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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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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.

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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The victory of the opposition in the Hungarian elections of April 12, 2026 was nothing short of spectacular. Péter Magyar and the Tisza party won 53% of the vote and 141 out of 199 parliamentary seats, ending 16 years of governance by the illiberal populist Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party. Fidesz rewrote the constitution, including changing the electoral rules, suborned the judiciary, clamped down on independent media, nationalized significant sectors of the economy, and engaged in massive corruption. Yet the party continued to hold elections. This time, the pendulum decisively swung away from Fidesz.

Hungarians cheered, and analysts celebrated. But what does this victory mean?

First, it does not imply that Hungary was a full-fledged democracy under Orbán. Some observers claimed that the Hungarian case shows that “competitive authoritarianism” is a contradiction in terms. Yet autocrats hold elections, often to forestall change—and they often misjudge their own popularity and the likely outcome. This was the case in the Philippines in 1986, in Poland in 1989, and in Chile in 1990. In Hungary, Orbán won successive elections in 2014, 2018, and 2022, and apparently thought his message of regime stability, oil supplies from Russia, and protecting Hungary from a Ukrainian invasion would continue to sway voters.

Second, this is not the end of illiberal populism, either in Europe or elsewhere. An autocrat suffered a blow in Hungary. But international demonstration effects are limited, and most voters care more about economic performance than democratic freedoms per se. Indeed, voters are often willing to trade democracy for other goods—and view the parties they support as appropriately democratic. These partisan evaluations of democratic performance mean that most voters see their parties as democratic, whether they support President Trump, PiS in Poland, or Modi in India. (In the United States, the share of voters who prioritize democratic values in their voting choices is less than 10%.)

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Yet even if voters don’t care that much about democracy, they do care about their pocketbooks. And here, Tisza’s victory carries another important lesson: Fidesz used its stranglehold on power to engage in unprecedented corruption—and the very real costs of that corruption are what brought them down. People care about corruption, not as an affront to democratic rules, but as an insult to their dignity and their wallets. And that was Magyar’s unrelenting message: corruption is everywhere, it has cost us EU funding, and it costs us untold damage in our standard of living, our health care and education, and the future of our children. Fidesz got rich, while everyone else became impoverished.

There are three other important implications for would-be democratizers. First, the ground game was everything in Tisza’s case. Magyar visited tiny villages and hamlets, usually the bastions of Fidesz support, and consistently delivered his message that everyday Hungarians were bearing the costs of corruption. He emphasized patriotic themes, surrounding himself with Hungarian flags and recitations of Hungarian national poetry and songs. Even the party’s slogan, “Now or Never,” echoed the 1848 uprising against Habsburg rule. Finally, he did not shame Fidesz supporters, but instead invited them to join a broad coalition to reclaim Hungary, winning them over with a combination of patriotism, multiple visits to key areas, and a consistent and credible message.

Second, autocrats live by gerrymandering—and die by it. Among other changes, Fidesz had reduced the number of parliamentary districts and concentrated opposition support (even if it resulted in districts of wildly varying sizes), and increased the compensation votes given to the largest parties. All of this was layered on top of an already disproportional electoral system, one that saw Fidesz win in 2010 with 53% of the vote and well over two-thirds of the seats. However, this institutional engineering meant that, when the swing occurred, it was even more decisive: Tisza now controls nearly 71% of the seats.

Third, the real work has just begun. Undoing the damage done by Fidesz to the judiciary, the public welfare system, the economy, and all the other sectors of the polity and the economy is going to be both a monumental and painstaking task. Yet even here, as every East European optimist will tell you, things could be worse. Fidesz politicized agencies to punish its rivals and competitors: media boards went after recalcitrant media, while tax audits and laws punished civil society organizations and disloyal politicians alike. All of this required retaining state capacity in some form.

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Here, the contrast with the Trump administration could not be starker: while Fidesz suborned institutions, the Trump administration is destroying them. Ironically, that limits some of the damage: it is difficult to pursue rivals with tax investigations when the IRS has fired 38% of its workers devoted to pursuing tax fraud among the very wealthy. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has abolished USAID and other agencies, effectively hobbling American foreign policy and, worse yet, its soft power abroad. The task in the United States will be enormously more challenging. Some agencies will not be rebuilt. The reputation of the United States has been permanently diminished. Neither one of these challenges applies to Hungary, where the EU is already in the process of releasing funding.

There are other complications: Magyar continues to be committed to several aspects of the Fidesz program: oil imports from Russia, minimal immigration to Hungary, and a focus on Hungarian sovereignty. As a defector from Fidesz in 2024, his democratic bona fides are not impeccable.

Nonetheless, Magyar and Tisza have brought down an autocratic regime that had been in power for 16 years, and that had systematically flouted democratic norms, international cooperation, and basic decency. Illiberal populism is not dead, and most voters care more about their pocketbooks than about lofty democratic ideals. But we owe several existence proofs to the opposition victory in Hungary, where the difference was a credible candidate, consistent focus on corruption, and campaigning where it matters the most—not just where it was convenient.

Anna Grzymala-Busse is the Michelle and Kevin Douglas Professor of International Studies in the Department of Political Science and the director of the Europe Center at Stanford University.

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Imagine the following exercise. You are asked to write down the values you wish both your neighbors and your elected officials possessed. You have as much time as you need, but there is a catch: you cannot use AI or any digital crutch. It is just you and a blank page. What do you scribble?

The difficulty of the task reveals a deeper tension in American civic life. Values are not easy to ponder or discuss, in part because the term has been hollowed out by the clichés of stump speeches. Phrases like “middle-class values” or “family values” have become placeholders that can mean almost anything to anyone. Yet the challenge runs deeper. We lack a shared vocabulary for the virtues we expect from one another and from those who govern us.

What, then, do we mean by “values?” Are personal characteristics such as industriousness or integrity values? They are—but they are often treated as private traits rather than civic expectations. One could easily imagine listing honesty, decency, kindness, and courage. There are also values we cherish collectively—liberty, freedom, individual responsibility, privacy—yet these are often invoked as national ideals rather than the qualities we hope to see embodied in individual leaders. They belong on the list as well.

Call it a moral deficit or a societal ethical breach, but candidates who speak meaningfully about civic virtue, and who integrate those virtues into their public commitments, are likely to resonate with a public that yearns for something steadier and more principled. When one looks at our collective lists, I suspect that—once rephrased and refined—what emerges is a shared blueprint for civic virtue.

Wisdom. Decency. Character. Public-spiritedness—the internal drive to seek the good of others. Moderation in temperament. The ability to reason, knowing that others do not share your view. Courage, including the willingness to articulate ideas that are not always popular. These are not small aspirations. It is not easy to be courageous, wise, or unselfish. Civic virtue is both something we occasionally grasp and something we continually strive to attain. It is both discernible and aspirational.

The purpose here is not to catalog every virtue but to raise a broader point. As the Democratic Party looks toward the 2026 congressional elections and the 2028 presidential race, commentators across the ideological spectrum note that it must address a wide range of concrete issues—national security, health care, housing, technology, climate, immigration, inflation, and deficits—and yes, even social issues such as trans rights. But alongside these policy debates lies a deeper need: a conversation about civic virtue and the values we hold, and wish to hold, as a nation.

Can one speak simultaneously to liberals and progressives who will reliably vote Blue, to 2024 Trump voters, and to disengaged non-voters? The answer is yes, but only if the message is grounded in conviction and purpose. Yet the current roster of potential candidates has not articulated a coherent civic-virtue agenda.

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Some political figures have embraced a performative, profane vernacular as a way to attract attention and signal authenticity. A recent New York Times headline noted this trend: “Online and on the Stump, Democrats Embrace a Four-Letter Word.” How myopic and unvirtuous. What about appealing to what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature?” Being glib or profane—whether in private or on the campaign trail—speaks to one’s character. In an age when clicks and likes are treated as political currency, it is tempting to seek the popular rather than the greater good. Profanity can be funny, even cathartic, but it does little to advance civic virtue.

Candidates of all party affiliations would benefit from revisiting Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba’s landmark 1963 study The Civic Culture. The authors remind us that a democracy survives not only through the strength of its institutions but through the habits, expectations, and values of its citizens. Our political culture is not created in a vacuum. We the people shape it, as do our leaders. We determine what we discuss, how we sound, and which virtues we elevate or ignore.

Across age, race, and party affiliation, Americans consistently express a desire to be respectful, strong, free, and courageous. Candidates who speak to the better angels of our nature—who appeal to civic virtue rather than to cynicism or spectacle—may find themselves inspiring something larger than a single election cycle. They may help renew our political culture for years to come.

And in doing so, they will remind us why we treasure our Bill of Rights, why we cherish liberty, and why the American experiment continues to serve as a beacon of hope for people around the world.

Robert M. Eisinger is a political scientist. He is the author of several works, including The Evolution of Presidential Polling.

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

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Democratic debate on artificial intelligence is increasingly taking place not in Washington but in village council chambers. Here, small communities who never imagined their voices were relevant to the dialogue on AI are demanding answers to why local governments are signing away land and energy infrastructure to hyperscale data centers.

In packed council meetings like those in Perry Village and other small towns across Ohio, the dividing line hasn’t been party affiliation, but instead who profits and who pays. While these debates focus on the benefits and pitfalls of Big Tech, they tell us even more about how—and if—local democracy still functions.

Hyperscale data centers are the physical infrastructure of today’s AI. These are data centers that occupy over ten thousand square feet and house 5,000 or more servers. As of writing, 613 of the 4,000 data centers in the United States are hyperscale, with a combined 18,289 megawatts of capacity. But “hyperscale” is rapidly scaling up: an additional 916 hyperscale data centers currently planned and under construction will raise total capacity by more than an order of magnitude to 300,000 megawatts of capacity.

In the process of generating the computing power (known as “compute”) essential to AI leadership, these hyperscale data centers consume staggering energy and water resources with profound impacts on communities. The new data centers may provide no benefits to the citizens in these communities, yet in town after town, deals are being quietly struck between Big Tech, developers, and local officials before residents hear about them.Perry Village is an egregious case. In July 2024, Mayor James Gessic and the Village Council entered a purchase agreement with Province Group, a California-based developer, to buy 163 acres of village-owned land at $8.4 million. The scale of the data center has since expanded to 230 acres, one-sixth the size of Perry Village itself. The data center, which borders local homes, farms, and the school baseball field, would include six buildings of about 250,000 square feet each and consume 200,000 gallons of water daily.

Few of the village’s 1,600 residents heard even a whisper of the plan in the year after the deal was signed. Mayor Gessic and key council members had signed NDAs with Province Group before negotiations began. Binding elected officials to silence through NDAs has become a standard feature of data center development across Ohio, and their proliferation points to a deliberate strategy. It wasn’t until June 12 of last year, when the Council voted to approve the new zoning ordinances for the data center, that the village began to talk.

What followed is a demonstration of the local democratic process reasserting itself. Within two weeks of the council’s June 12 vote, residents gathered enough signatures to force a referendum, and the council rescinded the ordinances so they could do further research. Then, at a quiet evening meeting in September, the Council reinstated the ordinances, a move that sparked outrage not just among Perry residents but among county officials and community leaders from surrounding towns.

Morris Beverage III, a Republican commissioner for Lake County, was among those shocked by the move: “They scheduled a special meeting, presented it, then had a council meeting at 7PM to vote and approve it under emergency provisions so that it could not be referendumed. That’s actively trying to deceive your constituents.”

As the local movement to stop the data center gained steam, details of Perry Village’s finances and the data center contract shed light on why the Council may have felt pressure to push forward approvals. The Village’s finances were under stress, and the signed contract could bankrupt the Village if the deal didn’t go through.

“The contract they signed says they have to deliver a clean deed free of any referendum, or any deed restrictions with proper zoning in place for their intended purpose,” says Commissioner Beverage. “Either a data center was being built or they were going to financially ruin the village.”

Carl Setzer, a Democratic congressional candidate for the 14^th District, where Perry Village is located, has made the data center debate a core pillar of his campaign, attending protests and council meetings while regularly sharing updates on his social channels.

“They want to slam these through, get a bunch of underprepared solicitors and village councils to agree to notorious terms, and get these things built ahead of the realization that these should be metered,” says Setzer. “They want to get as much free infrastructure into these communities as possible before governments realize there’s a tax structure being left on the table.”

An already troubling local story became something larger in January 2026, when Meta and Vistra announced a 20-year power purchase agreement covering three Ohio nuclear plants, including the Perry Nuclear Plant visible from the backyards of the Perry residents mobilizing against the data center.

Meta’s power purchase agreement for the Perry Nuclear Plant poured fuel on an already charged debate, and in January, citizens began organizing and seeking legal support to ensure they had a voice in the process.

Erin Derzon, an army veteran and owner of a nearby farm, helped form ConserveOhio, which is gathering signatures for a state-wide ban on new data centers that consume more than 25 megawatts.

“With this deal, Meta gets to take the power from that nuclear facility, and then our nuclear facility is no longer generating public power,” says Derzon. “Out here, if the wind blows wrong, the power’s out. We have rolling blackouts and brownouts year-round. Some people are without power for weeks on end.”

Derzon, who also works professionally in habitat restoration and wetland management, argues that the environmental costs extend well beyond the data center’s noise and heat: “They hyperfilter the groundwater and add PFAS-PFOS lubricant so the water can move through the small server coils. They don’t have to filter it back out. By default, my beef and maple syrup will be contaminated with PFAS, and I will never be able to get an organic certification.” (While data center cooling, manufacturing, and fire suppression systems are known to contribute to PFAS in water, Perry Technological Park states on its website that “The facility will not contribute to PFAS or other contaminants of concern.”)

John Nicely, a retired executive who moved back to Perry to care for his aging mother and now drives the town school bus, is concerned about more immediate dangers: “The community’s fire department is in the red. Its newest engine is 20 years old. There are no ladder trucks in Perry or the neighboring community of Madison. If fire breaks containment and becomes a structure fire, we have no way in this community to even comprehend how to battle it.”

Across Ohio, a similar pattern has played out with financially pressured local governments, well-resourced developers, NDAs, and contracts inked before residents discovered what had been signed in their names.

In Hilliard, a recent change to state law is allowing a proposal by Amazon Web Services for a fuel cell system to power a new hyperscale data center to bypass local zoning review entirely. In an October 2025 press release, the acting Hilliard mayor stated: “It’s regrettable that state lawmakers have overridden local oversight, particularly since this technology is unfamiliar and new not just to our City, but also the entire State.”

This development should concern anyone who cares about democratic governance. The response to community resistance, at corporate and often state legislative levels, has not been to improve transparency or democratic debate, but to eliminate it. Ohio legislators are reportedly advancing legislation that would bar counties, municipalities, and townships from passing laws that restrict data center development.

None of this makes sense to Setzer: “A data center is a manufacturing facility. It takes raw material—data—processes it, creates refined products, and sells them. If you’re making chicken tenders, you pay for the chickens going in and there’s a tax on what comes out. But with data centers, we’re not having that conversation. We’re leaving billions on the table.”

Setzer’s proposed response is to create a state-funded bipartisan legal defense fund that would send experienced lawyers to any village, township, or city that finds itself outgunned by a developer.

“It would cost Ohio two and a half million dollars a year and save billions in poorly negotiated tax abatements,” says Setzer.

It’s these kinds of practical, non-ideological proposals that too often get lost in the noise of our political conflicts, which is perhaps why unfettered and unmetered data centers are meeting such resistance across party lines.

“There’s only so much people can take,” says Derzon. “They will start voting people out because their government is not acting in their best interests.”

That is of course how democracy should work, if Ohio’s legislature will let it.

Perry Village is far from the first American community to discover that its land, water, and future were spoken for before anyone thought to ask. What is new is the industry, the scale, and the speed.

What is not new are the democratic principles residents of Perry are insisting upon with increasing force: transparency, fair compensation, and a democratic process that treats citizens as participants rather than obstacles.

Blake Stone-Banks is a writer and strategist who spent two decades working in technology, data, and marketing in China. Now based in the New York City area, he writes on artificial intelligence, democratic governance, and the political economy of Big Tech.

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Russians have learned to live with a lot: a devastating war next door, sanctions, inflation, mobilization, repression, and the full disappearance of independent politics. But the recent wave of internet restrictions—mobile internet blackouts across major cities, disruptions to Telegram and WhatsApp, and pressure on VPNs—has touched a nerve that the Kremlin may have underestimated.

Since 2025, Russia has seen repeated mobile internet shutdowns, officially justified as protection against Ukrainian drone attacks. By spring 2026, the problem had reached Moscow: mobile internet outages disrupted banking, ATMs, coffeeshops, taxi apps, and even officially approved “white-list” websites.

The response has been unusually visible. In April 2026, approval of Putin’s performance dropped below 80 percent for the first time since the fall of 2022, declining by 8 percentage points since September 2025. Influencers who normally stay far from oppositional politics have started complaining publicly. Victoria Bonya, the television personality and Instagram celebrity, posted a viral appeal to Vladimir Putin criticizing internet shutdowns, economic stress, and the growing distance between the authorities and ordinary people. The episode quickly became a meme: people joked that Bonya had “saved Telegram” after reports that authorities might soften some restrictions. More seriously, even Putin seemed concerned enough to urge officials to explain internet restrictions better to citizens, and then advised lawmakers “not to get stuck” on prohibitions too much.

It is not that Russians have suddenly discovered censorship—they have lived with expanding digital restrictions for years. In March 2022, a Russian court banned Facebook and Instagram after designating Meta an “extremist” organization. YouTube has been slowed, foreign media have been blocked. Yet ordinary users adapted: VPNs have become part of everyday life. Illegal Instagram remains widely used by citizens, influencers, businesses, and even elites. CEPA cited a survey showing that 48 percent of Russian influencers kept earning money there after the ban. For ordinary Russians, this created a bargain: you may use the internet as long as it’s for personal purposes rather than political ones. What is different now is that the state is no longer only blocking “political” content, but breaking the infrastructure of everyday life.

Russia is not a digitally backward country. At the start of 2025, it had about 133 million internet users, internet penetration above 92 percent, and roughly 106 million social media user identities. Telegram alone reached 61 million daily users in Russia in 2024. Digital technologies are the foundation of everyday comfort for the majority of Russians. Russians are so accustomed to the convenience of digitalization that Russian migrants living in wealthy European capitals often complain that Europe feels digitally backward by comparison.

Reportedly, a three-week disruption in Moscow produced backlash not only among ordinary users but also among parts of the political and business elite. In Moscow alone, business losses during a five-day outage were estimated at 3–5 billion rubles. Nationally, internet shutdowns and throttling cost Russia close to $12 billion in economic output in 2025.

But Russia’s digital economy is also about millions of people making small amounts of money in semi-formal and informal ways. Hairdressers, tutors, nail technicians, and repair workers all depend on visibility and communication online. Avito, Russia’s dominant online marketplace for privately buying and selling goods and services, had a monthly audience exceeding 72 million users and 230 million active listings in 2024, and had even overtaken the U.S.-based global powerhouse Craigslist years earlier. When the internet is broken by the government, people lose clients and income.

Russians are not particularly happy about losing money in this economy. By the end of 2025, inflation, rising utility bills, and tax hikes were hitting many Russians hard. Alena Ledeneva’s work shows that informal networks have long been central to how people navigate scarcity, uncertainty, and just everyday life in times of crisis in Russia. Internet restrictions now interfere with the updated digital version of that survival economy.

The internet is also where many Russians find coping mechanisms. Online life offers distraction, self-expression, and psychological escape. A huge virtual industry of coaches, fashion bloggers, psychologists, self-improvement gurus, and esoteric practitioners exists partly because people are looking for ways to manage the daily anxieties of life in today’s Russia. In 2024, online schools on the Russian platform GetCourse earned over 168 billion rubles, including more than 16 billion rubles in the “psychology” category. After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russians’ interest in magic and esotericism increased, with people spending about 6.6 billion rubles on such virtual courses in 2022. Seventy-seven percent of active Russian internet users regularly play online video games, and market estimates put Russian gaming spending in 2024 at roughly 170–200 billion rubles. As described by Alexei Yurchak, late Soviet citizens often created spaces of vnenakhodimost—being inside the system but mentally elsewhere. Today, for many Russians, the internet performs a similar function. When the state breaks these spaces, it invades the fragile private zones where people have learned to hide from politics.

The aggressive promotion of MAX, the state-backed Russian messenger, makes the situation even more difficult. In 2025, Russia ordered the app to be pre-installed on phones and tablets sold in the country, positioning it as a domestic alternative to WhatsApp and Telegram. Reuters reported that MAX is integrated with government services and that critics fear it could be used for surveillance. During shutdowns, authorities have also discussed allowing access only to approved domestic services (so called “white list” websites) while restricting the broader internet. To Russians, it means that the internet becomes a completely state-curated space.

The Kremlin’s logic is not irrational. Authoritarian governments have learned from Iran, China, and other countries that control over connectivity can be crucial in moments of crisis. The internet helps people document violence, coordinate protests, receive uncensored information, and maintain horizontal ties outside state control. From the regime’s perspective, the internet is political infrastructure.

But the Kremlin seems to deeply misunderstand the society it governs. It has spent years building a political order in which citizens are encouraged to be private, consumerist, and demobilized: do not interfere in politics, and the state will preserve stability and everyday convenience. Internet blackouts attack the second half of that bargain by punishing not only activists, journalists, or opposition-minded citizens, but also loyalists, apolitical consumers, and even pensioners trying to reach relatives.

There is also a symbolic problem. Russians know that Putin is not an internet user. He has repeatedly displayed suspicion toward the digital world, famously describing the internet in 2014 as a “CIA project.” Internet restrictions make the generational and experiential distance between ruler and ruled especially visible. There is the collision between two Russias: a digitally integrated society and an analog authoritarian state. For years, the Kremlin managed to combine political repression with technological convenience. But as the war pushes the regime toward deeper isolation, that compromise is becoming harder to maintain. The paradox is that many Russians may tolerate war more easily than they tolerate a broken internet, because it is more immediate in revealing the limits of authoritarian adaptation.

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In an autocracy, it is difficult to predict how public anger will play out because there are no meaningful democratic channels through which frustration can be expressed. Some Russians will likely respond as they have before: by looking for an exit from the situation, adding to the steady flow of people who have left since the invasion. But Russian society may also change once again while its rulers are “sleeping,” until a seemingly stable system suddenly discovers that society has no need for it.

Ivetta Sergeeva is a Senior Research Associate at the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University and a Research Affiliate at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, Stanford University. She is a co-principal investigator and co-founder of OutRush, a longitudinal survey of Russian migrants who left the country following the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

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

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The end this week of the longest ever shutdown of U.S. government offices marks a new normal in polarized Washington. Closing federal doors is now a routine power play for Republicans and Democrats alike. Last year, a bitter fight over healthcare funding forced some 900,000 civil servants to stop work for 43 days. This year, the same impasse hit about 100,000 employees in the Department of Homeland Security for almost twice as long. Returning to work with no resolution of the underlying dispute promises more future shutdowns.

Thirty years ago, American voters viewed the stoppage of government as unacceptable. When the Republican Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, refused to pass funding bills unless President Bill Clinton agreed to steep budget cuts, the backlash helped propel Clinton to reelection in 1996. A chastened GOP did not pull the trigger on federal funding until 2013, when closing government down failed to stop the rollout of the Affordable Care Act.

Now, however, the public seems ready to go along with missing the full range of government services as long as a few important red lines are not crossed. These include delays in federal benefits and tax refunds, the closure of national parks, and prolonged disruption of airport security. The other big things done by the government in public health, regulation, scientific research, and a host of other fields don’t figure as punishable.

While Congress and the White House focus on shutdowns as a maneuver, the deeper damage of holding government hostage goes unnoticed.

First, shutdowns over the past decade have pulled attention away from exploding U.S. budget deficits. The clash between President Clinton and House Speaker Gingrich in 1996 over the nation’s financial future had a positive outcome. Both sides agreed that U.S. budget deficits were unsustainable—they just differed on the pace and distribution of cuts. The compromise that ended the shutdown put the country on a path to pay down the national debt and resulted in one year of actual surplus.

The national debt has grown from $5.7 trillion to $39 trillion since 2000. Budget confrontations, however, have nothing to do with bringing deficits under control. Instead, government shutdowns stem from a bitter divide over America’s racial, ethnic, and cultural identity. The funding of President Trump’s border wall brought the government to a standstill during his first term, while no-holds-barred immigration enforcement has done so during his second. The divide over national identity has marginalized voices of fiscal restraint on both sides of the aisle. Neither Democrats nor Republicans are ready to hit the brakes.

Second, the normalization of shutdowns has weakened Congress. Every decision not to fund the government marks a failure on Capitol Hill of give-and-take political bargaining. Surveys record steep drops in public approval of Congress from the mid-30s to the mid-teens after every shutdown, followed by partial recovery when government reopens. Nevertheless, hardliners feel empowered by voters to stick to their guns.

The electoral costs of refusing to find common ground may be low, but the price that Congress pays as an institution is high. Legislation with input across party lines creates institutional leverage. However, the Republican-led Senate and House have given unequivocal backing to a them-versus-us agenda set by the White House. As a result, President Trump exercises a degree of control over Congress that used to be unthinkable, undermining its classic role as a check on executive power.

The third way in which shutdowns do damage is that they devalue federal workers. Having to stop work highlights their facelessness and political vulnerability rather than their specialized skills and commitment to public service. Since more than two million civil servants are spread over 15 cabinet departments and 50 independent agencies, most Americans lack an overall picture of what they do, why they do it, or what the true impact of stopping their work is. Lack of knowledge feeds a stereotype of careerists as overpaid, overprotected, and able to withstand shutdowns because they eventually get their paychecks.

The president has deliberately devalued the federal workforce by making its reduction a priority domestic goal. Some 350,000 career employees have left government through retirement, resignation, and layoffs since January 2025. The White House has taken credit for this downsizing despite the loss of experience and expertise and the need to backtrack on hasty, mission-threatening personnel cuts in disaster relief, tobacco oversight, and other federal programs.

A singular focus on reducing the size of government leaves out America’s stake in attracting and retaining top-tier personnel in dozens of specialized fields. As I have learned firsthand from high-performing federal workers, talent means as much in government as it does in the private sector. Devaluing federal careers reduces their appeal to the very men and women who are needed to improve federal performance.

Holding non-partisan civil servants hostage is an act of self-destruction. The damage won’t stop unless Americans get serious about rejecting extremism and making democracy work.

John Yochelson, the former president of the Council on Competitiveness, is assembling and editing a collection of personal stories of high-performing federal workers to make them more relatable to the public.

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In his recent interview with the Financial Times, Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, startled many by predicting that Russia might soon test NATO’s resolve to defend its allies. Yet what has ruffled feathers even more was his question about the “loyalty” of the United States as an ally.

Given Poland’s steadfastness over the past thirty years, it is easy to sympathize with Tusk. Regardless of who holds power in Warsaw, Poland has always taken its defense seriously. It has bought U.S.-made military equipment and welcomed U.S. investment—including in nuclear energy.

There is very little that the current administration has done in return for highly reliable allies such as Poland—notwithstanding the recent U.S.-brokered release of a Polish journalist held by Belarus. Polish exports to the United States face arbitrary tariffs. Washington has stopped almost all of its aid to Ukraine, whose victory remains an existential question for Poles. More recently, the U.S. president has picked NATO as a scapegoat for the failures of his ill-conceived war against Iran.

Yet Tusk is not a public intellectual, free to air musings about his country’s relationship with the United States. His task as prime minister is different. First, it is to ensure that Poland is ready for less-than-ideal scenarios in the U.S.-European relationship. Second, it is to help prevent the worst-case scenarios from materializing.

As a result, leaders like Tusk must resist the magnetic pull of the grotesque show that Donald Trump is putting on in the United States. It is easy to score political points at home by confronting Trump. Yet the further east one goes, the higher are the stakes of making the U.S.-Europe relationship a part of everyday political life. That does not imply rolling over in the face of the U.S. president’s antics. Quite the contrary: Europeans must be ready to push back whenever their interests are threatened, as they did when the Trump administration readied to take over Greenland.

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It is also conceivable that voicing questions about the U.S. commitment to Europe, as Tusk did, will help mobilize the European (or Polish) public to do more to prepare for scenarios in which Europe cannot rely on the United States. Yet it can also act as a self-fulfilling prophecy, as any unforced fights with Trump risk accelerating America’s drift away from the continent.

To be sure, the odds that the current presidency is just a fleeting episode in U.S. history, to be followed by a swing back to the post-war norm, are slim. Hope, moreover, is never a substitute for strategy. Nor should one believe in the mistaken trope of “transactionalism” as a way of placating Trump. As Ukrainians have learned from their critical minerals deal, mutually beneficial business relations are no guarantee of staying in the good graces of the U.S. administration. Similarly, billions spent by European militaries on future deliveries of F-35 fighters may or may not be justified on defense grounds. However, one should not live under the illusion that such purchases would prompt Trump’s United States to rush to the defense of Europe.

Rather, the reason for restraint in rhetorical and other confrontation with the United States is that adaptation to America’s reduced reliability and wild swings in its politics is a long-term project, requiring not just unprecedented investment in defense but also the building of new institutions and new political projects. That takes time, intellectual leadership, and a willingness to look dispassionately beyond the immediate horizon, instead of just reacting to the latest outrage or international crisis provoked by Trump.

Why make institutions a part of the equation? Well, if the current moment teaches anything of value to international relations theorists, it is that institutions—understood both as organizations and as rules of the game—matter. Personalist alignments, flattery, bribes—or “transactionalism”—are no foundation for a stable international system. Never mind the one-sided deals meant to mollify Trump or outright bribes offered by the likes of Qatar and UAE; the U.S. president has only one loyalty—and it is to himself.

And no matter how skillful the likes of Alexander Stubb, Giorgia Meloni, or Mark Rutte have been, their sweet talk has not fundamentally altered the course that the U.S. administration is on. It is only a matter of time until the glamour of King Charles’ recent visit to Washington will be superseded by yet another episode of the administration’s lashing out against the UK and its government.

As Europeans look ahead, seeking to put the relationship with the United States on a more durable footing, they will have no choice but to think about institutions and institution-building. That means building structures of political, defense, and economic cooperation that can deliver in the absence of U.S. leadership and that could perhaps even provide a deterrent against America’s predatory behavior in the future. It also means building institutions that America would want to be a part of, allowing them to constrain and moderate its behavior in future political cycles.

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The reason is simple. Institutions are sticky and they often survive under mercurial and unpredictable leaders. One tends to think, for example, of the post-war ecosystem of international organizations and treaties as hopelessly outdated—just waiting to be shattered by a Trump-like figure. Yet it should give one pause that ten years into Trump’s full-frontal assault, many of the relevant institutions still persist, weakened though they are.

Few in the Republican Party harbor any love of multilateral institutions; yet the United States has (for the most part) remained a part of the UN system, a member of NATO, and a party to countless international treaties and conventions.

In Washington, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are humming along, with a staff who may be a little confused about the new realities but who certainly do not feel under any existential threat. Sometimes, even Trump and his team seem to recognize the usefulness of the existing institutional architecture. More importantly perhaps, even for the Trump administration, it may not always be an appealing proposition to just smash things while being patently unable to come up with alternatives.

The Five Eyes alliance continues to function despite intelligence-sharing tensions. Meanwhile, the dollar-denominated international financial architecture appears resilient. And even if the United States withdrew from NATO tomorrow—reducing its own ability to project power globally through its European bases—the alliance would still be extremely useful to Europeans as a platform for ensuring interoperability, joint planning, and socializing allied militaries into fighting together.

Yet fundamental realities about the world have changed relative to the post-war era in which such international institutions, treaties, and alliances were being created. And unless those institutions adapt effectively, they will eventually be hollowed out and replaced by new ones. For all of the U.S. administration’s ham-fistedness, there is thus a grain of wisdom in the quest to build a “NATO 3.0,” or to create new structures of cooperation around critical supply chains.

It is an open question how effective the United States can be at institution building anytime soon, considering the magnitude of its domestic political crisis. But that provides an opening for others—perhaps for Mark Carney’s middle powers, perhaps for the EU, perhaps for China—to think about how the international arena could be structured by new rules and new political projects, sometimes working around an unreliable United States, rather than with it or under its leadership. Europeans must be at the forefront of that exercise, both at home (especially in updating and strengthening the EU) and in their engagement with the wider world.

Concrete moves underway include the expansion of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP); the EU-Mercosur trade deal with Latin America; strengthening of the Canada–EU strategic partnership; and, in the context of European security, the Coalition of the Willing to support Ukraine and the Joint Expeditionary Force of Northern European nations.

“We have all the institutions we need,” one European diplomat claimed during a panel I moderated. “We just have to make the existing ones work.” But that betrays a deeply ahistorical view of our situation. States, governance structures, alliances, and institutions have changed constantly through human history—sometimes through war and chaos and sometimes through ordered, democratic change. The Holy Roman Empire, the dual monarchy of Austria and Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the Soviet Union all seemed like basic, immutable artefacts—until they weren’t.

Tusk asked whether the United States is still a loyal ally. It’s a valid question, but not one for Poland’s prime minister to ask aloud. The right question—quieter, harder, and answerable only over years—is what institutions Europe could build that would make American loyalty matter less. In a few years, Donald Trump will be a memory. The institutional solutions that Europe and its partners come up with—or fail to come up with—in response to the change in America’s role in the world will shape the continent’s geopolitical future for generations.

Dalibor Rohac is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. and a contributing editor at American Purpose.

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

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

A Strategic Decision

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

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

How Did We Get Here?

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

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

Why Ukraine is Unique

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

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

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

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

How the Arms Trade Actually Works

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re-export Licence as Diplomacy

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

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

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

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

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

Not Bad For a Country With No Cards

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t bullshit the bullshitter

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

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

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

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

Starving the Guard

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

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

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

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

What the United States is trying to achieve

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And now, Iran.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For now, we reside in limbo.

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

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

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