Trump’s Voters Will Back an Iran Strike

Aaron MacLean, The Free Press

Host Aaron MacLean details why Trump voters are far from isolationists:

Of course, it is now quite evident that Trump will never be the ideologically consistent noninterventionist some of his backers wanted. He intervenes prolifically. And we are back in a will-he-or-won’t-he moment with regard to military action in Iran, just as we were last June, when he very much did. That intervention was swift (a single night), with no American lives lost, and successful in its clearly defined goal of meaningfully degrading Iran’s nuclear capabilities. It gave the lie to isolationists like Carlson for whom every use of force in the Middle East will inevitably lead to a repeat of the Iraq War. Trump again rolled the dice in Venezuela with highly limited and focused action, and again came out well on his own terms. Success no doubt contributes to the support for more military action among the MAGA base. Failure, we can expect, would have the opposite effect.

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Trump’s Kabuki Negotiation with Iran

Matthew Continetti, The Wall Street Journal

Inside the Trump administration’s diplomatic and military moves against Iran:

Calling off the attack allows America to play for time. President Trump will use diplomacy as cover for a buildup of U.S. forces in the region. What happens in Oman will be Kabuki: well-dressed actors performing elaborate diplomatic choreography. The real show is aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln.

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China’s Decadence and the Military Purge

Walter Russell Mead, The Wall Street Journal

Guest Walter Russell Mead explains how systemic correction and the Chinese system led to the Zhang Youxia purge:

In systems like China’s, healthy self-corrective measures cannot function. The worse the party mishandles key situations, the more loudly and unanimously officials and the media must praise its leaders. Almost every family in China is blighted by the ruinous and inhuman one-child policy, which brought a demographic crisis down on the whole country. Yet nobody could oppose the policy when it was in force. Nobody can now demand accountability from the cruel and misguided leaders who imposed it. Scores of millions of families have seen their life savings trashed by an utterly predictable real-estate bust brought on by decades of misguided central government policy—abetted by corrupt local officials and powerful interests. Nobody can say anything about that either.

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Putin Cannot Afford a Peace Deal Now

Mick Ryan, Futura Doctrina Substack

Guest Mick Ryan breaks down ongoing negotiations to end the Russia-Ukraine War:

The United States negotiating team is also planning to meet again with Ukrainian and Russian delegations in Abu Dhabi on the first of February. These latest discussions are being held against the backdrop of a truce on strikes against energy facilities. At least Ukraine is sticking to this arrangement. There is no word from Russia about whether they intend doing so. Besides this ‘energy truce’, and an exchange of fallen soldiers this week, very little else has emerged from the recent talks designed to end the current war in Ukraine. There is a very simple reason why there has been so little progress. There is no way that the Russian president can afford to end the war now.

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The Rise of the Tech Hamiltonians

Walter Russell Mead, The Atlantic

Guest Walter Russell Mead explains the impact Silicon Valley is having on the future of American politics:

While there are differences among the leaders of the Tech Hamiltonian world, what led so many to the Trump movement is a shared vision of the challenges facing the United States. They believe that the Information Revolution, greatly enhanced by the rise of AI, will disrupt American life and American politics on a massive scale. They see the United States and China at the forefront of this revolution, racing both to develop technologies and to apply their productive power. And they think that the Chinese Communist Party’s ability to direct immense resources toward chosen areas of endeavor and to impose massive changes on its society gives it advantages that the United States will be hard pressed to overcome.

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Zhang Youxia’s Differences with Xi Jinping Led to His Purge

K. Tristan Tang, The Jamestown Foundation China Brief

A theory of how a schism on military action concerning Taiwan may have led to the downfall of one of China’s top generals:

Based on publicly available information, Zhang and Liu likely failed to meet Xi Jinping’s requirements for force building related to a Taiwan invasion, and may even have engaged in open disagreement or defiance within the PLA. Other official statements indicate that the root cause of slow progress and resistance likely lay in a fundamental divergence in Zhang’s and Xi’s views over the timeline for military development.

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Troop Casualties in Ukraine War Near 2 Million, Study Finds

Helene Cooper, The New York Times

Inside the butcher’s bill of four years of war in Ukraine:

The study, published on Tuesday by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said that nearly 1.2 million Russian troops and close to 600,000 Ukrainian troops had been killed or wounded or were missing. That would put the overall casualty figure for both countries combined at almost 1.8 million. For the entirety of the war, casualty figures have been difficult to ascertain because Russia is believed to routinely undercount its dead and injured, and Ukraine does not disclose official figures. The study relied on American and British government estimates, among other sources. The figures present a grim accounting of Russia’s anemic progress in Ukraine, with Russian troops proceeding in some places at around 50 to 230 feet a day.

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Is a Country Rising or Falling? Watch Its Currency

Tyler Cowen, The Free Press

What a nation’s money tells you about their rise or decline:

The underlying issue is that the future of the regime and also the country is deeply uncertain. Even if the government survives, it is likely broke or close to broke at current relatively low oil prices. So people in the market know that more inflation is coming in the near future, to cover holes in the budget, and that encourages them to unload the rial all the more. Currency values are an important indicator of where the news is going. How likely is Iranian regime change and successful reconstruction? One way of divining that, of course, is to follow reports on X and in the press. Another, though, is to watch if the value of the rial starts to increase significantly. Just as the currency markets are telling us now that traders and merchants have little confidence in the current regime, an increase in the rial’s value would indicate that market participants think Iran’s chances of avoiding even deeper chaos are rising.

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Why 2026 Could Prove as Important as 1989

Matt Pottinger and Roy Eakin, The Free Press

Guest Matt Pottinger and Roy Eakin explain why 2026 may be a geopolitically seismic year:

If its first days are anything to go by, 2026 may end up the most pivotal year in geopolitics since 1989, a hinge point that began in a moment of geopolitical calm but ended with the collapse of the Iron Curtain. Within a few years the Soviet Union had fallen, the European Union had been born, and an era of hyper-globalized trade took off on the wings of NAFTA and the WTO (World Trade Organization). This year could be equally pivotal—only this time with a vaster range of possible outcomes for world order. It is possible to hear echoes of the late Cold War, and imagine regime change in Tehran, Caracas and Havana—which would strike a heavy blow to the ambitions of Beijing and Moscow. It is also possible Donald Trump will detonate NATO unity by coercively annexing Greenland, and that Beijing will wage war to subjugate Taiwan and seize its semiconductor plants, toppling a century of American-led Western technological dominance. The events of 1989 weren’t inevitable, of course, any more than we can know now where the turmoil at the beginning of 2026 will take us. But this is shaping up to be a year of enormous consequence, and it is worth looking at some of its possible outcomes—not in a spirit of prophecy, but preparedness.

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The Last Supper is Over

Shyam Sankar, First Breakfast Substack

Guest and Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar breaks down the Pentagon’s new approach to ensuring American AI dominance:

The AI acceleration strategy is designed to enable real-world action, at speed and scale. This isn’t another blue-ribbon panel to study the problem to infinity and beyond. It’s not a beard-stroking convention. It’s an aggressive effort to bring cutting-edge AI technology (and technologists) from the commercial sector into the military fold where it can be put to good use.

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Three Forces Shaping Post-Revolutionary Iran

Can Kasapoglu, The National Interest

How an aging theocrat, a brutal IRGC, and a loss of legitimacy threaten to tear Iranian society apart:

In the end, Iran’s post-revolutionary future will be decided less by slogans than by forces that operate quietly and without mercy: biology, military, and demography. Regime changes may be sparked in the streets, but states are ultimately reshaped by who controls the guns when time runs out. Tehran now stands at that threshold. Last but not least, one should keep in mind: Iran is not a monolithic Persian entity. The return of the Shah’s rule or a symbolic monarch with a parliament may appeal to the streets of Tehran. Being caught between zealous Persian oppression and democratic Persian assimilation would not necessarily make non-Persians, such as the Baloch and the Azerbaijani Turks, happy. Once the music stops, these people might just recognize a moment of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, rather than the fall of the dictatorship.

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Two Drinks with ... the Last Great Military Strategist

Eli Lake, The Free Press

Inside the mind of Edward Luttwak, military historian, strategist, and advisor:

The opening days of 2026 have felt like a hinge point in history. American commandos just snatched Venezuela’s tyrant and his wife from their heavily fortified residence in Caracas. The Iranian regime teeters as more and more people flood the streets in revolt. President Donald Trump, a former reality-TV star, has changed the rules of American statecraft. To make sense of this moment, I trudged out to the suburban Maryland home of Edward Luttwak, one of the last of the grand strategists and renaissance men.

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How the UK is Undermining US Indo-Pacific Security

Cleo Paskal and Alex Gray, The National Interest

Guest Cleo Paskal and Alex Gray explain how a small island in the Indian Ocean is vital to US national security:

While the world’s attention is on Venezuela and the Western Hemisphere, the British government is careening this week toward a colossal strategic blunder with significant implications for American interests in the Indo-Pacific. The British parliament is in the process of passing the “Agreement concerning the Chagos Archipelago including Diego Garcia,” which would transfer sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean from the UK to Mauritius. This archipelago contains Diego Garcia, one of the US military’s most critical facilities. The Diego Garcia base, known colloquially as the “footprint of freedom,” is one of the few outside the United States that can reload nuclear submarines, port aircraft carriers, and base and launch strategic bombers, and is critical for Space Force operations. […] It is key to US power projection in the Indo-Pacific and to deterrence of China’s growing naval threat.

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The Kinship Between Israel and Somaliland

Armin Rosen, The Wall Street Journal

The unexpected similarities between Somaliland and the world’s only Jewish state:

Both countries see themselves as global outsiders waging a long campaign for legitimacy and respect. Israeli citizens and products are still banned in dozens of Muslim countries. As an unrecognized state, Somaliland lacks access to the Swift system for clearing international financial transactions, and its government is effectively blocked from borrowing meaningful amounts of money. Like Israel, a poor, war-ravaged and diplomatically isolated desert outpost during its first decades of existence, Somaliland has to find its way without much help.

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What to Do About PLA Exercises Around Taiwan

Ryan Fedasiuk, Choosing Victory Substack

How America should respond to China’s aggression:

If it wants to deter the PLA from undertaking progressively more sophisticated exercises around Taiwan, the United States must craft policies that impose real costs on Beijing without triggering an immediate crisis. Doing so will require moving beyond the standard grab-bag of ad hoc reciprocal drills, Taiwan Strait Transits, and statements of condemnation — and toward durable principles and forward-looking mechanisms to deter gray-zone coercion.

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These College Students Ditched Their Phones for a Week. Could You?

Callie Holtermann, The New York Times

Inside the university experiment to “unplug” from the digital world:

Some young people, though, are not waiting for government intervention to re-evaluate their closeness with technology. On the dorm’s staircase that evening, 20 St. John’s College students who had decided to take part in Ms. Fagan’s experiment nibbled on zucchini bread and dashed off last messages to their friends. The undertaking was being called a “tech fast,” and there had already been some debate over which technology was actually the problem. Most people in attendance said they were interested in cutting back on smartphone use and social media, not, say, shutting off the overhead lights. “We should maybe call it an ‘electronics fast’ or something, but that sounds less cool,” said Jackson Calhoun, 21, a sophomore.

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Our Freedom or Their Tyranny

Shyam Sankar, First Breakfast Substack

Guest Shyam Sankar breaks down the high stakes of the technology race with China:

Great causes are on the move again in the world. Cold War II is on, the AI race has begun, and 2027 is right around the corner. China is building landing craft suitable for an invasion and sending its navy—the largest in the world by hull count—deep into the Pacific on maneuvers. This competition spans all frontiers, from biotechnology to telecommunications to advanced manufacturing to space itself, where China is working to erode our lead in a new space race. America has to mobilize again and use our freedom in the direction of accelerated progress, or live in a world shaped by the Chinese Communist Party and its tyranny.

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China’s Stealth War Has Already Begun

Nikki Haley and John Walters, The Free Press

Inside China’s Quiet War Against the United States:

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is working to undermine the U.S. across economic, technological, informational, diplomatic, and gray-zone military domains. Especially since Xi Jinping’s rise, Chinese leaders have committed to diminish American superpower without triggering a U.S. military response. The Chinese don’t want a shooting war today, or ever, if they can help it. Instead, they’ve chosen to erode the foundations of American power by coercing U.S. allies, commandeering global supply chains, and bending international institutions toward Chinese interests. Beijing wants to do all this while keeping the U.S. reactive, fragmented, and unsure about how seriously to take the threat.

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Antisemitism is a National Security Threat

Melissa Braunstein, The Jewish Chronicle

The weaponization of Jew-hatred and the dire threat it poses to America:

Sunday’s Bondi Beach terrorist attack reminded the world that Jew-hatred can turn lethal. Antisemitism also endangers non-Jews, though, and it now threatens America’s national security [...] “It was important for Hudson to hold this conference because antisemitism strikes at Hudson’s core concern: national security,” Michael Doran, the conference organizer and a senior fellow and director of Hudson’s Centre for Peace and Security in the Middle East, told me. “A revisionist axis led by Beijing, which includes Russia, Iran, and North Korea, seeks to weaken US power and erode the American-led order through coordinated pressure across regions rather than direct confrontation.”

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Norman Podhoretz, a Grateful American

Meir Soloveichik, Washington Free Beacon

Remembering the great Norman Podhoretz, writer, thinker, and inspiration to many:

There is so much to say about the legacy of Norman Podhoretz: premier conservative intellectual of the Cold War, stalwart defender of Israel and the Jewish people, one of the great literary critics of the 20th century. But it is the story above that comes to my mind as I ponder his life, and my own friendship with him. Only in America could Norman Podhoretz have come into being; only in America could I have had the privilege of knowing him, and learning from him; only in America would Norman, therefore, have devoted so much of his own efforts to reminding his fellow intellectuals—and his fellow Jews—the gratitude they owed this country.

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She’ll Be Right, Mate: The New U.S. National Security Strategy and the Pacific

Mick Ryan, Futura Doctrina Substack

Guest Mick Ryan breaks down the Trump administration’s latest national security strategy:

This saw the dawn of the 9/11 era of post-Cold War history, where counter terrorism operations, national building and the rise of social media, distrust in institutions and the growth of the power and influence of authoritarian regimes such as China and Russia. The 2025 Trump National Security Strategy ends that 9/11 era. We are now in a more chaotic and transactional era. It is the America First era. And it is likely to be a transitional era as the major powers – China, Russia, India, America, Japan and Europe – undergo a rebalancing in global power, prosperity and influence. This new America First era will last years, if not decades.

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See How a Chinese Invasion of Taiwan Could Unfold

Niharika Mandhana, Daniel Kiss, and Carl Churchill, Wall Street Journal

The team at the Wall Street Journal visualize what a Chinese invasion of Taiwan could look like:

Five miles off Taiwan’s coast, ZTD-05 amphibious vehicles roll out of ships and zip over the water amid a hail of artillery fire. The Chinese soldiers inside have their orders: the beach, or die trying. Close by, China’s airborne troops are taking losses. They arrived before dawn in low-flying Y-20 aircraft to seize Taoyuan Airport. Taiwanese defenders downed several planes. The paratroopers that landed, scattered, are in a race to assault the airfield before Taiwan wrecks it. This hypothetical battle scenario imagines a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, as militaries, policymakers and wargamers are doing. An amphibious invasion would be one of the toughest military operations to execute. And an all-out war would be extremely bloody, devastate the global economy and change the course of the 21st century.

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Trump Says Chips Ahoy to Xi Jinping

Wall Street Journal Editorial Board

Inside the Trump administration’s controversial decision to sell Nvidia chips to China:

Yet now Mr. Trump wants to sell the advanced H200 without strings. The question is why? Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has lobbied for loosening the restrictions. The company’s friends in the White House argue that doing so could retard China’s drive to develop competing chips and make its AI developers dependent on U.S. chips. That’s their best argument.

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University of Michigan’s Partnership With CCP-Linked Shanghai School Brought Chinese Spies to Campus—And Dozens of US Universities Have Similar Arrangements

Jessica Costescu, Washington Free Beacon

How the Chinese Communist Party infiltrated America’s most elite institutions:

Shanghai Jiao Tong maintains joint institutes, dual-degree programs, and student and faculty research exchanges with more than two dozen top American universities—including Columbia, Yale, Cornell, Northwestern, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California, Berkeley—in fields ranging from engineering to public health and finance, a Free Beacon review found. The University of Southern California, for example, houses the Institute of Cultural and Creative Industry, which “leverages the influence of SJTU” and offers students from the Chinese school a master’s of management studies.

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Working From Home Is Harming Young Employees. They’re Starting to See That

Noam Scheiber, New York Times

The unforeseen consequences of work from home policies:

New research sheds some light on why that might be. In a recent paper, a team of economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the University of Virginia and Harvard University found that younger workers suffered career-wise by working from home, receiving less training and fewer opportunities for advancement. The economists found that remote work even contributed to higher unemployment among younger workers. They calculated that younger workers appeared to be responding accordingly, spending more time in the office than older workers over the past few years.

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Ten Steps to Pressure Russia to Come to the Negotiating Table

Luke Coffey, Thomas Duesterberg, and Can Kasapoglu, Hudson Institute

What America can do to Pressure Moscow to negotiate an end to the Ukraine War:

The Kremlin has stalled negotiations because Putin still believes he can improve his position and extract greater concessions from Ukraine and the West. By ramping up support for Ukraine at this critical juncture, the Trump administration can weaken Putin’s hand and force him to negotiate on terms more favorable to Ukraine and its partners, including the United States.

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Trump Has the Authority to Strike the Narco-States Poisoning the US

Hugh Hewitt, Fox News

Inside the president’s constitutional authority to strike the narco-terrorists:

Jefferson acted despite his beliefs because it was in the best interest of the country and the need to act was immediate. From that sweeping exercise of an unenumerated power of the chief executive to act as the sovereign power in the new country flowed a long line of presidential actions that sometimes unsettle modern day pundits when they don’t like the president in the Oval Office. Trump has the same vast power as Jefferson. President Barack Obama had it for his approximately 540 drone strikes and his war in Libya, as did President Bill Clinton for his order to the American military to participate in the war in Bosnia in 1994 and the war in Serbia in 1999.

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A Newly Confident China is Jockeying for More Global Clout as Trump Pulls Back

Yaroslav Trofimov, The Wall Street Journal

Beijing’s newfound assertiveness and its consequences for the Indo-Pacific:

China is flexing its muscles, showing new confidence fueled by a belief that President Trump’s retreat from overseas commitments and his focus on the Western Hemisphere and trade deals create unique opportunities for Beijing. As bonds between the U.S. and other democracies come under strain, Beijing’s new assertiveness also stems from pride over China’s prowess in future-defining technologies, from artificial intelligence to high-speed rail and clean energy. Those achievements come in parallel with a rapid military buildup.

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How Israel’s Victory Strengthens America’s Hand

Zineb Riboua, Mosaic

How Israeli military success is bolstering America’s national security interests:

Israel overcame boycotts and condemnation and still produced the outcome that matters most for American strategy. It plays a pivotal role in a new regional architecture that gives Washington a real platform to compete with China in energy, trade, and technology. In this sense, Israel didn’t just beat its enemies on the ground, it thwarted Sinwar’s strategy and fast-tracked the very normalization and regional integration he was trying to stop.

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Assessing “Cognitive Warfare”

Frank Hoffman, Small Wars Journal

The enduring art of warping an adversary’s decision-making in war:

To the historically oriented, the fight for the minds of decision-makers and noncombatants does not expand the battlespace, but it does expand or at least challenge long-held Western conceptions about war. Those encultured with violent visions, per Clausewitz, will struggle with this concept. The acolytes of the Prussian sage think in terms of physical violence as the essence of war and overlook his description of war as a clash of wills, as well as his discussions about rational and irrational factors in human conflict.

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Gordon Wood Remarks: 2025 Irving Kristol Award Presentation

Gordon Wood, The American Enterprise Institute

Historian Gordon Wood on what makes American exceptional:

The United States is not a nation like other nations, and it never has been. There is at present no American ethnicity to back up the state called the United States, and there was no such distinctive ethnicity even in 1776 when the United States was created. Many European countries, Germany, for example, were nations before they became states. Most of the European states were created out of a prior sense of a common ethnicity or language.  Some of these European states, the Czech Republic, for example, are new, created in the twentieth century, and are certainly newer than the 249-year-old United States.  Yet these European states, new as they may be, are undergirded by peoples who had a preexisting sense of their own distinctiveness, their own nationhood. In the United States the process was reversed.  Americans created a state before they were a nation, and much of American history has been an effort to define the nature of that nationhood.

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History Should be Taught to all Children up to the Age of 16

Foundation for the History of Totalitarianism

British youth do not know their own country’s history. Thank the British education system:

History helps people to understand why the world is the way that it is. Institutions and ideas like Parliament, democracy, a constitutional monarchy and religious tolerance do not make sense without a historical awareness of how they have come to be. In a country as old as Britain, the structure of government has evolved over time and has been the resolution of conflicting forces. History also equips citizens and voters to make better decisions. The past is a back-catalogue of successes and failures that people can draw on in the present. A citizen with a secure knowledge of the past is much more likely to be able to effectively assess the costs and benefits of declaring war, replacing an institution or forging an alliance with another country.

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As We Await the Pentagon’s Posture Review, Here’s One Country We Should Keep Troops In

Luke Coffey, Defense One

The American interest in securing NATO’s northern flank:

Having this foreign presence in the Baltics makes sense for both regional and transatlantic security. The Baltic states are geographically vulnerable inside NATO—vulnerable in strictly military terms and, in a crisis, on whether the alliance has the military capability and political will to fully live up to its Article 5 security guarantees. Geography works against reinforcement: Lithuania connects to the rest of NATO only through the narrow Suwałki Gap with Poland, while the militarization of Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave and Belarusian territory complicates any rapid flow of forces by air or by sea.

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Caracas’s Crime Hub

Rep. Michael Baumgartner, National Review

What threat does Venezuela pose to the United States? Congressman Michael Baumgartner shares his experiences:

Long before I became a member of Congress, I frequently traveled to and advised international mining companies in Venezuela. I saw the country’s potential: blessed with the world’s largest oil reserves, talent, and the rule-of-law foundations to turn natural wealth into broad prosperity. I saw how socialist thugs Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro brutalized its people and impoverished a nation that once led Latin America in living standards. Their predatory policies now export disorder beyond Venezuela’s border.

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Not Lost in Translation

Barry Strauss, Washington Free Beacon

Guest Barry Strauss reviews a new translation of Thucydides’s history of the Peloponnesian War:

After more than 2,400 years, The Peloponnesian War remains a monument. The book is read not just by students of the classics or of ancient history but also by political scientists and strategists. It appears on the syllabi of college courses in international relations as well as in history, and it is required reading at the U.S. Naval War College, a school that offers advanced studies to American naval and military officers as well as to government officials and to officers of international navies. The great naval theorist and historian Alfred Thayer Mahan served as the college’s president, so what better place could there be for Thucydides, a onetime admiral himself?

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Defender of the West: A Response to Attacks on Churchill’s Life and Legacy

Andrew Roberts and Zachary Marsh, Policy Exchange

Guest Andrew Roberts defends the legacy and career of one of Britain’s greatest wartime leaders:

Many of these attacks on Churchill fail to stand up to basic scrutiny and assessments of historical accuracy. Accusations that Churchill was the force behind the war guarantee to Poland in March 1939 ignore the fact that Churchill was only a backbencher outside government at the time and remained so for another six months. Suggestions that it was Britain, as opposed to Germany, that initiated civilian bombing ignore its use by the Nazis from the outset of the war at Wieluń and Rotterdam and Hitler’s promise to erase British cities. Criticisms that Churchill lost the British Empire ignore the fact that no British colony ever achieved independence under either of his premierships and that Churchill’s devotion to the imperial project arguably sustained the Empire for several years beyond which his peers would have allowed it to continue.

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The New Right’s Affinity for Authoritarianism

Michael Sobolik, Wall Street Journal

Guest Michael Sobolik’s warning to the American Right:

Mr. Carlson’s choices aren’t new. During a broadcast in 2020, he praised China’s national unity as something we “could actually learn from,” and in 2021 he lauded the Communist Party for doing “something virtuous,” namely restricting housing speculation, curbing celebrity idolization and limiting access to video games. Never mind the authoritarianism that underlies each. Americans shouldn’t pine for the intimidation, surveillance and violence that the Chinese people endure daily. Beijing is rooting for the groypers. Conservatives should give them no space in their movement.

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Circling Back on Joseph Stalin

Aaron MacLean, Daily Wire

Host Aaron MacLean details the crimes of one of history’s worst mass murderers:

Why anyone, let alone anyone like Nick Fuentes, who claims to be on the Right, would “admire” Joseph Stalin seems at first a mystery — but the solution to the puzzle is in the fact that he seems to admire both Hitler and Stalin. The particulars of the revolutionary ideologies in question matter less than the sheer gleeful desire for destruction for its own sake. The terrain of the 20th century is made up of rivers of blood and mountains of murdered innocents, piled to the heavens. America’s heroic role in that period was to draw a line and defeat the terror of Hitler, and then contain that of Stalin.

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The U.S. Air Force has a Plan to Escape the ‘Doom Loop’

Mackenzie Eaglen, National Security Journal

Guest Mackenzie Eaglen breaks down the Air Force’s strategy to maintain readiness:

Reversing these trends—and America’s sagging deterrent—requires what the Air Force prescribes: an unprecedented modernization overhaul that is the largest in its history. This sweeping update to meet the geopolitical moment spans fighters, tankers, bombers, trainers, weapons, airmen and bases, and the ground-based leg of the nuclear triad. The solution is a reasonable all-of-the-above approach. The key is that the Air Force avoided the politically pleasing but capacity robbing approach of putting “all eggs in one [combat capability] basket” many sister services fell prey to the past two decades.

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Palantir Thinks College Might be a Waste. So It’s Hiring High-School Grads

Angel Au-Yeung, Wall Street Journal

How one of the world’s leading tech companies is revamping the job market:

Zanini is one of more than 500 high-school graduates who applied for Palantir’s “Meritocracy Fellowship”—an experiment launched under Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s thesis that existing American universities are no longer reliable or necessary for training good workers. Some fellows applied because college wasn’t interesting to them. Others applied after getting rejected from target schools.

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‘Soul-Crushing’: Students Slam Harvard’s Grade Inflation Report

Wyeth Renwick and Nirja Trivedi, The Harvard Crimson

America’s most elite institution is trying to get grade inflation under control. Its students are not happy:

Harvard students pushed back forcefully against a new University report condemning grade inflation, arguing that it misrepresented their academic experience and would add pressure to an already demanding campus environment. The 25-page report, released Monday by the Office of Undergraduate Education, suggested that Harvard’s grading system had become so lenient that it no longer meaningfully distinguished between students. It warned that current practices were “failing to perform the key functions of grading” and were “damaging the academic culture of the College.”

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The Great Leap South: October 2025

Zineb Riboua, Hudson Institute

A smart take on China’s major economic and diplomatic offensives in the Global South:

Chinese state-owned construction giant China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation (CCECC) signed a $1.4 billion deal with Zambia and Tanzania to upgrade the Tanzania–Zambia railway. The line, which links Zambia’s Copperbelt to Dar es Salaam, is crucial for exporting copper and cobalt to global markets. The agreement coincides with growing US engagement in the competing Lobito Corridor in Angola. China’s attempt to modernize the Tanzania–Zambia railway marks a strategic push to control southern Africa’s mineral export routes and counter US efforts to develop the competing Lobito Corridor. By upgrading the line, Beijing is reinforcing its dominance over the logistics of critical minerals while pulling regional governments closer into its economic orbit.

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What France Really Surrendered

Sean Durns, Washington Examiner

A review of Guest Julian Jackson’s excellent book France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Petain:

Pétain’s countrymen would sit in judgment of the old general and other leading figures of Vichy. There was, Jackson notes, “a thirst to understand exactly what had happened in 1940 when France had been defeated and French democracy had been swept away.” The country would seek to quench that thirst over three weeks in a sweltering Paris courtroom. In theory, Pétain’s trial for treason offered the country, bloodied, battered, and humiliated from four years of occupation, an opportunity to explore what had happened and why. It was, one historian alleged, more of “an elaborate ceremony aimed at symbolically condemning a policy” — the policy of working with, indeed actively aiding, the Nazi regime. The early days of the trial were less about Pétain and more about reckoning with what had transpired in the country. As one French newspaper remarked at the time, “We are listening to ghosts dragging their chains behind them.”

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Ukraine Dispatch: Ground-Based Air Defense

Mick Ryan, Futura Doctrina Substack

Guest Mick Ryan on the challenge of defending Ukraine’s skies:

With the exception of some isolated attacks including those on 9/11, attack from the air is something that western nations and western military institutions have largely avoided since the end of the Second World War. Not so Ukraine. During my Ukraine visit this month, I had the opportunity to meet with officials to discuss the challenges currently faced by land-based air defence organisations. This is more than the nightly challenge of intercepting Shaheds and missiles in their hundreds, although this is a major problem. Land-based air defence also incorporates the defence of ground forces against aerial threats, which can include strike and ISR drones, glide bombs launched by Russian tactical fixed wing aviation, and the threat of Russian military attack helicopters.

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Emergent Approaches to Combined Arms Maneuver in Ukraine

Jack Watling, Royal United Services Institute

How the war of movement is evolving in Ukraine:

This paper presents the conclusions of forces in Ukraine that are developing and experimenting with approaches to conducting combined arms manoeuvre under modern conditions. The paper is not an attempt to describe how most units are operating, other than highlighting the pressures that forces must manage in modern operations. Instead, it explores the concepts of operation being developed and successfully employed by a subset of units that have had disproportionate success. Because of the function they serve, these units are analogous to NATO battlegroups. The paper describes how these Ukrainian units combine the tools of modern war, and endeavours to highlight the specific utility of different capabilities and their complementarity.

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Trump’s Passage to India

Matthew Continetti, Commentary Magazine

America needs to make right with India:

If America wants to define this century as we did the last, we will need friends. And a growing, energetic, subcontinental nation of 1.3 billion people, most of whom are under 40 years old, with a two-thousand-mile long border with an adversarial superpower, is the obvious place to find them. Trump may have to pirouette and sway as part of his highwire balancing act. But there’s always the danger he trips and falls. Getting things right with India would make his job easier—and the world more prosperous and safe.

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Keith Douglas, an Englishman at War

Bryan Appleyard, Engelsberg Ideas

The fascinating story of one of Britain’s warrior poets:

But the most haunting theme of the book – at least for me as an Englishman – is that of a lost world. Douglas says that the two main sources of allusion in the radio chatter were ‘horses and cricket’. This is England as she was then, but is no more. Britain entered the war as a leading frontline nation, it exited as a secondary player behind Russia, America and, latterly, China and Japan. I suspect Douglas intuitively grasps this transformation, even though he never lived to see the full force of the idea. There will never be peace. Humans will always go to war. Douglas was as horrified, as any sane person would be, by the carnage. But he goes beyond politics and mere national rivalries to see the way people do not just die, they leave traces. And, in fighting, they create a unique culture of survival. No book has ever come so close to capturing this unique but also universal experience.

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The Last American Crisis – and Ours

Matthew Continetti, Commentary Magazine

What we can learn from Norman Podhoretz 52 years later:

Podhoretz ended on a hopeful note. The collapse of American leadership, he said, “is a necessary precondition to the development of a governing elite which, as is proper to the workings of a truly democratic society, follows as much as it leads, and leads precisely out of its superior capacity to articulate and make coherent what the people feel and think and want.” Indeed, by the end of the decade, voters had taken the first steps toward better governance. They inaugurated a new political era. The nation avoided Podhoretz’s worst fears of Communist victory and American decline.

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Why the China Doves Are Wrong

Shyam Sankar, Wall Street Journal

Guest Shyam Sankar, The CCP wants America to fail. U.S. business leaders must recognize that:

Ultimately, the Chinese Communist Party has more to gain from continued economic integration with the U.S. than we do. We should prepare for a long and painful road, while recognizing that the problem will get worse if we delay, rewarding China with more investment and trade to use against us. The first step to ending our dependence on China is admitting we have a problem. We can continue as useful idiots, decrying “China hawks” who point out that we’re funding our own demise. Or we can wake up to the reality that we’re already in an economic war in which every purchase and investment will help determine which system survives.

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Saved Round: Mountain Combat

CxFile Staff, The Connecting File Substack

On the excellent Connecting File Substack edited by guest Geoff Ball, a review and key takeaways of guest Lance Blyth’s interview on mountain warfare:

Blyth’s core point echoes through the 10th’s origin story: the techniques that keep you alive and moving in mountains—route finding, snow travel, belay systems, avalanche awareness, cold-weather sustainment—were borrowed from civilian climbers and skiers, then adapted for war. This was a formal process, not a coincidental occurrence. For instance, the National Ski Patrol became the Army’s recruiting arm for the 10th by screening and funneling thousands of capable outdoorsmen to the unit. Additionally, the American Alpine Club network supplied instructors and mountaineers, while supporting R&D efforts for clothing and equipment.

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‘Great Power Diplomacy’ Review: Making Friends and Allies

William Hay, Wall Street Journal

A review of guest A. Wess Mitchell’s fascinating book on the art of great power diplomatic negotiation:

Diplomacy, Mr. Mitchell rightly notes, has been misunderstood for several decades. Rather than what he calls “the art of negotiating, recruiting allies, and avoiding great- power war,” it became a “science of administration” to manage peace. Diplomats joined international lawyers and experts from nonprofit foundations and the academy to form a secular clerisy that set rules for governments to impose. Ironically, this conception of diplomacy as administration has the same unilateral thrust as imposing policies by military force. It misses how strategy is supposed to align ends with means while adapting to shifting circumstances; such an error thereby limits options when policies fail or are met with inevitable resistance. Mr. Mitchell sees virtue in how diplomacy mitigates costs and constrains violence. His cases focus on the gaps between finite means and what seem like infinite ends of a hostile environment.

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How the Muslim Brotherhood Built a Media Empire

Mariam Wahba, The Free Press

Inside Islamic fundamentalists’ propaganda machine:

Since its founding in Egypt in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood has evolved into a vast network of chapters and offshoots that operate autonomously. Though each has faced periods of both repression and resurgence, the movement has preserved and enhanced its ability to control the public narrative and spread its message. Today its media empire is diverse, diffuse, and pervasive, with no single mastermind or headquarters. The group’s ideology moves across borders through a web of seemingly uncoordinated but deeply connected channels. Together, they speak in one voice, infecting generations of Arab minds with the group’s Islamist doctrine. “Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope” is one of its slogans. The Trump administration is currently said to be preparing to designate several of the group’s chapters as foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs), something that could happen as early as Wednesday. Yet this discussion remains narrowly fixated on political structures and leaders, overlooking a pillar of the group’s survival: its seductive and deadly message.

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The Imperial Past of Indian Geopolitics

Ved Shinde, Engelsberg Ideas

How the British Empire informs India’s strategic thinking today:

Invoking Curzon and Caroe does not imply that India has the intention to assume any responsibilities as a regional security guarantor for the Gulf in the same way that British India once did, at least not in the foreseeable future. Nor is India nostalgic about bygone empires. Indians are fiercely protective of their independent identity (as are the Arab Gulf states). Nonetheless, the ideas that animated Curzon and Caroe refuse to be forgotten. The centrality of India in the Indian Ocean region will, sooner or later, compel it to play a greater security role in its peripheral areas. As India’s economic size and interests grow, its security perimeter will expand accordingly. It is a case of when, not if. Reflecting on the perennial dilemma of Indian policymakers perched in Delhi, a former foreign secretary and national security advisor said, ‘We have too much history for our own good’. Perhaps, therein lies the rub.

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The Nazi Conquest of Childhood

Caitlin Allen, Engelsberg Ideas

The fate of Europe’s children kidnapped by the Nazis:

In a secret paper, the Nazi Office for Race and Resettlement (RuSHA), which supervised the project between 1939-41, announced that new birth certificates, as well as German names of Teutonic origin, should be issued to the children to conceal their true identities. Crucially, even their new German adoptive parents should not be told the truth about their origins. ‘Particular care must be taken’, a secret 1941 order from Poland’s central SS office concluded, ‘to ensure that the term “Germanisable Polish children” does not come to public knowledge.’ Instead, adoptive families were led to believe that they were rescuing ethnically German children from ‘the regained Eastern territories’ who had been orphaned by the war.

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Joel Mokyr’s Economy of Ideas

David Wootton, Engelsberg Ideas

Why economic historian Joel Mokyr’s account of the Industrial Revolution deserves a Nobel Prize:

What makes Mokyr’s argument particularly challenging is that his account of the Industrial Revolution brings him into direct conflict with the mainstream of history of science. I happen to think that Mokyr is a better historian than the historians of science (most of whom are, at best, sociologists). According to the historians of science there was no scientific revolution in the 17th century, and science, as we understand the term, is a 19th-century creation that followed, and thus cannot have caused, the Industrial Revolution. They happily argue that the key technologies of the Industrial Revolution – starting with the steam engine – were not the result of new theories or of new experimental techniques, but of tinkering and of what the French call bricolage.

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Donald Trump Gave War a Chance – and It Worked

Aaron MacLean, The Free Press

I break down the Trump administration’s successful Gaza deal:

But with the hostages released, Israel and the rest of us suddenly have the freedom to prioritize the Gaza file appropriately. Perhaps there will be a meaningful path to a healthier Gazan politics woven into the complicated matrix of future normalizations and arrangements that the Trump administration is now pursuing with Arab and Muslim powers. I am skeptical—but then, I was also skeptical regarding the full release of hostages! In any event, Gaza’s overnight deprioritization—in what was for Israel a seven-front conflict—is an enormous relief, as America and Israel work to shape a region utterly transformed by two years of war. In a bitter irony for the region’s terrorists, this transformation is almost entirely for the benefit of America and Israel.

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The Oct. 7 Warning for the U.S. on China

Mike Gallagher, The Wall Street Journal

Guest Mike Gallagher details what the bloody lessons of October 7 th tell us about a China-Taiwan war:

The Israeli defense establishment never truly believed Hamas would launch a full-scale invasion. They viewed Gaza as a chronic but manageable problem—one for diplomats and intelligence officers, distant from the daily concerns of citizens. Israeli politicians and generals also spoke of open conflict with the Iran-led Islamist axis much like their American counterparts speak of China and a Taiwan crisis—the pacing threat and the most likely test, yes, but ultimately a question for tomorrow. Then tomorrow came. Are we falling into the same trap with China? Beijing is signaling that it is preparing for war, as Hamas did before Oct. 7, 2023. China has said it wants the ability to take Taiwan by force by 2027. It is building nuclear-capable missiles that can reach anywhere on the globe and is modernizing its military. It is stockpiling raw materials. As former deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger points out, it is opening new recruitment centers and surging its military spending in what Chinese Communist Party leadership calls “preparations for war” with the U.S.

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The Logic of Trump’s Neutralization Strategy

Zineb Riboua, Beyond the Ideological Substack

How President Trump is remaking American Middle East policy:

Linking Israel to regional stability, technological strength, and the containment of China and Iran deprives critics of moral leverage and strips the issue of political weight. In neutralizing the Gaza question abroad, he narrows its divisive power at home and turns what was once a source of contention into an assertion of American confidence. Will he succeed? It is uncertain. Iran remains untouched by full pressure, China stays entrenched in regional trade, and Hamas still threatens Israel’s security. Even so, Trump has shifted the balance. By neutralizing the conflict within his political window, he gives Israel room to emerge as a stabilizing force and key partner in regional growth. Cooperation with Israel now signals an advantage, while opposition carries a cost. For now, Trump turns Israel from a contested actor into a central partner in America’s regional strategy.

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The Hostages Return Home and the Lies Fall Apart

Eli Lake, The Free Press

Guest Eli Lake on the negative reaction to the Israel-Hamas conflict among ‘anti-war’ activists:

Those protesters are clearly disappointed that the war they falsely claimed was a genocide is ending. Only a few months ago, this crowd set the agenda for the public discourse about the war in Gaza. Their pressure was so great that the leaders of France, the United Kingdom, and Canada all formally recognized a Palestinian state last month at the United Nations. Now that the war is over, their palpable disappointment reveals that they were never against the war at all. They just wanted the jihadists who started it to win.

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The Sinister Disappearance of China’s Bosses

The Economist

Inside the unlucky fates of Beijing’s business leaders:

But a further set of concerns is growing in prominence. As the economic outlook darkens, China’s institutional shortcomings are making the business elite even more miserable. Official investigations into company leaders are on the rise. So are court rulings that limit their freedom to travel around the country. A spate of suicides among bosses this year is widely seen as evidence of intensifying pressure. Liuzhi detentions are perhaps the clearest source of unease. When the system was created in 2018 it was aimed mainly at Communist Party members and government officials, part of the anti-corruption crackdown begun by Xi Jinping, China’s supreme leader, five years earlier. It is now frequently directed at businesspeople too.

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The Existential Heroism of the Israeli Hostages

Franklin Foer, The Atlantic

Eli Sharabi and the immeasurable bravery of Israel hostages in Gaza:

Today, the last of the living Israeli hostages were liberated after more than two years—and their release has liberated the Israeli psyche from its fretful obsession with their fate. Having invested themselves so deeply in the hostages’ story, Israelis greeted the moment as an ecstatic conclusion that helps justify the terrible toll of their nation’s longest war. How does a human being survive two years of torment? And how do they make sense of their life once they resume? Within months of his release, Eli Sharabi summoned the courage to ask these questions of himself in a short book, Hostage. The manager of a kibbutz roughly two miles from Gaza, Sharabi was dragged from his home, away from his English-born wife and his daughters, ages 16 and 13. “A sea of people who start thumping my head, screaming, trying to rip me limb from limb,” he remembers.

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The Importance of the Battle of Kasserine Pass

Robert Williams, War on the Rocks

How the U.S. Army turned a tactical defeat into a strategic victory:

The Battle of Kasserine Pass in February 1943 was the first significant engagement between German and U.S. forces in World War II. The fight delivered a harsh reality check to U.S. military leaders […] Weaknesses were on display throughout the fighting: Poor logistics, inexperienced troops, piecemeal deployments, and ineffective leadership combined to result in a defeat that shook American morale and dispelled illusions of an easy Allied victory in North Africa. While the battle initially emerged as a story of defeat against a powerful enemy, the Axis failed to capitalize on the early success. In contrast, the Allies adapted and eventually secured North Africa, gaining valuable combat experience before the subsequent phases of the war. Often hailed as an epic failure, the battle was anything but.

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The ’Jews’ Are a Proxy for a Far Bigger Political Fight

Mike Doran, The Free Press

Guest Mike Doran breaks down what rising antisemitism on the left and right means for the country:

The antisemitism of left and right is not a noxious gas seeping out of the soil and wafting into politics. It is being weaponized—cleverly and deliberately—by organized forces for political warfare. Progressives festoon their bigotry with banners of diversity, equity, and inclusion, demanding Jews disown Israel. Meanwhile, Carlson updates the Protocols to paint Jews as the hidden hand behind the empire, insisting the covenant be cut so American patriots can smash unelected concentrations of global power […] On the surface, Carlson and progressives appear to be firing at each other. In reality, their cross fire converges on the same target: the bond between America and Israel.

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How to Counter BRICS and Preserve Global Dollar Dominance

Zineb Riboua, Hudson Institute

The strategic importance of U.S. dollar’s dominance:

Preserving the dollar’s centrality helps sustain US oversight of global transactions and Washington’s ability to enforce rules against drug cartels, terrorist organizations, and other transnational threats. It is also a key diplomatic tool in the current great power rivalry. BRICS threatens to chip away at the dollar’s dominance by creating opaque, unregulated channels for trade and finance. Unless Washington acts decisively to defend SWIFT, regulate stablecoins, apply diplomatic pressure, and reinforce the legitimacy of US global financial oversight, BRICS will continue to construct an anti-US financial order while presenting itself as the champion of neutral nonalignment and multipolarity.

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How China Secretly Pays Iran for Oil and Avoids U.S. Sanctions

Laurence Norman and James Areddy, The Wall Street Journal

Inside Beijing’s secret campaign to evade U.S. sanctions on Iran:

The barter-like system works like this, according to current and former officials from several Western countries, including the U.S.: Iranian oil is shipped to China—Tehran’s biggest customer—and, in return, state-backed Chinese companies build infrastructure in Iran. Completing the loop, the officials say, are a Chinese state-owned insurer that calls itself the world’s largest export-credit agency and a Chinese financial entity that is so secretive that its name couldn’t be found on any public list of Chinese banks or financial firms. The arrangement, by sidestepping the international banking system, has provided a lifeline to Iran’s sanctions-squeezed economy. Up to $8.4 billion in oil payments flowed through the funding conduit last year to finance Chinese work on large infrastructure projects in Iran, according to some of the officials.

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China Hawks Grow Queasy Over Trump’s Push for Deals with Beijing

Shawn Donnan, Kate Sullivan, and Edward Ludlow, Bloomberg

President Trump is remaking his policy with Beijing. China watchers have concerns:

President Donald Trump rewrote Washington’s rules for dealing with China in his first presidency, embracing confrontation, launching a trade war and upending decades of policy. In his second term, China hawks in Washington fear that Trump is going soft. As Trump pursues a trade pact with the US’s biggest economic and strategic rival, advocates of a tougher China policy fear they’re being sidelined inside the administration as the tech industry’s influence grows — alongside the president’s appetite for what he’s called “a big deal.”

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The Age of Adaptability

Bryan Clark and Greg Little, First Breakfast Substack

Guest Bryan Clark details the need for a flexible defense industrial base in the age of great power competition:

So yes, we need more of what works today. But more than that, we need the capacity to build what we don’t yet know we’ll need tomorrow. Not just more output. Scalable output. Flexible output. Modular munitions that can be rapidly tailored, mass produced, and adapted as the threat evolves. The winner in tomorrow’s war won’t be the side with the best missile. It’ll be the one with the best system to build the next missile. That’s the shift. It’s not just about output. It’s about adaptability. We need production lines and development pipelines that can flex. Factories that can shift from missile to drone to decoy. Platforms that can be updated via software. Architectures that let us plug in new payloads, sensors, and behaviors as fast as the threat evolves.

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Foggy with a Chance of Surprise Attack: PLA Amphibious Deception in a Taiwan Scenario

Ian Easton, China Maritime Studies Institute

Guest Ian Easton on what a PLA surprise attack on Taiwan may look like:

When Xi selects the officers who could be responsible for planning and executing a future amphibious campaign against Taiwan, what lessons of history does he expect them to have absorbed? What “glorious traditions” does he hope they will emulate? The PLA’s flagship newspaper, PLA Daily, released an article on Xi’s visit to Xuzhou, which expounded on his views. The commander who can outfox his enemies is priceless, the article opined, because victory is not to the strong, but to the cunning. “To preserve themselves and annihilate their enemies on the cruel field of battle, [commanders] must break common modes of thought…by applying deception and surprise attacks that create chaos, strike weakness, lure, and disintegrate.”

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Principles for the Revolution in Attritable Mass

Matthew Steckman and Eliot Pence, First Breakfast Substack

How to harness affordable, disposable technology in the age of unmanned systems:

Recent developments in warfare and defense reform alike suggest we are now on the cusp of a military revolution, focused on attritable mass. The future of military power will not be determined by the most exquisite hardware, but by the most effectively scaled and networked family of capabilities. This is not an altogether new observation. But far less discussed are the implications of this fact. As the United States begins a major shift toward employing systems that are attritable by design—deliberately engineered to be used fully, deployed widely, and replaced quickly—procurement, force design, and industrial policy must also be reorganized and reconsidered to an extent not experienced in decades.

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How Seapower Shaped the Hundred Years War

Jonathan Sumption, Engelsberg Ideas

Naval power and how its impact on one of the most important conflicts of the Middle Ages:

England is an island or, strictly speaking, part of an island, and until the development of air transport was dependent on the sea for both trade and war. The significance of seapower in the Middle Ages was the same as it was in the age of Alfred Tahyer Mahan. It enabled those who possessed it to project power, carrying armies across the sea, and landing them at critical points on the enemy’s coast, choosing their own time and place.

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They Don’t Read Very Well

Susan Carlson, Ananda Jayawardhana, and Diane Miniel, CEA Critic

Why is reading comprehension declining among students:

Recent studies indicate the students in this study who have trouble reading are not alone. Nationally, many American college graduates are not reaching proficient levels of prose literacy. According to the findings of a report by the Educational Testing Service Center for Research on Human Capital and Education in 2019, “One of every five bachelor’s degree holders among employed college graduates ages 21 to 65 lacks some important skills in literacy”. The last ACT report in 2022, two years after the COVID-19 pandemic, reported the lowest national ACT scores in thirty years, with the average Reading Comprehension score at 20.4. The newest test scores of middle- and high-school students also show a drop in skills.

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Tearing Down China’s “Great Firewall”

Michael Sobolik, The Dispatch

Guest Michael Sobolik shows how to battle the PRC’s internal censorship regime:

[T]he Great Firewall embodies the CCP’s greatest weakness: viewing the Chinese people as a threat. Exploiting this asymmetric weakness would not be impossible. As former Deputy National Security Adviser Matt Pottinger told me in 2023, the Great Firewall is “a series of bricks” that can be dismantled. “Just like the Great Wall of China,” Pottinger elaborated, “these things can be bypassed, undermined. People can break through.” Asked whether the U.S. government was working to dismantle it, he replied, “I left government two years ago, and I can tell you that the U.S. government was doing very, very little—very little—to even attempt to overcome the Great Firewall.” Fatalism had paralyzed Washington, Pottinger explained, and officials assumed there was no way to push back against the CCP’s cyber regime.

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‘While Israel Slept’ Review: The Road to Disaster

Charles Lane, Wall Street Journal

A review of guest Yaakov Katz’s book on Israeli strategic thinking before October 7:

Yet the ultimate source of these tactical misjudgments was a strategic one: the belief that a fanatical Islamist terror group could be, and had been, contained. In Israeli government circles, Messrs. Katz and Bohbot write, a conceptzia, or “overarching conception and prevalent assessment,” prevailed. Before Oct. 7, the conceptzia was that “Hamas had been deterred and wanted quiet.”

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What’s Wrong with the Postmodern Military

Ran Baratz, Mosaic

From January 2025, Guest Ran Baratz details the evolution in Israel’s military thinking from the Cold War to the present:

Despite numerous tactical successes and an enormous national investment in the war, both Hamas and Hizballah have managed to avoid total defeat, and despite the accomplishments of Israel’s soldiers the IDF has failed to secure total victory.” […] Today’s generals conduct special operations and embrace militarily revolutionary and asymmetrical theories rooted in the poorly founded assumptions of the social sciences—assumptions that are likely to collapse when tested in the reality of war, as they have in Israel.

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The Dawn of the Post-literate Society

James Marriott, Cultural Capital Substack

The death of reading and its dire consequences for society:

Now, we are living through the counter-revolution. More than three hundred years after the reading revolution ushered in a new era of human knowledge, books are dying. Numerous studies show that reading is in free-fall. Even the most pessimistic twentieth- century critics of the screen-age would have struggled to predict the scale of the present crisis. In America, reading for pleasure has fallen by forty per cent in the last twenty years. In the UK, more than a third of adults say they have given up reading.

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Not Letting AI Master Us

Aaron MacLean, The Dispatch

School of War Host Aaron MacLean warns of overreliance on artificial intelligence:

AI may never become a true superbeing, but we may choose to make it our master anyway. Thus, for all the misgivings detailed here, the Trump administration’s agenda for AI dominance is not misguided. The only thing worse than increasing de facto subservience to various LLM models would be subservience to such models controlled by China—TikTok, but doing what’s left of your thinking for you. And this is not to speak of the various other applications of AI in military or research domains which seem far less problematic than the potential impacts of LLMs on their human users. Such tools—the technology that controls a drone swarm, for example—are neither good nor bad in themselves. Such things simply must be mastered by Americans.

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Osama bin Laden’s Posthumous Victory

Niall Ferguson, Free Press

Ferguson reflects on the September 11 attacks 24 years later:

In short, comparing the world today with that of 24 years ago, I am tempted to say that bin Laden lost the war on terror but is winning the clash of civilizations. That’s not to say his particular brand of Salafist jihadism is winning; it can even be argued that it’s in decline. Bin Laden’s creed was always too uncompromising to form alliances of convenience. By contrast, the pro-Palestinian “global intifada” is much more omnivorous, and can easily absorb the old left (Marxism and pan-Arabism) and the new (anti-globalism and wokeism).

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Rebooting the Defense Production Act

Nadia Schadlow, Hudson Institute

Schadlow details how the U.S. can revitalize the Defense Production Act:

With the Trump team presumably ready to support the DPA’s renewal, the US has an opportunity to use the act to improve America’s defense industrial base and expand its military capabilities. No comprehensive assessment has studied the DPA’s impacts on the US defense industrial base, and few if any analyses consider how DPA funds have substantially affected or improved certain sectors over time. Absent a clear plan to use the DPA in a targeted and strategic manner, Washington risks turning it into another government program that benefits particular companies without actually strengthening the defense industrial base.

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Strategy and Security

Colin S. Gray, Military Strategy Magazine

From 2015: Gray highlights the complexities of understanding strategy versus security:

Alas, because security is about everything that does or might worry us, as a consequence it is really about nothing usable with prudence. Particular geopolitical or other metrics of potential alarm are not hard to invent for any state, but the problem is that they will lack integrity, even when they are developed honestly. Again, what can tell you how secure you really are? Indeed, is security an either/or condition, or is it a matter of more or less? Obviously, indeed unarguably, security is an important, perhaps the most important, concept in statecraft, but it is unmanageable.

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Xi’s Military Parade Showed Just How Dangerous China Has Become

Brad Bowman, New York Post

Guest Brad Bowman details how America should respond to China’s military power:

With the leaders of Russia, Iran and North Korea watching, Beijing conducted a massive parade on Wednesday, demonstrating the results of a years-long effort by the Chinese Communist Party to build a military that it hopes can defeat the United States in the Pacific. Beijing’s growing prowess has eroded American security and increased the likelihood of war in the Taiwan Strait, but it is not too late for Americans to respond.

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Smashing Russia’s Oil Industry: Ten Strategic Strike Lessons from Ukraine

Mick Ryan, Futura Doctrina Substack

Guest Mick Ryan details ten key takeaways from Ukraine’s deep strikes on Russia’s oil industry:

Ukraine’s development of a long-range, strategic strike capability over the past three and a half years has demonstrated such capabilities are no longer the preserve of wealthy, large nations. The explosion in drone technology in the past three years, and the convergence of commercial and military sensing and analytical capacity, has drastically lowered the barriers for entry into this once-exclusive long-range strike club. Ukraine has exploited this opportunity, but unfortunately, non-state actors have also demonstrated the capacity to do so as well.

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The World at War and the Coming of the Peace

Paul Kennedy, Washington Free Beacon

Kennedy reviews two volumes detailing the beginning and end of the Second World War:

Is there a single volume that could possibly encompass all that the Second World War was, and meant? Surely not. And yet, from one generation to the next, scholars have striven to produce such a work, although even the best of them inevitably falls short in one regard or the other, revealing as they do the historiographical approaches of their era. For example, when (almost 60 years ago) this reviewer was assisting the great military historian Sir Basil Liddell Hart in the completion of his History of the Second World War (1970), the approach of that work and so many like it was usually rather narrow, concerned with military operations and campaigns—the Desert War, the Battle of the Atlantic, Guadalcanal, and so on. Liddell Hart's magnificent private library at States House, Medmenham, some 50 miles outside London, fully reflected this military-history approach. There were few studies in it upon the social history of the war; labor and the war; wartime economics and technology; propaganda and morale; the war and Western imperialism—all of that was to come.

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The Perverse Consequences of the Easy A

Rose Horowitch, The Atlantic

Grade inflation has rendered Harvard’s education a joke, even to its own faculty:

The pandemic only made matters worse. In 2011, 60 percent of all grades at Harvard were in the A range (up from 33 percent in 1985). By the 2020–21 academic year, that share had risen to 79 percent. Students were more anxious than ever, so professors further eroded norms to help them. Taken together, this has led to a regime in which most students get near-perfect grades, but the grades mean something different to everyone. Outside observers might still think of grades as an objective assessment of a student’s work, and therefore a way to differentiate between levels of achievement. But many professors seem to conceive of them as an endlessly adaptable participation trophy.

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Send Harvard’s Chinese Students Home

Mike Gallagher, Wall Street Journal

Guest Mike Gallagher on the risks of hosting Chinese nationals at American Universities:

For decades, Republicans and Democrats agreed that our universities were crown jewels of American exceptionalism, and Harvard shone brightest of all. Mr. Trump, however, has an uncanny knack for exposing rotten shibboleths, and recent years have seen top universities unmasked as global far-left patronage networks using research as a smokescreen to prevent scrutiny of campus hate as they aid adversaries like China. Mr. Trump deserves credit for addressing the corrupt and immoral links between universities like Harvard and the Chinese Communist Party. But the recent deals his administration has cut with Columbia, Brown and other schools don’t go far enough. These settlements consist of impressive but ultimately immaterial fines and vague promises to abide by current laws, which may not last through the next presidential term. There’s a better way: Drastically reduce the number of Chinese nationals enrolled at American universities, especially those studying technology.

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The Baltic States must be part of the Ukraine talks

Brendan Simms, The Telegraph

Guest Brendan Simms advocates for Baltic involvement in Ukraine negotiations:

The Prime Minister’s summit in support of Ukraine was certainly a step in the right direction. As has been widely noted, Britain is now resuming its natural role as the most important democratic European great power. The UK government was quicker than most of the continent to recognise the Russian threat, and it has done a great deal to try to contain it through training Ukrainian troops, supplying anti-tank weapons to Kiev early, warning (together with the US) of an imminent attack in February 2022, and in many other ways. It is therefore very regrettable that the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which have been even further ahead of the curve in sounding the alarm about Mr Putin, were not invited to London. This comes on top of the Paris Summit last week, to which they were not invited either.

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Unsung Hero

Victor Davis Hanson, Claremont Review of Books

Hanson reviews a biography about Gen. Wainwright, MacArthur’s second-in-command:

There are dozens of biographies of MacArthur, and many accounts of the Philippines’ tragic fall to the Japanese. But there have been few treatments of MacArthur’s second-in-command Wainwright, who went on to spend three years in a number of Japanese prisoner-of-war camps. In The Fate of the Generals: MacArthur, Wainwright, and the Epic Battle for the Philippines, Jonathan Horn, a former White House speechwriter for George W. Bush who has previously written a book on George Washington and another on Robert E. Lee, offers month-by-month parallel biographies of two quite different generals covering their early years, their overlapping commands in the Philippines, and the critical decision each made—MacArthur’s escape to Australia and Wainwright’s choice to stay with his men—that changed their lives and, perhaps in some way, the course of the Pacific War itself.

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Steel and Silicon: The Case for Teaming Armored Formations with UAVs

Charlie Phelps, Modern War Institute at West Point

Pairing drones with tanks as a modern warfare staple:

Undoubtedly, tanks and armored fighting vehicles still provide unmatched survivability, mobility, and firepower on the modern battlefield. However, as the fog of war grows thicker in environments saturated with antiarmor threats, loitering munitions, and long-range fires, even the mightiest armored column risks becoming a vulnerable target. To survive and dominate, armored formations must evolve. Not by replacing tanks with cheaper, more expendable systems, but by fusing the two through manned-unmanned teaming. This imperative is about survivability, lethality, and increasing the tempo capable of armored formations to ensure that tank commanders are informed decision-makers who can see, shoot, and maneuver faster than the enemy. Teaming UAVs with armored formations is no longer a luxury or a science project. It is a necessity for prevailing in twenty-first-century conflict.

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How Europe can Make Putin Pay

Peter Rough, Engelsberg Ideas

Rough prescribes economic and military actions for Europe to defend Ukraine:

As foreign leaders attempt to divine Trump’s next steps, the Rosetta Stone may lie in the Middle East. Israel went to war with Iran without guarantees of US intervention. But by creating a slipstream of success and exuding the image of a winner, Jerusalem managed to persuade Trump to deal Tehran a major blow. The parallel for Europe is clear: if leaders want results, they will have to serve ‘as the first line of defence’, as Trump put it last week in Washington, and convince the US President that he can tip the battlefield in Ukraine’s favour at an acceptable cost. Europe should seize on Trump’s ruminations on Ukraine’s deep-strike campaign and Putin’s rejection of a bilateral meeting with Zelenskyy to deliver the German Taurus cruise missile to Kyiv. Moreover, by tapping hundreds of billions of euros in Russian assets currently frozen in European jurisdictions, European leaders can lift the financial burden of supporting Ukraine from their own people and signal to Russia that war has a steep and enduring price.

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A Letter to Emmanuel Macron

Charles Kushner, Wall Street Journal

The US Ambassador to France urges President Macron to address French antisemitism:

On the 81st anniversary of the Allied Liberation of Paris, which ended the deportation of Jews from French soil, I write out of deep concern over the dramatic rise of antisemitism in France and the lack of sufficient action by your government to confront it. Antisemitism has long scarred French life, but it has exploded since Hamas’s barbaric assault on Oct. 7, 2023. Since then, pro-Hamas extremists and radical activists have waged a campaign of intimidation and violence across Europe. In France, not a day passes without Jews assaulted in the street, synagogues or schools defaced, or Jewish-owned businesses vandalized. Your own Interior Ministry has reported antisemitic incidents even at preschools. Public statements haranguing Israel and gestures toward recognition of a Palestinian state embolden extremists, fuel violence, and endanger Jewish life in France. In today’s world, anti-Zionism is antisemitism—plain and simple.

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Time to Shut Down the Failed UN Lebanon Mission

Eugene Kontorovich, Wall Street Journal

Kontorovich calls for Unifil’s termination:

The first Trump administration considered nixing Unifil but was persuaded to compromise on a package reducing its size and supposedly introducing reforms. There will be temptations for the U.S. to compromise again. But if Unifil survives, it will eventually regrow under a less vigilant administration. Some in the administration argue the Lebanese army isn’t ready to take over for Unifil. But Unifil doesn’t keep the peace, so there’s nothing to get ready for. Last month, with its reauthorization up in the air, Unifil was busy organizing “a training on gender mainstreaming in military operation” and other woke seminars for the Lebanese army, while another had a mass therapy session for “local women leaders.” If the U.S. doesn’t veto Unifil, it would undermine the credibility of Washington’s broader demands—both for genuine disarmament of terror groups in Lebanon and Gaza and for broader U.N. reform.

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The urgent need to procure more THAAD interceptors

Bradley Bowman and Ryan Brobst, Defense News

Why THAAD interceptors require rapid production:

The U.S. Army’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense “Talon” interceptor inventory is unacceptably low, potentially leaving U.S. forces vulnerable in a future conflict. The service reportedly consumed nearly a quarter of its interceptors during the 12-Day War between Israel and Iran in June, and absent aggressive congressional intervention, it will take too long to replenish and expand stocks. The U.S. Missile Defense Agency awarded a $2.06 billion contract modification to produce Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, “Talon” interceptors late last month. That step is laudable but insufficient. Congress needs to help by approving the administration’s request to shift money between programs to purchase more interceptors, providing enough funding to procure the maximum number of interceptors industry can produce next fiscal year and pushing the Pentagon and industry to expand production capacity as quickly as possible, among other steps.

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Deterring a Taiwan Invasion: Lessons from Imperial Japan

Nicholas Welch, ChinaTalk

How 20^th century Imperial Japan’s experience on Formosa can inform Taiwan’s defense:

In 1945, the United States intended to use occupied Taiwan only as a staging base for a full assault on Japan; today, China seeks the full annexation of Taiwan. In 1945, Taiwan was a Japanese colony; today, Taiwan is free to focus on its own self-defense, free from regional complexities. In 1945, the availability of mass-produced, asymmetric wartime technology was limited (hence kamikaze attacks); today, asymmetric tech is more abundant. But the similarities which have survived the past eighty years are also striking: there is a significant power imbalance between the attacker and defender; the defenders will likely have very little advance notice of an invasion; and the defenders must fight despite the attacker’s air and sea superiority. As such, Taiwan and allied militaries have much to learn from Japan’s successful defense of Taiwan during WWII.

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‘The Golden Thread’ Review: A Treasure-House of Culture

Meghan Cox Gurdon, Wall Street Journal

Gurdon evaluates a volume on the Western tradition’s riches:

The people of the West have had their heroes humbled, their statues torn down, their language policed, their borders broached and the sins of their history fetishized. The cultural heirs of Pericles and Cicero, of Constantine and Charlemagne, of Dante and Shakespeare, have been taught to furiously disavow any connection with these titans of the past, even to the point of conceding their right to stand on soil wrested for them and their children by their own ancestors. The undermining of Western Civ has, of course, been going on for many decades now. A subject that was once routine in American public education has been on the outs for at least two generations, and today only students who attend classical schools or get themselves into specific college courses can hope to grasp a fraction of what the past of the West has to do with its present. Most Americans, Europeans and Australasians could not tell you what distinguishes the West from the rest of the world, unless it is our various crimes. What we don’t know, “The Golden Thread” can tell us.

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Liberated by the Smiling Giants

Warren Kozak, Wall Street Journal

An 80^th anniversary tribute to America’s World War II Victory:

In his 2014 book, “World Order,” Henry Kissinger, who was also a GI in Europe, writes of a visit to President Harry S. Truman in 1961. Kissinger asked Truman what in his presidency he was most proud of. “That we totally defeated our enemies and then brought them back to the community of nations,” Truman replied. “I would like to think that only America would have done this.” Kissinger wrote that Truman “wanted to be remembered not so much for America’s victories as for its conciliations.” At a time when many believe the foundations of this great country are false and soaked in evil, it should be remembered that 80 years ago the U.S. did something the world had never seen: It conquered and liberated entire continents with no intention of domination. Whether it was wiping the tears of a young girl with a number tattooed on her arm or giving bread and jam to a small boy, this is how much of the world came to know America. It’s a legacy Americans, of all people, should never forget.

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Victualling a Trireme: A Taste of Experimental Archaeology

Robin Alington Maguire, Antigone Journal

Maguire recreates an Athenian sailor’s rations (recipe included!):

I decided to see whether Thucydides’ description could serve as the basis for making a ship’s biscuit of some sort. It turns out that by using barley flour, wine and olive oil as the ingredients, plus a pinch of salt, and working from some simple modern biscuit recipes, it is possible to bake edible – if dry and unexciting – biscuits. Retsina is used as the wine. This adds something to the flavour of the biscuit without making it unpalatable by adding any obvious taste of turpentine. The biscuits produced in this way somewhat resemble modern oatcakes or crispbread. It is rather difficult to imagine doing hard physical work for several days with nothing but biscuits such as these as sustenance. This suggests that trireme rations might have contained some other ingredient not mentioned by Thucydides to make them more palatable and less dry in taste. Honey is the obvious choice.

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Australia must confront the perils that lie ahead

Mick Ryan, Engelsberg Ideas

Guest Mick Ryan analyzes the future of Australian security:

The 2024 US election campaign and years of Chinese belligerency have both served as ample warnings that challenging times for Australia are approaching. Australian governments across the political spectrum over the past decade have addressed strategic risks with minimal defence investments, hoping that the impending reckoning the nation faces would be avoided. Notwithstanding the potential strategic surprises described above, the time has arrived for Australia to face up to its challenges as well as the full measure of its responsibilities as a wealthy democratic nation that exists in the face of powerful techno-authoritarian regimes. Only moral and intellectual courage from political leaders, and an urgent and open discussion with the Australian people about the profound costs of not acting, will see Australia through the likely perils ahead.

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How Humanitarian Aid Feeds War Machines

Netta Barak-Corren, Wall Street Journal

On the consequences of unencumbered aid during conflicts:

The pictures are heartbreaking: convoys of United Nations-marked trucks inching toward bomb-scarred cities, desperate children clamoring for supplies. These images seem to prove that the international system is, at the very least, trying to help. Yet in every conflict I have studied—Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Ethiopia and Gaza—the same trucks double as cash machines for warlords, militias and authoritarian regimes. Aid diversion is a widespread problem in humanitarian operations. Unless the U.S. and other donors rewrite the rules so that aid can’t be separated from accountability, they will keep subsidizing the conflicts they abhor.

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AI Is Here, and a Quiet Havoc Has Begun

Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal

Noonan highlights AI’s rapid ascent in the US economy:

From the Journal’s Sebastian Herrera in a recent report: “The automation of Amazon.com facilities is approaching a new milestone: There will soon be as many robots as humans. The e-commerce giant, which has spent years automating tasks previously done by humans in its facilities, has deployed more than one million robots in those workplaces, Amazon said. That is the most it has ever had and near the count of human workers at the facilities.” All these stories were preceded by an important paper released in April by the AI Futures project. It is called “AI 2027,” and its authors, longtime analysts in the field with deep ties to research, safety and policy, began with a bang: “We predict the impact of superhuman AI over the next decade will be enormous, exceeding that of the industrial revolution.” They say it’s coming sooner than expected—in 2025 AIs will be training other AIs, and in early 2026 coding will be automated and AI research sped up. There will be a new debate: Is AI “bigger than social media? Bigger than smartphones? Bigger than fire?” We natter on about what cable news natters on about: Is JD Vance next, can Gavin Newsom make the sale? But the biggest domestic political story of our time is happening now, a remaking of the employment field in America. Mr. Newsom doesn’t threaten Mr. Trump, AI does.

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The Looming Social Crisis of AI Friends and Chatbot Therapists

Derek Thompson, Substack

AI’s effect on its users’ behavior and attitudes:

AI engineers set out to build god. But god is many things. Long before we build a deity of knowledge, an all-knowing entity that can solve every physical problem through its technical omnipotence, it seems we have built a different kind of god: a singular entity with the power to talk to the whole planet at once. No matter what AI becomes, this is what AI already is: a globally scaled virtual interlocutor that can offer morsels of life advice wrapped in a mode of flattery that we have good reason to believe may increase narcissism and delusions among young and vulnerable users, respectively. I think this is something worth worrying about, whether you believe AI to be humankind’s greatest achievement or the mother of all pointless infrastructure bubbles. Long before artificial intelligence fulfills its purported promise to become our most important economic technology, we will have to reckon with it as a social technology.

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AI Robs my Students of the Ability to Think

Alex Green, Wall Street Journal

Green considers how AI degrades academic development:

There is little evidence that senior university faculty are committed to tamping down the rampant overuse of AI. Instead, it is the paperweight on a pile of evidence that at an ethical level, universities are too timid or ignorant to insist that students use the core skills we are supposed to be teaching them. Perhaps willful ignorance is the better phrase—these core skills are no mystery. They involve an ability to sift through information and understand who created it, then organize and pull it together with logic, reason and persuasion. When teachers dream of our students’ successes, we want to see these skills help them thrive. For that to happen, students must gain the ability to synthesize information. They must be able to listen, read, speak and write—so they can express strategic and tactical thinking. When they say AI is eroding their ability to speak and write, this is what they’re losing, often before they’ve ever fully gained it.

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