Everyone just wants to help.

The tragedy is that the juvenile justice system can leave kids and teenagers worse off than when they entered it. Over the past six years, nearly 1,300 people have sued New Hampshire alleging that they were sexually and physically abused while in juvenile detention. According to New Hampshire Public Radio, this is “the largest government scandal in New Hampshire, and one of the largest youth detention abuse cases in American history.” On the opposite end of the country, California charged 30 juvenile corrections officers at a single facility last year for arranging “gladiator fights” among the youth they were tasked with helping. The indictment recounted 70 bouts over the course of just five months, with some of the 140 victims as young as 12. In spite of the ideals professed by lawmakers, officials, and the public, the juvenile justice system often hurts young people instead of helping them.

A decade ago, the juvenile justice system was new to me. I was a rookie public defender assigned a juvenile court caseload in a small county in north Georgia. Over the four years that followed, I kept that responsibility even as my adult court assignments shifted me to another community. I went to child custody hearings and got to know hundreds of kids in trouble with the law. I made regular trips to the Regional Youth Detention Center, where young people are held on a short-term basis. I also talked to a lot of lawyers whose life’s work is in juvenile courts.

Though I’m not on the front lines anymore, on June 12, I testified before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights about mental health in juvenile justice facilities. I told the commissioners about the conflicting mindsets that beset the law—on the one hand, a belief that people who commit crimes are problems, and on the other, confidence that youth merely have correctable problems. I spoke about the reasons I doubt the system will ever truly live up to its promise. And I noted ways to try to prevent and repair the harm the system will cause.

Just days before, I drove by the Youth Development Campus, a facility in my home city of Augusta, Georgia, where kids and teenagers are incarcerated long-term. I couldn’t help but think of both the promise of the system and its perils. The promise is that detainees there can receive a diploma from an accredited high school. Foremost among the perils is dehumanization. The whole place is down past the paper mills and slaughterhouses on the swampy side of town, sitting on barbed-wire acreage just 2,000 feet from the county jail.

W.E.B. Du Bois once asked what it felt like to be a problem. Certain people have problems. Others are condemned to being problems. That is most apparent in the adult criminal justice system, though it is reflected in the juvenile one, too. The adult system has long been tasked with resolving people deemed to be problems, and in large measure, that remains the case despite the rise of rehabilitative and restorative justice models. Using substances means one is an “addict.” Violating the law makes one a “danger to society.” A person, so reclassified, goes to a designated place for problem people—a concrete facility with barbed wire, armed guards in towers, and padded isolation cells.

Rehabilitation in such places is a distinctly secondary consideration, and it is not allowed to override the treatment of the person as a problem. The Supreme Court had to tell a prison to let a chaplain touch a convict undergoing lethal injection because prison officials initially thought that gesture too decent. First-class opioid-use rehabilitation is available in only a small minority of prisons. Family visitation helps manage problems, but letting mothers and fathers hug their sons and daughters is considered too humanizing. Conjugal visits have given way to video “visitation.” (As one North Carolina official explained in justifying this change, “You certainly don’t want a young child to be hugging a family member and their time expires and you have to pull them out of their arms.”)

Even after one graduates from whatever rehabilitation is on offer, an adult convicted of a criminal offense remains a “felon,” a status virtually as unchangeable as the color of one’s eyes—and one far costlier to one’s ability to earn a living. Adults who run afoul of the law are thought of as problems, then treated in a way that makes their problems grow.

We tell ourselves we treat kids and teenagers differently. The entire reason we have a separate juvenile criminal system is society’s discomfort with writing off people before their 18^th birthday, during a time in life characterized by (in the Supreme Court’s words) “immaturity, irresponsibility, impetuousness, and recklessness.” Perhaps most of us remember having problems when we were like this. There are plenty of people who cannot imagine calling the police on young people they know and love. Sara steals $100 while babysitting? Take away her car keys, yell sense into her, and make her go watch the kids for free until she’s learned her lesson. Joey had a beer at his friend’s house and they got into a tussle? Call the friend’s parents, make Joey write a letter, and have him pass the sniff test every time he comes home. Sara and Joey get to have problems. They’re good kids just making dumb mistakes.

On some level, we recognize that kids and teenagers in poorer neighborhoods, where the temptation to break the law is even stronger, deserve the same leeway. So we promise ourselves that we’ve come up with a gentler, more humane system.

Does the system deliver on that hope? Sometimes. Most of the young people I represented did end up getting help that my adult clients could not reasonably expect from the system. There was the teenager struggling with truancy who received a few months’ respite at a good camp while his grandfather cleared out cockroaches from their home. There was the girl who finally opened up after months of proceedings and admitted that her aunt—whom she had been accused of committing battery against during a fight—was in fact abusing her. I will never forget the trust it took for these young people to acknowledge that they weren’t the problems.

But the courts definitely deem some youth to be problems. The Supreme Court specifically tells judges that if they decide some young Alyssa demonstrates “irreparable corruption,” they can sentence her to life in prison without the possibility of parole. For all our compassionate understanding that kids and teenagers have problems, apparently there are things they can do that break our faith.

As for those who are not deemed broken beyond all hope, they are sometimes dehumanized, too. In Louisiana, just three years ago, the governor temporarily transferred 25 mostly black boys incarcerated by the juvenile justice system to live in the former death row unit of the state’s infamous Angola prison. He did so after a mass escape led to a shooting, revealing serious security gaps endangering detainees, staff, and the community. Youth aren’t always treated differently from adult prisoners after all.

Still, as evidenced by the Louisiana shooting, there are kids and teenagers who commit killings, rapes, and robberies. While they very often do have serious problems, these are not ones that can safely be wrestled with in the community while those facing them continue to cause other people new problems. Nor would it be justice not to bring these young people to account for their crimes. So facilities will have to continue to exist.

And so must scrutiny. These facilities must be used as a last resort. If a young person’s problems can be handled in the community, that is where they must be addressed. The court I practiced in relied on family therapy, mentorships, social service roundtables, and regular conversations with school administrators for much of its work. Most problems were handled inside the very community where they arose, rather than being treated as a reason to pull a young person out of that community altogether. For most kids, teenagers, and families, that was what they needed—and a harsher approach would have caused more disruption with less to show for it.

As for those youth who do have to be incarcerated, systems and officials must be pressed again and again to treat facility personnel issues no less seriously than they would those in schools, hospitals, or any other setting with vulnerable people. A system that cannot police its own officers will not be able to police those entrusted to it. And the last thing kids and teenagers inclined to disorder, violence, and crime need to see is that these things can be overlooked so long as the one committing them has power.

Rehabilitation must also be the driving principle for facilities. Religious chaplaincy, psychological care, family repair, substance abuse treatment, educational opportunity—these are not aspirations. They’re the bare minimum.

Here’s one more: accountability. Those who have been harmed by the system deserve a way to have their complaints heard and the injustices they suffer recognized in a court of law. They deserve some measure of compensation. So long as it remains exceedingly difficult to sue government officials, these remedies will remain illusory. Detained youth who allege that juvenile officers sexually assaulted them, as did a 14-year-old in Tennessee, cannot recover damages from governments unless they can prove that the officers were inadequately vetted, trained, or supervised. Kids and teenagers who claim that officers were grossly negligent in failing to prevent rape by fellow detainees cannot recover: As a federal appeals court held in the case of an 11-year-old Alabama boy, only deliberate indifference by officers can authorize damages. These decisions reflect a system that protects adults in authority rather than the young people entrusted to them. And they reinforce the impression that kids and teenagers will be punished severely for their infractions while those in power will escape scrutiny for adult brutality.

While the system sometimes does deliver rehabilitation, in contrast with the young people who endure it, it does not merely have problems. It is one. Scrutiny on it should never be less than that placed upon the young people imprisoned by it.

And it’s about time.

It’s a response to a shocking fact: Graduates of more than 800 college programs across the country — including at institutions like the University of Southern California and New York City’s New School — make less than the average high-school grad four years after getting a degree, despite all that time, effort and tuition money.

Now the American government will have no part in propping up degree programs that may not even lead to a livable wage. A provision of the Big Beautiful Bill cuts them off from federal aid access if they can’t break the non-grad salary baseline.

Graduates of more than 800 college programs across the country make less than the average high-school grad four years after getting a degree, despite all that time, effort and tuition money, according to a new report.

Programs that fail the test for two out of three consecutive years will no longer be able to bury kids in debt — at least not on the taxpayer’s dime.

These Big Beautiful Bill revisions represent “the biggest set of changes to financial aid in decades,” according to Robert Kelchen, head of the Department of Educational Leadership at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. And change is much needed.

Teens and twentysomethings should be protected by the federal government from making a catastrophic financial decision, like taking on debt to finance a degree that ultimately could decrease their earnings potential. But until now the government has been enabling those decisions by underwriting loans without regard to the value of the investment.

The Big Beautiful Bill’s alteration to the federal student loan program represents the biggest changes in decades, per experts.

“It makes complete sense from a student perspective and also from a taxpayer perspective [to stop giving] money to programs that leave students financially worse off,” Michael Itzkowitz, president of the HEA Group, said.

The HEA Group, a policy organization focused on higher education and economic mobility, used Education Department data to compare average graduate earnings from some 32,000 bachelor degree programs around the country with average high school graduate wages in the same states.

According to the findings, 804 programs — 2% of all undergraduate programs which graduate 40,000 students annually — were flagged as potentially failing the new policy changes, including several at high-profile universities.

Graduates with music degrees from the University of Southern California, Juilliard and the New School earned less on average four years after graduation than high school graduates — making $34,124, $32,842 and $32,930, respectively.

Music majors from the University of Southern California were earning roughly $34,000 four years after graduation, according to Department of Education numbers.

Graduates of the Fine and Studio Arts program at New York City’s Cooper Union pulled in just $24,920 on average four years out, and students with degrees in Liberal Arts as well as Fine and Studio Arts from Bard College made slightly below the typical high school grad, at $34,571 and $34,667, respectively.

The Post reached out to these schools for comment.

Mark Kantrowitz, author of “How to Appeal for More College Financial Aid,” says that we can expect to “see some chaos resulting from” these new changes. The Department of Education will analyze tax records from the Treasury Department to calculate the return on investment for students by school and program.

Graduates of the Fine and Studio Arts program at New York City’s Cooper Union pulled in just $24,920, on average, four years out.

“We may see some colleges discontinuing some of their programs when they see significant shifts in enrollment and borrowing patterns,” Kantrowitz said. “The higher-cost colleges that have the least generous financial aid [are] going to be the most impacted.”

Itzkowitz says that the new earnings provision actually is exactly what students are asking for: “If you speak to any [college] student … they will want to earn more than someone that has a high school diploma. They would probably [not] want to attend a program if the majority of students can’t even earn that amount.”

But Andrew Gillen, an educational researcher at the Cato Institute, says the changes from the Big Beautiful Bill “don’t go far enough.”

“You could still have programs that just barely increase their graduates’ earnings but load them up with so much debt that it’s still a terrible financial investment for the student and for the taxpayer,” he said.

Higher education researcher Andrew Gillen says that the new changes to the student loan program actually don’t go far enough.

Yes, it might be uncomfortable or even emotional for some in academia to acknowledge that many degrees, particularly in the humanities, are poor investments for many students. But it’s time we confront that truth so that students can make informed decisions about their futures.

The student loan system enabled by the federal government spent years foisting debt onto teenagers who were told that college is the singular pathway to success, without ever asking whether the programs accomplished what they promised.

Predictably, schools raised tuition, passed the bill over to the taxpayer, and buried kids in debt that they can’t repay. That’s why more and more young people are concluding that college simply isn’t worth it and dismissing the value of education altogether.

More responsible federal lending can prevent young people from throwing the baby out with the bathwater and help us reach a healthier middle ground — where colleges have a duty to make their product worth it, and students can pursue education with the confidence that they’ll be better off for it.

The legislative branch must empower the government’s chief executive to, in the words of Constitutional Convention delegate James Wilson, “involve us in such distress.” Had Trump followed the law, he may never have launched his disastrous attack on Iran.

Yet much worse would be a conflict between the U.S. and People’s Republic of China. The PRC is a great power, possessing an expansive economy, a burgeoning military, and nuclear weapons. Hostilities would almost certainly spread to the Chinese mainland and leapfrog across America’s Pacific possessions and bases, perhaps even reaching the U.S. homeland.

Combat also could entangle neighboring states and disrupt trade with and through Northeast Asia. Pyongyang might see American preoccupation with Taiwan and China as an opportunity to launch the Second Korean War. And the fight would not necessarily remain conventional: never have two major powers possessing nuclear weapons openly battled over interests perceived by both as vital.

No one wants such a war. Still, Taiwan has become a dangerous tripwire for just such a conflict. Indeed, Taipei has bulked up its lobbying operation in the United States in an attempt to preserve Washington’s implicit security commitment. As Trump’s decision to launch a lawless war of choice against Iran highlights, there is a real risk that he or a future president could succumb to reckless hubris in the Pacific.

Indeed, the likelihood of similar misjudgment is great. In the case of Taiwan, many U.S. policymakers simply assume that Beijing would not challenge America. Just tell Beijing what Washington expects, intoned Leon Panetta, former White House chief of staff, defense secretary, and CIA director, and the denizens of Zhongnanhai wouldn’t dare challenge America: “I think frankly if China understands that we’re serious about that, China’s not going to do that.”

Panetta is wildly optimistic. History and security make the island state a vital concern for China, while Taiwan matters not at all for America’s direct defense. The Chinese people view it as part of their nation, while few Americans know where it is. Moreover, distance matters. Taiwan is barely 100 miles off China’s coast but 6,000-plus miles from the American mainland. It is far easier and less expensive to deter than project power.

Absent support from nearby states, Washington would find it almost impossible to defend Taiwan, yet none of Washington’s Asia-Pacific allies have committed to join America and thereby become a permanent enemy of the region’s most powerful nation.

No doubt, American officials hope such a decision is never necessary, that the threat alone deters the PRC from taking military action. Indeed, that is the basis for Washington’s policy of “strategic ambiguity,” which assumes Beijing won’t test its unstated defense commitment while Taipei won’t provoke China. Alas, those nations are just as likely to get Washington’s decision wrong, which would make war more likely.

Moreover, if deterrence fails, the PRC is likely to preempt U.S. and allied action by hitting American bases and forces alongside those of Taiwan. In any conflict, Washington almost certainly would retaliate against Chinese facilities across the mainland, which in turn could trigger Chinese attacks on American targets, perhaps including Hawaii and the continental U.S. A dangerous, and potentially catastrophic, escalatory spiral would beckon.

Even victory would not be forever. Beijing undoubtedly would rearm and try again, rather like Germany responded to its loss in World War I. Washington would have to maintain an oversized military for years, decades, perhaps forever, to protect Taiwan. Yet just six weeks of bombing Iran, a middling power at best, left the Pentagon desperately short of munitions that would be vital for any China contingency. The fiscal burden of presuming to defend most of the known world in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East will grow ever more onerous as Uncle Sam’s finances continue to deteriorate and Congress proves unwilling to even pretend fiscal responsibility.

Perhaps even more challenging would be a Chinese decision to avoid a military assault on Taiwan and initiate a quarantine or blockade instead. The PRC has been steadily increasing naval pressure on the island state.

Reported the Wall Street Journal: “Chinese forces constantly fly, sail, probe and patrol close to Taiwan, signaling to the island’s 23 million people that Beijing’s hard-power buildup makes their resistance to a takeover futile.”

In response, the U.S. would be forced to initiate hostilities without the obvious provocation of direct attack. Would Americans support conflict over free transit for a territory as close to China as Cuba is to America? In 1962 President John F. Kennedy almost took the U.S. into war against the Soviet Union over the latter’s intervention in Cuba. How many Americans would be willing to risk the reverse today?

Of course, there is an informal war party in the nation’s capital, ever ready to race into war with the enemy du jour. Many members angrily denounce their critics — for instance, Steve Bannon, the well-heeled beneficiary of a Trump pardon, has criticized yours truly for insufficient bellicosity toward China. Bannon sensibly denounced Trump’s Iran misadventure but is willing to risk a far more dangerous war with Beijing, like so many others in the nation’s capital.

This is simply mad. The most important principle underlying U.S. policy toward Beijing should be avoiding conflict. Of course, a Chinese attack on Taiwan would be “terrible,” warned Dennis Blair, former commander-in-chief of U.S. Pacific Command and Director of National Intelligence. However, war would be catastrophic for both nations, ruinous for Asian states, and terrible for the world.

Imagine a globe-spanning naval battle, with both sides interdicting commerce. Imagine a collapse in Asian trade, far worse than the consequence of Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. Imagine a North Korean invasion of the South, backed by the PRC and Russia. Imagine steady military escalation as human and materiel losses mounted. Imagine Beijing’s leadership turning to nuclear weapons.

Unfortunately, even Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth acknowledges that the U.S. often loses in official war games. When Washington emerges victorious, its losses are typically still huge — two (and sometimes more) aircraft carriers, one or two dozen ships, hundreds of aircraft, and thousands of personnel. And many exercises simply don’t game the consequences of nuclear strikes. Are Americans prepared to risk their homes and nation so Washington can forever dominate China along its coast, thereby imposing what the U.S. would never accept?

This doesn’t mean the U.S. should do nothing to help Taiwan defend itself. Washington should sell weapons to Taipei, especially those most useful in defeating a blockade and invasion, such as anti-ship missiles. American officials should seek to unite major industrialized states to threaten trade penalties and economic sanctions if the PRC initiates force against Taiwan. Washington also should consider relaxing its opposition to friendly proliferation by its Asian allies.

However, Washington’s most important policy objective involving China should be avoiding conflict. Military force should always be a last resort. Full-scale war with a great power armed with nuclear weapons can be justified only when truly existential interests are at stake. The Taiwanese should be free to decide their own future. However, protecting that right, though a worthy end, does not warrant America risking a nation-ending clash with the PRC or anyone else.

Policymakers who believe that the U.S. should be prepared to go to war over Taiwan should initiate a public dialogue. How many Americans are willing to back such a conflict? It is essential to have that debate today, before a U.S. president recklessly commits the nation to a war against China.

First, the values and principles animating the American Revolution — radical in their time — enabled the freedom and prosperity that have persisted for generations ever since. Today’s Americans are the greatest beneficiaries of the forces of progress and flourishing unleashed by the founding generation.

But second, the events of 1776 redound far beyond the United States, for the declaration has inspired nearly every subsequent human movement for liberty — and against tyranny.

Indeed, the impact of Thomas Jefferson’s words contradicts the man himself. It was in his letter to Edward Carrington in 1788 that he famously observed, “the natural course of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground.”

Many freedom-loving Americans, surveying the scale and power of today’s government, treat Jefferson’s warning as axiomatic. And that may be true. But in the two centuries-plus since he said it, it’s been wrong.

By nearly any measure, the world is freer today than it was in Jefferson’s time. Government is far larger than at any time in our history. But consider the tremendous progress of America in liberty and equal rights for nearly every minority group since 1788. I’d sooner argue that since the American founding, the natural course of things has been for government to yield and liberty to gain ground.

But even with an awareness and appreciation for the sweep of history over the past 250 years and its upward march of freedom and prosperity for Americans, one can’t help but feel a sense of concern as we mark the declaration’s milestone. Are we at an inflection point where Jefferson’s warning is proved out? And recall Benjamin Franklin’s famous admonition as the curtain came down on the Constitutional Convention.

“Well, Doctor, what have we got?” asked Elizabeth Willing Powel.

“A republic … if you can keep it.”

We have kept it so far. And we’ve done so through periods of incredible stress, including bitter partisan battles, economic and social upheaval, and even a great Civil War. But the amount of stress we’re placing on it today makes Franklin’s question relevant in our own age. We’re simply asking too much of our republic when, as citizens, we ask too much of our government.

As the writer George Will has remarked on today’s intense polarization, “one reason the temperature of the nation’s discourse is high is that the stakes are high.” Government intervention and power now pervade nearly every aspect of our lives.

Americans used to look toward family and community for support when dealing with the inevitable rough patches of life. But increasingly, our first call is to the state to “do something” when we face such challenges. And the political class is all too happy to indulge, evidenced by federal spending that grows inexorably higher — and less sustainable — as the years pass.

With the scope and power of federal policymaking exceeding anything the founding generation could have imagined, it’s undermining their splendid constitutional architecture: the very thing that has engineered our current age of freedom and prosperity. And while the bending of that architecture is not new, it’s accelerating and being pushed to new boundaries.

So as we commemorate a revolution that was largely fought over the rule of law and executive power, it’s ironic that two of the most concerning trends in today’s America are the deterioration of the rule of law and an accumulation by both parties of breathtaking presidential power that is increasingly being wielded in unconstitutional and extralegal ways.

And could there be any clearer call that our efforts to “keep” the republic are at risk than bearing witness to 2020’s attempts to disrupt the peaceful transition of government that has been a hallmark of these 250 years?

Let’s do more than commemorate and celebrate the 250th. Let’s ask our government to do less for us, so that we can again feel the sense of empowerment and meaning that comes from doing more for ourselves.

Let’s insist that government live within its means, so that the power of our economy to generate prosperity for all is not derailed.

Finally, let’s renew our commitment to meet Franklin’s challenge, and keep the republic that will protect the lives, liberty and economic well-being of the future generations that follow us for the next 250 years.

Imagine. The official tasked with promoting cooperation among the EU’s 27 members is vilified for addressing a neighbor believed to pose an acute security threat to the continent. What was he thinking!? “I don’t think right now is the right time to start negotiations with Putin,” complained Lithuania’s President Gitanas Nausėda.

Which leads to the obvious question: If not now, when? The conflict in Ukraine has raged for 52 months, longer than World War I, and shows no sign of abating. The fight continues to wreak ever more death and destruction. For Europe, at least, nothing is more important than ending the war.

However, Nausėda is a moderate compared to other European leaders. “The European Union cannot assume the role of mediator in these negotiations,” insisted Estonia’s Prime Minister Kristen Michal, since doing so would limit “its own ability to take the very actions required to support Ukraine and increase pressure on Russia.” Even more significant, POLITICO reports, France’s President Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz “scorned efforts by European Council President António Costa.” (Apparently, they believe they should take the lead whenever any talks get going—if such talks ever happen.) Even Costa’s defenders downplayed his efforts. An unnamed EU official told POLITICO: “The contacts made at this point had the mere objective of establishing a channel of communication in order to, when the moment comes, have a diplomatic channel with Russia to defend EU’s interests.”

What are Costa’s critics doing to end the presumed threat from the east? In fact, the likelihood of Moscow attacking any EU country continues to fall. For Putin to double down after making such a colossal misjudgment about Ukraine’s resilience—an error that was widely shared in Washington and most European capitals—would test his hold on power. The likelihood that his crack legions could roll to the Atlantic is infinitesimal. Also bizarre is the theory that Moscow would attack the Baltic states, small nations of little strategic consequence, simply to test or erode NATO’s willingness to fight. Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine proved to be reckless, but at least reflected a coherent rationale. Invading the Baltics would be sheer madness.

However, the Ukraine War could still spread, given the Western allies’ deadly involvement in it. The conflict is a proxy war in which European governments as well as Washington have enabled Kiev to battle Russia’s army to a crawl and strike ever deeper behind the conflict lines. And Moscow fully understands that NATO members are doing their best to kill Russians. Biden administration officials even claimed credit for killing Russian generals and sinking a Russian ship. If Moscow similarly aided, say, Mexican forces battling America, the war cry in Washington would be cacophonous. And if Kiev uses Western aid to eventually transgress a red line, whether expressed or implied, Russia might retaliate against the NATO member responsible. Then all bets would be off.

This reflects practical reality, not moral judgment. Moscow’s deadly invasion was wrong—murderous and destructive without any compelling practical necessity. Allied policy was foolish, even reckless, but did not justify Putin’s decision to launch an aggressive war. The consequences have been horrendous for Russia as well as Ukraine. If the war has any positive result, it should be to remind every person affected and government entangled that technology is making armed conflict an ever more costly, even disastrous business.

Without negotiations, the war seems most likely become another frozen conflict and eventually peter out, though it also might escalate catastrophically. Kiev lacks the resources to defeat Russia, which, in extremis, could use nuclear weapons. Ukraine’s manpower dearth makes it more likely to continue slowly losing territory until Russia chooses to stop attacking. Kiev’s aerial attacks have embarrassed Putin and sapped support for the war, but they aren’t likely to force a peace. Nevertheless, despite Moscow’s advantages, the price of a decisive victory appears to be too high. Even Putin recently acknowledged that “we see the problems, we are aware of them and are responding to them.” Russia’s economic situation is likely to engender increasing popular dissatisfaction.

Perhaps the best of the mostly bad likely outcomes would be for Moscow to simply stop if it wins the rest of the eastern Donbas region. Neither country would then gain much from continuing missile and drone attacks. However, permanent armed hostility would risk renewed military action and discourage economic and social recovery. Europe would remain on edge, worried about Moscow’s future aspirations, especially if Putin is followed by a regime dominated by more radical, hardline nationalists.

Thus, negotiation is needed to reach a genuine, stable peace. Both Ukraine and Russia should be lodged within a larger security structure in which they are comfortable. That will happen only if European capitals help construct continental institutions to encourage economic growth and minimize military threats. These must include Moscow as well as Kiev.

Of course, participants in the next EU summit meeting are more likely to turn into an unruly mob shouting “Death to Putin” than to advocate that Europe recognize and respect Russia’s interests and fears. But there will be no stable peace without Moscow’s agreement. Ignoring persistent warnings of Russia’s (not just Putin’s) opposition to NATO expansion led to Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. To repeat, explanation is not justification. Nevertheless, had the transatlantic alliance not moved steadily eastward, ostensibly aiming to include Ukraine and Georgia as well, there is no reason to believe that Russia would have invaded its neighbor.

The various participants must place a peace settlement between Kiev and Moscow in the larger continental context. The allies, Europeans particularly, must understand Moscow’s red lines and express their requirements to Russia. Putin is no friend of democracy, but he was not hostile to Europe or America when he took office. To the contrary, as he explained to Germany’s Bundestag in 2001:

Recovering that moment is highly unlikely, but reminding both sides of what is possible could leaven the relationship, tempering the antagonisms and hostilities that have metastasized over the last quarter century. To the good, European governments are already spending more on the military, though divisions among them remain significant. Now they should work to reduce the geopolitical chasm that has opened between Russia and the rest of the continent.

Europe and America both would benefit if António Costa and others established a dialogue with Moscow. Tragically, the Russia–Ukraine war remains far from its conclusion unless Europe focuses on ending the conflict. That requires more than supporting Ukraine, important though that remains. After more than four years of war, Europe should actively push for peace.

But a new survey turns those assumptions on its head, revealing most Americans essentially agree that we’re extremely fortunate and have something special to protect. Sure, there are some bad apples that denigrate our country (and get a lot of attention while they’re at it), but they’re far from representative.

In fact, a majority of Americans — including a majority of Gen Z, even — report being patriotic. Just a tiny fraction say they aren’t grateful to live in this nation.

“Americans are a lot more patriotic than people realize. People are more on the same page than people realize,” Emily Ekins, the public opinion researcher who conducted the survey, told The Post.

The poll of more than 2,000 American adults found the “overwhelming majority” of Americans actually share some pretty pro-American sentiment.

Two thirds (63%) of respondents said they are grateful to be Americans, compared with a minuscule fraction (2%) who were not at all grateful. 70% of Americans were at least moderately patriotic, and 45% very or extremely so.

Most Americans believe that they’re lucky to live in the country.

54% of Gen Z members who were surveyed said they were patriotic.

And Gen Z — who often gets a bad rap, thanks to noisy members of the generation who take to the streets and social media to rag on the nation — also showed some American pride in the survey results. Just 9% said they were not at all patriotic, compared with a majority, 54%, who were at least moderately patriotic.

And yet, unfortunately, those are not the sorts of young people who attract all the attention. Instead, we so often talk about the sorts of agitators that burn American flags in Washington Square Park, or rip down our flag to raise the Palestinian flag, like students at City College of New York did in 2024.

Sure, Columbia students have posted “death to America” on their social media pages, and popular Gen Z influencers like Hasan Piker have said outrageous things like “America deserved 9/11” — but these are the nation’s squeaky wheels.

They don’t speak for the rest of us. And we shouldn’t let them.

“There is a small subset that is increasingly getting loud that has these really negative views of the country, but, like I said, they’re really a small subset that have a megaphone in media,” Ekins, Vice President for Policy at the Cato Institute, said.

Most normal people who aren’t too steeped in academic theory or social media rage bait have enough sense to realize that this nation is fundamentally a good one.

Only 10% of people polled had an unfavorable view of the founding of the USA. And almost everyone — fully 3 in 4 respondents — knew that the Constitution is very or extremely important for protecting their own freedom and liberty.

Anti-American agitators tend to get disproportionate attention in the media.

That said, there’s still progress to be made. Nobody living in the greatest nation in the world should be unsure of whether they have it good, or whether they should love their country. But some young people aren’t too certain.

Unfortunately, the survey found large generation gaps, like how 71% of Boomers have a strongly favorable view of the Constitution compared with only 29% of Gen Z, or how 69% of Boomers are very proud to be Americans compared with only 35% of Zoomers.

But this isn’t because young people have it any worse than their parents or grandparents. It’s because they’re not being taught about the country or why it’s so great.

That said, there’s still progress to be made. Nobody living in the greatest nation in the world should be unsure of whether they have it good, or whether they should love their country. But some young people aren’t too certain.

Unfortunately, the survey found large generation gaps, like how 71% of Boomers have a strongly favorable view of the Constitution compared with only 29% of Gen Z, or how 69% of Boomers are very proud to be Americans compared with only 35% of Zoomers.

But this isn’t because young people have it any worse than their parents or grandparents. It’s because they’re not being taught about the country or why it’s so great.

She’s right. Young people deserve to be taught the history of their own nation, and they should be empowered with knowledge of just how fortunate they are in the scheme of human history.

But, on America’s birthday, these results are also a reminder of another, very important thing: that, even in the era of social media, vicious partisanship, and divisive politics, most Americans stand on the common ground of love of their nation.

Let’s remember that fact, and stop allowing the anti-American agitators to taint our impression of our fellow countrymen and countrywomen.

This and other similar state laws, the 5–4 majority ruled, are not preempted by federal law.

Had the court ruled in favor of the RNC, as the 5th Circuit had previously, election administrators in 14 states would have had to scramble to print new election materials and educate voters about the abbreviated deadline. Election officials also would have faced tricky legal questions, such as what to do with ballots arriving after election day. Do they count the state and local contests on the ballot but not the federal ones? Or produce two sets of election materials—one for state and local contests, one for federal—for every registered voter?

Because the court avoided upsetting the apple cart, you might think that online reactions would be somewhat muted. Instead, extreme reactions and bad takes abounded, many of them not rooted in fact. Let’s dig into some of the misguided and misinformed claims about the implications of the court’s decision.

Watson keeps the federal government out of election law.

That’s wrong. A large number of Democratic elected officials quickly took to social media to celebrate that “states administer elections, not the federal government.” This is more than a bit rich coming from the party that in 2021 tried to use federal power to pack elections full of liberal voting laws (“H.R. 1: For the People Act”).

It’s also an inaccurate read of Watson. The court held that federal law doesn’t currently preempt state laws that provide a post-election day grace period. But the court didn’t decide that the federal government can’t create a law to prohibit such grace periods. Should Congress want to end post-election day grace periods, Watson won’t stop it.

The decision means states like California can continue to take weeks to count ballots.

So wrote conservative political commentator and Fox News contributor Nick Sortor. However, Watson addressed receiving mail ballots after election day, not counting ballots after election day. The RNC’s lawsuit against the state of Mississippi did not seek to limit the time period for counting ballots. President Donald Trump also seemingly confused that detail, posting on Truth Social, “the Supreme Court … allowed [ballots] to be counted LONG AFTER an Election is over…”

Every state tabulates ballots after election day, and it has been that way for a long time. In many states, it takes more than seven days to count all the ballots in a statewide election. That’s true for states that allow grace periods and for states that don’t allow grace periods. In my home state of Arizona, ballots must be delivered by the close of election day (no grace period). Nonetheless, Arizona always counts ballots more than a week after election day in a statewide election because hundreds of thousands of Arizonans drop off their ballots on election day. 

Furthermore, a ruling in favor of the RNC would have had little impact on the comparatively slow count in California. In that state’s recent primary, only 3 percent of the vote in Los Angeles County arrived after election day. The far bigger challenge for Los Angeles County is the 31 percent of the total vote that comes from mail ballots dropped off on election day. Those votes would be valid even if the Supreme Court had ruled for the RNC. Mail ballots dropped off on election day cannot be retrieved until that evening, then they must be scanned in, the signature verified, and the vote tabulated and adjudicated before being reported. This is what California election expert Kim Alexander calls the “pig-in-the-python” effect. It’s what currently prevents California from having more than, say, 85 percent of results available 48 hours after election day

The SAVE America Act would remedy the issues in Watson.

Many Republicans, including President Trump, reacted to their perceived loss in Watson with renewed calls for passing the SAVE America Act. In a social media post with over 27,000 likes, political commentator Eric Daugherty wrote the Supreme Court decision “ONLY PROVES WE NEED THE SAVE AMERICA ACT” (emphasis his).

The SAVE America Act focuses on documented proof of citizenship for voter registration and requires voter identification at the polls. The version of the bill passed by the House does not include any language about mail ballot deadlines. Proposed amendments, such as the one by Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri, would address Watson by requiring that all mail ballots be returned on election day, but Schmitt’s amendment would also limit mail voting to those in the military, people who are ill or traveling, and voters with disabilities. That will be a hard sell, even to some Republicans.

The RNC and the four dissenting justices sought to ‘limit voting rights and ballot access.’

That gross exaggeration came from Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic governor of Michigan, who wrote on X, “Today, the Supreme Court stopped Republicans’ blatant attempt to undermine voting rights …”

Whitmer should know that Michigan does not allow mail ballots to arrive after election day, even if mailed on election day. The RNC’s litigation in Watson sought to make all states like Michigan. Does Michigan undermine voting rights? 

In pursuing Watson, the RNC targeted a left-wing plot.

Rep. Abe Hamadeh of Arizona took a saturnine view of Watson: “The Left learned after the Supreme Court failed to stop the 2020 steal that they could weaponize mail-in ballots with zero consequences.” Hamadeh seems to have no problem suggesting that Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Republican appointees who joined the five-justice majority on Watson, are complicit in this leftist plot. 

But the map of states with a post-election-day grace period doesn’t cleanly support Hamadeh’s position; it’s a mix of red and blue. Yes, California, New York, Washington, and Oregon have grace periods. But so too do Mississippi (where the case originated), Texas, Nevada, Alaska, West Virginia, and Virginia.

Watson opens the door to election fraud.

Trump, Elon Musk, and MAGA political pundit Benny Johnson all alleged that Watson facilitates massive election fraud. More strikingly (because those three allege massive election fraud seemingly on a weekly basis), Justice Samuel Alito, in the last section of his dissent (section IV. B.), also invokes the specter of fraud: “Finally, today’s decision leaves open opportunities for voter fraud that may further undermine Americans’ faith in the integrity of this country’s elections.” 

To support such a bold statement, Alito points to a number of 20-year-old studies that acknowledge a greater risk of fraud from mail voting, including a report from a 2005 commission led by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker. Alito conveniently omits the fact that Carter later praised the security of mail voting and asked people not to mischaracterize the 2005 study. The only recent source cited by Alito is an explainer from the MIT Election Data + Science Lab website that acknowledges some administrative challenges connected to mail voting. But that same MIT website is replete with studies that have shown the non-existence of material fraud in mail ballots, none of which Alito cites.

But even if we accept Alito’s assertion that mail voting is less secure than in-person voting, the justice offers no evidence and no citation for why accepting mail ballots after election day is less secure than ballots received by election day. All mail ballots go only to registered voters. All ballots must be returned to election offices in a barcode-tracked return envelope assigned to that specific voter. Both mail ballots delivered before election day and mail ballots arriving after election day have to be signature-verified. There’s no reason why the difference in a day or two would affect the security of mail ballots, just as mail ballots that arrive 10 days before election day versus five days before would be no less secure.

What does all of this mean as we head into the November midterm elections? For election administrators, it means one fewer wrinkle in their election planning. For voters, it means the voting process remains the same, so most of them will quickly forget about Watson. But for the president’s most committed supporters and election integrity skeptics, Watson is perhaps one more reason—even if pretextual—for the federal government to intervene in election administration at an unprecedented level.

The Clark case arose after a Georgia woman died from surgery complications. A jury determined that the doctors had committed medical malpractice and awarded the woman’s family nearly $30 million for wrongful death, $2.5 million for her pain and suffering, and a little under $2 million for medical expenses. Pursuant to a Georgia statute capping “noneconomic” damages in medical malpractice cases, the court reduced the wrongful death damages to $350,000. The family challenged the statute under the state constitution, which reads in relevant part: “The right to trial by jury shall remain inviolate … and the jury shall be the judge of the law and the facts.”

In an opinion written by Chief Justice Nels S. D. Peterson, the Court unanimously sided with the family. Its decision depended partly on a 2010 case striking down statutory caps on damages for pain and suffering, Atlanta Oculoplastic Surgery, P.C. v. Nestlehutt. Nestlehutt traced the Georgia Constitution’s right to trial by jury back to English common law. It noted common law recognized precursors to medical malpractice suits and afforded juries trying them the right to determine damages. Because the statute at issue “clearly nullifies the jury’s findings of fact regarding damages and thereby undermines the jury’s basic function,” the Nestlehutt Court struck it down as a violation of the right to a jury trial.

The doctors in the Clark case asked the Court to overturn Nestlehutt. It declined to do so. Noting the uncertainty among the Justices as to whether Nestlehutt was rightly decided, they all agreed that it was entitled to respect as precedent (stare decisis) because it was not clearly wrong. 

Whatever mixed enthusiasm Nestlehutt received in the Court’s deliberations, Clark sets out a broad understanding of the historical prerogatives of juries. It holds that the right to trial by jury “has a substantive component and is not merely a procedural right.” Ignoring the historical prerogatives of juries “would be hollow and illusory.” Rather, jury findings of fact must “be given legal effect”—they must carry power that statutes cannot remove. The Court cited William Blackstone for the principle that once a jury finds “any flagrant violation of another’s right,” then “the law must of course redress it.” 

Officials lack the authority to negate the constitutional role of the jury. At common law, the right to jury trial was a limit on judges (though Parliament had complete sovereignty in the absence of a written constitution). In the independent United States, constitutionally enshrined jury rights like Georgia’s were understood to check “abuse of power by government actors generally,” including legislators.

The Clark Court concluded that a statute violates the state constitution if it curtails “the scope of the right as it existed at common law.” While the Court distinguished judicial damage reductions through remittitur and the power to grant new trials as valid ways of curbing excessive awards, it invalidated the statutory cap on noneconomic medical malpractice damages.

Advocates should take Clark—and its historical findings, many of which are not limited to the Georgia law—as an invitation to explore the historical role of juries and challenge modern rules that are incompatible with it. This is especially so for the criminal defense and civil rights bar, as a number of legal developments restrict jury power for the benefit of the government. First, Clark is clear that the right to trial by jury includes the right to have jury findings given legal effect. Acquitted-conduct sentencing contradicts this. Under that practice, a judge can sentence a defendant for conduct she finds by a preponderance of the evidence that he committed—even if the jury explicitly acquitted the defendant of it. Federal courts approve of this. While Georgia appellate precedent concerning it appears scant, Clark is a strong argument against allowing it.

Second, Clark quotes Blackstone for the rule that where someone violates another’s right, the courts should provide a remedy. Federal law contains a mess of doctrines that thwart this where the rights violator is a government official, including qualified, prosecutorial, and judicial varieties of immunity. The Georgia Constitution actually goes even further, presuming that the state and its officers have broad sovereign immunity. Yet Clark provides an important reminder that these privileges sit uneasily alongside the ancient doctrine that every right carries with it a remedy for injuries to it—and the value the Founders placed on trial by jury as a protection against government abuse.

Lastly, in a footnote, the Clark Court observed that its precedent may have overly discounted the Constitution’s direction that “the jury shall be the judges of the law and the facts.” Georgia courts have held since at least 1940 that this language means only that juries can apply the law as given by the judge to the facts as they find them. In other words, “the Constitution’s language does not mean what it appears to say,” as then-Justice Peterson wrote questioningly in the earlier concurring opinions to which the Clark footnote cites. The history to which Clark points adds reasons to doubt this precedent. Several common law cases that were important to early American understandings of the right to trial by jury, including those of John Peter Zenger and William Penn, featured jurors who acquitted defendants based on their own understandings of the law—ones judges disagreed with but were powerless to override.

While Clark is a civil case and relies on Nestlehutt, its research and holding concern the common law as a whole. The decision is a challenge to the bar and bench to recover the historical understanding of jury prerogatives. It deserves pride of place among recent Supreme Court of Georgia decisions taking originalism and the particularities of the state constitution seriously, an enterprise Chief Justice Peterson has encouraged in scholarship as well as important opinions. The Clark Court determined that medical malpractice damage caps cannot comport with the common law contours of the jury trial. Criminal defense and civil rights attorneys should welcome it as a way to revive juries for the benefit of their causes, too.

Reprinted with permission from the June 30, 2026 issue of Daily Report © 2026 ALM Global Properties, LLC. All rights reserved. Further duplication without permission is prohibited, contact 877–256-2472 or asset-​and-​logo-​licensing@​alm.​com.

For too many families, the answer seems to be “no.”

Pennsylvania’s Educational Improvement (EITC) and Opportunity Scholarship (OSTC) tax credit programs allow businesses and individuals to receive credits against their state income taxes when they donate to organizations that provide scholarships for students. EITC was one of the first tax credit scholarships in the nation—and, let’s face it, our commonwealth is rarely at the forefront of innovative ideas anymore.

Now, a majority of lawmakers in the Pennsylvania House—every Democrat and three Republicans — voted for a bill that would kill both programs and replace them with a new program that would be more burdensome for schools. While states across the country are increasingly embracing educational freedom and parental choice, some Pennsylvania lawmakers want to go in the opposite direction.

In 2023–24, more than 100,000 K‑12 scholarships were awarded through EITC and OSTC, but families submitted more than 170,000 applications that year. This means that around 70,000 scholarship applications were turned away. In other words, these are popular with Pennsylvania families.

My own family experienced the benefits of EITC first-hand. When my children were younger, we utilized EITC scholarships to afford tuition at a small Catholic school that provided a nurturing environment for them.

EITC and OSTC scholarships are targeted at lower- and middle-income families trying to give their kids a shot at a better education. For example, the median income of Philly families receiving tax credit scholarships through the Archdiocese of Philadelphia is $63,000, well below median family income in Philadelphia ($75,000) and Pennsylvania ($101,000).

It’s also worth noting that the average scholarship was less than $3,000 in 2023–24. Meanwhile, Pennsylvania public schools received an average of $23,000 per student that year, and Philly schools received nearly $25,000. Imagine how many kids could be helped if the program grew with demand so all applications were accepted and the average scholarship was more in line with the cost of education.

Then there’s what the proposal calls the “Accountability for Diverted Tax Dollars Restricted Account,” a name that shows the sponsors’ true colors. Tax credits aren’t “diverted dollars.” The state isn’t cutting a check; it’s allowing people to direct a portion of their own tax liability toward children’s education. Businesses and individuals choose how much to give, to whom, and when. Calling that a “diversion” assumes every potential tax dollar rightfully belongs to the government. The founders must be rolling over in their graves.

Participating private schools would face new mandates if the bill were enacted. Rather than helping students, history shows that increasing the cost of participating in scholarship programs tends push high-quality schools, small schools, and newer schools out of the program, thus limiting options for families.

It’s not as if public schools have a great track record of meeting kids’ needs. Fewer than 20% of Philadelphia school district students scored proficient or better in math or reading on the latest Nation’s Report Card, well below the average nationwide, statewide, and in other large U.S. cities. It’s a number that should cast a long, dark shadow over the district’s much touted four-year graduation rate. In the city that championed the idea that all men are created equal, too many kids are being handed an unequal start.

This is why our tax credit scholarship programs are so important—and why this proposal to drastically change them deserves scrutiny.

EITC and OSTC work because they’re built around a simple idea: parents know what their kids need better than government bureaucrats do. A scholarship follows a child to a school his or her parents choose. The school succeeds or fails based on whether families keep showing up. That accountability is direct and immediate — and much more effective than government mandates.

Philadelphia is the centerpiece of America’s 250th anniversary celebrations because it’s where American independence was announced to the world, predicated on our unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The families using Pennsylvania’s scholarship programs are embracing one of the most important liberties: that of choosing the environment where their children’s formative years are spent.

The least lawmakers can do is not make that harder.

July 1 is the first deadline for renewing the agreement, and it’ll probably be missed. That prospect, as well as President Donald Trump’s recent claim he’d “rather not have the USMCA,” has led to some warnings that the deal — and the supply chain it’s supported for 30-plus years — is at serious risk.

Granted, Trump loves drama, which will surround USMCA negotiations as long as he is president. And the next steps won’t be costless. But the agreement is simply too important to blow up, and Trump knows it.

For starters, the deadline is relatively meaningless. Under Article 34.7 of the USMCA, trade ministers from all three countries must convene at the deal’s six-year mark (that’s July 1) to assess its performance and decide whether to issue a 16-year extension, to 2042. If anyone declines to extend the deal, the three parties will meet annually until either everyone agrees to renew the agreement or it expires in 2036.

Canadian and Mexican officials have said they want to renew the USMCA tomorrow, but there are silver linings if, as expected, the US abstains. Today, a long extension is politically treacherous, and inaction won’t scuttle the agreement. Ten years is a long time, and Canada and Mexico might benefit from waiting Trump out instead of handing him major concessions because of a soft deadline.

Yes, Trump could withdraw from the deal. But it’s a safe bet he’s bluffing.

First, there are the economics. While the Nafta/USMCA’s macro effects are relatively modest, the agreement has facilitated an enormous amount of trade and investment since it took effect in the 1990s. In 2024 alone, trilateral trade in goods and services totaled $1.99 trillion, and regional foreign direct investment reached almost $380 billion — an increase of 37% and 16%, respectively, since the USMCA took effect in 2020. Mexico and Canada are now the top two US trading partners, well ahead of third-place China.

Just as important is the depth of this engagement. At $2 trillion in annual trade, the USMCA bloc might seem small compared to the EU’s single market ($6.4 trillion) or the China-led Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership ($3.3 trillion). But the USMCA involves just three countries, while the EU and RCEP involve 27 and 15, respectively. That means per country trade volumes — and regional supply chain integration — are far higher in the USMCA than in those other blocs.

This integration took decades to develop and is particularly important for US manufacturers. The National Association of Manufacturers calculates that roughly 71% of US imports from Canada and 64% from Mexico are industrial inputs — components, materials and intermediates flowing into American factories producing “Made in the USA” stuff. Further deepening comes from cross-border transactions occurring within the same multinational enterprise. Recent research from the Census Bureau finds that more than half of foreign affiliates worldwide export to or import from their US parent, but this figure jumps to more than 75% in North America, with intrafirm trade particularly deep in the transportation sector.

These are finely calibrated production systems built on predictable rules and minimal frictions, with inputs repeatedly crossing US borders before going into USMCA-made finished goods. Thus, the Census study’s authors warn that “raising trade barriers can be extremely detrimental for US multinationals, particularly when they are applied on imports from Canada and Mexico” — a conclusion supported by other research showing how complex supply chains amplified the costs of US tariffs in 2018–19.

The USMCA’s benefits — and the harms of termination — extend beyond manufacturing. The North American energy market is tightly interconnected, with Canada and Mexico serving as major buyers of US oil & gas products and major sources of US energy imports. Since Nafta took effect, moreover, US fresh produce imports have almost doubled — growth led by Mexico and Canada — as American agriculture also flows the other direction, with both countries serving as top destinations. Services and digital trade have also blossomed under the Nafta/USMCA’s streamlined rules for the business travel, cross-border sales, data flows, and physical outposts of North American service providers.

Unwinding USMCA would thus inflict real damage across the US economy — damage that Trump clearly understands. Days after he slapped fentanyl-related “emergency tariffs” on all imports from China, Canada and Mexico, he backtracked with a blanket exemption for goods that qualify under USMCA — a carveout that now covers more than 87% of goods imported from those countries. After applying “national security” tariffs on imported automotive goods, he immediately offered exemptions for USMCA-compliant parts and finished vehicles (followed by an “import adjustment offset” for US-based automakers to recoup tariff costs). And facing voter pushback on “affordability” last fall, the president exempted from his global tariffs foods and fertilizers that disproportionately originate in Canada and Mexico.

The political and legal obstacles are similarly daunting. The USMCA is Trump’s deal, which he negotiated, signed and declared to be the “best agreement we’ve ever made.” Termination would mean torching a signature accomplishment. There’s also the legal issue of whether Trump has the authority to exit the USMCA, since it was ratified by Congress and is codified into US law. As the Republican-led Senate Finance Committee concluded in a 2020 report, “The United States cannot withdraw from a congressionally approved trade agreement without the consent of Congress.” Litigation would surely ensue.

So, expect technical renegotiations, not seismic changes, in the years ahead. Here, again, the law looms large. Significantly altering the USMCA would require amending its implementing legislation and thus need congressional approval. A vote to reopen the most important (and controversial) trade agreement in US history is not a fight Congress is eager to pick — nor is it one, as US Trade Representative Jameson Greer just signaled, that the administration wants to encourage.

Instead, the parties will probably conclude a series of side letters targeting a few sources of continued tensions. The US is sure to demand stricter scrutiny of Chinese-origin content flowing through Mexico and Canada — a predictable response to US tariffs on Chinese imports and partly fueling Mexico’s increased exports, but one that can be targeted by new “rules of origin” for USMCA-compliant goods. The US might also seek increased access in both countries for American farm exports and tighter enforcement of digital trade, intellectual property, labor and environmental rules. Canada and Mexico, meanwhile, will press for breaks on US “national security” tariffs on metals and automotive goods.

Nobody will get everything they want, and talks will be a slog at times. But there’s common ground on several core issues — and, of course, a new US administration just 30 months away.

None of this is to say that the coming negotiations will be costless. A 10-year expiration window may be a lifetime in politics, but it introduces new and significant uncertainty for global businesses that make large-scale expansion plans on multi-decade timelines. So, on the margins, missing the July 1 deadline will likely reduce North American investment.

New rules of origin or labor and environmental conditions will also impose new costs on North American businesses, especially multinationals. The Federal Reserve has found that compliance costs under USMCA’s existing automotive rules of origin — just the documentation, classification and reporting burdens — amount to an invisible 2% tariff on cross-border trade, translating into billions of additional dollars paid by US manufacturers. Changing and expanding these rules will add to firms’ tab, as will the costs of monitoring, lobbying and adjusting to the political theater that accompanies each annual USMCA review.

These all count as taxes on seamless trade and productive activity. They’re hardly catastrophic — but they’re not exactly inconsequential, either. In the current environment, that’s probably the best North American businesses can hope for.

Those who defend the foreign policy status quo have in recent months taken to branding critics as un-American, the avatars of an alien ideology. But on this semi-quincentennial, it is worth remembering that the original opponents of American intervention abroad — the anti-imperialist movement that arose in response to an imperial turn in the late 19th century — were in fact the true inheritors of the republic and its first principles.

These American men and women were first roused into action by the prospect of Hawaiian annexation and later by war with Spain, viewing the seizure of the Philippines and Puerto Rico and the enlargement of the nation’s military establishment as threats to the nation’s republican character, economic health, and domestic tranquility.

As this nation remains disconnected from its republican path, their presence in American political life and their critiques are worth remembering if we are to find our way back to our birthright.

America’s anti-imperialist tradition was as diverse as the nation itself. Among the nation’s committed anti-imperialists was the then-world’s richest man, Andrew Carnegie. The movement also included the nation’s populist-in-chief and a perennial Democratic presidential nominee, William Jennings Bryan, who viewed the empire as an elite project that cost the nation’s farmers and laborers.

Reflecting upon the occupation of the Philippines, Bryan warned that the large standing army needed for it and other overseas adventures would prove “a pecuniary burden to the people” and “a menace to a Republican form of government.”

Bryan’s ideological opposite within the Democratic Party, former President Grover Cleveland, was also among the nation’s committed anti-imperialists. While in office, Cleveland governed as an anti-imperialist, forestalled the annexation of Hawaii, and beat back the plans of his Republican opponents for naval enlargement.

Even though American imperialism at the turn of the last century was largely a Republican adventure, the GOP produced a bevy of vocal and active anti-imperialists. These dissenting Republicans viewed the nation’s turn toward imperialism as a corruption of the nation’s character and, in particular, as an affront to their party’s history of emancipation.

Despite their differences, one thing united this otherwise disparate group: a belief that Americanism demanded an embrace of anti-imperialism. The anti-imperialists argued that, by taking on ambitions beyond its borders — particularly outside the Western Hemisphere — the nation was losing its republican character and becoming like the empires of Europe. They worried that America’s imperial turn would upset the nation’s republicanism by eroding the balance of power within the federal government, bloating the executive branch, and eroding First Amendment rights of individual Americans.

They also warned that the militarism that accompanied expansionism would distort the domestic economy, entrench cronyism, and foster a political culture that would further undermine the nation’s moral and political character. Summing up the concerns of the anti-imperialists, Carnegie asked rhetorically in 1899, “Shall we remain as we are, solid, compact, impregnable, republican, American” rather than give in to “the phantom of imperialism?”

If such critiques sound familiar, it is because, in taking a stand against adventurism in their own time, they foresaw the costs of American global power borne throughout the 20th century.

The original anti-imperialist movement, however, was not solely motivated by high-minded ideals and an inclusive liberal vision of Americanism.

Among those who opposed an American plunge into empire were those who were motivated, in part, by racist assumptions that foreign peoples could not assimilate into an Anglo-American tradition of self-government and would therefore corrupt the nation. Similar concerns emanated from American labor groups that believed the annexation of foreign lands, much like the influx of immigrant labor, would drive down the wages of native-born Americans and thereby undermine labor’s collective bargaining power.

Such attitudes were hardly unique to the anti-imperialists. Racial anxieties and economic protectionism ran through much of American society at the time — and coexisted with the high-minded republican principles that animated the anti-imperialist movement. This imperfect mix of high ideals and base fears makes the anti-imperialist tradition more human than heroic, yet no less worth recovering as we continue to face the issues of militarism and interventionism abroad.

This movement did not disappear overnight. It survived the Spanish-American War and remained a significant force during the interwar period, shaping debates over American foreign policy and later informing the arguments of the America First Committee. Despite this continuity, American involvement in the world wars began the political and cultural processes that steered the nation’s political culture away from its anti-imperialist tradition.

Due to the geopolitics and the scale of the world wars, supporters of a more muscular American foreign policy reframed intervention abroad from imperial meddling into a duty of global leadership. They argued that American disengagement from world affairs had helped create the conditions that made another global war possible.

The Cold War solidified these earlier trends and pushed American political culture further from its anti-imperialist roots. The ideological incentives of the early Cold War gave rise to the so-called “vital center,” a consolidation of elite opinion that jettisoned from mainstream discourse any criticisms of the nation’s new role in world affairs. This elite consensus was robust enough to survive the turmoil of the late Cold War and growing domestic opposition to the Vietnam War.

What the American public lost in the 20th Century was a broadly palatable and politically actionable critique of empire and militarism. Ideas that had once been voiced by former presidents, major-party presidential nominees, industrial titans, and prominent intellectuals gradually came to be dismissed as isolationist, naïve, or un-American.

As the United States continues to spend more on its military than any other nation in history and maintains a global footprint of security agreements and other entanglements, there is still a lack of substantive debate on the fiscal and moral costs of American militarism. Our muscles of republican self-government also atrophied as the adventurism and all of its accompanying costs — once viewed as intolerable — became sacrosanct.

As the material and ideological elements of interventionism became the norm, critiquing them became a radical perspective, whereas for earlier generations of Americans, such criticisms were self-evident.

The rise of an American empire constrained not just our policy debates but the boundaries of politics itself by turning the traditions of the past into the heresies of today.

The United States is still groaning under the burdens of empire. For those opposed to maintaining the status quo, these ongoing trends appear daunting. On the 250th anniversary of America’s birth, a new generation of Americans must answer a variation of Carnegie’s 127-year-old question: Shall we remain an empire, or shall we again become solid, compact, impregnable, republican, American?

To do so, Americans must first remember that there was once another way of thinking about their nation’s role in the world.

The modern presidency frequently sells its foreign policy to the American people via nominally private institutions, thereby bypassing official sanctions against propagandizing the public. So argues Chad Levinson, a political scientist at Virginia Tech, in The President’s Echo System.

These political pressure groups have ranged from the Century Group, which operated during the run-up to America’s entry into World War II, to the Project for the New American Century, active at the height of American hegemony in the 1990s. Levinson calls them extragovernmental organizations (EGOs): a web of private but government-aligned think tanks, pressure groups, and other players that lobby Congress and the public for foreign policies aligned with the president’s agenda. Pushing back against earlier scholars of elite machinations, such as C. Wright Mills, Levinson argues that the relationship between EGOs and the presidency is “symbiotic rather than coercive”: The White House serves as the senior partner, with their private counterparts playing a role akin to a “contemporary flash mob,” springing into action to amplify the president’s agenda.

Levinson opens by describing how EGOs operate in a public space defined by popular apathy toward foreign affairs. (“Left unprovoked,” he notes, “the US public pays little attention to foreign affairs.”) After America’s disastrous experience with the Committee on Public Information during World War I, Congress placed significant roadblocks on the executive’s ability to use overt propaganda. Meanwhile, Levinson notes, “Nonofficial propaganda…is protected by the freedoms of association and speech,” even when acting in coordination with the White House. He argues that EGOs are heavily slanted toward intervention: Such groups respond to incentives set by the executive branch—and broadly speaking, “Presidential ambitions…favor interventionism.” There are exceptions, of course: Levinson illustrates how President Barack Obama’s adviser Ben Rhodes enlisted EGOs to sell the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran, and how President Jimmy Carter used the Committee of Americans for the Canal Treaty to return the Panama Canal to Panama. But those were relatively dovish exceptions to a generally hawkish rule.

The ensuing chapters offer a series of historical case studies. The strongest one illustrates how President Franklin Delano Roosevelt coordinated with the Century Group, later known as the Fight For Freedom Committee and the Committee to Defend America (CDA), on messaging prior to America’s formal entry into World War II. Roosevelt allowed himself to be narratively paced by his EGO counterparts, delegating the responsibility of floating new policy ideas, creating the sense of public momentum, and creating a political space for the president to act. After America entered the war, EGO figures entered Roosevelt’s government, filling out public relations positions. Adlai Stevenson, for example, went from running the CDA’s Chicago chapter to working for the Department of the Navy.

A chapter on the early Cold War expands on these continuities, illustrating how the playbook used to sell Americans on entering World War II was repurposed to sell them on the Marshall Plan. The Democrats’ EGO model was so successful that the Republican wing of the Cold War consensus emulated it, with then–presidential candidate Dwight Eisenhower collaborating with a different set of EGOs, such as the Crusade for Freedom, to promote his policies.*

The ensuing chapters show how EGOs operated during the height of the Cold War. During the run-up to American involvement in the Vietnam War, Levinson notes, President Lyndon B. Johnson did not use EGOs to sell his policies: He didn’t need them, since the American people and Capitol Hill were at that point broadly supportive of Washington’s involvement in Southeast Asia. Such was not the case by the time President Richard Nixon took over the war, and the Nixon White House breathed new life into the long-established but politically inert American Enterprise Institute (AEI) to help sell his policy of Vietnamization.

Levinson’s chapter on the late Cold War, focused on President Ronald Reagan’s use of EGOs, shows yet more continuities. The EGO network born in the 1980s, built around such organizations as the Heritage Foundation and various Cuban exile groups, served as the backbone of right-wing foreign-policy politics that extended well into the 1990s and informed Republican thinking during the war on terror.

Unlike John Mearsheimer and Stephan Walt, authors of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, Levinson places the onus of American interventionism upon the presidency. Pressure groups such as the Iraqi National Congress and the Project for the New American Century “did not coerce the [George W. Bush] administration into doing something it did not want to do,” he argues, but rather served as an external partner that “helped persuade the public and Congress to go along.” Noting that both President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney had backgrounds in the oil industry and were primed to “identify a national security interest in promoting the stability of the supply for oil,” he suggests that they “needed no prodding from the outside.”

Levinson concludes by looking forward, speculating about the new forms propaganda-laundering will take in the digital era. Interwar organizations had to operate on a hub-and-spoke model, headquartered in New York or Washington with local chapters staffed through standing social and professional networks. Not so now, when the costs of organizing and the barriers to disseminating information have both come down. The same absence of friction that enables people to challenge the existing status quo can be used to propagandize them back into it.

Like all good books, The President’s Echo System raises further questions. Does Levinson’s thesis hold as firmly in the late Cold War and beyond as it did in World War II and the early U.S.–Soviet confrontation? Or did presidential agency diminish once an interventionist consensus hardened into not just a norm of the presidency but an entrenched feature of the state itself, with a Congress that at times has been more hawkish than the president? No book serves as a final word on any given subject, but Levinson’s work is a welcome addition to this evolving literature.

Despite such strengths, the book does contain a few historical inaccuracies. For instance, Levinson’s chapter on World War II says that Sen. Robert A. Taft (R–Ohio) was “among a small number of legislators who had opposed sending aid to the Allies before Pearl Harbor.” That misstates Taft’s position: Like a number of conservative Republicans on the eve of the war, Taft did not oppose aiding Great Britain per se, but he compromised on the issue by reluctantly endorsing the “cash and carry” provision in later iterations of the Neutrality Act. The provision held that the Allies could purchase munitions and other supplies so long as they paid for them up front and transported the items themselves. The difference may seem pedantic, but such policy minutiae fed into the EGOs’ work as they collapsed these distinctions and treated aid to the Allies as a binary policy choice when it was anything but.

Levinson has another lapse when he describes a photo of Sen. Burton K. Wheeler (D–Mont.) and the aviator turned America First activist Charles Lindbergh with “arms raised in the Nazi salute.” In fact, Wheeler and Lindbergh were not Sieg Heil-ing; they were doing the aesthetically similar Bellamy salute, which Americans used to perform during the Pledge of Allegiance. Levinson’s citations for the incident are a polemical essay in The New York Review of Books and the Rachel Maddow podcast Ultra, neither of which is a rigorous secondary source.

But these are small problems. The President’s Echo System is a worthy examination of how foreign policy propaganda operates in the United States. If you’re among those arrayed against that system, it’s a valuable tool for understanding what you face.

My sections were probably on the high end. Aside from greater mental health awareness among psychology students, the discipline skews heavily female, and young women are diagnosed with mental health disorders at over 1.6 times the rate of young men. While schools do not report what proportion of disabled students report mental disabilities, it could be the likely culprit behind the surge of disability accommodations. Psychiatry is inherently subjective, and there is no strict cutoff distinguishing between where ordinary psychological struggles end and mental disability begins.

It was well-intentioned when the Americans with Disabilities Act was amended in 2008 to include mental health conditions and learning disabilities as eligible for accommodations. But in practice, it created incentives for overdiagnosis. As The Harvard Crimson reported in December, the share of Harvard undergraduates receiving disability accommodations rose from roughly 3 percent in 2014 to 21 percent in 2024 — a sevenfold increase in a decade.

Harvard is not unusual among its peers. At Brown University, more than 20 percent of undergraduates are registered as disabled. At Amherst College, 34 percent. At Stanford University, a whopping 40 percent. Meanwhile, at community colleges, the rate is 3 to 4 percent and has not changed in a decade.

The numbers are particularly alarming at elite schools because the students there have the knowledge, resources, and competitive pressure to game the system.

Psychiatric overdiagnosis is a much broader problem than skewing school accommodations. American culture has increasingly treated the ordinary difficulties of growing up — social anxiety, trouble concentrating, sadness after loss, the turbulence of adolescence — as clinical conditions requiring diagnosis, treatment, and medication. According to the US Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 34 percent of young adults aged 18–25 met criteria for mental illness in 2024.

Over seven decades and successive revisions, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has grown from roughly 100 recognized conditions to nearly 300. Proponents of these changes argue that more diagnoses reflect greater mental health awareness and improved screening of previously unrecognized symptoms. But with successive DSM revision, mental illness has become easier to define, to the point of pathologizing ordinary struggles.

Autism prevalence rose 40 percent between 2018 and 2022, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an unprecedented and implausible increase for an inborn developmental disorder. Meanwhile, new disorders such as “prolonged grief disorder” pathologize grieving a loved one beyond 12 months — stigmatizing grief while offering little benefit over existing diagnoses which describe depressive symptoms. Even caffeine withdrawal is now a diagnosable condition.

The boundaries of what qualifies as a mental disorder have moved steadily outward, and every expansion creates a new population eligible for mental disability accommodations.

The gradual expansion of mental illness, to such a degree that over a third of young adults carry a psychiatric diagnosis, reflects a deeper problem with the field of psychiatry. And disability accommodations only work to create equity when they are accommodating genuine disabilities.

It is not surprising that overaccommodation appears most prevalent at elite colleges. These are students who have largely been steeped in therapeutic language since middle school, whose parents can afford the private evaluations that produce accommodations, and who face intense pressure to optimize every possible advantage in a GPA-obsessed, credential-driven competition. While some say it is that very competitive stress that is behind the rise in depression and anxiety among young people, most of my students appeared high-functioning. Some students outright admit that they only sought out a diagnosis because of favorable testing or housing accommodations.

No disability office wants to be the one that denies requests, because denial invites litigation and the accusation that a school doesn’t care about student well-being. The path of least resistance is always to approve. The problem is a collective action trap. Once a critical mass of students at one school has extra time on exams, students at peer institutions face pressure to seek the same or accept a competitive penalty for graduate school admissions, internships, and jobs.

Grade inflation followed exactly this dynamic for decades. In the psychology department where I taught, 60 percent of students received an A or A‑minus — a student at the 40th percentile, below average, still walked away with honors. Last month, Harvard’s faculty finally voted to cap A grades at 20 percent per course. It took coordination among peer institutions to break the trap, and it is encouraging that they are moving together. The same reckoning is needed when it comes to accommodations.

That conversation will be harder, because it carries the moral weight of preserving disability rights, and no one wants to be accused of indifference to suffering. But overdiagnosis is not compassion. It teaches a generation to mistake the ordinary difficulties of being young for evidence that something is clinically wrong with them and dilutes resources and attention away from the people who need them most.

Consider the recent overhaul of the childcare policy landscape by Assistant Secretary for Family Support Alex J. Adams, who leads the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) and recently unveiled a package of deregulating reforms. He is hardly the radical that critics — who argue his efforts would “endanger the children” — claim.

At a time when too many policymakers want to throw taxpayer money at the problem of expensive childcare without tackling the underlying cost drivers, reforming regulations represents simple common sense.

The new Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) flexibilities aim to give states and childcare providers greater choices to expand access and improve affordability by clarifying that “eligible child care provider” should be interpreted broadly. This approach gives families more freedom to choose the care arrangements that work best for their unique needs, including smaller or faith-based daycares as well as care provided by neighbors, friends, or family members.

The ACF also clarified that Temporary Assistance for Needy Families funds may be used more flexibly to support a wider range of childcare arrangements than in the past.

The ACF also reversed Biden-era CCDF policies that favored grants and contracts over parent-directed vouchers, giving states greater leeway and parents more options, and undid onerous Biden-era Head Start requirements as well.

Soaring childcare costs have become a widely held, bipartisan concern, and even on the Left some now recognize the role of overregulation in hampering daycare operations.

Childcare regulation has become so all-encompassing, micromanaging every minute detail of the activity. Congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp-Perez (D‑WA) recently took aim at rules that make it illegal for childcare workers to peel bananas, oranges, and other fresh fruits in daycares. When even an elected member of a political party not exactly known for its hostility to regulations is pushing for reform, it’s clear that regulators have overreached.

As a mother of young children, I’ve seen childcare overregulation up close. When searching through the website listing code violations for each daycare in our state, my husband and I were shocked to find that every daycare in our area had a lengthy rap sheet of citations.

A typical violation might read, “An outlet did not have a protective cover. The children were not in the classroom at the time, and the outlet was high up on the wall outside of the children’s reach.” Another common type of violation across many daycares and preschools involved a teacher briefly stepping out of a classroom still staffed by several other teachers, thus momentarily violating strict child-to-staff ratio requirements.

If each daycare had violations listed, did that really mean that every single provider — from large childcare centers to small in-home daycares — was unsafe? Of course not. When every student fails a test, the problem isn’t the students: it’s the test. The standards for daycare operators have become practically impossible to meet.

By driving up compliance expenses and limiting provider supply, extreme overregulation contributes to sky-high childcare costs, a problem that policymakers across the political spectrum recognize and decry. Too often, the proffered solution is subsidizing demand with tax dollars, which does nothing to cut at the root causes of childcare costs that many families struggle to afford.

The ACF’s announced reforms, on the other hand, are likely to beget real progress on childcare affordability by taking on the sprawling regulations complicating daily operations for providers and raising costs for American families.

Despite critics’ fears that without strict government mandates on things like child-to-staff ratios, daycares will descend into dangerous chaos, real-world evidence shows no such thing. Several countries, such as Denmark (not exactly a model of small government), Spain, and Sweden, do not specify any maximum number of children per childcare staffer. Their example proves that childcare systems can still operate safely and effectively without such regulations. Research suggests that granting staff members the flexibility to look after even one additional child can lower costs by up to 20%.

The general thrust of the recent reforms is to allow exactly that kind of cost-lowering flexibility by returning greater decision-making authority to states, providers, and parents. While New Mexico is doubling down on subsidies, Washington is trying something different.

Policymakers serious about affordability should see childcare deregulation for what it is: not some radical move but the clearest path to lower costs, broader access, and safe, reliable care for working families.

The Constitution protects a lot of rights and asks pretty little of us in return. We can certainly serve in the military, honor the flag, and vote for those who make the laws. But the only civic responsibility that is a true legal duty is jury service. It’s also the one thing that immediately makes government belong to the people.

Participating in elections is important, but when you go to the polls yours is just one of thousands of votes. At the national level, it may be just one among tens of millions. By contrast, when an American is called to sit on a jury, their vote determines the verdict.

Criminal cases require verdicts to be unanimous. That means every juror must come to an agreement as to whether the defendant is guilty or not guilty. Further, judges will assure each juror that they should never give up an honest conviction for the mere sake of getting along with the others.

This is a remarkable promise the Founders made for the people. When the laws actually threaten someone’s liberty or property, the ultimate judgment call is left in the hands of twelve ordinary members of the community. Lawmakers, judges, and lawyers are important. But it’s truck drivers and teachers, homemakers and store managers who have the final say over who goes to prison.

We’re celebrating America’s 250th birthday this year and that’s a great occasion for remembering the brave decisions of jurors throughout our history. They’ve used their power to protect liberty and change the country for the better. For example, before the Civil War, Congress made it a federal crime to help people escape from slavery. In 1851, the federal government charged Boston abolitionists with freeing Shadrach Minkins — formerly enslaved in Virginia—after his recapture up north. The abolitionists’ guilt could not have been clearer as a factual matter. But the jury stood up and refused to convict them. The brave stand of these ordinary jurors defended dignity against tyranny.

Serving on a jury remains meaningful today, even when criminal charges were properly brought against a wrongdoer. Federal judge Roy Altman recently told the story of presiding over an emotionally intense murder trial. Afterward, he met with the jurors. One, a quiet elderly woman who had come to this country from Haiti, slowly stood up using her cane. She gave the judge a hug, then explained that while she had moved to America seeking a better life, she had learned something new through serving. Her country gave her more than just opportunity, she said: it trusted her to be smart and wise enough to decide such an important matter. It was a memory she said she would carry with her for the rest of her days.

This woman understood something profound about democracy. It’s not just about deciding who gets to make the laws. It’s about deciding how they are applied. That work, too, belongs to all of us. The conscience of the community matters as much for freedom as does any other constitutional right.

It can have that role only if we the people exercise it. So next time you get that piece of paper in the mail summoning you to jury service, don’t think of it as something to avoid. See it as the chance to seek justice for your neighbors and your country. It may cost you some days away from work, but it’ll enrich your sense of what it means to belong to the community.

Such commerce should happen frequently in our vast, energy-rich country, but the Jones Act handicaps shipping. The law requires that goods transported between U.S. ports travel on American-built, American-flagged, American-owned and American-crewed vessels.

That makes domestic water shipping enormously expensive. U.S. vessels cost four to five times more to construct than foreign-built equivalents, and U.S.-flagged ships are over four times more expensive to operate. Compliant vessels are also in short supply. Of the world’s roughly 7,500 oil tankers, fewer than 60 are Jones Act-eligible. As a result, importing oil and fuel from halfway around the world is often cheaper than buying from domestic sources.

In mid-March, during the early weeks of the Iran war, the Trump administration suspended the Jones Act for ships transporting energy products and fertilizer. The move was a tacit acknowledgment of what economists and shippers have long known: The law imposes real costs on the American economy. The waiver initially expired after 60 days, but it was later extended for another 90, through Aug. 16. It constitutes something close to a controlled experiment in economic policy. And the results are striking.

I analyzed the shipping data since the waiver was enacted. In the roughly 90 days tracked, vessels operating under the waiver moved roughly 30 percent more oil and petroleum to the West Coast than Jones Act vessels move annually. More jet fuel shipped from the Gulf Coast to the West Coast than all recorded shipments between the regions in the last 27 years. In the waiver’s first 80 days, 49 percent more propane reached Puerto Rico from the mainland United States than over the past 22 years combined.

None of this should be surprising. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz may have deepened the domestic appetite for U.S. energy, but that demand always existed. The CEO of Overseas Shipholding Group — a Jones Act tanker company — admitted in 2017 that without the law, “there probably would be more movements of crude oil from Texas to Philadelphia.” That is exactly what has happened, with roughly 5 million barrels flowing from the Gulf Coast to the East Coast under the waiver.

Increased domestic commerce also has led to fewer imports. Energy company Phillips 66 noted on an earnings call that the waiver has allowed it to replace imported crude with U.S. supplies. Before it began buying U.S. propane under the waiver, Puerto Rico imported from Chilean Patagonia. Buying American wasn’t an option because the Jones Act fleet has no vessels that would carry it in bulk from the U.S. mainland. The White House should be thrilled with the results. For an administration that calls itself “America First,” making it easier to buy American energy is an easy layup.

The waiver’s biggest losers are not overseas suppliers but Jones Act supporters. Their claims that loosening the law would flood American waters with Chinese ships have not held up. After more than 130 completed voyages, vessels with China or Hong Kong ownership or management have thus far accounted for roughly 10 percent of waiver activity. Just one Chinese-flagged vessel has participated. The parade of horribles has not materialized. Safety concerns have proved similarly misplaced. The Jones Act fleet averages 17.6 years of age, while the waiver vessels are half as old, averaging 8.8 years.

Perhaps most significant is what hasn’t happened: No Jones Act tanker has gone idle. No American maritime worker is unemployed because of the waiver. Domestic shipping has more capacity than it had before.

In economics, deadweight loss refers to the societal benefits that never occur because commerce is artificially depressed. For more than 100 days, the waiver has recovered a small piece of that loss. Fuel moved, and shipping costs fell. The sky did not.

Now imagine the broader benefits from the Jones Act being repealed or substantially reformed. American farmers could move their crops on competitive terms; Great Lakes manufacturers could ship goods at lower costs; and American consumers wouldn’t have to pay a premium for energy.

Congress can make these changes permanent. Unless it acts, the waiver expires in mid-August, the new supply chains dissolve, and the country returns to shooting itself in the foot — by law.

These viral posts have delighted American onlookers and captured endless media commentary on how the foreigners’ innocent—and often hilarious—observations have helped unite a divided U.S. and remind us locals of just how good we have it. In an era of endless grousing about the U.S. economy—reflected in various surveys of American “sentiment” and sometimes even justified—the ongoing episode has been a welcome, optimistic change of pace and a loud, folk-libertarian reminder that a nation’s capital, policies, and political class are most definitely not the same as its communities and citizens.

The scenes have also raised several noteworthy economic policy points—some good, some ominous—that deserve more attention.

Yes, we have it pretty darn good.

For starters, the amazement of relatively wealthy foreigners—you don’t take weeks off touring America if you’re dirt poor—at relatively middle-class American environments is real-world evidence of our nation’s immense everyday wealth.

The timing couldn’t be better (and, no, I’m not talking about the A/​C‑less heatwave in Europe).

As The Economist just documented, earlier this year Nobel laureate Paul Krugman and several other elite economists got into a heated (and very wonky) online debate about whether Americans’ living standards really were zooming ahead of those of our European counterparts. The main point of contention was how to measure individuals’ purchasing power in both places, with one approach showing an increasing wealth gap and the other (Krugman’s) a relatively steady one. You can see the difference in the chart below: Using a constant “purchasing power parity” adjustment shows France’s GDP per capita—a standard way to measure individual wealth—to be declining versus that of the U.S., while using a “current PPP” adjustment shows little long term change, and thus a different wealth narrative.

As someone who loves both visiting foreign countries and returning home to my American creature comforts, I freely admit my biases in this debate. But both sides do raise some legitimate issues about how we should measure living standards across countries, as well as what should be measured. Overall, the debate has been delightfully intense and catty—at least for nerds like me.

Yet, as The Economist points out, both sides also seem to agree on a few things: First, Europe is growing more slowly than America, thanks in large part to the economic dynamism and tech-fueled productivity here. Second, even Krugman’s pro-Europe data (see chart above)—along with many other sources—show Americans to have higher average wages and more disposable income (yes, even after accounting for out-of-pocket healthcare costs) than the average European in most places (yes, there are exceptions), due to our superior labor productivity and their leisure choices. Third, and most importantly, both sides want to support their reading of the data with an “eye test”—i.e., visiting each place and just looking around—that the economists believe will confirm their own American/​European wealth story.

Hilariously enough, thousands of European World Cup tourists—along with ones from Japan and other countries, too—have performed just that test, mere days after the economists proposed it. And the result is an absolute rout for Team America:

Let’s be very clear: the European middle-class is not traveling to the US. They can’t afford it.

These are rich European traveling and being amazed at the wealth of the American middle class.

European middle class earns € 2200/​mo. After expenses they have €500/​mo left at… https://t.co/xMvX8AG46W

— Tony Aubé (@aubetony) June 23, 2026

Texas. Jesus what a place.

I often see Americans say on here “the European mind can’t comprehend..” and they’re are completely right.

From the scale of everything to the true southern hospitality. I loved every second and hope to be back soon. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 pic​.twit​ter​.com/​8​V​j​7​v​QJxOo

— Ed Baker 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🚜 (@EdBaker97) June 19, 2026

There are many reasons for the foreigners’ astonishment. (A big one, in my opinion, is that these folks are seeing parts of Real America, especially in the Sun Belt and Midwest, that foreign tourists rarely visit, yet—as we’ve discussed here repeatedly—allow not-rich Americans to live very comfortable lives.) And, to be sure, not all the astonishment is genuine.

But a lot of it obviously is, and at its root lies the Great American Prosperity Machine. Deal with it, haters.

Capitalist ‘charity’ is still good.

Another fascinating and wholesome part of the foreigners’ U.S. experience has been the outpouring of support they’ve received from both normie Americans—workers, neighbors, random passersby, etc.—and a wide range of American celebrities and companies. Most notable in this regard has been German soccer (fußball) fan Freddy, whose daily adventures in Middle America have earned him a giant online following and a Forrest Gump-like amount of in-kind support from pro sports teams, hotels, airlines, and a smattering of famous athletes, entertainers, and politicians (including at least one sitting governor who volunteered to help Freddy attend Germany’s game in Toronto after a flight cancellation). Freddy’s experience is unique, but only in terms of its magnitude: A wide range of U.S. businesses, municipalities, and influencers have rolled out the red carpet for these happy foreign visitors, greatly adding to the entire feel-good experience.

Unsurprisingly, this support has led dismissive cynics to explain that, actually, a lot of it is just a selfish attempt to boost sales, brands, and online engagement instead of genuine generosity and kindness. Some of those allegations are clearly false, but the correct ones are hardly worth complaining about. Instead, they evoke yet another lesson from Adam Smith:

Scholars (ahem) often apply this quote to explain that “selfish” market transactions among free people are not only mutually beneficial but also can have broader social benefits and generate the wealth individuals need to perform charity (which Americans do a lot of, by the way). But Smith’s famous line also often applies to many “charitable” acts by corporations and celebrities: While maybe not motivated by pure altruism, these efforts are often a strategic effort to drive long-term profitability by improving brand reputation, attracting customers and workers, and generating more sales.

There’s little reason to view such motivation as unseemly. First, the act still makes people better off in some way (and often entertains and encourages onlookers, too), so who cares whether it was done for “benevolent” or “selfish” reasons? “Dinner,” in Smith’s terms, still gets served. Second, it’s usually impossible to say why these “charitable” people and firms decided to help Freddy (and any others in need)—and it’s usually a combination of both sympathy and self-interest/promotion. On the latter motivation, see point 1 and Smith above. On the former, check out his other book.

Tourism as a massive U.S. services export (and source of ‘soft power’).

Admittedly, the World Cup visitor story isn’t all wine and roses, and there are—as noted—some less-optimistic policy lessons buried in here, too. For one thing, all these visitors are a stark reminder of the economic and geopolitical value of foreign tourism—and its recent, policy-driven decline here in America.

As we discussed last year, one of the more interesting and unfortunate results of Trump’s tariff wars, deportations, and related overseas antagonism (threatening to invade Greenland, calling Canada the “51^st state,” etc.) has been foreigners’ independent retaliation against U.S. goods and services. And tourism—a U.S. services export—has been the trend’s most conspicuous victim. According to a May 2026 Congressional Research Service report, in fact, international visits were down in 10 of 12 months last year, with the only increases coming before Trump took office (January) and due to an abnormally late Easter (April):

This drop, in turn, hurt lots of American businesses and likely reduced U.S. economic growth last year by billions of dollars:

On the bright side, CRS goes on to note that the World Cup could boost foreign visits and GDP growth in 2026, and—judging from the packed bars/​restaurants and sky-high prices for match tickets, airline fares, and hotel rooms—you can easily see why. Even with a few embarrassing visa-related snafus, the monthlong event has been going pretty smoothly so far and is forecast to attract almost 1.25 million international visitors, each expected to spend more than $5,000 (nearly twice the typical international tourist). None of that erases the roughly $12.5 billion in lost international visitor spending that WTTC projected for 2025, but it’s still a welcome rebound—especially for the smaller American businesses that depend heavily on foreign tourist spending each year.

The scenes of international comity surrounding the World Cup in 2026 are also a vivid, real-time reminder of how U.S. tourism is a market-based source of America’s “soft power,” improving the United States’ image abroad and advancing U.S. geopolitical objectives without spending taxpayer dollars (or doing stuff far worse than just that). Scholars call this the “contact hypothesis,” i.e., the notion that person-to-person encounters can affect overseas perceptions of a country in ways that no government messaging campaign or foreign aid package can match. World Cup visitors’ ecstatic consumption of everyday Americana is soft power in (mostly) organic form, with our culture, hospitality, and abundance doing the diplomatic work that American government officials can’t (or won’t) do.

To be clear, the goodwill America earns from Waffle House, Bass Pro Shops, Fenway Park—and the Americans who live and work near these and other iconic spots—doesn’t automatically translate into durable shifts in foreign acceptance of U.S. policy. But at a time when America’s global image has taken a few (ahem) hits, having a million-plus foreigners document their travels and return home as amateur American ambassadors is a welcome development, reminding people everywhere that the words of one guy in the Oval Office don’t represent a 350 million-person country.

The only question is whether the foreign tourism boost—and good vibes—can continue after the World Cup ends. The answer, unfortunately, will probably not be in Costco’s hands.

Seeing the linkages between trade and peace.

Relatedly, all these good vibes are a nice reminder of one of the ways that trade—in this case both foreign tourism and global sports entertainment—can help encourage peace. As I documented in a 2020 paper, a wide body of research finds that heightened foreign trade can meaningfully reduce (but not eliminate) the chances of armed international conflict through several channels:

Recent studies reinforce these conclusions. One finds a strong causal “peace dividend” from trade generally, i.e., that a doubling of bilateral trade reduces the probability of militarized conflict by roughly 30 percent. Elsewhere, a recent survey of almost 2,000 Japanese firms finds they routinely pushed for diplomatic solutions to supply-chain disruptions involving allies and adversaries alike—new support for the concept of “commercial peace,” i.e., that global businesses have powerful incentives to oppose wars that might harm their facilities (or, you know, kill their customers).

Regardless of the driver, however, the outcome is clear: While global economic integration can’t eliminate armed conflicts, policies that liberalize trade can make peace among nations more likely—especially when compared to the isolationist, antagonistic alternative the U.S. government is pursuing today.

In their modest but viral way, the million-plus foreigners now cheering in American bars are making a similar point.

Markets FTW

The lightly regulated U.S. beer market is an unexpected source of incredible innovation, with the latest example coming from this recent Food & Wine piece about how a bunch of American capitalist beer nerds have used #science and #math to make light beer … actually taste good.

Chart(s) of the Week

I’ve always sympathized with the intent of Brexit, but—10 years on—it’s pretty clear the execution has left a lot to be desired (more).

Yes, you need to adjust for the cost of living, but … wow, Raleigh.

“Back in December 2025, The Athletic surveyed 120 NHL players, and 86.3% said income tax matters when deciding where to play.”

A culprit was likely Britain’s tax code, which doesn’t stop at taxing prize money earned on British soil.

It also taxes a slice of a player’s global endorsement income, prorated by how many days of the year they happen to spend in the UK.

Fail to advance far enough in the tournament, and the tax bill on your sponsorship deals can exceed your payout.

So, the players who get to choose where they compete are now choosing somewhere else.

“(I)t’s not about the money for playing,” retired superstar Rafael Nadal once explained. “They take from the sponsors.… This is very difficult. I am playing in the UK and losing money.”

File this story under “how people dodge taxes by leaving.”

Evidence for the phenomenon was piling up long before California billionaires began their high-profile relocations to Nevada and Florida ahead of a proposed wealth tax on the ballot this November. And it’s not the only reason these taxes disappoint.

When Norway raised its top wealth-tax rate by just one percentage point in 2022, economist Christine Blandhol documented a wave of business owners leaving for Switzerland, helped by a treaty between the two countries that precluded being double-taxed during the move.

Norway lost tax revenue while the firms that business owners left behind, now run from a distance, saw their outputs decline.

Switzerland’s own cantons — 26 subdivisions that have taxed wealth since the 1800s at rates from about 0.1% to 0.9% — give researchers a natural experiment. The wealthy move steadily from high-rate Bern to low-rate Lucerne.

The people pushing California’s wealth tax know this. Gabriel Zucman of the University of

California, Berkeley — a frequent coauthor with fellow French economist Emmanuel Saez, whose revenue estimates underpin the campaign — has spent the past couple of years engineering around it.
Zucman wants a coordinated global minimum tax on billionaire wealth, designed explicitly so that there’s nowhere left for the superrich to move.

He admits frankly that the whole point of his international coordination plan is to defeat the mobility problem.

If wealth taxes are global, the thinking goes, they finally work as intended.

Not so fast. It’s easy to count up lost tax revenue after taxpayers move away.

There is also a less visible, but no less real, behavior change from people who stay home (by choice or because there’s no better option).

The effect showed up in Denmark, where decades of tax records — covering people who by and large stayed put during its wealth-tax era — show dwindling levels of wealth accumulation when more of it is taxed away.

Nobody had to leave the country for the effect to show up; the incentive to save and build wealth in the first place had simply shrunk.

Inside the businesses of the wealthy, there’s an avoidance channel that requires no moving van. When a wealth-tax bill comes due, the owner of a closely held company will often pull out a larger dividend to cover it. Once that money has left the company, it doesn’t go back into payroll or business expansion.

Make no mistake, the non-wealthy will suffer from this tax too. As wealth taxes diminish saving and reinvestment, the capital stock that workers depend on for tools, equipment and business expansion stops growing as quickly as it should.

Wages rise when there’s more capital for each worker to use, so the slower buildup eventually means smaller paychecks for people who would never pay a wealth tax.

This effect compounds for decades, so a modest annual drag turns into a substantial gap by the time anyone notices it in the data.

The same dynamic can show up even without a wealth tax. We saw it with another aggressive California levy.

When the state raised its top income-tax rate by three points in 2012, Stanford economist Joshua Rauh went looking for the revenue.

He found that the people who stayed and bore the tax increase deferred bonuses, retimed asset sales and restructured how they got paid, shifting income away from the year the higher rate applied.

Within two years, those reporting changes had erased most of the revenue gain the tax increase was supposed to deliver.

Income and wealth are taxed differently, but the lesson is the same: Raise the price of an activity and people do less of it, restructure how they report it, or, if they can, leave the jurisdiction entirely.

These are the responses that even a global wealth tax can’t reach, because mobility was never the sole problem.

The result is less tax revenue than pro-tax advocates project, and less economic activity too. Ultimately, everyone, not just the rich, will be poorer for it.

It’s a strikingly late debate to be having.

The proceedings, which must conclude by July 15, follow an April order from the Department of Justice that moved marijuana products approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and state-licensed medical marijuana into Schedule III, a less restrictive category that allows medical research to proceed. Tens of millions of Americans use marijuana today, and cannabis is sold legally in some form across most of the country. Yet we know far less about the drug than its ubiquity would suggest. For more than half a century, a classification that was never meant to be permanent has blocked the research needed to understand what marijuana actually does to the people who use it.

The origin of this problem is political, not scientific. When Congress passed the Controlled Substances Act in 1970, marijuana’s placement in Schedule I was explicitly provisional, a placeholder pending review by a presidential commission. The Shafer Commission, chaired by a Republican governor and composed largely of President Richard Nixon’s appointees, concluded in 1972 that marijuana did not meet the criteria for Schedule I and recommended decriminalizing personal possession. Nixon ignored the report and escalated the war on drugs. The provisional classification became permanent by default. Since 1965, an estimated 29 million Americans have been arrested on marijuana charges, roughly 90 percent of them for possession alone.

The most damaging consequence of Schedule I, however, has not been to cannabis users, who have gained access through state legalization, but to the research enterprise. Schedule I substances face the most restrictive regulatory barriers under federal law, including heightened DEA registration requirements, limited sourcing options, and protocol approvals that materially delay or deter research. Even DEA-registered researchers have been barred from using certain National Institutes of Health grants to purchase cannabis. The products available from government-approved suppliers have not represented the full range of what people actually consume at dispensaries. The classification, in effect, impedes research into drug safety, leaving the millions of cannabis users it claims to protect less informed than they would otherwise be.

And there is plenty we need to know. The strongest evidence of risk concerns psychosis, especially in young users. A multisite study published in The Lancet Psychiatry, drawing on data from 901 patients with first-episode psychosis across 11 European sites, found that daily cannabis use was associated with more than three times the odds of a psychotic disorder, rising to nearly five times for users of high-potency products containing over 10 percent THC, the primary psychoactive compound in marijuana. The authors estimated that one in five new psychosis cases across the study sites could be attributed to daily use. A 2022 systematic review of 20 studies covering nearly 120,000 cannabis users confirmed that higher-potency products are associated with elevated risk of both psychosis and cannabis use disorder.

The biological mechanism is plausible and concerning, particularly for young people. Adolescence is a critical window for brain development, marked by extensive synaptic pruning and the maturation of prefrontal circuits governing impulse control and decision making. The endocannabinoid system, the molecular network that THC activates, plays an essential role in these developmental processes. A 2025 review in the American Journal of Psychiatry concluded that translational research combining longitudinal neuroimaging with animal models provides compelling evidence that frequent cannabis use, particularly high-THC products, can disrupt adolescent brain development.

Meanwhile, the potency of commercially available cannabis has been rising steadily for decades, with average THC concentrations increasing by roughly 0.29 percent per year from 1970 to 2017. That trend aligns with what drug-policy analysts sometimes call the “iron law of prohibition”: When enforcement intensifies, producers and traffickers have incentives to favor more concentrated and potent products that are easier to transport, conceal, and distribute while generating greater returns relative to the legal risks involved. Today’s dispensary products bear little resemblance to the marijuana the Shafer Commission evaluated in 1972.

Prohibition may make youth cannabis access easier rather than harder. Illegal markets do not check identification, whereas licensed retailers risk losing their licenses for selling to minors. As long as recreational marijuana remains confined to illicit channels, teenagers will continue to obtain cannabis from suppliers who face no meaningful incentive to restrict underage access. It would be safer to have a legal market with age restrictions on marijuana sales, as with alcohol, nicotine, and other adult products.

Public opinion has moved faster than federal policy. According to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in January 2026, roughly nine in 10 American adults say marijuana should be legal in some form: 55 percent support legalization for both medical and recreational use, 33 percent support it for medical use only, and just 11 percent say it should not be legal at all. A 2025 Gallup poll found that 64 percent of Americans support making marijuana legal outright, more than double the level of support recorded in 2000, with no age group opposing legalization. Forty states, the District of Columbia, and several U.S. territories have legalized medical cannabis, and 24 states have legalized recreational use. More than 6 million patients are registered in state medical programs. Yet the federal classification persists, and so does the debate over whether and how to reform it.

The debate is not entirely one-sided. While Americans overwhelmingly support medical access, views on the broader consequences are more divided. According to a 2024 Pew report, 34 percent of adults said recreational legalization makes communities less safe, compared to 21 percent who said it makes them safer. About 29 percent believed it increases the use of harder drugs. These concerns are not irrational. But the current federal framework is poorly suited to resolving them, because the same classification system that is supposed to protect public health has, for decades, prevented the research that would tell us how worried we should actually be.

The medical marijuana system itself reflects a broader American tendency to force adult behavioral choices through medical gatekeeping structures. Millions of adults who simply want legal access to cannabis are effectively required in many jurisdictions to obtain physician certification for conditions that may be only loosely medicalized. When legal access to products, services, accommodations, or reimbursement depends upon obtaining a medical diagnosis, the boundary between illness and ordinary human behavior can become increasingly blurred. The physician’s role shrinks to that of regulatory intermediary, and with it collapses any meaningful distinction between medical treatment and adult lifestyle choice.

Schedule I classification has not stopped tens of millions of Americans from using marijuana, but it has made it extraordinarily difficult for scientists to study what happens when they do. The federal government has spent decades trying to suppress marijuana use while simultaneously obstructing the research needed to understand risks, benefits, dosing patterns, and long-term effects. Prohibition has not prevented widespread cannabis consumption. It has mainly ensured that policymakers, physicians, and consumers operate with less reliable evidence than they otherwise would.

Even so, the scientific case for medical cannabis has only strengthened. The FDA has approved one cannabis-derived drug (Epidiolex for severe pediatric epilepsy) and three cannabis-related synthetic compounds for chemotherapy-induced nausea and AIDS-associated wasting. A 2024 systematic evidence map reviewing 194 studies found that the majority of treatment effects across 71 distinct health outcomes were positive or potentially positive, with the strongest evidence for chronic pain, nausea, and spasticity. The Department of Health and Human Services recommended rescheduling in 2023, citing credible scientific support for medical use. In other words, the agency responsible for evaluating drug safety concluded that the government’s own classification was wrong.

Rescheduling marijuana to Schedule III does not legalize recreational use. It does not make cannabis available over the counter. What it does is substantially reduce the regulatory barriers to the research that informed policy requires. It will allow scientists to study the products people actually use, at the doses they actually consume, without years of DEA paperwork. President Donald Trump’s December 2025 executive order directing the attorney general to expedite rescheduling acknowledged as much, citing the need to remove barriers to medical research. If this summer’s hearing ends with marijuana as a whole in Schedule III, the research pipeline severed in 1972 can finally begin to be rebuilt.

Adults in a free society should be able to make informed choices about what they put in their bodies. But informed choice depends on information, and for half a century, the federal government has made it nearly impossible to generate the information needed to make those choices genuinely informed.

In response, Washington has already committed to rebuilding damaged bases, strengthening their defenses, and replacing destroyed equipment.

This is a mistake.

The Iran war underscored a simple reality—the expansive U.S. military footprint in the Middle East is counterproductive. This war footing is not needed to secure U.S. interests, and it makes it far too easy for the United States to entangle itself in the region’s wars or for Washington to unilaterally initiate them. The costs of sustaining this posture outweigh any conceivable benefit. Instead of rebuilding, Washington should close its bases, leave the Middle East, and adopt a strategy of offshore balancing.

The United States’ massive military presence in the Middle East is a relatively recent phenomenon, evolving in tandem with its increased involvement in the region’s affairs. U.S. troops levels have fluctuated for decades, but today, the United States maintains on average roughly 40,000 to 45,000 troops across its disclosed military bases in the Middle East. There are also an undisclosed number of troops stationed at various forward operating bases across the region.

Proponents of deep U.S. engagement in the Middle East typically invoke two core interests to justify this presence: maintaining the free flow of oil and preventing the emergence of a regional hegemon. Yet neither objective requires a direct U.S. military presence in the region. This was true both prior to and after Operation Epic Fury.

For decades, Washington was convinced that a forward-deployed posture was needed to deter disruptions to energy supplies and, if necessary, secure the region’s export routes through force. Yet oil would continue to flow out of the Middle East even without a U.S. military presence. Regional governments have strong incentives to keep exports moving because their economic and political survival depends on oil revenue. Oil is also a global commodity, meaning the entire petroleum-consuming world has an interest in Middle Eastern oil reaching the market. For all these reasons, global markets have historically proved resilient.

In fact, Operation Epic Fury triggered the most feared oil disruption scenario—Tehran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, removing 20 percent of global oil supply from the market. The result was unprecedented but not catastrophic. Large prewar inventories, increased output by alternative producers, releases from strategic reserves, and regional rerouting helped blunt the shock. While these steps were insufficient to fully offset the strait’s closure, they demonstrated that global oil markets can deal with disruptions.

More importantly, this unprecedented disruption was a direct result of the U.S. decision to attack Iran. Tehran closed the strait as a measure of last resort after concluding its survival was at stake. Yet Washington proved unwilling to shoulder the enormous costs of attempting to forcibly reopen the waterway because its immediate exposure was limited. For the United States, this was a war of choice, and the resulting consequences were largely self-inflicted.

Should Iran attempt the same in the future without provocation, it would likely trigger a much stronger international response—particularly from China, which remains the largest importer of Middle Eastern oil. Such a strategy could also prove self-defeating for Iran over time, given the country’s continued economic reliance on the waterway. Ultimately, the future stability of the Persian Gulf depends on achieving a new regional equilibrium—one that includes Iran and reduces the incentives for coercion. Such a balance is more likely to endure if it is self-sustaining rather than imposed by the United States.

Closely tied to the oil rationale, Washington has long believed that the emergence of a regional hegemon in the Middle East could pose a long-term security threat. Here, too, the argument for maintaining a U.S. military presence in the region centers on the belief that it is a stabilizing force, deterring would-be aggressors. But this claim does not withstand scrutiny, either.

The Middle East lacks a hegemon because no single actor has the combined political, economic, and military prowess necessary for such dominance. This is true independent of U.S. involvement. The region is politically fragmented, economically diffuse, and geographically resistant to regional consolidation. No actor commands sufficient military power to overcome these barriers and subordinate its rivals, placing regional hegemony beyond the reach of any Middle Eastern state for the foreseeable future.

This includes Iran. The Islamic Republic lacks the political legitimacy, economic wealth, and conventional military superiority needed for regional hegemony. Operation Epic Fury did not change that reality. To be sure, Iran demonstrated its ability to withstand tremendous pressure, wield its leverage over the Strait of Hormuz, and impose sufficient costs to compel Washington to change course. But this ability to resist coercion is not the same as the ability to dominate the region. Tehran remains politically isolated, economically constrained, and conventionally weak. Iran is an important regional power, but it is one among many. Recognizing this reality is necessary to defuse tensions between Tehran and Washington.

The U.S. military presence in the Middle East is not only unnecessary—it actively undermines U.S. interests by encouraging the country’s overreliance on force and entangling it in the region’s conflicts.

The current U.S. posture incentivizes Washington to treat military force as a first rather than last resort. By reducing many of the logistical and political constraints that would otherwise complicate or discourage military action, the network of U.S. bases lowers the threshold for using coercion at the expense of diplomacy. As a result, the United States has too often initiated or directly inserted itself into unnecessary Middle Eastern wars. These include virtually all of the region’s most consequential recent conflicts—Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria, and, of course, Iran.

The vast and enduring U.S. military footprint in the Middle East entangles Washington in conflicts it might otherwise avoid. It limits strategic flexibility, often forcing U.S. policy to be reactive and respond to events as they unfold. Washington’s partners recognize this, and they often pursue riskier policies than they otherwise would, confident that they can draw the United States in to protect them from the consequences.

Even when they pursue polices at odds with U.S. interests, military cooperation continues largely uninterrupted through U.S. Central Command’s constant involvement in regional security coordination. This dynamic played out with the Saudi-Emirati war in Yemen as well as Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon. The result is a vicious cycle that entraps the United States in the Middle East.

A strategy of offshore balancing would remedy these problems. Under this approach, the United States would eliminate its direct military presence in the Middle East, relinquish its role as the region’s primary security guarantor, and shift responsibility for regional security to local actors. Washington would still engage the region diplomatically and economically, but it would move to an over-the-horizon military posture and intervene only in the event that a meaningful challenge to U.S. regional interests emerged.

By distancing itself politically and militarily from the Middle East, this strategy would allow the United States to be more selective in the regional issues it chooses to respond to—an option currently constrained by its expansive presence and self-imposed role as the regional police. It would increase U.S. strategic autonomy, allowing Washington to engage the Middle East solely on its own terms rather than constantly managing the region.

Shifting to offshore balancing is likely to foster greater regional cooperation because the United States would not be there to absorb the costs of its partners’ policies. Persistent U.S. involvement in the region’s affairs has contributed to an artificial power imbalance by insulating partners from the policy trade-offs that typically constrain other states. By shielding them from the political, economic, and security consequences of their actions, Washington discourages them from finding a stable equilibrium with their neighbors. Offshore balancing would also reduce the U.S. exposure to blowback, be it in the form of direct attacks or unnecessary tensions with avoidable adversaries.

The consequences of Operation Epic Fury should prompt a long-overdue reassessment of the U.S. military presence in the Middle East. Maintaining this presence is not worth the profound strategic, economic, or human costs that the United States incurs to sustain it. The better course for Washington is to bring the troops home.

Indeed, with Beijing’s imposition of the draconian National Security Law in 2020, the chief executive position turned into the equivalent of a Gauleiter, or regional czar, in Nazi Germany. Today, Hong Kongers are not allowed to speak, at least politically, unless spoken to.

Unfortunately, none of this is a surprise. Lee was the chief enforcer under the previous chief executive, Carrie Lam. He has enthusiastically worked to turn the territory’s “one country, two systems” promise into a “one country, one system” reality. Today, residents of Hong Kong, once one of the freest jurisdictions on earth, enjoy as few civil and political liberties as those possessed by residents of the mainland.

That is primarily the result of the NSL, imposed by the Xi Jinping regime on June 30, 2020. The measure criminalized “secession, subversion, terrorist activities, and collusion with a foreign country or with external elements to endanger national security, and stipulates the corresponding penalties, which in the most serious cases, could result in life imprisonment,” covering even minimal criticism of the SAR’s transformation into an outdoor prison camp.

Since 2019, thousands have been arrested for having protested the Hong Kong government and its Chinese overseers. About 400 have been charged with supposedly threatening “national security,” with 150 so far tried, suffering an almost universal conviction rate. The very concept of national security “has proved almost infinitely elastic.” Explained Georgetown University’s Asian Law Center:

Since then, Beijing has used a mix of legal and extra-legal measures to attack virtually all elements of Hong Kong’s once free-wheeling and robust open society. No sector has been spared: opposition political parties, journalists, lawyers, grassroots activists, protesters, academics, and others have all been targeted. The space for public discourse has narrowed dramatically, and self-censorship, always a problem in Hong Kong even in the best of times, has now become rampant.

According to Amnesty International, the NSL “is being used to target civil society groups, journalists, political activists and academics for actions that are fully protected under international human rights law.” Virtually any criticism of the PRC, such as commemorating the Tiananmen Square atrocity, is prohibited and can result in prosecution. Detailed Amnesty, people “have been targeted and harshly punished for the clothes they wear as well as the things they say and write, or for minor acts of protest, intensifying the climate of fear that already pervaded Hong Kong.”

Trials and convictions continue, often of alleged offenses committed years ago. Last December, 78-year-old Jimmy Lai, former publisher of the Apple Daily and long-time defender of democracy and liberal freedoms, was convicted and sentenced to what amounts to life in prison. In February, Hong Kong’s Court of Appeal dismissed an appeal in the conviction of 47 people for organizing a primary in advance of the then-legal regularly scheduled elections. Since they opposed the government, Lee & Co. declared their past conduct to be illegal.

Now, more retrospective prosecutions are certain with Lee claiming the right to retroactively classify previous actions taken before passage of the National Security Law as criminal violations. According to the South China Morning Post:

The regulation essentially legislates lawlessness. Warned Amnesty: “This could in theory turn any criminal case into a national security case, meaning it would be bound by the specific legal procedures under the national security regime, including the presumption against bail and being tried only by judges selected by the Chief Executive.” The Center for Asian Law’s Eric Lai observed “that the chief executive could also step into other criminal cases, such as commercial fraud and money laundering, under the pretext of safeguarding national security. These offenses are often being weaponized to suppress dissidents in authoritarian states.” The threat of retroactive law-making and criminal prosecution effectively ends any pretense that the SAR is governed by the rule of law.

Unfortunately, the courts will provide no barrier to executive abuse. The Bar Human Rights Committee of England & Wales published a major study that found

Lee and his CCP masters are attempting to remake Hong Kong with a mailed fist. Indoctrination has replaced education: “The city’s new school curriculum, for instance, denies Hong Kong was once a British colony. The curriculum redefines patriotism as unconditional allegiance to the Chinese state, with teachers facing repercussions if they present alternative views. The teachings of ‘Xi Jinping Thought’ are part of the new curriculum, while English classes in primary schools now focus on patriotism and national security.”

Media freedom has disappeared: “In 2021, the pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily was raided under the law, after which it ceased publication. … Stand News, another independent outlet, was shut down following similar raids. Its senior editors are now serving prison sentences.” Even self-publishing books on the earlier protest movement earned Hong Kongers convictions and prison sentences for sedition.

Nor are only activists at risk. So are friends, supporters, and even family members. For instance, maintaining a fund to help those overseas resulted in prosecution. Even worse, in February, “Kwok Yin-sang, the father of exiled pro-democracy activist Anna Kwok, was convicted in early February, found guilty of handling financial assets belonging to his daughter.”

Finally, leaving Hong Kong does not end the threat of persecution. The Lee regime has sought to make repression global. For instance, it placed bounties on nearly a score of dissidents who have fled. Observed Sarah Brooks of Amnesty International: “These bounties not only threaten the liberty and safety of the activists targeted; they also have far-reaching consequences on other activists who are now left feeling increasingly uncertain about their security, whether in Hong Kong or overseas. The bounties only compound the already existing climate of fear.” Chinese agents have also spied on Hong Kong democracy activists overseas.

As a colony, Hong Kong was undemocratic, but it protected civil and political liberties, and before Taiwan’s transformation, represented the freest majority Chinese land on earth. For decades, it offered sanctuary to those fleeing the People’s Republic of China, especially during the mass starvation of the “Great Leap Forward” and madness of the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.” The United Kingdom returned the territory to China in 1997, and in the early years, Beijing respected its promise to preserve “two systems” in one country. However, that began to change a decade ago, and in 2020, Xi greatly tightened his control with the NSL.

Lee enthusiastically fulfills his role as oppressor-in-chief with great efficiency and ruthlessness. In a recent interview, conducted with deference, even obsequiousness, by the South China Morning Post, he denounced Western critics and their “very serious disinformation campaign.” He complained: “It is despicable that they attempt to prevent the cause of justice by threatening sanctions.” Alas, his vision of “justice” is suppressing not just opposition but dissent, crushing the slightest resistance with brutal cruelty.

Hong Kong once offered a beacon of hope to the rest of the PRC. Today, it demonstrates what PRC rule entails. We should remember and support those who continue to seek, at great personal cost, a China that treats its people as governed rather than ruled.

For investors, the Greenspan era marked a debate over the Fed’s role in stabilizing financial markets and the belief that the Fed would ease conditions in response to a stock-market crash or to prevent one. This belief was dubbed the “Greenspan put.” A put option pays off when asset prices fall, so holding one lets you own risky assets without fear of downside.

Investors came to assume Greenspan’s Fed was writing them a put for free. Whenever markets cracked — the 1987 crash just weeks into Greenspan’s tenure, the hedge-fund blowup and Russian default in 1998, the demise of the dot-com bubble in 2000 — the Fed cut rates and injected liquidity into the financial system. To many investors this implied that stocks had a floor propped up by the Fed. But the Greenspan put was a myth.

The reason this matters now is artificial intelligence. The run-up in AI stocks has revived the comparison to the late 1990s, when the internet promised to remake the economy and stock valuations climbed to historic levels. In December 1996, with the boom barely underway, Greenspan wondered aloud whether “irrational exuberance” had gripped asset prices. The market kept climbing for more than three years before it broke.

I am neither predicting nor expecting an AI bubble burst. But the hypothetical still begs answering: If AI stocks are an inflated bubble that eventually bursts, should the new Fed chair, Kevin Warsh, backstop the stock market as Greenspan supposedly did?

That is, will there be a “Warsh put”?

The honest answer starts with what made the Greenspan years work, and it wasn’t the put. Greenspan was considered a “maestro” who read the economy by feel and distrusted mechanical rules. Yet when economists go back and measure what his Fed actually did, monetary-policy decisions look strikingly mechanical. Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond found that a simple formula — akin to what economist John Taylor proposed in 1993, nudging interest rates up when inflation or growth runs hot and down when they cool — closely tracked FOMC rate decisions under Greenspan.

Strip away the mystique and the Greenspan put merely resembles a sensible response to prevailing economic conditions, just as a simple rule designed to account for inflation and growth forecasts would predict.

When the Fed eased after a market rout, it was usually reacting to what the decline foretold. A falling market is an early sign that spending and growth are about to soften. The Fed was moving to counter that slowdown, with any lift to stocks a by-product. The clearest evidence is that the cuts often failed to protect the very investors the Greenspan put supposedly insured. The Fed cut rates in January 2001 as the dot-com market came apart, and stocks kept sliding for almost two more years.

This subtle distinction is crucial. The Greenspan-era stability Wall Street remembers likely came from the predictability of rules-based monetary policy meant to facilitate general economic stabilization, not from a desire to bail out investors. And the Greenspan put, if there ever was such a thing, ran counter to that — as the Fed’s numerous bailout missteps in the years since Greenspan have demonstrated.

So what should Warsh do as AI valuations climb? The temptation will be to play umpire and decide from the chair whether AI stocks are overpriced and then lean against them, or to hint that the Fed will catch the market if they fall. But nobody, Warsh included, can reliably call a bubble in real time. Greenspan couldn’t: His exuberance warning came three years too early. A Fed that sets out to manage asset prices is a Fed making forecasts it has no special power to make.

What investors should want from Warsh is the predictability that made Greenspan’s tenure a success — a Fed that responds to prevailing economic conditions as they show up in the data. Such a Fed will not rescue a portfolio if AI valuations correct. But it will not wreck the wider economy guessing about them. Over a full cycle, that is the better deal, even for the investors hoping for a backstop.

Warsh has said he wants a more disciplined, less improvisational Fed. The lesson of Greenspan’s record is for the Fed to do less, not more. It is to tie monetary policy to a rule — not to ask the chair to outguess the market.

What is sustaining this transformation of the workplace? The inconvenient answer for those who see government action as the source of progress is that this transformation is thanks to freely chosen, mutually beneficial decisions by employers and employees rather than any top-down mandate.

The proof is in how durable these patterns have been. Millions of workers and employers continue to choose them because they work. Roughly half of the U.S. workforce consists of employees who are capable of working remote or hybrid jobs. The most common arrangement sees workers commute two days a week and work remotely the other three. Most workers appreciate the flexibility, with a mere 6% of remote-capable workers saying they prefer to work on-site full-time.

An analysis from the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that across industries, the rise in remote work and total factor productivity growth may be positively correlated, and many employees report higher productivity at home. Some research also suggests that hybrid and fully remote work may have positive effects on individual employee productivity, satisfaction, and physical health, as well as employee retention.

Historically, most improvements for workers have followed a similar pattern—wherein the market dictates employer-employee relationships, not government—despite a popular narrative to the contrary. The economist Benjamin Powell observed that legal labor standards, working-hour limits, and the introduction of a minimum wage in the United States and other wealthy countries after industrialization largely mirrored policies that employers had already implemented of their own accord. Legislation merely codified preexisting norms instead of prompting a change in industry practices.

Economist Price Fishback similarly noted, for example, “State laws limiting the number of working hours for women … passed after many employers had substantially reduced hours for women. Recent studies have found that the laws had relatively little effect.”

A century ago, the Ford Motor Company pioneered limiting the workweek to five days. Ford’s example soon inspired manufacturers across the country and around the world to adopt the Monday-to-Friday workweek. That occurred because employers discovered that productivity increased, while employees valued the extra leisure time. As the economist Ludwig von Mises put it, “The nineteenth century’s labor legislation by and large achieved nothing more than to provide ratification for changes which the interplay of market factors had brought about previously.”

Today, remote and hybrid work often benefits both employers and employees, and this work flexibility rise occurred in spite of many outdated government rules that hinder such arrangements. These rules are in desperate need of reform. For example, various federal tax rules discriminate against remote work arrangements, while differing state rules can subject remote workers to double taxation, and occupational licensing rules limit workers’ options to move between states. If anything, the government has stood in the way of the great workplace transformation toward remote and hybrid work.

Calls to legally mandate remote or hybrid work are a misguided attempt to give the government credit for a shift that has already happened independently of government action. Premier Jacinta Allan of Victoria, Australia, announced that her state government will enshrine a legal right for employees, in both the private and public sectors, who can perform their job from home to do so at least two days a week. The law comes into effect in September.

The legal change will benefit few employees, as 65% of Victorians are already hybrid or remote, but it will create more bureaucratic headaches by adding unnecessary red tape for employers and employees alike. “WFH [work from home] is already happening, and there is no reason to legislate a one-size-fits-all approach,” cautioned Andrew McKellar, the chief executive of the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

This represents perhaps the first example of a legal entitlement to work from home, coming long after the market has already made such arrangements widespread. “If you can do your job from home, we’ll make it your right—because we’re on your side,” said Allan. In reality, it is employers and employees exercising their freedom in the market, not political mandates, that have made the flexibility of remote and hybrid work widely available today.

Normal investments get taxed twice. You pay taxes when you earn the money as wages, and then any profit you make on the investment gets taxed again at the lower capital-gains rate. Nearly every tax-advantaged investment account—401(k)s and individual retirement accounts, 529 plans for education—eliminates either the wage tax on the way in or the capital-gains tax on the way out.

A traditional IRA lets you make pretax contributions and taxes the withdrawals. A Roth IRA flips it: after-tax dollars in, tax-free out. The result is similar: Tax the money going in or tax it coming out, but not both.

Trump Accounts do both. The accounts accept after-tax dollars from parents and other authorized individuals, but when the child turns 18, they convert to traditional IRAs for retirement. That means the gains (along with the original $1,000) are taxed at withdrawal as ordinary income rather than at the lower capital-gains tax rate, which would have applied if the investment weren’t in a Trump Account. You pay taxes on the front end and the high rate on the back end. No deduction, no capital-gains rate, no flexibility.

If you are investing after-tax money for your children, a 529 plan is the better option for education savings. Money goes in after-tax, and qualified withdrawals are tax-free. Recent rule changes make 529s even better by allowing up to $35,000 to be rolled into the child’s Roth IRA, freeing the funds from the education restrictions. For general saving, a brokerage account allows the same after-tax contributions and keeps the lower capital-gains tax rate, with no restrictions on when you can touch the money.

The fix is easy: Lawmakers should pick a lane. Make contributions tax-free and then tax the withdrawals. That is how a traditional IRA works. Alternatively, keep the after-tax contributions and make the withdrawals tax-free, like a Roth. Either path would give parents an incentive to add their own money.

While they are at it, lawmakers should drop the lock-up rules and penalties, and instead let the savings roll into a more flexible account at age 18.

Under current rules, if a child withdraws funds before retirement for anything other than a short list of government-approved uses, such as college or a first home purchase, he owes an additional 10% penalty on top of ordinary income taxes. IRS data show lower-income households are the most likely to pull money out early, and few 18-year-olds will leave it untouched until they turn 59½. A penalty on early access is a tax on flexibility charged to the people who can least afford it.

The better design would be a Universal Savings Account. The owner could pull money out at any time, for any reason, without penalties. Canada and the U.K. have had similar accounts for years. There, simple, multipurpose accounts have allowed people to build personal savings for decades without a dollar of government subsidy. That is what a Trump Account should become when the child turns 18.

The idea behind Trump Accounts is sound, but Congress got the tax treatment wrong. Make contributions tax-free, and I’ll happily fund my children’s Trump Accounts. Until then, the $1,000 handout is where it stops. The rest I’ll save elsewhere.

At least Bush defeated his Mideast opponent: the regime of Saddam Hussein. Despite Trump’s repeated assertion that Tehran had lost and should surrender, the Islamist regime blocked global oil traffic, wrecked U.S. bases, and destroyed regional energy infrastructure. Unwilling to risk potentially devastating Iranian escalation, the president was reduced to repeatedly announcing plans to destroy civilian targets across Iran, a war crime, only to retreat and claim that he was responding to Iranian pleas. It became a comedy routine that never truly entertained and got old fast.

However, the Blunderer-in-Chief’s disastrous war has at least one silver lining: It inadvertently demonstrated the case for closing U.S. bases throughout the Middle East and bringing American forces home. Disengagement is long overdue, especially for an administration supposedly committed to America First.

Washington’s continued entanglement in the ever-unstable Mideast is a Cold War relic. The U.S. generally eschewed direct military involvement in the region until the 1970s. Then came the so-called Carter Doctrine, intended to prevent Soviet domination of the region’s oil supplies, considered vital for America and its industrialized allies. However, that world disappeared long ago. International energy supplies are far more diverse, and no country is poised to monopolize the market.

Nor is Israel a good reason for America’s continuing presence. It has long been capable of defending itself from all comers and has now become a regional superpower. Disengagement would allow Washington to protect its reputation as Jerusalem seeks Mideast hegemony, brutalizing Palestinians within and other Arabs without its borders.

As for the dictatorial Persian Gulf states—where else do so many antediluvian, absolute monarchies hold so many people in bondage?—Washington should unshoulder the burden of protecting them. The Trump administration’s 2026 National Defense Strategy rightly proposed “to empower regional allies and partners to take primary responsibility for deterring and defending against Iran and its proxies.”

Critics complain that such an approach would signal “America’s unreliability as a strategic partner.” However, Washington has spent decades defending much of the known world. Surely it is time, as Americans confront the price of endless budget prodigality, for other nations to stop offloading responsibility for their security onto the U.S. Will that be easy for the Gulfdoms, which have grown accustomed to paying others to do their nations’ hard work? No, but so what? Americans have no duty to act as bodyguards for dissolute royal families that believe toil is for others. And if the only way to rally their people to the national defense is for these governments to finally put their peoples’ interests first, so much the better.

Reducing Washington’s Mideast commitments would also diminish the tripwires for war. Most U.S. military commitments of recent years had their genesis in the Middle East and nearby regions. Washington threatened war if the Soviet Union intervened in the Yom Kippur War in 1973, fought against Shia forces in the Lebanese civil war in the early 1980s, aided Iraq in its brutal aggression against Iran throughout the 1980s, battled Somali militias in the early 1990s, intervened in both Afghanistan and Iraq in the aftermath of Al Qaeda’s 2001 attacks, launched sustained drone campaigns in Pakistan and Yemen in succeeding years, backed Saudi Arabia’s war on the latter beginning in 2015, conducted naval operations against Yemen from 2023 to 2025, and launched attacks on Iran in 2025 and 2026. The U.S. also has routinely launched more limited strikes throughout the region, such as the 2020 assassination of Iran’s Qasem Soleimani.

Reducing the habit and ease of using military force in the region would force a more serious debate in Washington over the appropriateness of intervention, especially unprovoked aggression leading to a broader war, as with Iran.

Our Middle Eastern bases have become liabilities, literal targets risking the lives of Americans and our allies. Although the Trump administration spent practically the entire Iran conflict asserting that Iran’s military had been essentially obliterated (just like the president claimed Tehran’s nuclear program had been last year), Iran did massive damage to U.S. installations, forcing the evacuation of most personnel.

According to the New York Times, Iran responded to the American-Israeli attack “by launching drones and missiles at American targets across the Middle East, hitting embassies, killing U.S. soldiers, and damaging military bases and air defense infrastructure. … The intensity of the retaliatory strikes has signaled that Iran was more prepared for the war than many in the Trump administration had anticipated, U.S. military officials say.” The Washington Post analysis is even more damning:

Equally shocking, concluded the Post, “The threat of air attacks rendered some of the U.S. bases in the region too dangerous to staff at normal levels, and commanders moved most of the personnel from these sites out of the range of Iranian fire at the start of the war, officials have said.” Many of America’s 40,000 personnel in the region were transferred to civilian hotels throughout the Gulf and to locations as far away as Europe and the U.S., resulting in “one of the largest movements of U.S. military families out of the Middle East in years.” This withdrawal was a humiliating admission that America’s armed forces were unable to protect their facilities and personnel. So much for the president claiming a glorious and victorious campaign.

Washington’s inability to protect the Gulf nations hosting these bases, and its ostentatious prioritization of Israel’s security above their own, has had significant foreign policy consequences. Explained Dalia Ghanem, a senior visiting fellow at the German Marshall Fund:

This is forcing allied governments to rethink their relationship with the U.S. These consequences should have surprised no one in the Gulf, given Israel’s pernicious political influence in America generally and the Trump administration specifically, as well as its malicious role as chief advocate of the reckless and lawless assault on Iran. Although Washington’s allies are unlikely to abandon their ties with America, they may reduce their overwhelming reliance on the U.S. for their security. Reported the Guardian: “Gulf nations will seek to add security partners as they rebuild battered economies after the U.S. and Israel’s war on Iran and deal with an emboldened Tehran.” They are also likely to seek more self-reliance and distance themselves from American and Israeli hostility toward Iran.

In such a world, Washington should take the initiative and begin withdrawing its military. Even before the misbegotten assault on Iran, it was essential for America to separate itself from the radical, expansionist government in Jerusalem, which is dragging the U.S. into Mideast wars and crushing Washington’s reputation. Future administrations should also transfer control over our bases to the host nations and bring forces home. The region is no longer essential for American security and certainly not worth the cost and risk of new wars.

Trump proved unable to resist Benjamin Netanyahu’s deceitful and misleading arguments for war. Trump also held wildly unrealistic expectations about the war’s likely course, blundering at almost every point of the active hostilities and the peace negotiations. The best, and perhaps only, way to avoid a disastrous reprise is to remove the U.S. military from its needlessly exposed position in the Middle East. The Iran War, though itself a disaster, has presented a golden opportunity to do so.