraine said was helping support Russian drone strikes from Belarusian territory had stopped operating. The Belarusian leader seems to have backed down.

Previously, just days before Zelenskyy’s ultimatum, amid growing tensions between Ukraine and Belarus, Lukashenko publicly apologized to the Ukrainian leader for his harsh comments in the past. Zelenskyy, however, bluntly rejected the apology, stating “He can keep his ‘apology’ to himself.”

Instead, the Ukrainian president expected Minsk not only to remove Russian relay equipment from southern Belarus but also to stop supplying Russia with fuel. As a result of Ukrainian drone and missile strikes on Russian oil refineries, fuel shortages in the country have become the norm. Russia now relies on fuel supplies from two oil refineries in Belarus: the Naftan Oil Refinery in the north and the Mozyr Oil Refinery close to the Ukrainian border.

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The Ukrainian military has already shown that it has the capacity to significantly damage major refineries, if not completely destroy them. To avoid such an outcome in Belarus, Lukashenko did not seem to have much choice but to make a concession to Ukraine and switch off Russian signal relay devices.

The problem for him is that, in the eyes of Russian hardliners, he has demonstrated serious weakness. On the other hand, by complying with Zelenskyy’s ultimatum, he avoided—at least for now—being directly involved in the war in Ukraine, something he has managed to stay out of since 2022.

Weeks before Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, Lukashenko said that, in the event of war, the Belarusian military would act “in the same way as the Russian army.” But that did not happen. Instead, he allowed Russia to use Belarusian territory to attack Kyiv, but refused to directly participate in any military operations against the neighboring state.

When it became clear that the Russian military lacked manpower to seize the Ukrainian capital, Moscow made a “goodwill gesture” and withdrew its forces not only from the suburbs of Kyiv, but also from the whole of northern Ukraine, as well as from Belarus. Although Russia maintains military bases there, it does not have nearly enough troops to launch a new offensive on Kyiv.

Under the current circumstances, it is Ukraine, with almost one million soldiers, that would be unlikely to face serious resistance from the Belarusian Armed Forces—estimated at around 60,000 personnel—if it decided to capture parts of Belarus. That, however, does not necessarily mean that Zelenskyy is willing to make such a move, even though the Ukrainian military undoubtedly has the capacity to do so.

In the eyes of parts of Belarusian society—namely those who support Lukashenko—a potential invasion would be interpreted as an act of aggression. It also remains unclear whether Kyiv’s Western allies would support such an operation, especially given that the Trump administration is reportedly seeking to improve relations with “Europe’s last dictator.”

On the other hand, Lukashenko, despite his history of threatening Ukraine and NATO with nuclear weapons, showed that he does not seem interested in supporting Moscow at any cost. On June 25, he openly told the Russian ambassador to Belarus that Minsk “has no intention of joining the hostilities against Ukraine.”

Lukashenko’s logic is simple: if Russia, after four and a half years of war, is unable to protect itself from Ukrainian drone and missile strikes, then where is the guarantee that it would protect Belarus in the event of conflict spillover? If Putin openly admitted that he wasted hypersonic Oreshnik missiles by firing on sheds in Ukraine in response to Kyiv’s strikes on Russia’s key energy infrastructure, what assurance is there that he would not use the same approach by “helping” Belarus?

Fully aware of the Kremlin’s unreliability, this time Lukashenko decided not to escalate. Although, at least for the time being, he might continue supplying fuel to Moscow, the Kremlin cannot count on Belarus’ military assistance in its war on Ukraine. This raises a key question: does Russia have any real allies?

According to Article 4 of the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization, “an act of aggression (an armed attack that threatens security, stability, territorial integrity, and sovereignty) against one of the member states will be considered as a collective act of aggression on all member states of the CSTO.” Belarus is a member of the CSTO. But so are Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Armenia. Yet none of them has ever supported Moscow following Ukrainian attacks on Russian energy infrastructure.

The Kremlin is, therefore, on its own. It may count on North Korea’s limited assistance, but that is unlikely to have a decisive impact on the outcome of the war. At this stage of the conflict, it is Ukraine that has the initiative, even though Russia continues making small tactical gains in the Donbas at extremely high cost. Kyiv, on the other hand, seems focused on isolating Crimea and other occupied regions in southeastern Ukraine from Russian territory, potentially preparing for a large-scale offensive in the foreseeable future.

One thing is for sure: Zelenskyy’s ultimatum to Lukashenko was a clear demonstration of Kyiv’s military and political might. Just as the Ukrainian military is cutting off Crimea from Russia, Zelenskyy seems to have managed to isolate Belarus from Russia. Now that the Belarusian strongman has effectively backed down—aiming to save his own country—Kyiv is likely to increase strikes on Russia. Indeed, hard days lie ahead for Moscow.

Nikola Mikovic is a freelance journalist, researcher, and analyst based in Serbia.

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For years, Donald Trump and his supporters often said that Iran never wins wars, but never loses negotiations either. This critique was often made about U.S. administrations, particularly the Obama administration and the 2015 nuclear deal, which Trump called one of the worst agreements in American history. However, under Trump’s leadership, recent events suggest a different, even ironic, outcome. It seems Trump has lost both the military confrontation with Iran and the negotiations that followed.

The contrast between the June 2025 Israeli-Iran war and the February 2026 U.S.-Iran confrontation is quite striking. In the June conflict, Iran faced a major setback; its military was weakened, its deterrence diminished, and its leaders endured a level of humiliation that hadn’t been seen in decades. The war, which revealed cracks in Iran’s military infrastructure and showed the limits of Tehran’s regional plans, ended with Iran making no gains.

The February 2026 U.S. intervention and the negotiations that followed produced a very different result. Although Washington entered the confrontation with overwhelming military superiority and ambitious objectives, it ultimately failed to achieve its central political goals—largely due to incompetence in political leadership and a lack of true understanding of the Islamic Republic. The United States was unable to compel the Islamic Republic to fundamentally change its ideological identity, regional posture, or strategic orientation. Instead, Tehran leveraged one of its few remaining sources of influence—its ability to disrupt the global economy by closing the Strait of Hormuz. By disrupting maritime traffic and amplifying fears of a prolonged energy shock, Iran demonstrated the economic costs of ongoing escalation. As oil and gas markets responded, pressure grew on Washington to find a quick resolution to the crisis, as even President Trump noted.

The outcome seems to be a memorandum of understanding giving Tehran many concessions at the expense of some limited structural changes. The reports about easing sanctions, economic opportunities, and exemption periods show a degree of flexibility that would not have been politically possible in previous periods of Trump’s Iran policy. For instance, Iranian sources claim that the negotiation team arrived at an agreement in Switzerland regarding the release of $12 billion in frozen Iranian assets. If these reports turn out to be true, the administration that called any negotiations with Iran appeasement would have entered into an agreement in which Iran receives considerable economic gains without making any behavioral or ideological changes to the regime. So far, the main thing that Tehran has agreed to do is open the Strait of Hormuz, which was open before Trump started attacking Iran.

Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance are both touting the deal as a diplomatic victory, although the long-term ramifications may be quite the opposite. Sanctions relief and renewed access to foreign investment would give the Islamic Republic resources at a time when its military credibility and regional influence have been severely hurt. But there is little evidence that the regime has abandoned its core objectives. Rather, Tehran appears to be pursuing what late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has long described as “heroic flexibility”—a tactical adjustment designed to preserve the regime, reduce immediate pressure, and create favorable conditions for future recovery.

The reason is not just Iranian strength but the realities of power and economics. While military force can erode capabilities, devastate facilities, and impose costs, it cannot easily force ideological transformation in a regime such as the Islamic Republic. For years, the Islamic Republic has survived war, sanctions, domestic unrest, and international isolation because its leadership has seen regime survival as its overriding objective. As long as the regime’s core institutions remain intact, Tehran can absorb considerable punishment and simply wait for geopolitical conditions to change.

At the same time, the United States faced constraints of its own, since escalation threatened energy markets, regional stability, and the broader global economy. Rising economic costs increased pressure on Washington to seek a negotiated exit from the crisis; it did so. As the risks of prolonged conflict mounted, the administration’s bargaining position weakened. The result was a familiar paradox: the stronger military power found itself making concessions to stabilize the very situation it had sought to control.

This outcome of the U.S.-Iran conflict will carry a broader lesson about coercive diplomacy; most critically, that the assumption that military pressure automatically produces political surrender is flawed. This is especially true when it is done by an incompetent administration, which alienated its allies and was not able to create a global alliance. It is even more true when dealing with revolutionary regimes. The Islamic Republic’s leadership has consistently demonstrated a willingness to absorb extraordinary costs in pursuit of regime survival. Military action can influence Tehran’s calculations, but it cannot by itself resolve the underlying political conflict between Washington and Tehran.

For Trump, the political implications are especially significant. His critique of the Obama administration rested on the argument that American negotiators traded sanctions relief for inadequate concessions. Yet the emerging agreement may expose him to the very same criticism. If Tehran retains its essential political and strategic characteristics while receiving substantial economic benefits, critics will rightly argue that the administration accepted a deal even less favorable than the one it spent years condemning.

The ultimate irony is difficult to ignore. Trump once argued that Iran never lost negotiations, yet under his presidency, the United States may have achieved something even more remarkable: after failing to translate military pressure into political transformation and clearly signaling the weakness of the U.S. military force on the global stage, it accepted a negotiated settlement that left the Islamic Republic politically intact and economically relieved. If that assessment proves correct, the administration will have lost both the war and the peace that followed. And, interestingly, nobody is surprised!

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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With the fate of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts—for the moment, no longer the Trump Kennedy Center—unknowable, it’s tantalizing to inquire what it might become. A related question is whether it became all it could have been in the first place.

When Jackie Kennedy urged Leonard Bernstein to become the first artistic director of the Kennedy Center, what was on her mind? Did she phone him because he was a famous and dynamic American musician with whom she happened to be well acquainted? Or because he was a famous and dynamic American musician dedicated to curating the American musical past and charting its musical future? All we know (from Jamie Bernstein’s memoir) is that he answered the call, said yes—and then changed his mind because he could not see himself dedicating time to the job.

What became the Kennedy Center was envisioned as a showcase for both American and “global” performing arts when President Eisenhower signed the National Cultural Center Act in 1958. The specific form this might take was secondary to a prolonged fundraising effort that surged after the Kennedy assassination. The eventual result both is and is not a “national cultural center.” Its National Symphony has never aspired to be a national symphony—it is the Washington, D.C. Symphony, which is a perfectly legitimate thing to be. That said: We really do need a national symphony, because our native musical inheritance, in the concert hall, remains largely unattended. For that matter, American cultural memory is notoriously short, and never more so than today. Imagine a national cultural center with national music, theater, and dance companies. It’s a pipedream, but it’s an informative one.

Bernstein is a wild card in this narrative. He enjoyed a dynamic rapport with JFK and the First Lady. The day of the assassination, the first edition of the New York Times announced the impending appointment of Richard Goodwin, a Kennedy insider, as the president’s advisor on the arts. The impending Bernstein/Kennedy partnership might have taken many forms. Very possibly it could have included a bona fide national symphony at the planned “national cultural center” that was being planned and promoted with Bernstein’s help.

Something like a national symphony was in fact created four years after the Kennedy Center opened in 1971. This was the American Composers Orchestra, which during its initial decades commanded the resources to regularly perform at Carnegie Hall. But it was crippled by a programming formula (often attributed to the composer Francis Thorne) that created eclectic concerts, sampling American works from different periods.

When I was invited by the Pacific Symphony to help create a West Coast equivalent to the ACO, we instead programmed thematically—and surveyed a lot of important American music that remains neglected. But in Orange County, California, we had no national impact. D.C.’s PostClassical Ensemble, during the years I helped to run it, was dedicated to curating an American repertoire. Our concerts, CDs, DVDs, and broadcasts championed Louis Moreau Gottschalk, William Levi Dawson, Harry Burleigh, Arthur Farwell, Lou Harrison, Silvestre Revueltas, Virgil Thomson (his film scores), Aaron Copland (the music not heard: The City with film; the Piano Fantasy), Zhou Long, Charles Ives, and more.

But the closest thing to a national symphony was Bernstein’s New York Philharmonic, especially in its earliest phase. Correction: It was a national symphony. His first subscription program, on October 2, 1958, proclaimed a template—William Schuman: American Festival Overture/Charles Ives: Symphony No. 2/Beethoven: Symphony No. 7. Bernstein’s repertoire explorations were systematic. They included Gustav Mahler and subsequent twentieth-century symphonists little played or otherwise marginalized. They included programs dedicated to specific periods and styles of American composition.

In the realm of symphonic music, Charles Ives is our supreme creative genius. Bernstein’s Ives advocacy, with the Philharmonic, figured crucially in the belated discovery that Ives was a composer who singularly enriched American cultural memory. As a matter of course, Bernstein prominently participated in the Ives Centenary in 1974. But the recent Ives Sesquicentenary was wholly unmarked by our most prominent orchestras. It also passed unnoticed at the Kennedy Center. What form of arts leadership might Bernstein have furnished in D.C.? His tenaciously American odyssey, embracing both Broadway and the concert hall, testifies that he would have pursued a mandate passionately weighted toward New World achievement.

An informative footnote to this tale is the candidacy of Nicolas Nabokov. He lobbied hard for the Kennedy Center job and was supported by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., once Kennedy’s intellectual aide de camp. As secretary general of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (covertly funded by the CIA), Nabokov was a crucial figure in the cultural Cold War. His output included high-profile arts festivals abroad. The biggest and most ambitious, in Paris in 1952, showcased orchestras and opera companies from London and Vienna, and orchestras from Boston, Paris, Geneva, Berlin, and Rome. Nabokov was not especially knowledgeable about the American arts. He was a Russo-European intellectual based in France. His Rolodex was famous—he could have conceivably turned the Kennedy Center into something like an American Edinburgh Festival.

Nabokov visited the Kennedy White House in 1962 for a dinner (which he helped to plan) honoring Igor Stravinsky. His impressions of the First Lady were not especially flattering. Perhaps this disaffection was returned. In any event, it was the American baritone George London who served as the Kennedy Center’s first executive director, overseeing artistic planning. The center never attained the international prestige Nabokov would have craved—and never attained the New World focus Bernstein would have pursued.

What might the Kennedy Center have hypothetically become? We could also use a national theater with a gifted dramaturg. Right now, it might pertinently curate the important political theater works of the thirties. A play like Clifford Odets’ Waiting for Lefty (1935) might be a poor bet in a commercial theater today. But it once electrified America, and we should have an opportunity to remember why and how. In the world of ballet, we actually possess a national company once linked to the Kennedy Center. Thanks to George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein, the New York City Ballet Americanized classical ballet and more bravely explored the American repertoire than any present-day orchestra. The Suzanne Farrell Ballet, an offshoot of City Ballet, was once the Kennedy Center’s resident ballet company.

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In New York City, the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts hosts an orchestra, an opera company, a ballet company, and a theater company. The artistic synergies once vaguely envisioned, binding the constituents, never materialized, but they could do so at a bona fide national cultural center stocked with scholars, dedicated to preserving and applying American cultural memory. Imagine an alternative world, in which Bernstein and the Kennedys—John and Jackie both—bequeathed a proactive White House arts component prioritizing American achievement, past and present. It almost happened.

Joseph Horowitz is most recently the author of a novel, The Disciple—A Wagnerian Tale of the Gilded Age. His book on the cultural cold war is The Propaganda of Freedom.

A version of this piece was originally published on Arts Fuse.

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A specter haunts debates about governance: the idea of benevolent and efficient dictatorship. Where democratic leaders haggle, delay, and pander, the authoritarian ruler simply acts. Where elected governments bend to lobbyists and electoral cycles, a dictator is in for the long haul. This vision—or autocratic temptation, if you will—has been popular as far back as we have documented political theory, and it still has plenty of champions today. Beijing officials invoke it to explain the rise of China; climate activists to argue that the planetary emergency demands that we put democracy on pause; populists to suggest that current institutions are broken and that a fresh start and setting the popular will free requires a firm and unchecked hand.

The academic literature has supplied these critics with plentiful ammunition. Books with ominous titles like Against Democracy, Democracy: The God that Failed, and Democracy Kills have found audiences well beyond university campuses. The charges echo those we find all the way back to Plato: democracies are short-sighted, paralyzed by special interests, prone to electing demagogues, and incapable of making the sacrifices that the challenges of the day require.

However, a large body of studies of how democracies and autocracies actually perform across regions, over centuries, and in domains ranging from economic growth to military effectiveness to environmental protection have questioned this story. They do not show autocracies to be superior—on the contrary, the autocratic temptation is, in most domains, a mirage, or even a trap. Not only are democracies morally preferable because they recognize the political equity and dignity of citizens; they also tend to work better.

Countries that successfully consolidate free and fair elections face substantially lower risks of civil war and domestic political violence than authoritarian states. Democracy, by design, offers losers something: the prospect of future victory at the polls, legal channels for dissent, protection from persecution. Citizens who can kick out the opposition at elections are less inclined to take to the streets with weapons.

The military dimension is also revealing. At least since the ancient Greek historian Thucydides, who admired oligarchic Sparta’s discipline over democratic Athens, democracies have been accused of weakness in warfare. This charge resurfaced in the 1930s, when authoritarian Germany and Japan ran roughshod over unprepared democracies, and again during the first three decades of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union seemed to outmaneuver its wealthier Western rivals. Yet the long-term record is unambiguous: since 1815, democracies have won more than 80 percent of the wars they have fought. They win not in spite of their openness but because of it. Elected governments have more legitimacy; they are better placed to ask citizens to make hard sacrifices. Democratic alliances, rooted in shared values, are more durable and credible than autocratic alliances. And no two modern democracies have ever gone to war with each other—a remarkable empirical regularity, an iron law, that has held for two centuries.

Vladimir Putin’s catastrophic miscalculation in Ukraine illustrates this. Putin appears to have made a bet that a divided, energy-dependent West would fracture under pressure; that Ukrainian society, lacking the coercive power and will of a dictatorship headed by a strongman, would collapse quickly; and that his own military was far stronger than it proved to be when put to the test. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s citizen-soldiers have fought with a tenacity and creativity that has confounded nearly every prior assessment, and support from other democracies has helped them make their brave stand against the aggressor. An autocrat’s epistemic isolation, it turns out, is not a strategic asset—it is a liability.

An even more seductive version of autocratic temptation is economical. Authoritarian leaders, the argument goes, are unencumbered by electoral cycles, and thus can make investments that democracies are unable to but which are necessary for development. They can suppress wage demands, override property rights when needed, and redirect capital toward the sectors that create growth. Democratic politicians, by contrast, must constantly placate voters and campaign donors, skewing policy toward immediate gratification.

There is something to this argument—but much less than its proponents claim, and the authoritarian alternative is hardly perfect in its economic results. Democratic accountability, for all the short-termism it supposedly encourages, creates powerful incentives to invest in public health, education, and physical infrastructure. Citizens who benefit from these things tend to reward the governments that provide them. Democratic institutions protect property rights in a way that encourages the private investment that drives productivity. And the open circulation of ideas across universities, a free press, and competitive markets is not a distraction from growth but one of its primary engines. Studies show that, on average, democracies enjoy a modest but robust long-run growth advantage over autocracies, and that this advantage strengthens with the quality and longevity of democratic institutions.

More telling than average growth rates, however, is the frequency with which disasters strike. Unchecked political authority not merely fails to deliver growth; rather, it periodically produces catastrophes. Mao’s Great Leap Forward between 1958 and 1962 killed tens of millions through an entirely man-made famine, a consequence of ideological fantasy insulated from the real world. The Soviet collectivization campaign produced similar horrors two decades earlier. Comparable disasters in democratic states are virtually unknown—not necessarily because democratic leaders are wiser or more virtuous, but because they face institutional constraints and public scrutiny that make disastrous policies impossible to sustain.

The most advanced economies in the world are democracies. The handful of countries that have joined the ranks of wealthy, high-technology societies over the past century, including South Korea, Taiwan, Israel, and Ireland, made at least the final leap under democratic governance. Singapore is the sole exception to this rule. Autocratic regimes can mobilize resources to achieve middle-income status, as China has done. But the transition to a knowledge-based economy requires the rule of law, the protection of intellectual property, and the freedom to challenge received wisdom—all of which are systematically undermined under dictatorship.

Climate change has given the autocratic temptation a new lease on life. The argument is compelling: effective climate policy requires incurring costs now for the benefit of future generations who cannot vote, overriding vested interests that are well-organized and politically powerful, and maintaining consistent policy over periods that exceed any electoral cycle. Addressing climate change might therefore require setting democracy aside. Others, meanwhile, have proposed nurturing a class of enlightened eco-authoritarian technocrats.

However, this appeal to authoritarian governance relies on a fundamental confusion between the capacity to decide on policies and the likelihood of adopting and implementing good ones. Authoritarian regimes can certainly move fast when they decide to. But choosing to address climate change rather than subsidizing fossil fuels is precisely what they frequently fail to do. They also regularly lie about emissions.

Freedom of expression is not in fact an obstacle to climate action; it is what makes it possible. Green movements need to organize, publicize, and campaign. Independent scientists must have the freedom to publish findings that inconvenience powerful interests. International environmental agreements require governments that can credibly commit. Overall, democracies, especially high-quality ones with a capable state apparatus, outperform their authoritarian counterparts, whether on greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, water pollution, or soil erosion.

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The eco-authoritarian chimera also sidesteps the tough but unavoidable question of how the virtuous technocrats are to be selected and constrained—the classical problem of who will guard the guardians, which no eco-authoritarian has satisfactorily answered. Concentrated power that happens to be used wisely for climate issues can easily be turned toward repression, ethnic persecution, or foreign-policy adventurism. Absent democratic accountability, there is no mechanism for ensuring it remains focused on the planet’s welfare without neglecting or undermining other things we cherish.

China is the principal exhibit in every contemporary case for autocratic governance. China’s growth over the past four decades has been spectacular. It has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, building infrastructure at a pace democratic countries are unable to match. To many observers, China is decisive proof that the authoritarian model outperforms.

Look at the record more carefully, however, and a different picture emerges. To begin with, China’s official growth figures are among the most manipulated of any major economy. Satellite-based measures of night-time light emissions, which correlate closely with actual economic activity, indicate that Beijing’s statistics overstate both the pace and the scale of growth.

Context also matters. In 1949, China, Taiwan, South Korea, and North Korea were all equally poor. Today, South Korea and Taiwan are consolidated democracies with per capita incomes substantially higher than China’s. North Korea, on the other hand, offers the unvarnished control case. Communist one-party rule without economic reform has produced one of the most disastrous economic and humanitarian records of the modern era. China’s own pre-reform decades under Mao were characterized not by rapid development but by stagnation punctuated by ideologically driven disasters.

China’s environmental record, meanwhile, questions the case that autocracy handles long-term challenges better. Decades of growth have left cities choked with smog, rivers contaminated across large regions, and groundwater depleted in ways that will come back to haunt future generations. China’s domestic security spending now exceeds what the country spends on its military—a striking indicator of the regime’s lack of trust in its own population.

The handling of Covid-19 is also instructive. China’s initial containment, characterized by rapid hospital construction, mass testing, and strict lockdowns, impressed many Western observers. What is less often noted is that China’s initial response also included the active suppression of early warnings and the punishment of those who tried to alert the public, delays that cost not only China but the whole world dearly. And when Beijing eventually abandoned its zero-Covid policies in early 2023, almost a year after other countries had lifted most of their measures, it did so abruptly and without preparation, exposing a population with minimal acquired immunity to a wave of mass infection. The government had optimized for control rather than for public health, and when control became untenable, it had no alternative to letting the virus spread unchecked. South Korea and Taiwan, facing similar epidemiological conditions as democracies, managed to handle the crisis without the brutality or the catastrophic crescendo.

Taken together, China’s rise not only reflects a historically specific combination of starting conditions, reform choices, and global economic integration that is not easily replicable; it has also generated huge costs, in inequality, in environmental damage, and in political repression, that official accounts systematically obscure.

Democracies have real and well-documented failings. They are often slow. They are susceptible to capture by organized interests. They sometimes elect leaders who undermine the very institutions that gave them power. None of this should be ignored. But the relevant comparison is not between actually existing democracies and some imagined model of virtuous authoritarian efficiency. It is between actually existing democracies and actually existing autocracies. By that yardstick, the democratic record is substantially better.

Niccolò Machiavelli is not the first thinker who comes to mind when defending democratic governance. But the Florentine cynic recognized something like this five centuries ago. Contrasting republics with principalities, Machiavelli concluded that “fewer errors will be seen in the people than in the prince—and those lesser and having greater remedies.” The mechanism he identified was not virtue but accountability—the capacity of a political system to detect its mistakes and correct them.

That capacity is precisely what democratic institutions are designed to provide. At a time when open societies face serious pressure from within and without, the temptation to admire their alternatives is understandable. But admiration is not a sound foundation for political judgment, especially not when it is based on a selective reading of the evidence. The autocratic temptation promises fortitude and efficiency—but too often, it only produces chaos and mismanagement; and, occasionally, it delivers disaster.

Jørgen Møller and Svend-Erik Skaaning are both professors of political science at Aarhus University.

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There are serious countries and unserious ones. Where the United States belongs these days I leave for others to judge. But about one country I have no doubt, having recently returned from it. It may be tiny and poor, but Moldova is a serious country—and its leaders know exactly what they want.

I visited Chișinău last year, several months before Moldova’s parliamentary election, when its outcome—and with it the country’s European trajectory—hung in the balance. This time, however, the mood was different. While meeting President Maia Sandu, the prime minister, the foreign minister, members of parliament, and journalists, my American Enterprise Institute colleagues and I were struck by how uniformly serious they all were about Moldova and its place in Europe.

Anne Applebaum recently called the September result—the victory of Sandu’s party despite a deluge of Russian money, vote-buying, cyberattacks, and bomb threats—“the Moldovan surprise.” And yet, while the absolute parliamentary majority that her faction enjoys in Parliament was unexpected, I remember a number of well-placed Moldovan officials who assured me a year ago that they had a good handle on Russia’s interference in the fall election.

When she met with us, Sandu wore white trainers and a smart glenplaid suit that would have looked less conspicuous at the World Bank—where she once worked—than at the fairly monstrous Soviet-era presidential palace. But Sandu is no technocrat. She is a skilled politician who built a party from scratch, without oligarchs or networks of patronage, and stayed the course with steely determination through numerous setbacks.

Mihai Popșoi, the foreign minister, who wrote policy reports for AEI a decade ago, has yet to turn 40. His command of his brief is impressive, as is his ability to think on his feet—especially when my colleagues and I asked difficult questions about Moldova’s relationship with the United States. In a way, it mirrors the deftness with which Moldova’s ambassador to Washington avoids the traps that the Trump era presents for him—neither antagonizing Donald Trump nor cozying up to him, always working scrupulously across party lines. In an era when so many European governments lurch between sycophancy and tantrum, Chișinău’s poise is a quiet masterclass.

The prime minister, a former financier with a Columbia degree and a U.S. passport, speaks the same language. One can also see Moldova’s seriousness clearly in the unglamorous business of energy policy, which the PM is visibly passionate about. For years, Moldova was hostage to a power plant running on subsidized Russian gas in the breakaway region of Transnistria—a lever that Moscow could pull at will. That has now changed. Moldova has stopped buying Russian natural gas completely. A new 157-kilometer high-voltage line from Vulcănești to Chișinău—aptly nicknamed the “Independence Line”—connects the country directly to Romania and the European grid and will cover more than half of peak demand.

Moldova has EU candidate status, its accession negotiations are underway, and it is aiming—ambitiously—to conclude them in 2028. While not a completely unrealistic timeline, some European diplomats whom we saw were squeamish about the prospect of bringing Moldova in so rapidly. “It is not just a question of meeting the criteria, but also a political one,” we heard several times—both from one European ambassador (sincerely) and from several Moldovans (with a hint of sarcasm).

A related lesson that Brussels is slowly absorbing is that EU accession should not be an all-or-nothing prize handed over only at the very end of a decades-long marathon. The smarter approach is to frontload the benefits of membership: phased access to the single market, structural funds, and a seat—even a non-voting one—at the institutional table, so that citizens see the dividends of integration well before the final treaty is signed. For Moldova’s pro-European elites this is a no brainer. The country’s political life is fractious, and progress made today could be reversed. In order to anchor the country in the West for good, tangible benefits to ordinary people must first be delivered before any formal process is completed.

Yet, on the front of European integration, Moldova has both benefited from—and now risks being a victim of—the imperative of bringing Ukraine into the West’s fold. Kyiv’s case for EU membership is morally overwhelming and necessary in geopolitical terms. But it is also a difficult one. Ukraine is enormous, not to mention busy fighting a war against an intimidating adversary. Its entry would reshape the EU’s budget, its agricultural policy, and the balance of votes around the table in ways no previous enlargement has come close to. While it has leapfrogged the West in some ways (not least in defense technology), many of its post-Soviet pathologies seem to linger.

It was against this backdrop that Friedrich Merz floated, in a late-May letter to EU leaders, the idea of an interim “associate membership” for Ukraine—participation in the Union’s institutions without a vote during the long negotiations—while accelerating Moldova and the Western Balkans toward full membership. The clumsy label aside, the idea is sound: deliver what you can now, and don’t let the hardest case set the pace for everyone else.

It was unfortunate that Kyiv’s reaction was a faintly indignant refusal. President Zelenskyy insisted that Ukraine’s place in the EU must be “complete, with full rights,” and that there can be no genuine European project without it. Meanwhile, Ukrainian commentators denounced the proposed decoupling from Moldova as a red flag.

I yield to no one in my admiration for Ukraine. But treating any interim arrangement as a demotion—and full EU membership as a debt the West owes for Ukrainian blood—is unbecoming and self-defeating. An associate status, if firmly tied to eventual accession and packed with real benefits, is not a consolation prize. It is a head start that earlier candidates never enjoyed. Reflexively spurning it hands ammunition to those in Europe who would be perfectly content to leave Ukraine parked in the waiting room indefinitely.

It would be a disaster if Kyiv’s all-or-nothing insistence, colliding with the genuine complexity of its situation, froze the entire enlargement machine on political grounds—and if little Moldova got dragged down as collateral damage.

Decoupling Moldova’s accession from Ukraine is not a betrayal of Kyiv but common sense. A third of Moldovans, or 850,000 of them, hold Romanian, and therefore EU, passports. A large share of the country is already, in effect, made up of European citizens. Integrating a country the size of a mid-sized European region would not strain the EU, but would instead be an accelerator, bringing Ukraine even closer to the fold.

Yes, there is Transnistria, a seemingly intractable problem. But the true size of the Russian garrison, excluding locals with Russian passports, is tiny: some 300 officers. Since the border with Ukraine is sealed, the region is boxed into a position from which Moscow can neither reinforce nor resupply it. Moreover, the territory’s real master is not an ideologue but a businessman: Viktor Gushan of the Sheriff conglomerate, whose exports flow overwhelmingly to the EU. It must be possible to resolve this issue through negotiation.

Serious countries deserve to be treated seriously. Moldova has done the work—which is more than can be said for many of its larger, richer, and longer-established neighbors, whether or not they seek (or already enjoy) EU membership. The least Brussels can do is to reward that clarity of purpose, rather than punish them for the headaches involved in some of the harder cases.

Dalibor Rohac is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, an advisor at GLOBSEC, and a columnist with American Purpose.

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June 14 is an important halfway point in America’s summer civic holidays, connecting Memorial Day with Independence Day—and in more ways than one. June 14 is the anniversary of the birth of the U.S. Army in 1775—and is today celebrated as Flag Day.

“A yearly contemplation of our flag strengthens and purifies the national conscience,” declared President Calvin Coolidge. Echoing sentiments Woodrow Wilson expressed in his 1916 proclamation recommending the annual observance of “Flag Day,” Coolidge succinctly summed up the point for such a national holiday: “We see in [the flag] the great multitude of blessings, of rights and privileges that make up our country. But … we must remember that it is equally a symbol of our duties. Every glory that we associate with it is the result of duty done.”

Like Achilles’ famous shield depicting both war and peace, the American flag symbolizes the blessings and the duties of a self-governing nation dedicated to freedom and equality. The blessings are frequently invoked, while flag-draped coffins of fallen soldiers show viscerally both the glory and the cost of “duty done.” But, as successive presidents from Wilson onward have noted in relation to Flag Day, the stars combined with the red and white stripes remind us of the ongoing and current duties we carry as citizens, chief of which is respect for the rule of law.

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“In whatever direction we may go we are always confronted with the inescapable conclusion that unless we observe the law we cannot be free,” noted Coolidge. Or, as that philosophical grandfather of America John Locke put it, “the end of law is not to abolish or restrain but to preserve and enlarge freedom.” In the American tradition, this observance of the law as a supreme principle is two-pronged: it means that laws when made must not designate winners and losers, applying unequally to different persons or groups of society; it also means that all alike, from those in elected office, enjoying positions of economic power, to the those struggling to make ends meet, must follow the law—and can enjoy the shared peace this brings.

But, as the stories in our newspapers seem frequently to remind us, the rule of law is much easier to invoke than to practice, particularly as it relies upon the goodwill of human agents. Like the flag itself, it is fragile without both.

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Flag Day is not an official holiday. Rather, mandated by a 1949 act of Congress, the president is “requested to issue each year a proclamation, calling on United States Government officials to display the flag of the United States on all Government buildings on Flag Day; and urging the people of the United States to observe Flag Day as the anniversary of the adoption on June 14, 1777.”

America’s flag, and indeed all flags in general, originally had a predominantly military purpose. It emerged out of the Revolutionary War (although not sewn by Betsy Ross) and its martial image became fixed for many Americans through the “gave proof through the night / that our flag was still there” lines in “The Star-Spangled Banner,” an 1814 poem that over a century later would be adopted as the national anthem. Marking the 200^th anniversary of “The Star-Spangled Banner” in 2014, American composer extraordinaire John Williams celebrated the link between the nation’s flag and its national anthem, when on the steps of the U.S. Capitol he debuted a new arrangement of the Star-Spangled Banner. During this 250^th anniversary year of our American nation, we are reminded that our flag is still here. Remember its glories; remember, too, its requests.

Rebecca Burgess is a senior fellow with the Yorktown Institute and at Independent Women. She serves as an advisory board member at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello.

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Although the Strait of Hormuz has been closed for only three months, it seems like an eternity. U.S. President Donald Trump has been promising that a deal to reopen it is imminent and will happen any moment. His announcements briefly rally the markets, but it is slowly becoming obvious that a deal is not that close after all. The recent news of Iranian president Pezeshkian’s attempted resignation only cements the unwelcome realisation that not only is an agreement unlikely in the near future, it is structurally impossible. The goals of both sides, their very reason for existence, oppose each other and cannot be reconciled unless one capitulates to the other. How is Pezeshkian’s reported effort to leave office, albeit denied by the IRGC, related to the inability to reach an agreement? It confirms what many have suspected—that power in Iran has been concentrated in the IRGC’s hands. So much so that the president, the nominal head of civilian government, feels unable to perform his duties.

88 Islamic Jurists and a Power Vacuum

Why does it matter who holds power? Because any agreement with the United States must satisfy the goals of whoever is actually in charge. As far as anybody can tell, Mojtaba Khamenei, the official head of the Iranian state, has been notably absent from—well, everywhere. It is unclear if he is even alive following the bombing of his father’s compound on the morning of February 28. We are told he communicates with his people via handwritten notes, avoiding electronics to stay ahead of potential assassination attempts. That does not explain the complete lack of any photos or videos of him since that morning. What it does, however, is remove the need for the 88 Islamic jurists of the Assembly of Experts to gather in one place at the same time—which would present a considerable target to the United States and Israel, as that assembly is precisely what is required to elect a new supreme leader. It also ensures that whoever comes next is not killed immediately after election. Having what looks like a pretend supreme leader is a smart move for the IRGC—if he is always in hiding, nobody knows if he is even alive, and if he communicates only in writing, the IRGC can produce whatever notes it wants. They are in charge of the state.

All Power, No Compromise

A government, even an authoritarian one, can compromise because its goal is to stay in power, and staying in power sometimes requires flexibility. The IRGC’s claim to power does not come from governance but from ideological purpose: the export of Islamic Revolution and the destruction of Israel. That is not a policy preference that can be traded away. It is the IRGC’s entire claim to legitimacy and the basis of its internal cohesion. An institution that abandons its founding purpose does not survive the compromise. The IRGC cannot negotiate away the nuclear programme or Hormuz without negotiating itself out of existence.

It might come as a surprise to some, but the slain Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was not a hardliner when it came to nuclear capabilities. At least officially, he delayed the development of Iranian nuclear weapons, citing religious caution—he issued a fatwa against their acquisition as far back as 2003. With him gone, that restraint is no longer needed.

Why is Iran so intent on procuring nuclear weapons? The current predicament answers the question—if Iran did not have the Strait of Hormuz as leverage, it would not have any enriched uranium left either. Without closing the Strait of Hormuz, Iran would not have a bargaining chip—or, indeed, an upper hand—in its dealings with Washington. As things stand, without enriched uranium, it cannot pursue what the Islamic Republic has declared its founding purpose. The destruction of Israel and resistance to the United States—the Little Satan and the Grand Satan in the regime’s own language—are not rhetorical flourishes. The export of revolution is enshrined in the constitutional preamble; the annihilation of Israel is the stated doctrine of the IRGC and has been repeated as state policy for nearly five decades. These are the principles that literally underwrite their constitution—much as the Declaration of Independence underwrites America’s.

To keep the dream alive, the IRGC needs nuclear weapons. To protect the nuclear programme, Iran is using the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Giving up one means giving up the other, and giving up both means giving up the state’s reason for existence. And yet that is what the United States believes Iran will do.

A Fix Worse Than the Problem

Whatever goals the United States had before the start of hostilities in the Middle East, very few have survived the bungled attempt at regime change in Iran. By now, the only demands Washington has not backed down from are the opening of the Strait of Hormuz and Iran abandoning its nuclear programme. Even there, the Trump administration has climbed down from permanent dismantlement to a temporary moratorium—with the duration still contested, Iran proposing five years and the United States demanding twenty.

The rest of the wishlist, meanwhile, like the Iranian demand for the release of some $12 billion in frozen assets held in Qatar, the lifting of sanctions, the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the region and the crowning glory—reparations paid by the United States—have not been shot down by Washington. Even Donald Trump understands that having wrecked the security equilibrium in the Middle East and having taken a hammer to the world economy, he cannot just pretend that a closed Strait of Hormuz is better than an open one. To be frank, he did try—posting on Truth Social that the United States is the world’s largest oil producer and that when oil prices go up, America “makes a lot of money.” Despite the fact that U.S. oil producers are probably ecstatic about current oil prices, which allow them to invest heavily into new projects in a way that was impossible when oil cost $40 a barrel, and despite the fact that Donald Trump may feel more affinity with oil producers than with people paying high prices at the fuel pumps, Trump presumably understands that he will have to pay for the unmitigated disaster he has unleashed.

He also understands that after all the effort the U.S. military went to in order to stop Iran from ever being able to acquire a nuclear bomb, walking away now would be a failure of epic proportions. He would look very bad to his own supporters. And Donald Trump does not like looking bad. To say nothing of the fact that a nuclear-capable Iran in the Middle East would disrupt the entire region for years—an outcome no U.S. administration, regardless of who is in office, would be able to live down.

Which is why the Strait of Hormuz and Iran’s nuclear programme are the two things Washington cannot compromise on. It can skate around the rest, swallow its pride, sell another bridge if it must. But it cannot sell a closed Strait of Hormuz and Iran’s having a nuclear programme.

In the meantime, Washington is running out of time to restart any hostilities to reinforce its position. June sees the start of the FIFA World Cup, hosted across the United States, Canada and Mexico. Military operations in the Middle East would put a damper on festivities. Then there is America’s 250th anniversary on July 4, at which point restarting the war would not sit well at home. And then there are the midterm elections, in which the GOP is expected to lose Congress and with it any ability to militarily rectify Trump’s mistakes.

Waiting For the Sun

And so both sides are trying to wait each other out. Iran has seemingly taken a leaf out of Russia’s book and is pretending to negotiate in the hopes of reaching the November midterms intact without having to give up anything valuable.

The Trump administration is biding its time. Having imposed a half-hearted blockade on Iranian ports, the United States is hoping to wear out Iran to the point where it will give up resistance.

Should the power configuration in Iran change, the structural impasse would shift. But for now, unless one of the sides unexpectedly gives in and changes its goals, there is no version of reality where a compromise between two opposite goals is possible. Iran has to give up its raison d’être, or the United States has to give up its entire influence in the world.

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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Have we been here before? Scholars and pundits alike have identified striking parallels between today’s political developments and those of the interwar years: democracy in retreat, radicalized parties going from strength to strength, ethnic minorities scapegoated, dictators and would-be dictators advancing, economic crisis, the breakdown of a liberal international order. We even find a deadly pandemic in both periods, the Spanish flu of 1918-20 and Covid-19 in 2020-23.

The parallels send shivers down the spine. Tellingly, the economic crisis that began in 2008 was branded the “Great Recession”—a deliberate echo of the “Great Depression” that began in 1929. If that era is where we are headed, it is time to buckle up. Two dark premonitions are often combined: that democracy has experienced a decades-long rollback, and that we are now on the eve of something like the early 1930s, with democratic setbacks poised to turn into freefall.

For nearly two decades, the American organization Freedom House and the British magazine The Economist have published annual assessments of democracy with strikingly bleak titles, such as “Discarding Democracy: Return to the Iron Fist,” “The Global Expansion of Authoritarian Rule,” and “Global Democracy in Retreat.” These reports have been accompanied by a surge of books from scholars and public intellectuals, many of whom draw comparisons with the interwar period during which democratic systems collapsed across much of Europe and Latin America.

Take the following three books: How Democracies Die, by Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, with the telling subtitle What History Tells Us About Our Future, the American historian Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, and former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s Fascism: A Warning. These books point to what the authors see as striking parallels between developments in Europe during the 1920s and 1930s and those unfolding today, particularly in the United States.

Yet the claim that today’s troubling developments mirror those of the interwar period is misleading—rooted in a superficial reading of that era and a flawed historical analogy. As the interwar U.S. Supreme Court justice Benjamin N. Cardozo once warned, metaphors and analogies intended to free our thinking can just as easily end up enslaving it.

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To begin with, the extent of our current predicament has been exaggerated. We have certainly seen instances of democratic backsliding and assertive authoritarian behavior since the turn of the millennium. But many studies—including some mentioned above—have overstated both the severity and the persistence of the negative democratic trend. In fact, global democracy measures and long-term historical analyses show that democracy grew substantially in the late 20th century, reached a high point around 2015, and has only recently shown a downturn, which is so far—with the very recent exception of the United States—confined to weaker democracies or reflects authoritarian regimes shedding superficial democratic features; it does not reflect a broad retreat within well-established democratic systems.

The more specific warnings about a repeat of the interwar developments are also problematic, for two reasons. First, they ignore crucial differences in the historical context, which we outline below. Second, the resilience of interwar democracies has been overlooked. Observers have mainly focused on the democratic failures of the 1920s and 1930s, and especially those of Italy and Germany. But this perspective ignores the fact that many long-established, well-institutionalized democracies successfully weathered the crises of the 1920s and 1930s, avoiding both widespread political radicalization and a breakdown at the ballot box or in the streets.

It is important to note just how different the interwar period is from what we find today. The very term conjures up an image of crisis. It denotes the 21-year interval between the two most destructive conflicts in modern history, from the end of World War I in 1918 to the outbreak of World War II in 1939.

The war between 1914 and 1918 profoundly destabilized European societies. Around ten million men died in the trenches under conditions that are difficult to comprehend today, while millions more returned home physically injured or psychologically scarred. Many veterans found it hard to reintegrate into civilian life, and large numbers gravitated toward extremist paramilitary movements in countries such as Germany, Austria, and Italy. In the 1920s and 1930s, these groups contributed to widespread violence and instability. The brutal clashes between police and protesters on May 1, 1929, in Berlin—“Bloody May” (Blutmai)—left 33 civilians dead by police gunfire. A staggering 89 demonstrators were killed by the police in Austria on July 15, 1927, after the Ministry of Justice was set on fire. In Germany, right-wing militias bearing menacing names such as Stahlhelm and Sturmabteilung fought with left-wing militias like the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold. Similar events took place in Italy in the early 1920s, where fascist blackshirts (Squadristi) fought communists and socialists.

Meanwhile, the economy was in tatters. In the years after the 1918 armistice, Europe experienced a severe inflationary crisis that far exceeded the levels seen during the high-inflation episodes of the 1970s and 1980s. In 1923, the Weimar Republic experienced hyperinflation on a nearly unimaginable scale. Postage stamps were issued with face values in the billions of marks, and wages were sometimes paid multiple times per day because money lost value so quickly that it had to be spent immediately. This hyperinflation wiped out savings while also creating opportunities for speculation and enrichment. Inflationary pressures also spread to Italy and the newly established states of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, where they caused significant economic and social strain.

There was a brief respite in the second half of the 1920s. The Locarno Treaties of 1925 normalized relations between France and Germany, and Germany was admitted to the League of Nations, the precursor to today’s United Nations. The years from 1924 to 1928 are often referred to as the “Golden Years” of the Weimar Republic, a period during which Germany’s young democracy appeared to be gaining stability and confidence.

These golden years came to an abrupt end in the autumn of 1929 with the onset of a new and terrible crisis. The Great Depression was and remains the most severe economic downturn of the modern era. Between 1929 and 1933, global industrial production fell by an estimated 37 percent, world trade declined by 68 percent, and agricultural prices dropped by as much as 75 percent. In response, many governments introduced high tariffs and turned toward economic self-sufficiency—a policy chillingly known as “beggar-thy-neighbor”—which nearly brought international investment to a standstill. In Germany, the economic collapse led to mass unemployment, creating fertile ground for anti-democratic movements. Support for Communists and National Socialists surged as the crisis deepened between 1929 and 1933.

Meanwhile, the international order created by the victors of World War I collapsed. In 1933, Japan disregarded the League of Nations’ ruling that its occupation of Manchuria was illegal, and in 1936, the League futilely condemned Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia (Ethiopia). That same year, Mussolini’s Italy formed an alliance with Hitler’s Germany, while the democratic great powers were largely preoccupied with their own domestic challenges. On the international stage during the 1930s, might did make right.

While the world has experienced many crises in recent decades, they pale in comparison with what we have outlined above. For this reason alone, political developments are unlikely to repeat themselves. But there is another fascinating facet of interwar democratic stability that has too often been ignored.

A large democratic wave engulfed Europe after the victory of Western democracies in 1918: In 1919, only a small number of European countries—including the Soviet Union, Hungary, Spain, Portugal, and Albania—were governed by regimes that had not come to power through free elections. Two decades later, the situation had dramatically reversed as the number of European democracies effectively halved, with the democratic breakdowns equally distributed in the 1920s and the 1930s.

This is what keeps today’s observers awake at night. It seemingly shows that even democracies in Europe are not immune to breakdown during crises. But what is often forgotten is how these breakdowns took place in countries that had only democratized after the armistice in 1918. A large body of research has demonstrated that such new democracies are fragile during crises in general and economic crises in particular. The fact that half of the democratic breakdowns took place before the onset of the Great Depression in the autumn of 1929 illustrates their fragility.

More interesting is the resilience of the old democracies. Faced with the same cocktail of crises—economic, social, political, and international—all European countries that already had been democratic in 1918 survived the crises of the 1920s and 1930s. In these countries, democracy had developed gradually from within through long-standing internal political struggles between established elites and emerging mass movements, including those of peasants and workers. This history gave democracy a strong foundation, as both political parties and the broader population came to cultivate mutual respect and to internalize the basic principle of democracy: “sometimes we win, sometimes we lose.”

In countries such as Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Norway, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland, extremist parties attracted little or no support during the 1920s and 1930s. In countries such as Belgium and France, there was more radicalization, both in the streets and at elections. But throughout the old democracies, we find a pattern where the democratic center was able to come together and hold the forces of radicalization at bay.

As political scientist Kurt Weyland has noted, contemporary debates are often marked by conceptual stretching, with terms such as “coup” and “fascism” being used in loose and expansive ways.

A closer look at the interwar period shows that many observers have made false historical analogies with that period. On the first page of How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt note about their native country, the United States, that “…even though we know democracies are always fragile, the one in which we live has somehow managed to defy gravity.” Upon inspection, it becomes clear that a surprising number of countries have, in fact, managed to defy gravity. The resilience of old and established democracies during crises is perhaps the most important lesson to be derived from the interwar developments.

This is not to make a case for complacency. The challenges facing democracy today are real, and the trendline of the past decade is certainly worrying. But the interwar analogy, however vivid and emotionally compelling, is the wrong lens. It conflates the structural fragility of brand new post-1918 democracies, in a world marked by war and about to face a series of dramatic and mutually reinforcing crises, with the very different situation of long-established systems today. It mistakes turbulence for terminal decline. And, as Cardozo cautioned, it risks enslaving our thinking precisely when we need clear thinking most, by obscuring what today’s democracies actually require to defend themselves, and what history suggests they are capable of withstanding.

Jørgen Møller and Svend-Erik Skaaning are both professors of political science at Aarhus University. This article is based on their new book, Seven Myths about Democracy (open access).

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Irakli Miladze, a food courier in Tbilisi, spent long shifts dodging not only the weather, but also fines for using bus lanes. They were the same bus lanes that government officials sped down in their fancy vehicles with impunity.

In late 2022, Miladze did what citizens in a modern democracy are supposed to be able to do: he took to social media and vented his frustrations. His central complaint was not merely that Tbilisi’s public transportation service is badly designed; it was that it is enforced with naked class bias. City hall employees, ministry officials, and State Security Service personnel were, he alleged in a TikTok video, “flying down the bus lane with tinted windows like they own the road,” while delivery drivers working twelve-hour shifts in the rain are fined for using the same lane to do their jobs. “You are acting like a bunch of motherfuckers who think you are better than everyone else,” Miladze said. “How exactly are you better than us? You are not better than us at all.”

The language throughout the video was, to put it mildly, unparliamentary. But despite warning viewers of offensive content, the video was shared 600 times and reached 100,000 viewers, evidently resonating among Georgians navigating the same chaotic traffic.

This did not amuse the impugned officials. Police were dispatched to Miladze’s house (he directed abusive language at the officers, which probably didn’t help his case) and Georgian courts ultimately fined him the equivalent of €180. Miladze took his case all the way to the European Court of Human Rights, hoping to benefit from its long-held view that freedom of expression protects ideas that “offend, shock or disturb.” Unfortunately for Miladze, the seven judges unanimously upheld the fine.

The ECHR’s reasoning deserves serious scrutiny. The judges found that while the video contained criticism of public policy, “a substantial portion of the recording consisted of extremely crude and sexually explicit verbal attacks … personally directed at the mayor and at unnamed police and security officers.” These segments “contained no argument or criticism but rather sustained verbal aggression devoid of informational value,” and “assume[d] the character of targeted and degrading attacks on identifiable individuals.” Such “wanton denigration” solely intended to insult, the court argued, falls outside the protection of freedom of expression.

The ECHR also suggested that public officials may enjoy special protection against verbal abuse: “civil servants must enjoy public confidence in conditions free of undue perturbation if they are to be successful in performing their tasks. It may therefore prove necessary to protect them from offensive and abusive verbal attacks in the course of their duties.”

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That was not all. The court accepted the Georgian authorities’ assertion that the comments amounted to “an attack on the personal dignity of the individuals concerned and constituted violent verbal aggression rather than political criticism.” (Emphasis mine)

In other words, the ECHR conflated an expletive-laden social media rant with violence even though the comments—however offensive—included no threats, no intimidation, and no encouragement or incitement to actual violence.

Finally, the judges devoted critical attention to online speech and repeated previous case law to the effect that:

The internet’s capacity for instantaneous and wide dissemination may justify a stricter regulatory approach, including liability for defamatory or otherwise unlawful speech, because online content poses heightened risks to the enjoyment of human rights.

With regard to TikTok specifically, the ECHR emphasized the platform’s “rapid algorithmic amplification and particularly high youth engagement”—treating the platform’s design and reach as aggravating factors that weighed against the speaker.

The implication is stark: online speech, precisely because it travels further and faster, warrants more restriction, not less. That gets the logic of democratic accountability exactly backwards. A food courier raging at the mayor of Tbilisi in 1995 would have been heard by twenty people. That his 2022 equivalent reached thousands is not an argument for punishing him more severely—it is an argument for why robust protection of such speech matters more than ever.

Miladze may not be the most sympathetic free speech hero. He gave voice to legitimate grievances against the authorities with foul and offensive language. Defenders of the ECHR will point out that the court emphasized that the sanction was administrative rather than criminal, that the fine was modest, and that therefore the restriction on Miladze’s speech complied with the requirement of proportionality.

But these mitigating factors cannot compensate for the fact that the ECHR has seriously eroded the principled protection of free speech. The arguments the court gave are the same ones that 19th century European governments long used to silence radicals demanding universal suffrage, freedom of religion, equality before the law, and justice reforms—values that were hard won and that the ECHR is supposed to uphold.

The difference between living in a country where fierce criticism of the government is protected versus one in which it’s prohibited is striking. Anyone who has spent five minutes on social media knows that thousands of Americans express their views on their elected officials—including the president—in language that would make Miladze’s TikTok seem genteel. Under the standard the ECHR just blessed, all of them would be subject to legal action.

To understand why a free internet is vital for a free society, just look at Hungary. Earlier this year, Péter Magyar’s Tisza party won a two-thirds supermajority in the Hungarian parliament, sweeping away sixteen years of Viktor Orbán’s illiberal democracy. In theory, this should not have been possible. Orbán controlled eighty percent of Hungarian media and had restrictive laws against public protests, minorities, universities and NGOs. But there was one thing Orbán did not control: the internet. It was small, fearless online outlets that broke the corruption story that forced his president, Katalin Novak, to resign in 2024. It was a viral YouTube interview that launched Magyar’s political career. It was social media that allowed Tisza’s organic messaging to outcompete Fidesz’s well-funded propaganda machine. The very tools that the ECHR insists warrant more government control are the tools that just delivered the most important democratic victory in Europe this decade.

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The court’s logic is even more disturbing given the current reality in Georgia, where a Putin-aligned government is cracking down on protest, civil society, and the media, and where social media is the only avenue left to the pro-democratic opposition. In response to the ECHR decision, the Georgian Young Lawyers Association, which represented Miladze, warned of a “severe human rights crisis” in the country. It highlighted that “administrative offense proceedings against individuals on grounds of insult” are now “routine for the Interior Ministry.”

Must Georgians fighting for democracy really show respect and polite deference to the government officials turning their country into a client state of Putin? That would seem to be the direction of travel. Europe is sleepwalking ever deeper into a free speech recession, guided by the very institutions supposed to sound the alarm.

Jacob Mchangama, a contributing writer at Persuasion, is the Executive Director of The Future of Free Speech, a research professor at Vanderbilt University, and a Senior Fellow at The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. His latest book, co-authored with Jeff Kosseff, is The Future of Free Speech.

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Canceling an election. Banning political parties. Blocking access to foreign media. Arresting demonstrators simply for holding signs.

These sound like the tools of dictatorships. But over the past five years, European governments have engaged in all these actions.

In each case, governments have defended these measures as essential to maintain democracy, national security, or the rule of law. Their explanations echo Karl Loewenstein’s concept of “militant democracy”—the argument that the defense of democracy sometimes requires undemocratic acts. Loewenstein published his theory of militant democracy in 1937 amid the rise of European fascism. Winston Churchill expressed a similar idea in 1948, writing, “The letter of the law must not in supreme emergency obstruct those who are charged with its protection and enforcement.”

And yet, these actions give ammunition to authoritarian powers that claim Western democracy is a sham. When Britain banned Kremlin media outlets RT and Sputnik after Russia invaded Ukraine, Vladimir Putin’s spokesman accused the UK of “another step to grossly restrict freedom of speech.”

How did European governments get to the point where far more repressive regimes like Russia can purport to give them lectures on political rights? More pertinently, are there ways European states can defend democracy and national security without using tactics that turn into political and reputational liabilities?

European governments have taken several actions in recent years that go beyond normal democratic practice.

In 2025, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency labeled the most popular party in the country, the Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD), “right-wing extremist.” The classification created a legal basis for wiretapping the AfD and infiltration by undercover agents. German officials said they took action against the AfD because its “xenophobic, anti-minority, Islamophobic” statements threatened the constitutional rights of citizens.

Last December, British police arrested hundreds of demonstrators just for holding up signs containing the words Palestine Action—the name of a group banned under UK terrorism laws after it carried out attacks on British military facilities, defense contractors, financial firms and universities. “This is not even ‘draconian,’ it is vile,” huffed a commentary published by Russia’s RT. (Russian police, meanwhile, have arrested demonstrators simply for holding up blank pieces of paper.)

Romania canceled the first round of its presidential elections in 2024 after the surprise victory of Călin Georgescu, a Russia-friendly new age Christian who appealed to conspiracy theories and superstition, while Moldova banned pro-Russian political parties in 2023 and 2025. Romania attributed the cancellation of its 2024 election to an intense, Russian-backed TikTok campaign supporting Georgescu that violated campaign financing and labeling laws.

There is no mystery as to why some governments have taken dramatic actions to protect liberal democracy from foreign and domestic threats. European society is under extreme stress. The Great Recession in the late 2000s, COVID lockdowns, the hollowing out of Europe’s industrial base, and the arrival of large numbers of immigrants have fed radical, populist movements on the left and right.

Right-wing parties believe national governments and the supranational EU have been far too liberal in economic and social policy, while leftists favor even more social diversity and public spending.

Meanwhile, many governments perceive a foreign policy emergency born of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Trump administration’s ambiguity about defending Europe. They are spending heavily on their own militaries and aid to Ukraine. Leftists and rightists have been able to find common ground in opposing this spending, arguing it could provoke Russia further and that the money is better spent at home. Russian propaganda has sought to intensify the conflicts inside each European nation, amplifying grievances from any quarter against governments that stand up to the Kremlin.

Governments have been at pains to justify their coercive actions as individual special cases. For example, the EU’s ban on Russian media outlets recalled efforts by Putin’s Russia and the Soviet Union to block out Western broadcasts and news sources. But the EU bypassed questions of media freedom, saying its action was essential because Russia’s disinformation was “an operational tool in its assault on Ukraine.”

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Still, as the saying goes: when you’re explaining, you’re losing. Despite constant justifications—many of them well reasoned—the succession of such incidents has a bad look overall for nations that see themselves as beacons of democracy.

The best guarantor of national security is a sense of national unity and confidence. Traumatized by the national chauvinism that unleashed World War II, European elites bet heavily on the EU to develop a “new European man” with a continent-wide, rather than a national, frame of reference. This boomeranged into extreme nationalism by some citizens and disaffection toward their nations by others. In 2023, for example, just 32 percent of EU citizens said they would be willing to fight for their country.

Reversing this trend requires inculcating national pride, spreading knowledge of how democratic societies work, and an understanding of what life is truly like in lands ruled by authoritarian governments and terror groups. Such education is also the best firewall against undemocratic domestic political movements. Making populations less vulnerable to messaging from the extremes is far better than banning parties or prosecuting their leaders once they have built large followings.

Governments need to be alert to threats in the shadows. For example, the massive TikTok campaign to support Georgescu, with its obvious violation of election regulations, was directed mainly to the social feeds of young, rural, and politically radical people. It was almost invisible to state authorities and the pro-democracy community before he emerged with an election win. If the machinations in Georgescu’s favor had been detected earlier, they could have been publicly exposed well before election day.

This is what Moldova’s government did when it disqualified pro-Moscow parties from running. It broadly publicized evidence of vote-buying and other irregularities, dampening claims the parties were banned solely for political reasons.

When the actions of anti-liberal actors are less egregious, strong actions are harder to publicly justify. When French right-wing politician Marine Le Pen was preparing to run for president last year, a court banned her from holding elective office for five years. It found her guilty of diverting millions of euros, provided to pay for aides when she served in the European Parliament from 2004-2016, to pay employees of her own party in France.

Such a crime was not the kind likely to incense citizens, meaning in practice that the verdict played easily into claims authorities were using technicalities to suppress her popular Rassemblement National party. Prosecutors are now investigating Jordan Bardella, who is expected to run in Le Pen’s place if her appeal is unsuccessful, for alleged fraud. A poll in May showed he could win the 2027 race for president.

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Governments should also dare use their most coercive powers only when they are likely to prevail. The British ban of Palestine Action was overturned by the High Court in February; a government appeal is pending. A German court issued a temporary injunction against the state’s designation of the AfD as “confirmed right-wing extremist.” Such developments undermine governments’ claims they deploy extreme measures only in cases of unquestionable certainty and gravity.

Authorities have also looked rather hapless in their bans on RT and Sputnik. The bans sharply cut audiences on the outlets’ main channels, but the networks have gloated over their cat-and-mouse strategy to spread content through dozens of new information brands. “We spit on your sanctions,” RT Chief Editor Margarita Simonyan said.

Given present dangers, democratic governments may have no choice but to take highly undemocratic actions again to fend off authoritarianism and terror. But such measures should always be a last resort—and only after the exhaustion of the less draconian remedies of education, vigilance, and public exposure of malign actors.

Thomas Kent teaches at Columbia University. He was formerly president and CEO of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and standards editor of The Associated Press.

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The apocalyptic scenes coming from Tuapse in the Russian Federation, with oil raining from the skies and burning through the streets, are just the latest illustrations of the measures Ukraine is taking against the Russian oil industry. Ukraine has taken a hammer to Russian oil processing and exports, calling this their long-range sanctions in lieu of European and U.S. sanctions that do not work.

From afar, it might seem that Ukraine is hitting anything within the oil industry it can reach. In fact, Ukrainian attacks are three-pronged, directed at Russian export capacity, budget revenue, and future oil production.

The Way We Were

Although hardly anybody remembers it now, the first Ukrainian attack on Russian oil infrastructure came very early in the war. Two Ukrainian Mi-24 helicopters crossed the Russian border at low altitude in the early hours of April 1, 2022. The target was a Rosneft-owned fuel depot in the city of Belgorod, approximately 35km from the Ukrainian border. Eight fuel tanks caught fire. Two depot workers were injured. Nearly 200 firefighters were deployed.

At the time the rationale for the attack, in addition to a much-needed morale boost for Ukraine, was that it would complicate Russian troop movements by depriving them of fuel.

In 2023, as Ukraine increased the range of its attack drones, it started attacking oil refineries in Russia—initially only within a 500km radius, as the current 2,000km range was still years away. Ukraine targeted specialized equipment—catalytic crackers, hydrotreaters, vacuum distillation units, and primary processing columns. These are technologically complex and depend on Western specialty manufacturers, and Russian sanction avoidance was still in its infancy, so spare parts were difficult to come by.

In fact, Ukrainian attacks contributed to the first fuel export ban in September 2023. A combination of a spike in military demand, holiday traffic, the autumn harvest, and refinery repair delays under sanctions had created real shortages within the country. The state often described as a “fuel station” had no fuel. And since it did not have any storage, it did not have reserves.

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The Other Side of the Refinery

At the start of 2024, Ukrainian drones turned to oil and gas depots, terminals, pumping stations, and port facilities. The burning storage tanks produced the most spectacular results—they burned for days and were filmed extensively by locals. However, the overall consensus was that they were merely a sideline for Ukrainian attacks, and that processing equipment and port infrastructure constituted more valuable targets.

These and further attacks caused Russia some difficulties, but the losses were not considerable—until the war in Iran started. Russia should have finally been able to cash in by selling oil at a higher price. But, in late March 2026, Ukraine hit its most valuable ports in the Baltic Sea, so Russia could not get its oil out of the country.

Then, in April 2026, the Tuapse refinery and marine terminal were hit four times in two weeks, destroying 24 storage tanks as well as the marine terminal that loaded the tankers. Days later, Ukraine struck Perm, over 1,500km from the border, hitting both the Transneft pumping station and the Lukoil-Permnefteorgsintez refinery within 24 hours, with most of the storage tanks at the pumping station reportedly burning. That is when Ukraine’s strategy became clear.

Ode to Storage

Most countries have strategic oil reserves intended for a rainy day. The United States has massive salt caverns that can hold up to 700 million barrels of oil. Their structural integrity requires a certain amount of oil to be kept there at all times, so the oil available for release is usually less. China’s strategic oil reserves are well over one billion barrels, although the exact number is not publicized, and a large part of this storage was created within the last ten years.

Russia, on the other hand, has no strategic oil reserves. They never built them.

The main reason is that most Russian infrastructure was built in the Soviet era, when labor was cheap and the working population had no choice. Corruption existed, but it took different forms. Elites had better access to goods, schools, and housing rather than money. Money could not buy everything. There was no private property in the USSR, and no private businesses. So, all the large infrastructure projects were built to last centuries and withstand a nuclear strike.

However, Soviet officials determined that they did not need any strategic reserves because their oil was in the ground. Consequently, no storage facilities were built. What they did build, though, was a vast network of oil refineries with substantial operational storage. This processing buffer was the closest thing Russia had to a reserve, and this is what it inherited after the fall of the Soviet Union.

While the attacks on oil refineries and the storage tanks were disregarded almost as publicity stunts, they turned out to be very important in combination with the attacks on Primorsk, Ust-Luga, Novorossiysk, and Tuapse ports. When ports are damaged and cannot move oil or fuel out of the country, that oil or fuel has to stay put, so needs to be stored somewhere. Further, attacks on ports usually involve attacks on storage tanks as well, meaning the remaining tanks are insufficient to store all the leftover oil. Again, it would not be an issue if the refineries had all their oil tanks intact and ready for storage. Refineries, however, have been fixing or replacing their storage tanks almost non-stop for the past couple of years. Building a large 50,000 cubic meter storage tank can take up to two years, smaller ones up to a year—and that’s assuming the imported parts are available.

In summary, Russian producers end up with oil they cannot store. Existing storage is full, so they have no room for newly extracted oil. Oil wells, however, cannot be turned on or off with a flick of a switch—at least not in Russia. Oil wells in Russia are mostly old, drilled decades ago and worked hard ever since. They depend on continuous water injection to maintain reservoir pressure, and they produce oil with very high water content. When such a well is closed, paraffin solidifies inside it, pressure drops, and the reservoir itself suffers permanent damage. Once production has been stopped, it can be restarted only with significant investment, and that investment exceeds the future profits from the well. Which means that once an oil well is closed in Russia, that should be the end of it.

When the Wells Bottom Out

This is already happening. According to Reuters reporting in late April, Russian oil output has fallen by up to 600,000 barrels per day compared to late 2025 levels—roughly 7 percent of total production, and the sharpest monthly drop since the COVID pandemic. Industry analyst Mikhail Krutikhin has cited more recent reports suggesting the figure may already be approaching 800,000 barrels per day. Either way, this is not the total. Production has been falling steadily as long as ports and refineries remain under attack.

That production will not come back. Russia can drill new wells, yes—but with what money? Foreign investment has dried up, almost all oil companies are under direct Kremlin rule, and around 40 percent of the Russian federal budget is committed to defense and security. There is simply no money for new wells.

If the irreversible decrease in oil production were not enough, the current shutting of wells also reduces budget revenues. Oil in Russia is taxed at the point of extraction. As long as oil is being extracted, the revenue stream is maintained and taxes are paid into the budget, even if it never leaves Russia. When oil can no longer be extracted because there is nowhere to store it, even if there is demand domestically, current tax revenues drop. And future ones are affected too—there will always be less oil to tax from that moment onwards.

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Sanctions Are as Sanctions Do

Most of the recent commentary has framed Ukraine’s spring 2026 strikes on oil infrastructure as an effort to prevent Russia from cashing in on high oil prices during the Iran war. And that is correct, although only on the tactical level. Denying Russia additional revenue is only the immediate result of these attacks. The strategic objective is to reduce Russia’s oil production capacity altogether—not to lower earnings per barrel, but to ensure that fewer barrels exist to be earned from. The Iran war provided a tactical opportunity to accelerate the campaign and to magnify its visible effects. But the campaign was already a long time in the making.

Western sanctions, such as they were, sought—in theory—to restrict Russia’s oil revenues. In reality, they never worked. Russia routed around the G7 price cap from the start, and the West lacked either the will or the means to close the loopholes. Under Trump, sanctions multiplied while enforcement disappeared entirely.

In the meantime, Ukraine, having relied on the Western world to do what it claims to do best—namely, enforce the international order—in the end had to work out how to decrease Russian oil revenues on its own. Unlike Trump’s sanctions, which can be turned on and off without rhyme or reason, and unlike European sanctions, which can be reversed the moment the EU’s financial position weakens, Ukrainian strikes cannot be walked back once a certain result has been achieved. By hitting the entire oil chain, including depots, pumping stations, marine terminals, and storage facilities, Ukraine has removed close to 10 percent of Russian oil production from the equation. Unless Russia makes considerable investments in new oil wells, this 10 percent will not be recovered.

And under current circumstances, with a large fiscal deficit, an economy in catastrophic condition, and almost half of the budget committed to the war, that investment is not coming.

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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In July 2021, Tunisia’s president, Kais Saied, dismissed his prime minister, suspended parliament, and began ruling by decree. The country that had been the lone democratic success of the Arab Spring—the same country that had produced a Nobel Peace Prize-winning national dialogue, ratified a celebrated constitution, and held competitive elections—folded with little public resistance. Polls in the following months showed majority support for the consolidation. The institutions that Western democracy theorists had spent a decade praising did not so much fail as become irrelevant.

This is an intriguing puzzle. Tunisia had nearly everything a democracy requires, according to traditional political science. It had a civil society—particularly the powerful Union Générale Tunisienne du Travail (UGTT)—that had supported the country through the 2013 crisis. It had a written constitution drafted through compromise. It had elections, peaceful transfers of power, and an active press. By 2014, observers could plausibly point to Tunisia as evidence that Arab democracy was not an oxymoron. But seven years later, Tunisians traded that democracy for a strongman, and they did so without much regret.

The standard postmortems emphasize institutional weakness, factionalism, or constitutional design. While these factors had an impact, they miss the deeper story. Tunisia’s democratic collapse was not, at its core, a crisis of institutions. It was a crisis of economic performance that institutions could not absorb, which hollowed out trust, and finally made authoritarian populism look like the rational choice. This provides both a parallel and a warning for America.

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The Economic Roots of Tunisia’s Trust Collapse

The 2011 revolution did not start with a vote or a manifesto; it started with an unemployed fruit vendor setting himself on fire in protest against police harassment. The original grievance was economic precariousness, and the democratic transition that followed inherited economic obligations it could not meet. Between 2011 and 2021, Tunisia’s youth unemployment hovered above 30 percent, with university graduate unemployment higher still. Real GDP growth lagged behind the demographic wave. Foreign direct investment never recovered to pre-revolution levels. The informal economy expanded as the formal sector failed to absorb new entrants.

Why couldn’t the new democracy deliver? Part of the answer is structural. Tunisia inherited a French-derived labor code that made hiring and firing costly, discouraging investment in jobs for young workers. These rules might suit a wealthy European economy with deep social insurance and high productivity. But in a middle-income country with 30 percent youth unemployment, they functioned as a ceiling on opportunity.

The deeper problem was political. The UGTT—without which the revolutionary coalition could not have held together—had veto power over the very reforms most likely to produce employment. IMF-backed structural packages stalled. Subsidies remained. Stagnation eroded trust.

This is the missing link between Ben Ali’s ouster and Saied’s coup: a decade in which democracy delivered freedom but not work, and in which young Tunisians, who had supplied the bodies for the revolution, found themselves with the same economic prospects under democracy as under autocracy—and concluded, not unreasonably, that the political form was a secondary concern.

The Civil Society Paradox

The role of the UGTT illuminates a paradox at the heart of democratic theory. Civil society is supposed to be a bulwark of democracy. In Tunisia, it was—yet it was also one of the obstacles to democratic survival.

The United States has no analog to the UGTT, and the decline of American labor unions is a real loss for workers’ voices. But the underlying pattern is familiar. Organized interests across both parties block productivity-enhancing reform—in housing, occupational licensing, infrastructure permitting, healthcare, and education—and citizens experience the resulting stagnation as a generalized institutional failure. The lesson is not that more unions would save American democracy, but that democracy requires coalitions willing to deliver material improvement, and that organized interest groups can obstruct this delivery. This is already apparent in many areas of American life, with democratic processes such as citizen participation or interest groups holding back infrastructure development.

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How Economic Failure Becomes Institutional Failure

This economic story gives context to the decline of trust in the Middle East, North Africa, and beyond. Citizens do not lose faith in judiciaries, legislatures, political parties, and police in the abstract—they lose faith when those institutions fail to resolve economic tensions. And once trust bottoms out, institutions stop functioning as shields and instead start functioning as targets.

Tunisia’s party system collapsed because no party could deliver on economic promises, and the public concluded—reasonably—that the parties were a cartel of bickering elites who differed in every way except their inability to provide meaningful work. Saied’s ascent was a populist verdict on that cartel. The American parallel is unmistakable: decades of wage stagnation, regional decline, and elite indifference have produced populist movements on both the left (Bernie Sanders, Zohran Mamdani) and the right (Donald Trump, JD Vance) with a shared diagnosis of failure despite disagreement on solutions.

This is echoed in the undermining of the judiciary. Saied dismantled Tunisia’s judiciary by leveraging widespread perceptions of corruption—perceptions rooted in decades of Ben Ali-era capture that the 2011 transition could never fully repair. Low trust made the institution disposable. American politicized judicial appointments have similarly eroded perceptions of neutrality, creating a permission structure for narrowing judicial authority that would have been unthinkable even a generation ago.

Most striking is the trust differential between security services. Tunisia in 2019 had roughly 62 percent trust in the police compared with 96 percent trust in the armed forces—a pattern that recent research identifies as a leading indicator of backsliding. Low local-security trust drives protest; high military trust legitimizes consolidation. The United States is seeing declining confidence in federal and local policing alongside persistent high trust in the armed forces. While economic grievance is what puts citizens in the streets, the trust differential is what determines how the state responds when they get there.

The final warning is in the legislature. Saied sidelined parliament by ruling through decree once trust in the legislature had collapsed. The American legislative branch is drifting in the same direction, with executive orders rising as congressional productivity falls. A legislature that cannot deliver on economic policy becomes a legislature whose bypass the public will tolerate, and, eventually, ratify.

The American Ledge

The United States is not Tunisia, and the differences matter. America’s GDP per capita is more than fifteen times Tunisia’s. Its institutions are older, and its constitutional system has survived crises that would have ended most democracies.

But none of this is grounds for complacency.

The American trust collapse has its own economic roots. Median wage growth has lagged behind productivity for four decades. Housing and healthcare costs have outpaced wages on nearly every metric. Regional economic divergence has stranded entire communities—manufacturing towns in Ohio and Pennsylvania, agricultural regions across the Plains, former resource-extraction economies in the West—in conditions of long-term decline. The cohort of Americans now entering middle age is the first in modern history that does not expect to do better than its parents.

These conditions do not produce 30 percent youth unemployment. They produce something subtler and arguably more dangerous: the persistent political signal, sent through every available channel, that the system is no longer delivering. When that signal reaches every institution simultaneously—Congress, the courts, local police, federal agencies, the parties—the result is the sort of low-trust landscape that Saied exploited, transposed into a larger and more consequential democracy.

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Restoring the Economic Foundation of Democratic Trust

Tunisia’s tragedy was not simply that its citizens lost faith in institutions. It was that its institutions, constrained by a revolutionary coalition that could not reform itself, could no longer earn that faith. This triggered the descent into authoritarianism.

The American lesson is therefore not to redouble institutional defense alone, but to build coalitions willing to deliver the housing, the jobs, the wages, and the opportunity that make trust rational. Democratic reformers focused only on procedural integrity are merely treating symptoms. Without economic renewal—and without the political courage to confront the organized interests that block it on every side—the institutional defenses will not hold.

Dania Arayssi is a Program Head and Senior Analyst at New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy, where she works on policy research and analysis at the Central Asia Center.

Henry Rogers is a student fellow at the New Lines Institute, a contributor to the Middle East Policy Council, and a public affairs consultant with the Washington AI Network.

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ICE’s budget has grown dramatically in recent years, now rivaling, and in some cases exceeding, that of entire branches of the U.S. military. It has been given one mission: the deportation of over 10 million people with virtually no constraints.

Legally and ethically, ICE has pushed past acceptability. Due process is ignored, family members are lost to the system, and excessive enforcement methods have caused public outcry.

Demographically, this mission is setting the United States up for failure in the medium- and long-term. Like many Western countries, the U.S. birth rate is slowing; combined with a low-immigration scenario, this would lead to population decline and all the socio-economic complexities that this entails. With Trump’s deportation campaign, we are already seeing immigration and naturalization rates fall faster than at any point in recent history.

Serious immigration reform was never meant to be like this, and Americans know it. The mission and the agency are now being seriously questioned. Defunding and abolishing ICE are no longer fringe positions. In the upcoming midterm elections, Americans will decide whether ICE’s current mission still has a place in this country.

The danger, however, is in treating defunding and abolishing as the solution rather than the starting point. We need to confront harder, more consequential questions: Who enforces immigration law going forward? What would become of the personnel who, until recently, had a mission, carried guns, and have been told they have federal immunity?

Let’s start with the easier question.

How should immigration law be enforced?

Any functional immigration system rests on three things: the capacity of the host country to absorb newcomers, the ability of migrants to contribute, and the humanity to recognize that not everyone arrives under the same circumstances.

That last point matters more than it might seem. There is a fundamental difference between an economic migrant in search of opportunity and an asylum seeker in search of safety. The U.S. system stopped distinguishing meaningfully between the two, and that failure is a fundamental part of the current crisis.

Over the past forty years, legal immigration has become progressively harder. The reforms of the 1980s and 1990s (the Immigration Reform and Control Act and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act), as well as the post-September 11 expansion of enforcement through the creation of Homeland Security and the Secure Fence Act, steadily narrowed legal pathways and increased enforcement—whilst doing little to address the millions already here. While the government attempted to manage this contradiction, the underlying problem remained: legal immigration was too slow, too complex, and too opaque for a country that still represented opportunity to the world.

That gap was filled by asylum. Migrants learned that filing a claim triggered a legal process that allowed them to remain and work for years while awaiting a decision—a rational response to a broken system. An administrative system designed to handle tens of thousands of cases a year was suddenly handling close to a million. The backlog became the system.

Fixing this requires three things. First, legal immigration pathways need to be coherent and timely. Canada’s historical points-based system, which matches migrant skills to economic need, offers a useful model. Second, the asylum system needs to be properly staffed and designed to distinguish genuine refugees from economic migrants. The 2024 Border Act, voted down in the Senate under pressure from Trump, came close to addressing this by proposing thousands of additional asylum officers and a faster adjudication process. Third, there needs to be a path to legalization for people who have demonstrated they are contributing members of society. France allows undocumented residents of over three years to apply for legal status if they have worked for at least twelve of the previous twenty-four months, a pragmatic framework worth seriously considering here.

As for those with criminal records, existing agencies—local police, the FBI, and the DEA—are already equipped to handle them. Deportation remains a legitimate tool in those cases.

A humane, coherent immigration system is achievable, but it requires an agency that can differentiate between opportunity migrants, asylum seekers, and criminals. ICE was deliberately designed to blur those lines. It is impossible to turn an agency built for monodimensional paramilitary enforcement into one that makes civil, humane decisions.

What happens to the people shaped by ICE?

Many within ICE come from backgrounds marked by economic insecurity, limited opportunity, or social marginalization. ICE offers them something powerful: a uniform, authority, a sanctioned enemy, and a narrative. Over time, this mission becomes their moral framework. Loyalty and betrayal, order and chaos, us and them. As ICE agents become increasingly isolated from the public because of the job they are being asked to do, they must choose to either leave or double down.

Dismantling the agency or removing its authority without taking into account how it has shaped its employees thus creates certain risks.

• Diffusion: Former personnel do not vanish. They could reappear in local law enforcement, private security, militias, and online extremist networks. While their location has changed, their self-image will remain the same.

• Re-composition: Groups formerly under federal mandate often reorganize, explicitly or implicitly, around the same narratives that once justified their actions. Violence is no longer framed as enforcement, but as “defense,” “patriotism,” or “restoration of order.” Groups may start appearing outside the law, just like the KKK appeared right after the Civil War.

• Moral inversion: Individuals who once acted under state sanction may even come to see the state itself as illegitimate. History shows this clearly: post-Reconstruction militias in the American South illustrate how former enforcers, stripped of formal authority, reinterpreted extra-legal violence as defending “order” against a state they no longer recognized. Internationally, the collapse of French Algeria offers an interesting parallel: after withdrawing from the colony in 1962, former counterinsurgency forces, the Organisation Armée Secrète, turned their violence against the French state, assassinating officials and bombing civilian targets in France. When state-sanctioned enforcers lose formal authority, the narratives that justified violence do not disappear. We may see the emergence of militia groups targeting what they believe is an illegitimate government.

In short: dismantling ICE without reintegration and oversight is more dangerous than anyone seems to realize.

The harder question

Calls to defund and abolish ICE remain morally compelling, but incomplete. We need to have a serious conversation about what the enforcers of yesterday will become tomorrow. History offers relevant precedents, the most striking of which is de-Nazification.

When Nazi Germany collapsed, its enforcers did not simply return to civilian life unchanged—dismantling the regime required significant investment in education, accountability, and a deliberate cultural reckoning to establish that the behavior of the prior regime was unacceptable. We may need to ask ourselves similar questions as to how we ensure ICE agents do not revert to violence. That might mean mandatory reintegration programs, psychological support for personnel leaving the agency, and explicit community engagement requirements before former agents can move into other roles.

Ending ICE is not just about cutting a line item. It is about ensuring that what ICE has built—the culture, the identity, the permission to use force—does not simply move somewhere it is even harder to control.

Benjamin Aimlin is a New York-based French-American Managing Director at an international consulting firm who writes about democratic institutions and policy.

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In Iran, ambulances are no longer always trusted, especially in times of crisis. During protests, people have watched emergency vehicles move through streets not to rescue the injured, but allegedly to transport security forces, arrest demonstrators, or move detainees. This image says something larger about the Islamic Republic. The regime does not only repress society from outside, but enters civilian life, uses its institutions, borrows its vehicles, hides behind its buildings—and then presents itself as the victim when those same spaces are caught in the consequences of conflict.

This has long been part of the Islamic Republic’s evolution, not an accident or a temporary wartime improvisation. Over the last three decades, the regime has gradually blurred the line between civilian and security (or military) institutions. Universities, hospitals, schools, banks, municipalities, and even private companies have been penetrated by the security apparatus, including the Basij and Herasat offices. For the regime, civilian institutions are more than pure autonomous spaces; they are resources that can be used for surveillance, ideological control, repression, military movement, and propaganda. Unlike other authoritarian states, the regime doesn’t just control society; it securitizes it.

Herasat offices operate inside universities, ministries, banks, municipalities, and public organizations. Their job is to protect buildings and sensitive information, but also to monitor employees, supervise behavior, enforce ideological discipline, and shape hiring and promotion decisions. The civil Basij organization also performs a similar role inside schools, universities, workplaces, and neighborhoods. It is a multifaceted organization. The Basij is an armed militia, as well as a social-security network that extends the state’s eyes and arms into everyday life.

But the blurring of civilian and security spheres has also become operational, meaning that during moments of crisis, the regime uses civilian tools for coercive and security purposes. For example, ambulances, buses, ordinary cars, commercial trucks, hospitals, schools, universities, and mosques can all become part of the security system. The regime benefits from the civilian appearance of these spaces and vehicles. They are familiar, less suspicious, and often protected by social trust. That trust becomes a weapon.

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The use of ambulances is one of the clearest examples. Iran’s military and security agencies used ambulances as military vehicles to arrest and transport protesters and political rivals, and to move them to detention centers, for example during the Women, Life, Freedom movement.

This is important because an ambulance normally carries a special moral and legal status. Representing medical neutrality, it has access to restricted areas and people are expected to move aside for it. When the state uses it to carry security forces or detainees, it destroys public trust not only in the regime but also in emergency medicine. The victim is not only the arrested protester. The victim is also the next injured person who may not receive help because people now fear the ambulances.

Similarly, hospitals have also been treated as extensions of the securitization of civil institutions. According to Reuters, Iranian security forces removed protesters from hospitals and detained them—with the support of the Basij and Herast offices at the hospitals. The Revolutionary Guards took wounded patients while police and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) members searched hospital records to identify discharged protesters. The same pattern holds for other civilian vehicles, such as ordinary cars, vans, buses, and commercial trucks, which were used to transport security personnel or detainees. Claims about specific private companies, including Mihan ice cream trucks, have circulated widely; in one case, security forces used one such truck to transport a 17-year-old girl to a detention center, then raped and killed her.

According to Amnesty International, Iran’s highest military body instructed commanders across the country—including the Basij and plainclothes security agents—to “severely confront” protesters. This matters because repression in Iran is carried out through overlapping institutions, some formal and some informal, some uniformed and some hidden inside society.

Since the June 2025 Iran-Israel war, this blurring of security and civilian domains has become even more stark, showing that the regime’s use of civilian space is not limited to domestic repression but is in fact part of its wartime defense. During the U.S.-Israeli airstrikes, Iranian security and military forces moved personnel, weapons, and equipment into civilian sites, including schools, hospitals, stadiums, universities, mosques, parks, and government offices across the country. This is not simply about hiding. It is about transferring risk onto society. In some cases, the Islamic Republic even used civilian trucks for transportation and for the launch of missiles and drones during the war.

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International humanitarian law is clear that civilian objects are protected from attack unless and for such time as they become military objectives. Even when a civilian site is misused by military or security forces, any attack must still obey the laws of war. The Iranian regime is creating ambiguity and turning schools, hospitals, ambulances, and commercial vehicles into contested spaces by using them for coercive or military purposes.

This is the regime’s double game: it militarizes civilian life and then, when those spaces are damaged or threatened, it plays the victim card by presenting them as purely civilian, and uses those images for propaganda. This victimhood narrative is powerful because it contains a partial truth: that civilians are suffering. When civilian buildings and equipment are damaged, ordinary people are the ones who pay the price. But the regime hides its own role in creating that danger, denying that it placed security forces inside civilian areas or used medical institutions as instruments of control or transformed schools, universities, hospitals, and commercial infrastructure into parts of the security system.

This strategy undermines Iranian society from within and erodes political and social trust. Iranians distrust ambulances, fear hospitals, and avoid treatment, especially during protests. They understand that universities, schools, and mosques are not safe, as they are used for military purposes. The regime’s survival strategy creates insecurity everywhere.

This is why the concept of a modern security state is a useful framework. The Islamic Republic is more than a theocratic regime—it is also a military dictatorship. It is a system in which ideology and security reinforce each other inside everyday institutions. The mosque, school, university, hospital, workplace, and neighborhood are all connected to the survival of the regime. The result is the transformation of the civilian sphere into a security field.

Many analysts still look for a clean division between civilian and military life in Iran. They ask whether an institution is educational or security-related (like Minab School, which was struck earlier this year), and whether a vehicle is medical or used by military commanders. But in the Islamic Republic, the answer is often both: the form may be civilian, while the function is security. For example, the university may produce engineers, but it may also serve the defense establishment and work on military equipment.

This does not mean that every civilian institution in Iran is a legitimate military target. That approach would be legally and morally wrong. But it does mean that we must understand how the regime itself has polluted the civilian sphere and made civilian life vulnerable by inserting security apparatus into it.

The Islamic Republic has endangered Iranians by placing security and military equipment and personnel inside the spaces where ordinary people live. Iranians are trapped inside this system, which exposes them to risk and then turns them into propaganda images. In fact, the regime, despite claiming to defend the people, constantly sacrifices the safety of the people for its own survival. By removing the boundary between civilian life and the military, the regime has turned Iranian society into part of its battlefield.

Jason Brodsky is the policy director of United Against Nuclear Iran.

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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