A South Carolina pastor and his wife are accused of abusing children for decades, with investigators alleging the couple forced some children to search dumpsters for rotten food, sleep in a trash can and watch as family pets were killed, according to arrest warrants and court testimony. Myron Chorbajian, 73, and Kathleen Chorbajian, 71, were arrested in May 2025 after Greenville County investigators said adopted children came forward with allegations reaching back to the 1980s. ... Read more

A 70-year-old Oklahoma woman is charged with first-degree murder after deputies said they found her husband, a former Cherokee Nation Supreme Court justice, shot multiple times while seated in a chair at their home late Feb. 5, with investigators saying she told dispatchers she would be waiting on the porch when police arrived. The death of Troy Wayne Poteete, 70, has drawn attention because of his public role in Cherokee Nation government and because the ... Read more

A North Carolina man is charged with first-degree murder after authorities say he choked and stabbed his mother to death hours after deputies were called to her home because she said he would not let her leave, according to investigators and a newly released autopsy summary. The case centers on Stephanie McCoy, 64, who was found dead May 15, 2025, inside her home in the 4500 block of Red Mill Road in northern Durham County. ... Read more

Executive Summary Amid a deepening real estate recession and diminishing returns on traditional infrastructure investment, Beijing has introduced a series of policy concepts aimed at stimulating growth. Among these, the “low-altitude economy” (低空经济) has emerged as a particularly prominent focal point. Since the inclusion of the low-altitude economy in the 2024 Government Work Report as The post The Low-Altitude Economy’s Great Leap Upward appeared first on Jamestown.

Executive Summary: In early January, the China–U.S. Exchange Foundation (CUSEF; 太平洋国际交流基金会), a Beijing-based non-profit, organized a trip to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), bringing U.S. college students to Beijing, Guiyang, and Chengdu (CUSEF (Beijing), January 14). In Beijing, the students met with Lu Kang (陆慷), the vice minister of the International Liaison Department (ILD) of The post Recent ILD Activity Suggests Expanded Mandate appeared first on Jamestown.

For decades, François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows has stood as cinema’s definitive portrait of an unhappy childhood. Kaouther Ben Hania’s devastating new film, The Voice of Hind Rajab, may finally dislodge it. Centered on the real-life story of a five-year-old Palestinian girl, the film renders Truffaut’s adolescent anguish almost quaint by comparison. Built around real

A former compliance officer for the international financial powerhouse Deutsche Bank told the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) she was fired in 2018 after raising concerns about suspicious banking activity from accounts owned by financier and sex predator Jeffrey Epstein, as well as accounts linked to Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, adviser, and business partner. The

In 2021, Academy Award–winning director Alex Gibney and I published a desperate plea. In a Rolling Stone essay, we implored Democrats then in power to heed Franklin D. Roosevelt’s (FDR) long-forgotten warning about the link between economic hardship and authoritarianism. Five years later, it appears that at least one prospective Democratic presidential candidate understands the warning — and

Halfway through his acclaimed novel Perfection, Vincenzo Latronico inserts a particularly revealing episode. It is 2015 and Anna and Tom are both graphic designers, working in one of Berlin’s trendiest neighborhoods. Their comfortable life is suddenly interrupted, however, when a picture surfaces on social media and soon goes viral. It is an image of Alan

Is literary culture in America on the decline? The decline of reading in all age groups is certainly well-documented and is grave cause for alarm. And so, when The Washington Post recently announced the demise of its vaunted books section, the response by Adam Kirsch in The Atlantic that “The Literary Ecosystem Is Dying” seemed justified at first glance. Kirsch, a seasoned reviewer himself, explains his theory for the vicious cycle he is observing:  “People don’t want to read book reviews—at least, not enough people to make publishing them worthwhile. It’s a vicious circle. As people feel less of a need to keep up with new books, they stop reading reviews; publications respond by cutting books coverage, so readers don’t hear about new books; as a result, they buy fewer books, which makes publications think they’re not worth covering.” I presume that Kirsch knows his readers well enough to accurately describe them. Yet, I wrote over forty book reviews in 2025 for twelve different publications that were not The Washington Post or The Atlantic. The vast majority of these reviews were, in point of fact, for publications that can be characterized as having a distinct Christian identity or otherwise being conservative enough to be open to Christian perspectives. Furthermore, I serve as Books Editor for a Christian ideas magazine, Mere Orthodoxy, where I also host a podcast on reading classic books. Mere Orthodoxy itself includes about ten review essays in every issue of its print magazine, published thrice a year. But print is only a fraction of our book coverage. Additional reviews and book-related interviews run online, amounting to about three or four books pieces each week, sometimes more. While many of the books reviewed are written by and for Christians, others are intended for more general audiences—poetry collections, novels, works of history and social science, memoirs, and more. All of these essays and interviews find readers and prompt further dialogue and conversation.  From my perspective, the Christian literary ecosystem is thriving—expanding rather than contracting. And while many magazines for which I regularly write do not have a designated books section or a separate books editor, they publish multiple reviews weekly, interweaving them organically with news essays, analysis pieces, and op-eds. The persistence of a conservative/Christian literary culture begs the question: could there be something different about conservative readers—and, especially, conservative Christian readers? Might Christians—a people of the Book—have a more dedicated relationship with books and reading after all? I would like to think so. I speculate that this is because Christians, as believers in the objective nature of truth, beauty, and goodness, are more inclined to see themselves as taking part in a literary culture geared towards a constructive vision of illuminating the human condition in ways that honor God. Atheists and non-believers can, obviously, also engage in literary criticism, but there is an intrinsic difficulty with articulating a positive vision of what constitutes good literature as opposed to utilizing endless critical theories to analyze the myriad power structures at work in any text. It stands to reason that Christians would be particularly interested in the collaborative endeavor of what Germans call Geisteswissenschaft, literally the “science of the mind/spirit.” If it’s believed that uncovering the human spirit is an act of worship, and literature is one avenue through which God can be glorified, then the real question is why there aren’t even more Christians involved in the literary scene.  With regard to the declining interest in book reviews, I wonder if the approach taken to much literature feels less about constructively contributing to a broader literary culture and more about tearing down the work of others. Editors do have a distinct responsibility to stretch their readers’ tastes at times by presenting them with a variety of perspectives, both familiar and novel. But there is also a degree of trust in the balance, as readers expect a magazine to contribute to the discourse in ways that are both interesting—presenting new ideas and interpretations—but also responsible by not following the latest fad too closely. A books section that does not provide what the reader has been hoping for has, in some cases, only itself to blame for not understanding the readers’ needs and thus becoming irrelevant. This matters, because most magazines are, to a great extent, reader-supported publications. Readers vote with their feet—and their wallets.  This is not to say that all publishing should become a sleazy sell-out business in which pageviews are the only currency. Rather, writers and editors have a considerable responsibility to edify and uplift our often blighted discourse on politics and culture. Books that delve into complex themes in nuanced ways allow us to address the pressing issues of our time (and all time) away from the hyperbolic tone of Twitter (X) and the 24 hour news cycle. Such is, indeed, one of the greatest arguments for reading not only great books of the ancient variety—Homer’s Odyssey, for example, which continues to enthrall because the quest for home and the sense of not having control over the vicissitudes of life are intrinsic to the human condition—but also newer books that continue to perpetuate the conversation about life’s great questions, updated for the times we live in.  Ultimately, I believe in the civilizational significance of reading for the formation of an educated and thoughtful citizenry. But this is not just my perspective, but that of America’s Founding Fathers, including Thomas Jefferson, who cited similar reasons for founding the University of Virginia. And while universities continue to carry significant responsibility in equipping thoughtful readers for America’s democracy, magazines play a key role in supporting the informed debates that make a liberal society such as ours possible. So no, book reviews are not dead—and book reviewing is just as energetic now as it was in the heyday of Washington Post’s book review section. For readers who want to know about new books, reviews are all around, and more publications than ever will welcome you with un-paywalled arms. Pick up and read. 

Two women were killed and two other people were wounded when gunfire erupted inside a nightclub along Southwest Boulevard early Sunday, police said, as investigators searched for video and witnesses to explain how a late-night altercation turned deadly. The shooting, reported just after 2 a.m. Feb. 15, unfolded inside Status Nightclub near West 28th Street in a corridor known for late-night bars and weekend crowds. Kansas City police identified the women who died as Eboni ... Read more

A Utah mother and her preteen daughter were found dead inside a hotel room at the Rio Hotel & Casino after they did not arrive for a cheerleading competition, and police said evidence indicates the mother fatally shot the child before taking her own life. The deaths, discovered Sunday, Feb. 15, triggered an outpouring of grief from cheer teams and families in Utah and beyond and left investigators working to piece together a timeline inside ... Read more

A 6-year-old Girl Scout from the Pittsburgh area has drawn national attention after her family and local reports said she sold about 87,000 boxes of cookies this season, a total they say surpasses widely cited single season benchmarks and has set her sights on an even larger goal before the annual sale ends. The surge in orders has turned Pim Neill, a Daisy Scout in kindergarten, into a familiar face on social media and local ... Read more

The family of a 66-year-old Walmart greeter who died in 2023 has sued a northern Utah nursing home, alleging she developed large, infected bedsores during a rehabilitation stay after surgery and later died from complications that included MRSA and sepsis. The lawsuit, filed against Rocky Mountain Care in Clearfield, describes what the family calls a pattern of neglect that began within days of her admission and worsened over months. Relatives say Tamara “Tammy” Bircumshaw entered ... Read more

Tre’ Johnson, a former Washington offensive lineman who earned a Pro Bowl nod and later became a high school history teacher in Maryland, died Sunday during a short family trip, according to his wife and the team. He was 54. Johnson’s death drew quick tributes from the Washington Commanders and from people who knew him as both a powerful player and a calm, thoughtful presence off the field. The team said it was “heartbroken” by ... Read more

The 2026 National Defense Strategy(NDS)dropped a few weeks ago, as these things do, to modest fanfare. But it is not insignificant. Call it what you will, whether the sister publication to or child publication of The National Security Strategy(NSS), published at the end of last year, the NDS is a part of a family of documents outlining the executive branch’s national security vision defining goals, international interests, commitments, objectives, policies, and priorities. The NDS does its part by describing how the US military apparatus will help execute the president’s vision. In two broad sections the current document reflects first on the global security environment with chapters on the American homeland and our hemisphere, China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and evaluation of US allies’ and partners’ performance in shouldering their share of the West’s defense burden. It then moves to specific strategic concerns including defending the homeland, deterring China, increasing said burden-sharing among allies, and supercharging the US defense industrial base. The NDS has no real surprises andfollows its predecessor document in elevating the Western Hemisphere to the apogee of US strategic priorities while reshuffling other regions in importance. And though both documents reorient US focus more inward—emphasizing sovereignty and territorial defense, including border security and other domestic concerns as foundational to national security—it can’t credibly be said that any of this suggests the US is turning isolationist. Indeed, the documents seem clear that this would be impossible. Modern technology has shrunk the world so that real seclusion—the mode of the genuine isolationist—is no longer an option. Missiles, 5th domain warfare, and terrorism aren’t turned away by closed borders or disregard for the rest of the world. To care about the Western hemisphere is to care about the things that can penetrate—or seep into—the Western hemisphere. Secretary Hegseth knows this and, in his cover memo to the NDS, is at pains to insist on the simple recognition that while America will remain the indispensable superpower it is not America’s duty “to act everywhere on our own,” especially, as he can’t help himself to put it, when allied security suffers from their “leaders’ own irresponsible choices.” Nevertheless, for many critics, the documents, taken both in whole and in part, are so overly preoccupied with fretting about “America first” that they ignore or irresponsibly downplay our responsibilities to friends and partners. This isn’t entirely fair, but it’s forgivable, at least from a surface view of things. Indeed, the concept of “national interest” saturates both documents, appearing in various forms more than almost any other substantive noun. “America” and “American” appear more often in the NSS—though mainly under in fidelity to the “America First” theme. Both “Trump” and “allies” appears slightly more than “national interest” in the NDS—though, to be fair, “allies” appears quite frequently in the context of increased burden sharing or becoming autonomous and less dependent on the US. If in past national security documents terms like “bolster,” “reassure, or “indispensable” preceded “allies,” the current documents prefer “accountability” and “conditionality.” Everything really is viewed through the lens of our interests. For these reasons, and many others, both documents have come under scrutiny and criticism and caused much concern. But I want to take a different tack to focus on this business about national interest. Somewhere in my lifetime—or in the hippy-dippy pre-dawn hours just before—the term became pejorative. Disparaged as an obstacle to global cooperation, a concern for national interest is derided as exclusionary, chauvinistic, or just grossly selfish. It appears, for some, the stuff of cold calculation, power, and to-hell-with-the-rest-of-you-ism. It needn’t be. It oughtn’t be. The primacy of nations, as the NSS rightly insists, remains as the world’s “fundamental political unit.” Because it is so, “it is natural and just that all nations put their interests first and guard their sovereignty.” This is not just a concession to reality. It is not even simply common sense. It is, as the document declares, just—it is virtuous. The moral philosophers or ethicists might call it “associative relationships” or “special obligations.” Whatever the term, I know that if you, me, and my son were hiking together and you and my son fell into a nest of poisonous vipers together that it is my duty, as a father, to pull out my son first. I might even have him use you as a ladder. It is appropriate that I am concerned, in the first place, with the welfare of my family—that I support and supply their necessities—food, shelter, security—before I supply yours or your children’s. In the same fashion, a political ruler—that authority over whom there is no one greater charged with the provision and maintenance of the order and justice—and therefore the peace—of the political community for which they are responsible—has, as their chief responsibility, the welfare of those they rule. The Trump administration is not wrong when it concludes that “the purpose of the American government is to secure the God-given natural rights of American citizens.” But I do wish it qualified purpose with the word primary—that’s to say, primary purpose. For while its omission is not exactly wrong, its absence isn’t exactly right. This is because our duties—whether individually or corporately—do not end with our own. While I would pull my child out of that nest of vipers before I would help you out, I would also do everything in my power to save you both. It is also true that I might not always attempt to save my own over you no matter the details of the particular case. Circumstances might affect the basic principle and reorient my behavior—we can imagine a multitude of scenarios in which I pull you out first. Likewise, while it is my duty to provide my children their necessities, it is not my duty—quite the opposite—to cater to their luxuries while your family doesn’t have enough to eat. And, in a real catastrophe, even my children’s enjoyment of their necessities might need to be carefully curtailed in order to help your family if you were starving. If true of individuals, then it is true, too, ultimately, for nations. While it is also true that the chief moral obligation of any particular sovereign is to his or her own people, this obligation is not absolute. A nation should cultivate those capacities that they are able to cultivate in order to be of use to other nations in need. What I am championing here is the so-called Spiderman ethic: with great power comes great responsibility. My thesis is that there is always a strong presumption that if there is someone in danger then I ought to do something about it, and that my actually doing something about it is conditioned on my having the capacity to. Providence and ambition have allowed the US to gather to itself vast stores of power and security. This is not simply the result of having (mostly) friendly neighbors above and below and two vast oceans to either side. It has been a choice. We chose to become the most powerful nation the world has ever seen. For most of our history, we also chose to accept the responsibilities—not infinite and not solitary—that we bear because of that power. And so, we have chosen to not simply horde this power to our own good. America has, throughout our history, been a force for good in the world. This has not been altruism at the expense of national interest. Doing good in the world, for the world, rebounds to our own good. Besides much else, an ordered community of nations aligned to a common good forms the outer perimeter of our own security. But spending our power on the welfare of other nations also makes the power we have sufferable to those beneath it. This is to argue, as I have argued before, that national interest encompasses the pursuit of virtue. As with individuals, nations too, if only in an analogous way, can develop the habit of—and the reputation for—virtuous behavior. Specifically, America ought to develop our miliary, financial, cultural, diplomatic, scientific, industrial, and technological power in order to deploy that power—when both duty and prudence align in doing so—to aid our international neighbors—including both discreet people groups as well as states—even if doing so is not strictly in defense or support of those kinds of national interests like protecting global trade, strengthening our financial, energy, and environmental systems, and securing our power, security, and wealth. These things are vital national interests. But while that, national interest is more than that. In an outstanding essay in an old issue of First Things, Nigel Biggar, Providence contributor, Regius Professor Emeritus of Moral and Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford, Commander of the Order of the British Empire, hiking partner, and now Lord Biggar of Castle Douglas, put it all this way: The defense and promotion of the domestic security and well-being of one people depends upon making and keeping the international environment friendly rather than hostile. One way to do this, Biggar points out, is to promote and defend abroad what is defended and promoted at home. This will include those “values and institutions generally important for human welfare—such as the rule of law, an incorrupt civil service, and legal rights.” This exhortation is no gassy idealism. It is deadly practical and comes with a crucial warning, Biggar again: The United States is not the only trustee of such values and institutions, but, thanks to the gifts of providence and its own achievements, it happens to be the most powerful global actor at this time. Its primary duty to its own people obliges it to sustain its power. But that duty implies a secondary one to promote the weal of other nations. For if it should surrender its dominant international power, other states, less humane and liberal, will pick it up. The U.S. has a vocation to shoulder the imperial burden, certainly for the sake of Americans, but for the sake of the rest of us as well. There’s a helpful distinction made in theological reflection about the character of God that categorizes the divine attributes under two key headings: God’s greatness and His goodness. I considered this early on in the first Trump administration. It would pay to reflect upon them again. Attributes, of course, refer to those qualities that are rightly ascribed to someone or something, they express some truth about a thing’s nature. When we speak of God’s “greatness” we point to those things that reveal his majesty or magnificence, his glory, dignity, and splendor. His “goodness” directs our attention to his moral character. Scripture attests to both. Consider Psalm 8: You have set your glory in the heavens. Through the praise of children and infants you have established a stronghold against your enemies, to silence the foe and the avenger. When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them? Here, God’s greatness is clearly evidenced in the witness of creation which attests to his eternal power. The omni-everything, God’s greatness is associated with terms such as wrath, justice, power, immutability, sovereignty, and the like. Included among the manifold ways in which he directs this power is his Kingship over the earth, the rule and defense of His people, and his judgment and destruction of evil. But this greatness is coupled with—not qualified or limited by—his goodness. God is not simply creator; he is mindful of his creation. He is providentially concerned that it should flourish. God’s goodness is described by his holiness, love, mercy, graciousness, and his fidelity—both to his own character and to his creation. To distinguish between God’s goodness and His greatness is helpful but it’s not meant to be stark. One cannot talk about His goodness without also needing to gesture to His justice. Neither can one start to describe His Kingship without very quickly needing to bring in His love. God is just to the nth degree, and He is loving to the nth degree. Would He cease to be one He would cease to be the other. This is a useful analog regarding the character of nations and to what America should aspire—as it always has—to be. Nations are not, of course, gods. But there is nothing inherently wrong in wanting one’s nation to be great. In fact, because, as I’ve stated above, the primary purpose of government is the provision and maintenance of the common good of the people over which they govern, we must remember that these things cannot be had by any nation whose greatness is insufficient to overcome the threats against it. For a nation as materially blessed as America, greatness can be had for a song. Goodness, however, can be harder to come by and is more easily lost. This is partly because seeking to be good is far more risky than merely wanting to be great. It is seen in such acts as the willingness to kick in doors to get at the bad guys rather than simply leveling the village entirely, or in expending a measure of our own blood and treasure abroad that others too might flourish. It means refusing to make simplistic distinctions between being compassionate and being secure and to instead find means to be both. Made in the imago Dei, human beings are intended, both individually and corporately, to represent the Divine in history. How we conceive the attributes of God shapes how we worship Him. So too does our conception of our nation’s character shape how we serve her. Christian theological witness has always contended that this service cannot be rightly rendered by seeking either greatness or goodness absent the other. Any nation so concerned with being “good” that it refuses to be great will not long survive. Any nation so concerned with greatness over goodness simply isn’t much worthy of surviving. American national interests and our willingness to spend power for the global common good are more closely aligned than many seem to believe. Wherever America retracts abroad, an adversarial power will take our place. Whatever concerns, criticisms, or discontent attend the national security and national defense strategy documents, the strategies appear firm in recognizing this fact and in refusing to allow it to come about. This is good. It would not only be irresponsible to for America to let that happen. It would be against our interests.

The United Auto Workers’ (UAW) 2023 “stand-up strike” against Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis delivered historic gains for our members. But just as significant is what came next. Before the strike even ended, thousands of nonunion autoworkers — primarily in the South — began signing union cards on their own, using website links from defunct

What could possibly go wrong? A company called Rent A Human boasts on its website that “robots need your body” and calls itself the “meatspace layer for AI.” Customers can find humans to do their embodied work while would-be contractors can rent themselves out to agents. It’s a kind of demented Taskrabbit or Fiverr. Potential

It would require a highly selective memory to regard the abduction of Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro and his wife on January 3 as Washington’s return to an imperialist policy that it supposedly abandoned in 1945, or even 1918. There’s something disingenuous about the sudden reappearance of the term “imperialist” in Western media outlets, which previously

Houston police opened a homicide investigation after a co-owner of a north Houston smoke shop was found shot to death inside the business Saturday, according to investigators at the scene. Officers responded to the Daze Elevated smoke shop on North Houston Rosslyn Road after an employee found the owner’s body in the back of the store. The case drew immediate attention because detectives said the shooting may have happened hours before the body was discovered, ... Read more

A 38-year-old man was sentenced to life in prison in Dallas County after pleading guilty to killing two Chick-fil-A employees during a June 2024 shooting inside a restaurant in Irving, authorities said. Prosecutors said the gunfire erupted while the man’s wife was working at the location and witnessed the attack. The sentencing closes a case that sparked a large, overnight manhunt and drew renewed attention to workplace violence at public businesses. The defendant, Oved Bernardo ... Read more

On Sunday, February 1, Costa Ricans went to the polls to elect a new president and fifty-seven members of congress. The election, which was framed as a referendum on the outgoing administration of Rodrigo Chaves, delivered a resounding victory to his chosen successor, Laura Fernández, who secured over 48 percent of the vote. The campaign

On February 4, the Trump administration quietly filed a motion to end the asylum claims of one of the countless Minnesota residents being targeted by masked immigration agents throughout the state. In this case, their mark is just five years old, one of thousands of children likely to have been abducted by adults with guns since President Donald Trump’s

For decades the Nordic welfare states have been held up as global exemplars of gender equality and expansive public care systems. Yet beneath this image of egalitarian modernity, cracks have begun to widen. Across Europe and North America, scholars increasingly speak of a mounting care crisis — a systemic imbalance in which society’s care needs

The largest and longest nurses’ strike in the city’s history is continuing at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital (NYP) after nurses there decisively rejected the hospital chain’s contract offer 3,099 to 867. About 10,500 other nurses are starting to return to work today, ending the strike at three Manhattan hospitals run by Mt Sinai and at Montefiore Medical

On Thursday, the Trump administration abruptly announced that it was ending the monthslong occupation of Minneapolis and St Paul by thousands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol officers. Donald Trump’s scandal-ridden “border czar,” Tom Homan, said that “a significant drawdown has already been underway this week and will continue to the next

In the days following the US abduction of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro on January 3, Donald Trump wasted little time in extending the threat to both Colombia and Mexico. Labeling President Gustavo Petro a “sick man,” Trump followed up by opining that an invasion of the country sounded “good to me.” As for Mexico, after

Last week, MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes took to X to announce that America’s white-collar workers were the latest victims of a newly waged class war captained by tech billionaires. The goal, he wrote, was “to do to white-collar workers what globalization and neoliberalism did to blue-collar workers.” That thread went viral because the narrative is

Executive Summary: On February 2, Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin appointed Ksenia Shoigu as Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Development Fund of the Innovative Scientific and Technological Center, referred to as Mendeleev Valley (Долина Менделеева, Dolyna Mendeleyeva) (Government of Russia, February 2). Shoigu is the daughter of Sergei Shoigu, secretary of the Russian Security Council The post Russia Struggling to Resist PRC Rare Earth Dominance appeared first on Jamestown.

The sentencing of Jimmy Lai to 20 years in prison is a moral emergency for the Catholic Church and the West more broadly. This month, a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) controlled court in Hong Kong condemned the 78-year-old devout Catholic to what amounts to a life sentence. His crime was exercising the very freedoms of speech, press, and conscience that the Church has long defended as reflections of human dignity. Pope Leo XIV now faces a defining moment of his papacy: Will he continue the failed policy of appeasement toward the CCP that has emboldened this persecution, or will he stand firmly as a defender of the faithful? Jimmy Lai’s story is one of remarkable conversion and courage. Born into poverty in mainland China, he fled to Hong Kong as a boy and built a business empire. As Beijing tightened its grip on Hong Kong over the last decade, Lai used his platform to champion democracy, the rule of law, and human rights. He supported the 2014 Umbrella Movement and 2019 protests, becoming one of the CCP’s most vocal critics. After being arrested in 2020 under the draconian National Security Law, he endured years of trials on charges ranging from fraud to “colluding with foreign forces,” a catch-all for speech that displeases Beijing. The 20-year sentence seals his fate. Yet Lai is not merely a political prisoner. His detention and treatment constitute a direct challenge to religious freedom. Baptized into the Catholic Church in 1997 by Cardinal Joseph Zen, then coadjutor bishop of Hong Kong, Lai has described his faith as the foundation of his fight for freedom. In prison, he reads the Gospel, prays daily, and draws images of the Crucifixion and the Blessed Mother. His daughter Claire has said the ordeal has only deepened his devotion; he views his cell as a “holy sanctuary” where grace abounds. Beijing has repeatedly denied him access to the Eucharist and Mass. This is not incidental. The CCP targets Lai precisely because his Catholic witness unites faith with the pursuit of justice, a direct challenge to Beijing’s demand for total ideological control. Lai’s imprisonment is no isolated injustice. It forms part of Xi Jinping’s relentless crackdown on religious freedom. Under the banner of “Sinicization,” the CCP seeks to subordinate every faith to party doctrine. In 2025 and early 2026, authorities launched sweeping raids on underground Protestant churches. Leaders of the Early Rain Covenant Church and Zion Church were detained in nighttime operations. Pastors face charges for “illegal” online sermons or unregistered gatherings. Catholic communities suffer similar restrictions. Underground bishops have been disappeared, forced into “re-education,” or pressured to join the state-controlled Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association. New regulations treat clergy like quasi-cadres under surveillance. Churches are stormed, assets seized, and believers harassed. The message Beijing is sending is clear: In Xi’s China, there is no God but the Party. This repression has intensified precisely because the Vatican’s policy of engagement has signaled weakness. In 2018, under Pope Francis, the Holy See signed a secret agreement with the CCP on the appointment of bishops. The deal, whose full text remains undisclosed, granted Beijing significant influence over bishop appointments for China’s Catholics in exchange for a supposed path to “unity.” It has been renewed repeatedly, most recently extended for another four years. Far from protecting the Church, the accord has legitimized the regime’s control over appointments, sidelined loyal underground bishops, and left faithful Catholics feeling abandoned. Cardinal Zen, who spent years warning against the deal, called it a “surrender.” The policy of quiet diplomacy and compromise has not moderated Beijing’s behavior; it has emboldened it. Jimmy Lai’s sentencing is the clearest proof yet that appeasement does not buy safety; it invites escalation. When the Vatican refuses to name the persecution of Christians by name, renews agreements without demanding concrete improvements, and prioritizes diplomatic access over prophetic witness, the CCP interprets silence as permission. Lai’s 20-year term is the fruit of that miscalculation. Every day he spends in isolation is a day the universal Church fails to live up to its own teaching on the dignity of the human person and the primacy of conscience. Pope Leo has the opportunity, and the duty, to break this cycle. He should immediately and publicly call for the release of those imprisoned on religious-freedom grounds. He should demand unrestricted access to the sacraments for Lai and for all imprisoned believers in China and Hong Kong. Most importantly, he should declare that the 2018 agreement, in light of unrelenting persecution, no longer serves the good of the Church and must be terminated. Continuing to negotiate with a regime that jails a faithful Catholic for decades while denying him the Eucharist is not prudence; it is complicity. Pope Leo should go even further. He should launch a global advocacy campaign, mobilizing the Church, governments, and international institutions, to expose and condemn China’s systematic assault on religious liberty. Vatican diplomacy must shift from backroom deals to public moral clarity. Wielding the authority of the Church, Pope Leo should speak up for China’s persecuted faithful and end the Vatican’s dangerous experiment in the appeasement of tyranny.

Last October, the Trump administration announced a ceasefire deal in Gaza after two years of relentless carnage. Since the deal was announced, Israel has continued to occupy much of Gaza, and its forces have killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians. Meanwhile, Donald Trump has launched his so-called Board of Peace to administer Gaza without any input

Last April, Canada’s parliamentary left suffered the worst electoral blow in its history — losing official party status and winning just seven seats in the House of Commons. With Mark Carney’s Liberals now riding high in the polls, and whispers of a snap election as early as this spring, the New Democratic Party (NDP), Canada’s

In 1960, then deputy assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs Lester Mallory laid out the argument for waging economic war on Cuba. The US government, he wrote, should deny “money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.” Mallory also wrote that the

When struggling football managers get a vote of confidence from their board, it often comes with an unspoken “for now.” In a similar vein, the clock for Keir Starmer is definitely ticking, despite pledges of support from politicians eager to replace him as prime minister. The bigger issue, however, is whether or not any of

Aged eighteen, just three months after giving birth to her second child, Dalisay emigrated to Spain. Leaving her daughters in the care of her sister in the Philippines, she started a job as a live-in domestic worker in Madrid, sending money home each month. Not long after moving into her employer’s family address, the husband

Executive Summary: On February 4, the Estonian Investigation Department of the Tax and Customs Department, police, and navy detained the Bahamas-flagged Baltic Spirit container ship. Estonia seized the vessel, which was traveling from Ecuador to Russia and stopped in Estonia’s waters to refuel, on suspicion of connections to smuggling (Unian, February 4). The crew of The post Russia Leverages Economic Ties to Exert Political Pressure on Ecuador appeared first on Jamestown.

Executive Summary: Ever more Russian commentators are saying the oblasts, krais, and republics of their country are “on the brink of bankruptcy.” They have had to slash spending on many initiatives their populations want while borrowing more money from the center and paying an increasing share of revenues to service that debt (Region Voice, February The post Russian Regions Starved for Money by Moscow Facing Serious Financial Problems appeared first on Jamestown.

Executive Summary: Chinese leader Xi Jinping has decimated the Central Military Commission (CMC). In 2012, the military’s highest decision-making body comprised 10 individuals, in addition to Xi himself. Today, that figure is down to one. The most recent stage in Xi’s purge, removing CMC vice chair Zhang Youxia (张又侠) and Joint Staff Department chief Liu The post Defense Minister Dong Jun Leading Contender for CMC Seat appeared first on Jamestown.

Executive Summary: On October 9, 2025, Pakistan allegedly carried out airstrikes on the outskirts of Kabul, Afghanistan, to target key leaders of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), particularly its head Mufti Noor Wali Mehsud  (Hash e Subha, October 11, 2025). Pakistan repeatedly requested the Taliban authorities to refrain from harboring the TTP leadership inside Afghan territory (The The post The Afghan Taliban’s ‘Digital War’ Against Pakistan appeared first on Jamestown.

Executive Summary: On December 24, 2025, five people—including two Tajik officers—were killed in an armed clash between Tajikistan’s security forces and three militants, who were trying to enter Tajikistan through the 870-mile-long border with Afghanistan (Radio Ozodi, December 24, 2025). Tajik authorities claimed it was the third militant act, or illegal border crossing, from Afghanistan The post Tajikistan Becomes Latest Victim of Cross-border Attacks from Afghanistan  appeared first on Jamestown.

Executive Summary: Myanmar accounted for nearly two-thirds of the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) Rare Earth Elements (REEs) imports from 2017 to 2024 (ISP-Myanmar, March 28, 2025). Ethnic rebel groups in Myanmar’s Shan and Kachin states, which control most of these REE mining sites, have become increasingly dependent on revenues generated from leasing and facilitating The post PRC and India vie for Influence on Rebel Militias in Myanmar  appeared first on Jamestown.

Executive Summary: Jihadist and bandit groups in West Africa have expanded and become increasingly bold in their online activities (YouTube/@LeMonde, November 14, 2021). This is necessary to stand out, as the territories and memberships of these groups often overlap. Members of Group for Supporters of Islam and Muslims (JNIM), for example, have opened TikTok channels, The post West African Militants turn to Social Media appeared first on Jamestown.

Among many others, there are three themes that run through the Jeffrey Epstein disclosures released by the Department of Justice (DOJ) recently: that the rich and powerful people who denied having any connection to the billionaire pedophile were often a lot friendlier with him than they let on; that these members of the elite are,

Much of the recent coverage of Christians in Israel suffers from a basic analytical flaw: it focuses almost exclusively on the places where the fewest Christians actually live. Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza dominate the conversation. These communities matter, but they are not representative. More than 70 percent of Israel’s 188,000 Christians live elsewhere—primarily in the north, especially in Galilee—and their absence from the discussion has distorted the picture beyond recognition. The Christians of northern Israel are not marginal figures. They play an outsized role in education, medicine, and business. They are overwhelmingly laypeople, yet media coverage fixates almost entirely on religious officials. One might be forgiven for concluding that Christianity in Israel is a clerical caste rather than a living community of families, professionals, and citizens. If these northern Christians are mentioned at all—and usually they are not—they are treated as an afterthought, stripped of agency and relevance. The result is an account of Christian life in Israel that is incomplete and misleading. Unmentioned in such accounts are Israeli Christians like Jacob Hanna, a leading stem-cell researcher; Hossam Haick, a pioneer in nano-sensor technology; and Johnny Srouji, who helped lead Apple’s research and development expansion in Israel. Ignored, too, are the statistics showing Christians as Israel’s most highly educated and most fully employed population per capita. Forgotten as well are the extensive efforts undertaken to protect and preserve Christian holy sites—efforts neglected under previous regimes—and the fact that the number of churches and chapels in the Holy Land has more than doubled since 1948. Consider the case of George, a young Christian from Haifa who volunteered for the Israel Defense Forces several months before October 7th. That choice alone is telling. Christians are exempt from military service by law, and for decades only a small number chose to enlist. But Christian enlistment has been rising steadily for years, a trend that accelerated sharply after October 7th. George is no symbolic soldier. Over the last two years, he fought alongside Jews and Muslims on the front lines of Gaza, Syria, and Lebanon. Although younger than most American college graduates, George has already lived a kind of pluralism that Western commentators can describe only in theory. He wore the uniform of a Jewish state and a cross around his neck. He shared foxholes with men of other faiths. He saw friends die. His family endured immense strain as the war dragged on. Yet George and his family are more patriotic, more rooted, and more invested in Israel’s future than ever. This reality is hard to reconcile with the dominant narrative. So it is ignored. The same dynamic appears in discussions of Christian decline in places like Nazareth, where the city’s shrinking Christian population is often blamed on the state. That explanation collapses under scrutiny. More significant factors include longstanding Christian-Muslim tensions and rising crime—not government policy. To ignore those factors is to choose a preferred storyline over the truth. Something similar is happening with recent incidents involving harassment of Christians in Jerusalem, including spitting by a small group of Jewish extremists. These acts are real and reprehensible—I have seen a few with my own eyes. But assessing the well-being of Christians in Israel based on the behavior of a few provocateurs is analytically unserious. It is akin to judging the condition of Muslims in the United States by the actions of a few white supremacists. The broader picture—the one most media outlets overlook—includes tens of thousands of Christians who live free, safe, and prosperous lives. Unlike their co-religionists elsewhere, these Christians can speak honestly about their society. Yet their voices are virtually absent from the public debate. This omission is especially glaring in the work of pundits like Tucker Carlson, whose recent coverage conveys the appearance of careful journalism while excluding those Christians most integrated into Israeli civic life. Such journalism—if it can be called that—is out of touch with lived reality. Any serious assessment of Christian life in Israel must begin with that reality, not the comments of a few clerics and politicians. The Christians of northern Israel are not abstractions. They are doctors, teachers, entrepreneurs, and soldiers. They are people like George. They do not need to be spoken for. They need to be heard.

Twelve years ago, the 2014 Winter Olympics were held in Russia. These was also the last Winter Olympics in which the Russian team (or lack thereof) didn’t garner significant controversy. The 2014 Games were followed by the government-led doping scandal that got Russia banned from the 2018 Games, and then another doping scandal in 2022, and now the banning of the Russian team once again due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. To be clear, not all Russian athletes are banned but instead compete as “Individual Neutral Athletes” and must not have shown support for Russia’s war on Ukraine. Despite Russia’s continued onslaught, the possibility of the ban soon being relaxed is making headlines. The current rules are being applied laxly, and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has recommended that Russian athletes be allowed to represent their country in the Youth Olympics this year. The new IOC President has also publicly implied openness to relaxing the ban. It is not hard to imagine the Russian team being admitted to the 2028 Summer Olympics, even if the war continues. This would be a grave error. I understand the concerns about politicizing the Olympics and hurting athletes; however, I am well positioned to place those concerns in perspective, having represented Ukraine twelve years ago when the Winter Olympics were held in Sochi, Russia, as a skater on the Ukrainian Olympic team.  I am American, born and raised, but represented Ukraine for seven years with my Ukrainian ice dance partner. I worked closely with Russian coaches and athletes, as did most of the Ukrainian athletes I knew. Russian and Ukrainian skaters trained together, chatted in Russian in the locker room, and even shared an apartment building in the Sochi Olympic Village. Even as Russia teetered on the brink of invading Crimea during the 2014 Olympics, I could never have imagined that twelve years later I would be advocating for the indefinite exclusion of the Russian team. Unfortunately, much has changed since then, as I am forcefully reminded when I read of some Russian skaters with whom I shared the ice openly supporting Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine. The rationale that sporting officials have given for readmitting Russia to the Olympics (or other major sporting events) tends to boil down to two primary objections: Banning a particular country for misbehavior risks politicizing an event that should be apolitical. It isn’t fair to punish athletes for the actions of their government. Even if we allow them to compete as neutrals, taking away their ability to represent their homeland is an unjust punishment. While international sporting officials usually express themselves differently, I think these objections also lie at the heart of some American conservatives’ claim (fueled by Russian propaganda) that Russia has been the victim of “cancel culture.” These objections include some valid concerns; I don’t want to see an increasingly politicized Olympic movement, and as a former Olympic athlete, I understand that being unable to compete under their own flag might seem like a crushing blow to some athletes. Banning countries is not a punishment I would want to see doled out lightly. However, in the case of Russia’s Olympic team, these concerns are badly misplaced. The Olympic movement should not be political, but by seeking to remain apolitical at all costs, it risks becoming a joke and slipping into irrelevance. Under Putin, Russia has systematically used the Olympics as a launching pad for its wars of aggression, actually beginning wars with enormous international ramifications during the Olympic truce: Georgia in 2008, Crimea (Ukraine) in 2014, and then Ukraine in 2022. As if this weren’t enough to justify banning Russia from the Games, let us recall the particular horror and global consequences of the war in Ukraine: the systematic civilian torture and killings, the brutal crackdowns on all but state-approved churches in Russian-occupied Ukraine, the callous willingness to plunge Europe into its largest land war since WWII, risking global security for generations to come. Putin’s Russia has made a mockery of all the Olympics stand for. Welcoming Russia back into Olympic Village while this war rages would seriously undermine the legitimacy of the Olympic movement and, in the name of apolitical neutrality, would grant Putin a geopolitical win. As we have seen in recent days, American Olympians can publicly criticize their government, and all the President can do is complain. The situation is radically different in Russia, where there has long been an unholy alliance between government and sport, and the prowess of their Olympic athletes is nearly synonymous with Russians‘ sense of power in world affairs. Russia’s repeated and gross violations of the Olympic values and the real risk that Olympic medals won under the Russian flag will further solidify Putin’s grip on the information landscape easily outweigh the desire of Russian athletes to compete under their own flag. This is all the more true if the proposed easing of the ban were to allow athletes who have supported the war on Ukraine.  Competing in the Olympics is not a right, but a privilege that comes with responsibility. Athletes who use their platform to promote a war with all the characteristics mentioned above have already violated the most basic rules of fair play and have no business being held up as exemplars of Olympic values. With the 2028 Summer Olympics set to be held in Los Angeles and the Trump administration seemingly eager to mend diplomatic ties with Russia, I worry that there will be extra pressure on the IOC to readmit Russia to the Games. This would be a defeat, not just for the Ukrainian team, but for the Olympic movement and for all who are committed to peace in Ukraine. Pope Leo XIV made headlines last week with his call for reinforcing the Olympic truce—a call Ukraine quickly reiterated. We should heed the words of the American pope and insist that if the Russian flag is to arrive with the Olympic torch on American soil, it must be preceded by a peaceful and just settlement of Russia’s war on Ukraine.

The old quote, widely attributed to John F. Kennedy, tells us that “success has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan” – a pithy aphorism that captures the innate tendency to utilize whatever rhetorical tricks necessary to distance oneself from responsibility for a negative outcome. As a corollary, the larger the failure, the greater the machinations and maneuvers to avoid culpability, and there are few failures as profound in recent American history as the defeat in our longest war—not at the hands of a peer adversary, but instead a twenty-year loss to a militia which, though equipped only with small arms, ultimately won out by its sustained desire to outlast the greatest military in the world.  Choosing Defeat, by Georgetown professor Paul Miller, traces the history of the war and the lineage between America’s ultimate failure and its thousands of fathers. Despite recriminations between Trump and Biden acolytes trying to toss the historical hot potato, Miller argues that blame is much more widely distributed—across administrations, from junior to senior staff, from inception to conclusion, from the operational to the strategic, and from the decisions made on the ground in Afghanistan to those made for domestic reasons in the U.S. By tracing the history of America’s longest war and the decisions which shaped it, Miller illuminates an uncomfortable reality: that there is not one singular moment where a key decision lost the war, no single point of failure that, if reversed, would have resulted in a decisive victory. Instead, we have a 20 year history of bad decisions, each building upon the last until the final collapse in a cascade of failure. The trouble may have begun, counterintuitively, when the initial rapid progress made by intelligence and special operations forces, in conjunction with Northern Alliance formations, created a false sense of security. This early success fostered the misbelief that continued political and security commitments were not needed as the Taliban seemed to be defeated, rather than just temporarily disrupted. Miller argues that the American belief in and desire for a “decisive military victory” may have skewed our understanding of what we realistically could and could not accomplish. This initial miscalculation was compounded by the greater attention paid to the Iraq War shortly after. Continued neglect and failure to address structural difficulties in the American-established Afghan political and military institutions meant that, like an untreated splinter, a manageable wound festered and grew, eventually becoming a widespread infection that went largely ignored.  Other books have attempted to tell the story of America’s War in Afghanistan. Some, like Wes Morgan’s The Hardest Place, tells the story of Afghanistan through the particular locus of the Pesh Valley, chronicling the missteps and mismanagement there as a microcosm of the larger errors. But Miller’s book takes a broader look—examining operational and strategic decisions by both military and political actors that shaped—and misshaped—the war. Most importantly, at a time when multiple presidential administrations and their proxies have attempted to cast blame elsewhere, Miller spares no one, facing the ugly truth head-on that America’s failure in Afghanistan belongs to everyone involved, military and civilian, Republican and Democrat, in country and in Washington. And, as the title of the book makes clear, each of these guilty parties made choices that contributed to the disastrous outcome through a combination of hubris, disinterest, mismanagement, downright stupidity, and a pathological tendency to kick the can down the road. But perhaps most frustrating, Miller points out that the “lessons of Afghanistan” were not new epiphanies only discoverable through trial and error. Rather, they were the result of continuing down well-trodden paths of failure, willfully engaging in misjudgments which we had all the knowledge to understand were fundamentally erroneous. The impartiality of Miller’s analysis, his laying out the facts without shading the hard truths or casting excess favor or blame, is commendable given his own deep involvement with the conflict. Miller is himself a U.S. Army veteran of the war and later served as the country director for Afghanistan on the NSC during the tail end of the Bush years and beginning of the Obama administration—directly implementing the decisions he turns his magnifying glass on in the book. This is not an effort to place a positive spin on his own work . Miller is just as harsh in his critique of the military campaign when he was in theater and the decisions of government when he was at the White House as he is of events with which he was not involved. It is rare to find this level of honest critique of events in which one participated, and we should be grateful for Miller’s fortitude in confronting these truths. By excusing no one from rightful critique, Miller helps to disarm the unhelpful fictions that so often creep up in the aftermath of failure. Just as Andrew Krepinovich’s The Army and Vietnam was a necessary text to dispel the belief among many veterans of that conflict that the military had been winning the war only to be betrayed by the politicians, so Miller allows no one the comfortable fiction that another party was responsible, or that the war was lost by the military or the civilian policy makers, or, as so many joked, that “we were winning when I left.” Instead, Miller forces the country to face the grim reality: the United States chose to fight a war badly by hedging, lacking commitment, putting a partial effort towards an endeavor requiring complete dedication and, ultimately, choosing defeat.   No doubt the United States will continue to debate and reflect on the lessons of Afghanistan, with those debates hopefully growing less emotional and more objective as more time passes. As the War in Afghanistan is dissected by historians, Miller’s book will be recognized as an essential part of the understanding of the conflict and a roadmap of errors to avoid in future wars. The dead of Afghanistan and the lives we might spare in the future deserve no less.

In Israel’s tabernacle, the high priest stepped into the Holy Place carrying the tribes over his heart. Their names were engraved on twelve stones fastened to a breastpiece of judgment—an embodied reminder that this people existed by grace, not merit. Hidden in that same vestment were two mysterious objects: the Urim and Thummim, “lights and perfections” (Exodus 28:30), through which the Lord sometimes gave clear, binary answers about war, kingship, and justice. Today the jeweled breastpiece has been replaced by glowing screens. The high priest has been displaced by machine-priests: engineers, data scientists, lawyers, and intelligence officers who tend our new “oracles.” From AI-assisted targeting in Gaza to predictive-policing and welfare algorithms, we increasingly entrust grave decisions to opaque systems whose inner workings almost no citizen can see. This begs the ethical question: To whom are we willing to give the power to speak with apparent authority about life and death, guilt and innocence—and on what terms? The rise and disappearance of the Urim and Thummim offers Christian realists a guide for thinking about AI oracles in an age of war. When God Turned Off His Own Oracle Scripture tells us very little about the Urim and Thummim. We do not know their size or shape, or how often they were used. We know only that God commanded Moses to place them “in the breastpiece of judgment,” and that they could be consulted at critical moments: “Shall I go up? Will Saul come down?” (1 Samuel 23:9–12). For a people still learning to trust the Lord in concrete history, that clarity was a gift. Israel needed to know that YHWH was not like the mute idols of the nations. Yet even then, the oracle was never a shortcut around moral formation. The same Torah that institutes the Urim and Thummim commands judges to hear witnesses, weigh evidence, and refuse bribes. God never meant Israel to live by oracles alone. Most striking of all, by the time of the exile and restoration the oracle simply vanishes. Ezra speaks of disputes that must wait “until a priest with Urim and Thummim should arise” (Ezra 2:63), implying that in practice no such guidance is available. God withholds the old device without abandoning his people. He forces them to live by the written Word, the prophetic tradition, and the slow, painful work of communal discernment. In other words, God disables his own “black box.” He refuses to keep Israel in a perpetual childhood of oracles. He prefers to form a people who can judge, repent, and act under his providence. That pattern ought to sober us as we hurriedly enthrone new oracles of our own. Maven, Gaza, and the Donbas Israel has already begun to harness the power of AI for its military. After Hamas’s October 7, 2023 massacre—the deadliest day in Israel’s history, killing around 1,200 people and taking roughly 250 hostages—the Israel Defense Forces shifted into a grinding urban war against a terrorist organization embedded in civilian neighborhoods and infrastructure.  Israeli officials have described the campaign as “the first robotics war,” with “tens of thousands of autonomous systems” deployed across all domains. Small ground robots, loitering munitions, unmanned naval craft, and AI-assisted targeting platforms are presented not only as instruments of lethality but also as a way to protect IDF soldiers and to make strikes more discriminating in dense civilian environments.  But the deeper continuity is not the hardware. It is the posture: commanders, legislators, and citizens standing before systems they cannot see into, receiving outputs they cannot fully explain, yet feeling pressure to treat those outputs as authoritative. The temptation is to imagine that the oracle itself resolves our moral dilemmas—that if “the system” says a building is a command node or a person is “high-risk,” we can dodge the burden of judgment. Biblically and politically, that is backwards. Israel, Hamas, and the Law of Nations In Israel, AI and law now intersect sharply. Israel has built a dense network of legal advisers around its targeting processes. Analyses of IDF practice describe legal advisers as an “integral facet” of operational planning and targeting, with a distinctive Military Advocate General’s Corps and intensive legal review. That does not settle arguments about proportionality, siege, or urban bombardment in Gaza, especially in light of staggering Palestinian casualties and critiques from bodies like the UN human rights office. Christian realists should neither romanticize Israeli actions nor accept Hamas’s propaganda. But it does matter that Israel’s use of AI-assisted targeting sits inside an existing, heavily lawyered framework rather than in a moral vacuum. To be “pro-Israel” in a Christian realist sense is not to baptize every IDF operation. It is to hold together three truths: moral clarity about the asymmetry between Hamas’s deliberate terror and a flawed but law-bound state; honest grief for innocent life lost on both sides and a willingness to scrutinize Israeli tactics without demonization; and sober attention to how Israel’s choices about AI, robotics, and law will shape global norms for decades to come. What Our New Oracles Cannot Do Christian realists affirm that political authority is both ordained and limited. States are called to reward good, punish evil, and secure a basic public peace. They are not given omniscience, and they remain accountable to God and neighbor for their judgments—especially when they aim lethal force at a city block, a refugee boat, or a prison cell. Our AI oracles invite us to forget this in three connected ways. First, predictive-policing and risk-scoring systems promise a kind of artificial omniscience; they sift vast data sets and begin to feel more trustworthy than the messy people they describe, making it easy to see neighbors as probabilities rather than as bearers of the divine image. Experiments with tools like the COMPAS risk-assessment system and investigative work such as ProPublica’s “Machine Bias” have already sparked a deep debate about how such systems can encode and mask racial bias.  Second, algorithmic tools blur responsibility. When an AI-assisted drone hits the wrong car or an asylum-seeker is wrongly flagged as fraudulent, it becomes tempting to hide behind “the system.”  We must still be able to say, in specific cases: this use of AI in targeting, policing, or welfare is unjust, even if every box on the form was checked. Ongoing efforts like the EU AI Act and its rules for systems in law enforcement, migration, and public services, or its provisions on human oversight, may help—but no regulatory framework can replace moral judgment.  Third, AI systems tempt us to swap the doctrine of providence for a doctrine of probability. A neighborhood labeled a future crime hot spot, or a population assigned a high fraud-risk score, can quietly be treated as if its destiny were fixed. Biblically, that is false. The God who chose Israel “not because you were more in number…but because the Lord loves you” (Deuteronomy 7:7–8) and grafts unlikely branches into his olive tree (Romans 11) does not bind himself to our confidence intervals. A Christian-Realist Way of Living with Black Boxes What, then, might a Christian realist approach to algorithmic oracles look like? At minimum, it means drawing bright lines around decisions that must not be delegated to opaque systems: final positive identification for bombing targets in dense cities; decisions to deny asylum or deport families; long-term incarceration based on risk scores. Tools may inform judgment but must not replace it. It also means demanding intelligible explanations and real avenues of appeal wherever authorities use AI: clear documentation of intended use, independent auditing for discriminatory impact, and procedures by which ordinary people—not just experts—can challenge the oracle’s verdict. In biblical terms, the “gate” of justice must remain a place where the poor and the stranger can make their case, not a sealed portal guarded by proprietary code. Finally, Christian realists must keep responsibility personal and ecclesial. Dense legal-adviser networks and elaborate doctrine are not reasons to relax; they are reasons to ask sharper questions: which commander ultimately said yes? Who will answer before God for civilian blood and unjust wars? The Urim and Thummim were real, and their lights once flickered in the dark of the priest’s breastpiece—but God did not let Israel keep them forever. So too with our black boxes. No oracle—human or machine—can absolve us of the call to love God, love our neighbors, and govern as those who must one day give an account before the judgment seat of Christ.

A pivotal statesman who transformed domestic politics and helped to win the Cold War emerged on the global stage 50 years ago.  Both the first female and longest-serving British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher earned her legendary nickname—the “Iron Lady”—before she even took office in 1979.  The iconic sobriquet came courtesy of the official newspaper of the Soviet Ministry of Defense. Great Britain experienced its greatest push for socialism during Prime Minister Clement Attlee’s post-World War II Labour government (1945-1951), which nationalized key industries in banking, power and light, transportation, medicine, and iron and steel; created a welfare state, including the National Health Service (NHS); and exercised central planning through a vast network of controls and regulations over the remainder of industry as well as agriculture.  With the partial exception of steel, subsequent national governments—whether Conservative or Labour—maintained a postwar consensus of nationalization, heavy regulations and controls, high taxes, strong trade unions, and a far-reaching welfare state.  Years after proclaiming in 1945 that it was “a socialist party and proud of it,” the Labour Party still featured a robust faction that pledged in Labour’s Programme 1973 to achieve a “fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families.”   Enter Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013).  In 1976, she was starting her second year as the opposition leader of the Conservative (Tory) Party.  The ruling Labour government was divided between non-socialists and socialists—the latter set upon state ownership of additional industries, expanded central planning, and radical redistribution of wealth—at the same time it faced crises in the domestic and global economies to which it responded with austerity measures.  Meanwhile, the Soviet Union bid to outproduce the West in military (sea, land, and air) power and to install or reinforce communist regimes in Angola and elsewhere.  Deeply concerned, Thatcher warned against the combined threat from communism abroad and socialism at home.   On January 19, 1976, Thatcher gave a speech before Tory supporters at London’s Kensington Town Hall that made a splash because of the Soviet reaction; she followed up with remarks on January 31, to her Conservative Party Finchley constituency.  The second speech attracted worldwide attention due to Thatcher’s response—both for its substance and clever style—to the Kremlin and other critics.  A Soviet propagandist for the newspaper Red Star intended “Iron Lady” as an insult; so did TASS (official Soviet state media) and other press.  Thatcher astutely embraced “Iron Lady” at Finchley, “I stand before you tonight in my Red Star chiffon evening gown, my face softly made up and my hair gently waived, the Iron Lady of the Western world.”  Then she strategically drove home the point: “Yes, I am an iron lady, after all it wasn’t a bad thing to be an iron duke, yes if that’s how they wish to interpret my defence of values and freedoms fundamental to our way of life.”   At a time of detente  when Western diplomats wanted to settle and communists wanted to win, when America was in decline after defeat in Vietnam and the scandal of Watergate, and when the Soviets were on the march on several continents, Thatcher said no.  She said no clearly, and she explained why.  She also channeled her inner Churchill and was willing to stand alone.  The start of the political partnership between Prime Minister Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan was five years ahead in a future that was neither known nor determined. By dint of her family upbringing, Christian faith, and education, Thatcher lived by and championed individual liberty, personal responsibility and hard work, community rather than collectivism, free markets, and a limited state.  She believed that Karl Marx and his heirs regarded socialism as a transitional stage on the way to full communism and thus meant the end of the West; she took on the most destructive political ideology yet created by man from the start of her career.  “We believe in the freedom of the democratic way of life,” she wrote in her 1950 New Year’s Eve message as a first-time, prospective candidate for Parliament.  “Communism seizes power by force, not by free choice of the people….We must firstly believe in the Western way of life and serve it steadfastly.  Secondly we must build up our fighting strength to be prepared to defend our ideals, for aggressive nations understand only the threat of force.”   Thatcher developed her core understanding about big-brother communism and little-sister socialism, as she honed her communication skills to educate supporters and counter opponents.  Politics and economics were morally and consistently intertwined in her position.  In a 1968 speech entitled “What’s Wrong with Politics,” Thatcher, while Conservative shadow minister for fuel and power, maintained that “[m]oney is not an end in itself,” and that “even the Good Samaritan had to have the money to help, otherwise he too would have had to pass on the other side.”  In her view, communism and socialism—in their varying degrees—suffered from the same source problem of “too much,” too big, and too centralized government, which robbed the people of their right and ability to practice self-government.  Lessons for today’s America abound from Thatcher’s “Britain Awake” and “Iron Lady” speeches.  Central among them, Thatcher conveyed that a free people must clearly see, understand, and answer its enemies.  In “Britain Awake,” she emphasized that “Socialists never listen” and that socialist policies were weakening Britain’s economic and military strength and jeopardizing both the “survival of our way of life” and the country’s strength in foreign affairs.  A major theme of the speech was that Britain’s main external enemy, the USSR, was exploiting détente and the Helsinki Accords, and that the Labour government—whether willfully or not—was blind to threats.  It was time for the British public to wake up “out of a long sleep,” she added, for the advance of communist power “is not irreversible, providing we take the necessary measures now.  But the longer that we go on running down our means of survival, the harder it will be to catch up.”    As important, Thatcher knew that words matter and that ideological opponents at home and abroad manipulated them.  Words express ideas, principles, and policies.  The press release for what was quickly called the “Iron Lady” speech was even titled “War of Words.”  Referring to the Cold War battle on many fronts and “the guns and missiles aimed at us,” Thatcher said, “equally we must not let them blind us to the insidious war on words which is going on.”  She then elaborated, “The war is a true war of words, where meanings get lost in a mist of revolutionary fantasy; where accuracy is slipped quietly under the carpet; and where truth is twisted and bent to suit the latest propagandist line.”  All of this, she underscored, is “totally alien to our notions of freedom and truth.”  In a tour de force, Thatcher dissected that communists—Marxists, socialists, and everyone in-between—had corrupted and co-opted key words such as “freedom” and “public.”  Looking at her main U.S. ally and her many American friends, she would advise us to identify the cancer—in New York City, for instance—using clear, factual language.  Only then can we stop its spread and rid it from the body politic.  The end of the Cold War does not make the rise of socialism less but more dangerous because, as absurd as it is to anyone who knows the history of that ideology, it is now seen by some in liberal democracies as a legitimate form of governing city, state, and even nation.  In 1976, in language that resonates at this moment, the newly dubbed “Iron Lady” concluded, “Socialists believe people are not to be trusted with choice…Socialism is the denial of choice, the denial of choice for ordinary people in their everyday lives.  There is a will in Britain to work and build up the future for our children.  But Socialists don’t trust the people.  Churchill did.  We do.”   In 2026, on the 250th anniversary of America’s birth, we as a self-governing people will recur to the republican principle of popular rule.  Publius notes in Federalist 1 that it has been left to Americans, “by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”  We must once again choose to reject the rule of force—this time, ideological—in our country.  It is time for America to wake up and listen to Margaret Thatcher.

Was the academic interest in (or fear of) Christian nationalism that proliferated in the years between Trump’s first term and the Biden administration, brief though it was, a self-fulfilling prophecy?  Nationalism itself became a concern among scholars during the first Donald Trump presidency when MAGA populism was a clear volley against the thrust of a reigning liberal internationalism.  Some historians like Jill Lepore in This America: The Case for the Nation (2019) used the moment to remind U.S. historians that their academic fields originated precisely in the study of modern nation-states, even as she wanted to keep nationalism away from illegitimate appropriators. For much of Trump’s first administration, the preferred term was “white nationalism.”  After the January 6th riots, with the protesters’ use of religious images, the language shifted to “white Christian nationalism,” which then became merely “Christian nationalism” (whiteness assumed).  Around this time sociologists and historians provided relatively short monographic assessments of how large and deep this phenomenon was.  The set of books (for starters) published seemingly in response to the white Christianity permeating MAGA circles included Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry, Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States (2020); Philip Gorski and Samuel L. Perry, The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy (2022); and David Hollinger, Christianity’s American Fate: How Religion Became More Conservative and Society More Secular (2024).   All of this scholarship came before any single author had set out to explain what Christian nationalism is or why it might be desirable.  Before Stephen Wolfe wrote The Case for Christian Nationalism (2022), scholars relied mainly on opinion poll data, selectively interpreted to fit preconceived definitions of the subject.  But Wolfe broke through with an argument for a Christian nation, not only as a “necessary alternative to secularism” but as the best way to cultivate a just society.  His publisher, Canon Press, is connected to Doug Wilson’s church and academy.  Wilson himself came out with a book, Mere Christendom: The Case for Bringing Christianity Back into Modern Culture (2023) which according to publicity confronts “the prevailing secularism in modern culture and its impact on . . . Christian witness.” More recently, James Baird, a pastor in the PCA, has written a primer on government’s duty to promote Christianity as a public good.  King of Kings: A Reformed Guide to Christian Government (2025) calls Christians to call upon their government to promote Christianity as the only true religion for the public good.  All of this theorizing in conservative Presbyterian and Baptist circles has prompted the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) to appoint a committee to study and make recommendations about the best ways for pastors and officers to understand and react to Christian nationalism.   This brief overview of recent history indicates that scholars were studying a subject that did not really exist in a coherent way before Christian nationalist authors began writing their own books on the subject.  That history does not, however, explain why Christian nationalism has become an appealing way to think about government and its duties since 2022.   The short answer is that conservative Christians (especially Protestants in the United States) have understood secularization and moral relativism as the consequences of the nation abandoning its Christian heritage and founding.   Among evangelical and Presbyterian-leaning Protestants, the first iteration of Christian nationalism came with Francis Schaeffer’s transformation from the philosophical guru at a small Christian study center in Switzerland into the public intellectual behind the New Christian Right.  His documentary series and book, “How Shall We Then Live?”, alerted evangelicals to the dangers of secularization and moral relativism that drove many social ills, chief among them abortion.  Embedded in Schaeffer’s outlook was the idea that America had a Christian founding that depended on ideas and institutions from the Protestant Reformation. Schaeffer inspired Jerry Falwell’s political activism in the short-lived Moral Majority (1979-1987).  Schaeffer also inspired a group of young evangelical historians, George Marsden, Mark Noll, and Nathan Hatch to write a book, The Search for Christian America, that pushed back at least on Schaeffer’s historical claims about America’s Christian character.  Ironically, those historians, while dubious about the United States’ Christian origins, left room for those who desired a Christian nation.  In the book’s conclusion, the authors wrote that “Christians still must labor without ceasing for truth and morality in the midst of our own age.”  That message may not have necessarily included approval of the Moral Majority’s politics, but it still added legitimacy to Christians who wanted American society to reflect Christian ideals.   At roughly the same time that Schaeffer was tapping Christian nationalist sentiments, Chuck Colson and Richard John Neuhaus were teaming up to rally Protestants and Roman Catholics in an informal alliance against secularism.  Neuhaus’s book, The Naked Public Square (1984) was a thoughtful version of Schaeffer’s critique that resonated with Colson’s Kingdoms in Conflict (1987), a book that popularized worldview thinking, or the idea that a person’s basic beliefs influence his or her perspective on all aspects of life.  That particular understanding of belief as a controlling principle in human experience added momentum to the idea that secular government was a myth.  Neutrality was impossible.  Government would inevitably be religious in some way, either positively or negatively.  This understanding of society and the role of religion received even greater plausibility when James Davison Hunter, then a young sociologist at the University of Virginia, wrote Culture Wars (1991), a widely read book about the religious divide in the United States between theologically orthodox and progressive Americans. What was notable about the 1980s and 1990s version of a religious, if not per se Christian nationalism, was its inter-faith character.  Hunter envisioned a set of policy matters that united conservative Protestants, Roman Catholics, Jews, and Mormons while Neuhaus and Colson initiated the pan-Christian conferences, “Evangelicals and Catholics Together.”  The culmination of such cooperative efforts was one factor in the election of George W. Bush, arguably the most evangelical of any Republican president since World War II.  Bush’s “Compassionate Conservatism” was the title of a book by the conservative evangelical and current editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, Marvin Olasky, who taught journalism at the University of Texas and was an advisor to Bush while governor of Texas.  The hope among many Christian conservatives, especially in the Neuhaus and Colson orbit, was that Bush as president would add vigor to a faith-based set of policies and reduce the secular outlook that had dominated American politics since the 1960s.  The 9/11 terror attacks, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Great Recession of 2007-2008 knocked Compassionate Conservatism off the Bush administration’s list of priorities.  The challenges of the war in Iraq, in turn, were too much for some evangelical leaders (academic and ministry) who experienced Bush-fatigue and left the world of conservative politics.   It might have made sense for advocates of Christian nationalism to surface around 2010 when both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street offered alternatives to the status quo of both major political parties.  But it took until 2022 after three presidents, two with ties to mainline Protestants (Obama and Trump) and one a Roman Catholic (Biden), took no clear side in the secular-sacred divide.  Obama might have been able to code-switch and sound like a black preacher or break out and sing “Amazing Grace,” Trump might have sought the blessing of Prosperity Gospel Protestants, and Biden may have diligently attended Mass and avoided criticisms from his bishops, but none of those administrations sent clear signals about the place of faith in politics or America’s traditional mix of separating church and state while nurturing high levels of religiosity.   The likeliest explanation for the 2022 origins of Christian nationalism was the remarkable cultural chaos that started in 2020 amid protests over George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police, the restrictions on ordinary life during the COVID lockdowns, the aggressive activism for tran srights, and the sometime hysteria over climate apocalypse.  Anyone observing the United States might well imagine that Christians living in that setting would say, “enough is enough and let’s return to the basics of faith and good government.”  As sensible as a plea for a return to older playbooks might seem, the favorite era chosen by Christian nationalists for inspiration comes across like the awkwardness of the autistic kid in class who knows way more than his classmates but has no sense of how he comes across in classroom banter.  Today’s Christian nationalists often advocate that the uninitiated “do the reading” in early modern Protestant politics.  As such they promote the Reformers, seventeenth-century Protestant scholastics, American Protestants at the time of the American Founding, and some Protestants from the nineteenth century who still maintained that religion was necessary for moral and social order.  Unlike the faith-based politics proposed by Roman Catholics and evangelicals in the 1980s and 1990s, today’s turn to religion shows little ecumenical instincts.  The current version of Christian nationalism is interdenominational (mainly Presbyterian, Baptist, with a few Anglicans) but aggressively Protestant.   This is an odd turn among Christian reactions to secularism if only because the American public of 2026 is not monolithic.  Whatever the merits or faults of U.S. immigration policy since 1870, the United States is a diverse country that for at least a century after the Civil War did remarkably well in assimilating people from many parts of the world.  Christian nationalists either ignore American demographics or imply that immigrants from non-Protestant backgrounds are out of place.  Some proponents of Christian nationalism even say that we need “Protestant politics for a Protestant country.”  Such an assertion might have made sense, and did to Josiah Strong, the Social Gospel author of Our Country (1885), at the time of unprecedented immigration from southern and eastern Europe. But 130 years later those sentiments are tone deaf. One way to make sense of such naiveté about Christian government and American religious diversity comes from a recent essay by Trevin Wax in First Things.  Though not written with the current debates over Christian nationalism in mind, Wax, a Southern Baptist, explains what it was like to grow up in the 1990s and 2000s in an environment dominated by church youth group activities, Christian television and radio shows, and evangelical contemporary music.  Wax writes that “seven of the top twenty movies in 1999 were rated R, including lewd teen comedies and salacious blockbusters” and “the nihilism in rock music, the sensuality in pop, the promiscuity normalized in Friends, one of the decade’s biggest TV shows” prompted parents to look for safe alternatives for their children.  In response, “evangelical culture-makers stepped into the gap, providing music, media, books, and even outlets for activism.”   Later in the essay, Wax describes how all-encompassing this evangelical culture was.  The length of this quotation suggests how little exposure evangelical teens may have had to non-Christian Americans: A fifteen-year-old kid wakes up in the morning and reads a Bible passage in a student study Bible recommended by his favorite Christian band. On the way to school, Adventures in Odyssey is playing—an episode about responding with generosity to someone who insults you. He arrives at school early in the morning chill, where he joins a tight circle of believers around the cold metal flagpole, hands clasped and prayers whispered into misty air, a demonstration of his desire to be salt and light. During study hall, he finds time to read a few pages of the Christian fiction novel he bought at the bookstore the week before. After school, he heads home, listening to Christian radio on the way. The songs warn against sin, champion Christ’s redemption, and speak about standing out as a believer in the world. It’s Wednesday, so there’s church that evening, and CCM is pumping through the stereo system when he arrives for worship, friendship, and Bible teaching. These are his people, the ones who tell him he’s not alone, that others are seeking the Lord and living the great adventure of faith. After church, there’s a hangout for the youth group at a friend’s house. Teens cluster around the TV; a familiar circle of friends are laughing at VeggieTales as pizza grease stains paper plates. . . . Before bed, he slides off his faded WWJD bracelet, tossing it onto his bedside table beside his battered Bible, whispering a prayer beneath posters of his favorite Christian bands taped to the bedroom wall. Another day over. A new one ready to begin. Wax himself is grateful for having grown up in this isolated culture.  “I feel profound gratitude . . . an evangelical subculture that earnestly sought to offer my generation a vision of faithfulness amidst cultural upheaval.”  Whatever the merits of that kind of cultural submersion, it may – I stress, may – explain why some generations of American Protestants have little feel for living in a society with non-Protestants.   Could it be that today’s Christian nationalists, whose mocking of Boomers suggests an age group weighted toward Millennials or Gen-Z who grew up like Wax? On one level, the question seems preposterous.  How could anyone online, streaming audio, watching professional sports on cable TV, or studying American history be unaware of America’s religious and ethnic diversity?  At the same time, how could anyone who did know of and appreciated the contributions Roman Catholics and Jews have made to American society, from stand-up comedy to intellectual conservatism, consider Protestant politics a realistic proposal for contemporary America?  In theory, perhaps, or maybe once upon a time in the United States.  But in the current moment a return to Cotton Mather or Hugo Grotius comes across as a combination of cosplay and LARPing.  Whatever the explanation, Christian nationalism has added to the mix of influencers who gain followers by disrupting perceived norms.  Ironically, by riling the (primarily) young men who quickly attribute the worst motives to other points of view, Christian nationalism discourages the peaceful and quiet life that the Apostle Paul recommended to early Christians when their society was ruled not by Protestants but by pagans.

In the days prior to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine and senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center Daniel Fried said it best: “This has not been a good week for American diplomacy.” And indeed it was not. “We are seen as less than stable.” Indeed we are. “The bo​ld and bad outweigh the constructive.” Indeed they do. And despite President Trump’s change of mind at the WEF regarding tariffs on eight European nations—Germany, France, Belgium, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Finland—as well as military action in Greenland, Fried’s observations remain true. The “bold and bad” indeed outweigh anything constructive that might develop in the days ahead. Let us take stock. Early in 2026, following the daring raid that captured Venezuelan strong man Nicol​ás Maduro, President Trump claimed publicly that the U.S. will “run” Venezuela. On the heels of that development, Mr. Trump, along with other administration spokespersons, repeated the U.S. intention to take as its own the self-governing island of Greenland for security purposes, threatening military aggression to accommodate this acquisition. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced on January 6 that “The President and his team are discussing a range of options” and “utilizing the U.S. military is always an option at the Commander in Chief’s disposal.” This was announced against the backdrop of European leaders in convulsion, rejecting Trump’s comments and claims about aggressively acquiring the world’s largest island and expressing their fears that the NATO alliance would thereby be destroyed. Indeed any use of NATO troops to inhibit the U.S. would have no precedent whatsoever. In an interview with the BBC, Archbishop Timothy Broglio of the Archdiocese for the Military Services, stressed that given the treaties in place that allow military installation in Greenland, the recent Trump administration statements are simply unacceptable. More damningly, he noted, “I think it [the recent Greenland development] tarnishes the image of the U.S. in our world,” given our history of responding to situations of oppression.  A meeting at the White House the week before the WEF in Davos between Trump, Danish Foreign Minister Lars Lǿkke Rasmussen, and Greenland’s Foreign Minister Vivian Motzfeldt did not persuade the President to abandon his position. The result of that meeting, according to the Wall Street Journal, was an “extraordinary standoff.” In response to this “standoff,” Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) said that Trump’s designs are “incinerating the hard-won trust of loyal allies in exchange for no meaningful change across the Arctic.” McConnell compared Trump’s actions, should the President in fact follow through with military action, to the disastrous withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan by his predecessor, stating that it would be even more disastrous. It is difficult to disagree with McConnell’s assessment. No matter. Trump, days before the WEF in Switzerland, seemed to link his aggressive position on acquiring Greenland to the decision by the Nobel Peace Prize foundation not to award him personally the Nobel Peace Prize, which exiled NPP recipient María Machado, former Deputy of the National Assembly of Venezuela, gifted him for his recent confrontation of the Venezuelan regime. Trump informed Norway’s Prime Minister on January 18 that he no longer felt “an obligation to think purely of Peace.” And if this was not enough, before his trip to Davos, Trump posted online an image showing himself lecturing European leaders in front of a map that showed Venezuela, Canada, and Greenland covered with the Stars and Stripes of the American flag. Think of it. French President Emmanuel Macron, to his credit, was unabashed in his response to Trump’s Greenland push and what he called “useless aggressivity.” “Now is not the time for new imperialism,” he insisted, arguing for “respect” over “bullying” and the “rule of law” over “brutality.”  Macron was honest, acknowledging in a text to the President that he was in basic agreement with what the U.S was doing in Syrian and Iran, but then said matter-of-factly, “I do not understand what you are doing on Greenland.” As it was, Macron was speaking for most everyone in the free world. And as it is, NATO’s Article 1 renders illegal any threat to using force internally, while the United Nations Charter, adopted in 1945, also forbids such action. Subsequently, Macron announced that France will open a consulate in Greenland by February 6. Moreover, Danish and Greenlandish officials have repeatedly insisted that Trump can get what he wants without actually acquiring Greenland. The question then arises, why hasn’t the Trump administration worked with (rather than against) officials of both nations in order to work out the perceived security measures of the Arctic region? As it stands, in 2023 Congress determined that the U.S. cannot withdraw from NATO without a two-thirds Senate vote. Thus, at bottom, both international law and U.S. law stand in the way of potential the Trump administration’s foolishness. The Atlantic Council’s Daniel Fried is surely correct: “there is no good reason for the threats against Greenland and Denmark; that demand for territory is mere ugliness that, if acted on, puts the United States in the company of 19th century imperialists and the 20th century’s worst tyrants.” Greenland, it will be remembered, achieved “home rule” autonomy in 1979; in 2009 this was “upgraded” to the present “self-government” arrangement we find today. Denmark retains formal responsibility for “foreign policy, defense, and security in coordination with the government of Greenland.” Greenlanders retain Danish citizenship. The Greenland episode, sadly, echoes Trump’s earlier foolish call for Canada to become the fifty-first American state. While Trump did his U-turn on Greenland following his meeting in Davos with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, the President’s speech at Davos did little to comfort or encourage those in attendance; it is fair (and accurate) to say that it was designed to embarrass. In that speech he depicted Denmark as “ungrateful,” stressed the European debt (including Switzerland’s very existence) to American influence, and reminded his audience both of Europe’s economic problems and of the fact that Denmark and Greenland are incapable of defending Greenland’s territory.  French Parliamentarian and human rights advocate Raphaël Glucksmann has summarized Trump’s approach to foreign policy as follows: “Trump is tough with the weak but weak with the tough” (for example, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping). This approach, argues Glucksmann, manifests itself in Trump’s Greenland tantrums, spells “suicide for the West,” and represents “an invitation for Putin to act” inasmuch as “the windows and doors are open.” In a remarkable admission on January 21, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov acknowledged that he had never even imagined the “deep crisis” occurring within NATO as a result of Trump’s actions. And former British attache in Moscow John Foreman noted, “Russia must be sitting back thinking Christmas just keeps coming.” In such a case, most tragically, Ukraine will surely fall. Putin’s mission has not changed; NATO is the one obstacle to his imperial aims. In the end, Mr. Trump’s bullying and carping are unhelpful. One need only observe statements by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who at Davos lamented the end of the “rules based” international order—a reference not to Russia or China but to the Trump administration—and called on “mid-level powers” to unite and stand up to the “great powers” by creating a “third path.” Russia and China are watching. This is perhaps the most important fallout, with both short-term and long-term consequences, of Mr. Trump’s unpredictable antics – antics that have been accurately described in the pages of this journal in recent days by Aaron Rhodes. This should greatly disturb those in the free world who desire the rule of law in international affairs and the inhibition of totalitarian tendencies. What is needed on the part of the United States is true statesmanship – one in which “my own morality” and a president’s unpredictable bullying are vanquished and a desire to serve our allies, based on moral principle and our global influence (whether we like it or not), is the preeminent and guiding force. After all, gratitude and empowering others should be the national security strategy of any political figure-head who has providentially escaped assassination twice in public office.