u/Reddenbawker

CNBC has the full text of the resignation letter. There's not much else in the article, so I'm not gonna quote it here. It takes 2 minutes to read.

Looks like she's resigning because her husband has bone cancer. This seems like a hard thing to lie about, so I'm inclined to trust that that's true. Terrible news for her family. Regardless of how much you dislike her or the conspiracies she traffics in, cancer still sucks.

>When Donald Trump warned Iran on April 7 that “a whole civilization will die tonight,” a European diplomat in Washington said his government wanted an urgent answer to a chilling question: Was the U.S. president contemplating the use of a nuclear weapon?

>Across Europe and Asia, the concern went beyond whether Trump’s apocalyptic threat was real or bluster. One fear, the diplomat said, was that Russia could seize the moment to justify similar threats in Ukraine, triggering a nuclear crisis on two continents.

>European governments immediately sought reassurance through a traditional channel: the U.S. State Department. But according to the diplomat, officials there gave an unsettling response: They didn’t know what Trump meant or what actions his words might portend.

>The previously unreported episode points to a historic breakdown in American diplomacy. At a moment when a uniquely unpredictable U.S. president is rattling markets and capitals with dramatic pronouncements, governments around the world are scrambling for clarity, only to discover that their usual points of contact – at U.S. embassies or inside Washington – are missing, mute or out of the loop. At least half of America’s 195 ambassadorial posts worldwide are now vacant.

>Margaret MacMillan, an Oxford University professor of international history, said the Trump administration is eroding America’s capacity to understand the world it operates in, raising the risk of global instability. “We’re not going to be able to use diplomacy as we have often done before: to build relationships, get agreements that benefit both sides, and avert and end wars.”

>The Trump administration rejects the notion of a breakdown, saying the changes have strengthened U.S. diplomacy and streamlined decision-making. “The President has the right to determine who represents the American people and interests around the world,” said Tommy Pigott, a State Department spokesperson.

>This account of America’s diplomatic upheaval is based on interviews with more than 50 senior diplomats, White House officials and recently retired ambassadors, as well as dozens of foreign officials, diplomats and lawmakers across Europe and Asia.

>As America’s career diplomats are fired or sidelined, its allies are changing how they deal with Washington. Rather than rely on embassies or formal channels, foreign governments say they are rewiring their diplomacy around a small circle of people with direct access to the president, leaving many dependent on back channels to manage a superpower whose signals have grown erratic.

>Some U.S. allies now believe the most effective response to a volatile president is to treat his rhetoric as background noise.

>That calculus was evident after Trump’s threat to annihilate Iran stoked fears of nuclear war. In response, officials in Britain, France and Germany drafted what one European diplomat called a “harsh” joint statement later that day. But they chose not to release it, deciding Trump’s language was bluster and a public rebuke could prompt him to continue the bombing. By evening, Trump had announced a two-week ceasefire with Iran.

>The British, French and German foreign ministries didn’t reply to requests for comment.

>The episode, also previously unreported, illustrates an approach many allies now follow: restraint over confrontation. But diplomats said that repeatedly discounting Trump’s threats is also dangerous because it might leave them unprepared when another crisis looms.

>More than a year into Trump’s second term, influence and information are increasingly flowing through a handful of envoys. Most prominent: Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and the president’s longtime friend, real estate developer Steve Witkoff. Kushner has no formal government title and Witkoff no prior diplomatic experience. But some foreign governments now prioritize communications with them over official channels, Reuters found.

>Kushner and Witkoff did not respond to requests for comment.

>Other countries have cultivated their own unconventional lines into the White House. South Korean officials bypassed U.S. trade negotiators to forge ties with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles – a person they felt could explain Trump’s true intentions as they fought back against his 25% tariffs. And Japan found an unlikely intermediary in SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son – one of Trump’s golfing partners.

>The State Department was an early target in Trump’s second term. In April 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio called it a “bloated” bureaucracy gripped by “radical political ideology” and announced a “comprehensive reorganization plan.” The effort was foreshadowed in Project 2025, a policy blueprint published in 2023 by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank in Washington, D.C. The plan called for a leaner State Department with more political appointees and the removal of career ambassadors deemed hostile to the administration.

>About 3,000 employees left the State Department last year, nearly half fired and the rest taking buyouts – a roughly 15% cut to its U.S.-based staff. Then, in December, Rubio ordered the unprecedented recall of about 30 ambassadors worldwide.

>Rubio promised last year that his overhaul would “empower the Department from the ground up, from the bureaus to the embassies.” But today, 109 of the 195 U.S. ambassadorial posts worldwide are vacant, according to the American Foreign Service Association, the diplomats’ union.

>A White House official said the changes “have made our government more efficient and less bloated and more able to effectively execute the president’s foreign policy.”

>The new structure leaves Washington with fewer top diplomats on the ground in a major war zone. Five of the seven countries bordering Iran, and four of the six Gulf States, have no U.S. ambassador.

>Many U.S. embassies are now run by chargés d’affaires – diplomats who serve as acting heads – rather than Senate-confirmed ambassadors, which some countries regard as a diplomatic downgrade. Former U.S. ambassadors and State Department officials said the reduced diplomatic presence contributed to a chaotic scramble to evacuate Americans from the region when Trump started the Iran war.

>“Those missions should all have ambassadors when you’re fighting a war,” said Barbara Leaf, a retired career diplomat who served as U.S. ambassador to the United Arab Emirates under the first Trump administration and as assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs under President Joe Biden. “At a moment of crisis – and it’s an open-ended crisis – this administration has left these missions in a parlous state.”

>Pigott said U.S. embassies have performed well during the Iran war and are “more than appropriately staffed.”

>DIPLOMATIC PURGE

>For Bridget Brink, the fracture between the Trump administration and its far-flung diplomats was potentially a matter of life and death.

>Brink was the U.S. ambassador to Kyiv when Trump returned to office. In March 2025, just days after Trump’s explosive encounter with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy at the White House, the U.S. cut off military aid and intelligence sharing to Ukraine. The weapons included air defense munitions that helped protect not just Ukrainians but also U.S. embassy personnel from Russian drones and missiles, Brink said.

>“I had 1,000 people, all civilians, on the ground,” Brink said in an interview. “And we were protected by Ukrainians using U.S. and other equipment.”

>The halting of military aid came without warning, she said. “When we tried to find out why it was stopped, we got no answer.” Brink reached out to the Pentagon, the State Department and the White House – “everywhere that we could, because we were very concerned about what this meant not only for Ukrainians but also for our own security.” The Pentagon did not respond to a Reuters request for comment on her account.

>Brink said her staff worked behind the scenes to persuade the Trump administration to resume the aid, which it agreed to do on March 11. But she said she never received official confirmation of why the aid was halted in the first place.

>Layoffs at the National Security Council, which traditionally coordinates foreign and defense policy at the White House, further frayed relations between the Trump administration and its embassies. In 2025, Trump slashed the NSC from hundreds of people to just a few dozen.

>For months, NSC staff held no regular meetings and faced a de facto ban on holding interagency meetings on national security and foreign policy, according to three current and former U.S. officials in Washington. The White House official said the NSC did not stop regular or interagency meetings but they were smaller and focused on Trump’s priorities.

>During that period, multiple officials said, staffers received little formal guidance about major topics such as the Ukraine war or NATO’s future. Instead, they scrutinized Trump’s Truth Social account for policy signals. Many NSC staffers kept Trump’s account open on a dedicated screen and responded quickly when he posted, the officials said.

>Under Biden, Brink had regularly joined NSC meetings to develop and coordinate complex wartime policy between Washington and the Kyiv embassy. Under Trump, those meetings stopped, Brink said. She was told instead to “just call people” – an ad hoc approach she described as inefficient and unworkable in a conflict zone where Russian attacks were routine. “We’re seven hours ahead and in the bunker almost every night.”

>The final straw, she said, was Trump’s policy of “appeasement” on Ukraine – seeking closer ties with President Vladimir Putin while blaming Ukraine for Russian aggression. She resigned in protest in April 2025. Two months later she announced she was running as a Democrat from Michigan for the U.S. House of Representatives.

>Her successor, Julie Davis, who served as chargé d’affaires, will also step down and retire in June, the State Department said on April 28. Department spokesperson Pigott said Davis is retiring after a “distinguished 30-year tenure” in the foreign service.

>Many other career diplomats have had their ambassadorships abruptly cut short. A week before Christmas, about 30 were told to vacate their posts by mid-January – a recall that came largely without warning or explanation. Some departing ambassadors privately dubbed it “the Saturday Night Massacre,” a Watergate-era phrase now used to describe mass firings of officials.

>U.S. ambassadors fall into two categories: career diplomats and political appointees. Both are nominated by the president and confirmed by the U.S. Senate. Career diplomats traditionally pride themselves on being nonpartisan and often have decades of experience. Political appointees are usually major campaign donors, former lawmakers or close presidential allies, and may have little or no diplomatic background.

>In U.S. administrations spanning nearly 50 years, career diplomats have typically made up between 57% and 74% of ambassadors, according to the American Foreign Service Association. In Trump’s second term, about 9% of his ambassadorial appointees are career diplomats – a dramatic decline in the institutional expertise that has historically guided U.S. diplomacy.

>Most of the ambassadors recalled in December were career diplomats who were appointed to their current posts under Biden but had also served Republican administrations, including Trump’s. Ukraine envoy Brink, for instance, served five presidents, Democrat and Republican, including Trump in his first term.

>The State Department said the mass recall was a “standard process” and that replacements would represent Trump and “advance the America First agenda,” which the White House says will “champion core American interests.”

>More than 100 ambassadorships remain open worldwide. “We are conducting our diplomacy with one arm tied behind our back,” said Brian Nichols, an ambassador for Democratic and Republican presidents from 2014 to 2021, in Peru and Zimbabwe.

>Against that backdrop, a new pipeline of diplomats aligned with Trump’s agenda is emerging.

>The Ben Franklin Fellowship, founded in 2024, identifies and seeks to promote conservatives within the State Department and counters what its leaders describe as bias against them. “A lot of moderate officers come to us – men, white men – (and) they say, ‘I’m totally marginalized by DEI,’” said co-founder Phillip Linderman, referring to diversity, equity and inclusion programs under previous administrations.

>The group now lists about 95 fellows on its website, including Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau. Another 250 members, mostly active diplomats, conceal their identities to avoid retaliation under future Democratic administrations, said Linderman, a former diplomat.

>Among the fellowship’s largest financial backers is the Heritage Foundation, the architect of Project 2025. Last year Heritage gave the group a $100,000 grant, effectively helping to advance one of Project 2025’s main recommendations: to remake a workforce it views as hostile to conservative administrations. Heritage told Reuters it supported many U.S. organizations but exerted no “direct control” over them.

>The fellowship aims to help Trump avoid appointing State Department staff who could obstruct his agenda, said Linderman and Matt Boyse, another ex-diplomat, fellowship co-founder and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank. The group convenes networking seminars, recruits on college campuses and advises the Trump administration on which career diplomats they see as ideological activists. “We’re helping them know – if they want to know – if a person is part of the resistance,” Boyse told Reuters.

>Eighteen former ambassadors expressed concern that Ben Franklin Fellowship members were being fast-tracked into senior roles ahead of more experienced people. Pigott said the State Department “does not make personnel decisions based on participation in outside groups or demographic quotas.”

>THE RISE OF THE ENVOY STATE

>Trump has increasingly bypassed embassies, entrusting sensitive diplomacy to special envoys, most prominently Kushner and Witkoff, his principal negotiators on the wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Iran.

>In the lead‑up to the Iran war, Kushner and Witkoff met Iranian officials in Geneva in late February but didn’t bring along U.S. nuclear specialists, according to European officials involved in the discussions. In the previous nine months, the Trump administration fired at least a half dozen Iran nuclear experts, including Nate Swanson, a career diplomat who worked on Iran issues across administrations.

>Swanson helped implement the Obama administration’s 2015 nuclear accord with Iran. The highly technical document, in which Iran agreed to significantly limit its nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of nuclear-related economic sanctions, was drafted by large teams of diplomats and experts. Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018. Swanson said Witkoff called in April last year to ask him to rejoin renewed talks with Tehran. At the time, Swanson was working at the State Department’s Office of Sanctions Coordination.

>Weeks went by, however, without meetings on Iran, Swanson said. “He had a ton on his plate,” he said of Witkoff, who was also juggling talks over Ukraine and Gaza. “We just didn’t have any input.” Before long, Swanson said, the administration “just stopped asking for advice.”

>Less than two months after joining Witkoff’s negotiating team, Swanson was dismissed after the right-wing influencer Laura Loomer derided him on social media as an “Obama holdover.” He has since joined the Atlantic Council think tank as a senior fellow. Loomer did not respond to a comment request from Reuters.

>One senior European diplomat said that during last-ditch talks in Geneva, the U.S. team struggled to grasp the significance of different uranium‑enrichment thresholds and other elements of Iran’s nuclear program, forcing European officials to explain. “How can you negotiate when you don’t understand the fundamentals?” the diplomat said.

>On February 28, after the Geneva talks failed, the U.S. and Israel started bombing Iran. On that day, and again on March 3, Witkoff briefed reporters on the talks. Those briefings suggested he had misread Iran’s proposal, exaggerating Iran’s nuclear threat by conflating limited enrichment of uranium with its near‑term weaponization, said Kelsey Davenport of the Arms Control Association, a Washington, D.C.-based group that advocates for effective arms control policies. She reviewed recordings and transcripts from participants in the briefings.

>Davenport said Witkoff’s statements contained many errors suggesting “technical incompetence.” For example, he referred to Iran’s IR-6 uranium-enrichment centrifuge as “probably the most advanced centrifuge in the world,” when it’s not even the most advanced one in Iran. “Witkoff does not need to be a nuclear expert to negotiate a good deal. But if he’s not, he should be surrounded by people who are,” she said.

>Trump’s top two envoys have also faced scrutiny of their potential conflicts of interest by Democrats in the U.S. Congress – Kushner for allegedly negotiating peace deals with countries with which he has billion-dollar business deals, and Witkoff for his family’s role in a Trump crypto firm seeking inroads in the Middle East. Both have denied any conflict of interest.

>The White House official called such claims “a tired narrative” pushed by Democrats and said both men “fully understood” Iran’s proposals during negotiations.

>More than 90% of ambassadors appointed by Trump this term have been political loyalists, not career diplomats, and wield unusual power due to their perceived connections with the president’s inner circle. Two European officials recalled how Kushner’s father, Charles, the U.S. ambassador to France, underscored his proximity to power by calling Jared directly in front of foreign counterparts at a meeting last year.

>The U.S. embassy in Paris declined to comment.

>As his ambassador in Beijing, Trump appointed another loyalist: David Perdue, a former Georgia senator and businessman who has echoed Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was rigged. Three U.S. government officials who focus on China said Perdue has called Trump directly to hammer out decisions and address unresolved diplomatic questions, while even senior U.S. diplomats were cut out of the loop. In planning high-level visits, they said, embassy staff often waited until Perdue had phoned Trump before committing to final arrangements – a break from the past when such decisions were done at lower levels.

>Wolfgang Ischinger, a former German ambassador to Washington, said America’s current approach reflects a dramatic concentration of power over U.S. foreign policy in one person: Trump. “That person will take decisions, sometimes overnight, sometimes in a formal meeting, sometimes not,” he said. “That’s very different, and I’m not sure the Trump way of taking decisions actually offers a guarantee for good decisions.”

>Some countries are forging unconventional routes into the White House.

>In April 2025, Trump announced a 25% tariff on South Korea, threatening its export‑driven economy. In subsequent trade talks, South Korean officials were struggling to determine whether their U.S. counterparts were accurately conveying Trump’s position, Kang Hoon-sik, the presidential chief of staff, told a South Korean podcast. South Korean officials instead adapted by engaging directly with Wiles, the White House chief of staff. The arrangement was atypical. Kang is not the usual Korean counterpart facing the U.S. on foreign policy, security or trade, and Wiles is not a trade negotiator.

>The South Korean president’s office and foreign ministry didn’t reply to a request for comment.

>Japan turned to SoftBank founder and Trump golfing buddy Masayoshi Son.

>Shigeru Ishiba, who served as prime minister until October 2025, told Reuters that while he was leader, Japan used the tech tycoon as a back channel to reach Trump – the first time Son’s role has been publicly acknowledged. Ishiba said Son was acting largely in his own business interests, but confirmed that his government passed messages to Trump through Son.

>Reaching Trump directly was vital because “the people around him are all yes-men,” said Ishiba.

>SoftBank and Son declined to comment. Japan’s foreign ministry denied using Son as a back channel, but declined to comment on whether Ishiba had done so.

>Pigott, the State spokesperson, said he “rejects the premise that key decisions were made without meaningful input from experienced professionals.” He described Trump’s use of envoys and direct lines to the White House by some countries as effective. “The sustained direct engagement from the highest levels of this administration around the world is an asset,” he said, “and anyone claiming otherwise doesn’t know what they are talking about.”

>THE WORLD RECALIBRATES

>Trump has upended diplomatic norms with a steady stream of threats – aimed at foes such as Iran and allies including Denmark, Canada and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Governments have been forced to weigh whether responding publicly would calm tensions or make them worse.

>That’s what happened in early April after Trump warned that Iran’s civilization could be wiped out. Officials in Britain, France and Germany drafted what one European diplomat described as the “harsh” joint statement – then decided against releasing it.

>“We thought in the end (that) every time he barks like that, he does not bite,” said the diplomat, who helped draft the statement. European officials believed a U.S. ceasefire with Iran remained possible and worried that a public rebuke might push Trump to continue bombing. They held back. By the end of the day, Trump declared the ceasefire. The episode reinforced a lesson for many U.S. allies: Silence can be the safest response to Trump’s most extreme threats.

>Some European diplomats call this the “Merkel method,” a nod to former German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s stoic response during Trump’s first term: absorb provocations without public reaction while firmly defending national interests.

>A handful of allies, including Australia and New Zealand, did criticize Trump’s Iran remarks. But some others, including Japan, held their tongues.

>“President Trump’s statements changed constantly, so over time we stopped reacting to each one,” said Takeshi Iwaya, a lawmaker with Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party who served as foreign minister until October 2025. “Reacting can just provoke unnecessary responses.”

>When Secretary of State Marco Rubio met Pope Leo in Rome in early May, he came with a short list of discussion topics. Cuba was on it, as was the persecution of Christians in Havana and around the world. Both the United States and the Vatican share, as Rubio put it, a “concern about the destruction of religious liberty.”

>Few places exemplify this destruction better than Cuba and Nicaragua. Havana’s communist regime and Managua’s Murillo-Ortega dictatorship operate the most egregious state-run campaigns against Christianity in the Americas. In these majority-Christian countries with deep Catholic roots, churches and other faith-based institutions face persecution because their very existence challenges the underpinnings of the regimes.

>But as the church suffers under anti-Catholic authoritarianism in Cuba and Nicaragua, it still has an institutional and social role to play. Specifically, the Catholic Church can provide a conduit to deliver much-needed support to people in both countries. Last week, the United States publicly offered to provide $100 million in humanitarian aid for the Cuban people — but only if the aid was distributed through the Catholic Church, rather than the regime.

>As the Trump administration escalates pressure on Havana and Managua because of their deep hostility to the United States, stemming the tide of Christian persecution should be a top priority in America’s efforts to support the Cuban and Nicaraguan people.

>The roots of this persecution date to the Cuban Revolution. After Fidel Castro consolidated power, he began a prolonged campaign of control, surveillance, and repression against Christian institutions. In 1961, the regime nationalized roughly 350 Catholic schools, two Catholic universities, and 81 Catholic charitable organizations. It also expelled hundreds of priests and thousands of consecrated religious persons.

>Today, the Communist Party of Cuba’s Office of Religious Affairs (ORA), run for more than 30 years by Caridad Diego Bello, exercises draconian control over Cuban religious life. Basic church activities, from repairing a roof to requesting to hold a procession or ordain a deacon, go through ORA. The regime has near-total impunity in persecuting religious groups and figures that catch their ire: Article 143 of Cuba’s 2022 Penal Code imposes up to ten years imprisonment for religious groups believed to be receiving foreign funds, while other statutes criminalize “public disorder,” “contempt,” and “resistance.”

>And persecute they have. According to Christian Solidarity Worldwide, Havana commits more than 600 documented violations of religious freedom each year. Pastor Alain Toledano watched bulldozers raze his Emmanuel Church in 2020 and was driven into exile two years later after facing a regime ultimatum to leave or face prison. Pastor Lorenzo Rosales Fajardo of Monte de Sion Independent Church was beaten in Boniato Prison and held for three and a half years. He was released in 2025, as part of a Vatican-brokered deal that freed 553 prisoners in exchange for Cuba’s short-lived removal from the U.S. State Sponsors of Terrorism list by the Biden administration.

>Cuba’s Sandinista allies in Nicaragua seem to view the island’s system of persecution as a model. After the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) first took power in 1979 with the help of Cuban intelligence, the new regime, led by Daniel Ortega, persecuted Catholic Church leaders who spoke out against human rights abuses. After losing the 1990 presidential election — the first free vote the Sandinistas allowed — Ortega and the FSLN returned to power in 2007 with short-lived promises to improve relations with the Catholic Church.

>In 2018, Ortega and Rosario Murillo, his wife and vice president, launched one of the most aggressive state campaigns against organized Christianity in modern Latin American history after Catholic churches offered protesters sanctuary during massive demonstrations in Managua. As of February 2026, Nicaragua has carried out 1,070 persecutory acts against the Catholic Church. The regime has exiled 309 clergy and religious and prohibited 27,286 religious processions. The regime has also dissolved 80 percent of Nicaragua’s NGOs, many of them religiously affiliated, and used mass denaturalization to render church leaders and adherents stateless.

>Holding regime officials accountable and supporting the Cuban and Nicaraguan people would benefit the U.S. beyond merely improving global conditions of religious freedom. Both Cuba and Nicaragua provide America’s greatest adversaries with forward operating bases in the Western Hemisphere. From Chinese intelligence facilities outside Havana to a new military cooperation agreement between Managua and Moscow, these regimes directly threaten U.S. national security.

>It’s a situation that the Trump administration can help to improve. It should start by redesignating Cuba and Nicaragua as Countries of Particular Concern under the International Religious Freedom Act. Building on recent human rights sanctions on Murillo-Ortega regime officials, the administration should designate Caridad Diego Bello as a “Specially Designated National” under the Global Magnitsky Act and additional Ortega-Murillo regime officials in the National Police and Ministry of Interior under Executive Order 13851, Trump’s first term Nicaragua sanctions package.

>Additionally, Congress should continue to fund programs that support the Cuban and Nicaraguan people. The 2026 appropriations package included $25 million to promote democracy and strengthen civil society in Cuba and $15 million for democracy and religious freedom programs in Nicaragua. The Trump administration should deploy these resources immediately and support continued funding in the next budget.

>Some of the world’s worst persecutors of Christians are in America’s own backyard. As Washington confronts these regimes and supports the Cuban and Nicaraguan people, religious freedom should remain a priority.

>Cryptocurrency companies are preparing for the threat that powerful quantum computers could soon be able to hack the security at the heart of the global industry, including breaking the critical code that underpins bitcoin.

>The risk to crypto posed by fast-developing quantum technology — which exploits the way the physics of matter works differently at atomic and subatomic levels — was once considered a distant possibility, with bitcoin widely seen as unhackable.

>But digital assets firms are speeding up their preparations for a “post-quantum” age, as tech companies slash the timelines for developing practical quantum computers to as soon as 2030.

>“The threat has moved from theoretical to credible,” said Ayo Akinyele, head of engineering at RippleX, the blockchain development arm of crypto group Ripple. The company is exploring post-quantum cryptography, with securing wallets as its first priority, and expects to transition its infrastructure to this within the next two years.

>The risk is especially stark for the crypto industry because theft from blockchains can be anonymous and irretrievable, whereas traditional finance institutions generally have multiple safeguards allowing them to track and stop money flows. The quantum threat is becoming more stark as traditional financial firms such as big banks invest in blockchain-based technology and explore the use of digital tokens.

>While traditional computers use binary “bits” limited to adopting one of two values denoted zero or one, quantum bits, or “qubits”, can exist in all possible states between those numbers. This means quantum computers can handle calculations involving much larger volumes of data, theoretically enabling them to unscramble the multiplications of large prime numbers that underpin existing cryptography.

>The focus on the threat to crypto has grown as quantum computer developers have predicted useful machines could be built as soon as 2030, although sceptics point to big remaining technical hurdles, notably the need to cut the computers’ error rates.

>“The challenge is no longer ‘a decade away’ as thought earlier,” said Gautam Chhugani, senior analyst of global digital assets at Bernstein, adding that the crypto industry would need three to five years and investments of “several billions if not hundreds of billions” of dollars in order to prepare. 

>A paper published by Google in April laid out the risks for the crypto industry. The researchers found that quantum computers could break cryptography with fewer resources than previously suggested, and identified specific vulnerabilities for cryptocurrencies and their digital infrastructure.

>“We want to raise awareness on this issue and are providing the cryptocurrency community with recommendations to improve security and stability,” wrote the paper’s lead author, Ryan Babbush.

>Crypto is vulnerable to the quantum threat because of the structure of digital wallets, where users keep their holdings. Each wallet has two keys — a public key that serves as the user’s address, where coins can be sent, and a private key that is kept secret by the user and allows access to their holdings. Quantum computers could potentially decrypt private keys, allowing attackers to steal funds.

>“The integrity of cryptocurrencies is clearly quite a big issue,” said Alex van Someren, executive chair of quantum computing company Photonic and a former chief scientific adviser to the UK government on national security.

>“Cryptographic blockchains depend on these kinds of algorithms for their security — and for the integrity and ultimately therefore the auditability of previous transactions.” 

>Crypto companies have jumped into action following the publication of Google’s research. Along with Ripple, stablecoin issuer Circle and crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun’s Tron group are among companies that have detailed plans to make their businesses quantum secure. 

>The Ethereum Foundation, which oversees one of the world’s biggest blockchains, has launched a post-quantum team and roadmap, while Circle is preparing its blockchain Arc for a post-quantum world, starting by creating quantum-resistant crypto wallets. 

>“There are ways to make a quantum computer’s life much more difficult,” said Sebastian Weidt, chief executive of quantum computing company Universal Quantum. Researchers have created “protocols that a quantum computer will find very difficult to break — it’s just the particular type of maths the machine needs to carry out, [which] it doesn’t really like”, he said.

>The crypto industry concerns come as the US government backs quantum computing technology, announcing on Thursday it will take stakes worth a total of $2bn in companies in the sector.

>The biggest challenge is for bitcoin, which is heavily decentralised and not run by a single entity. Industry leaders warn that significant co-ordination will be needed to implement secure cryptography for bitcoin, but that such co-ordination has yet to emerge.

>“It’s leaderless,” said RippleX’s Akinyele, adding that while “there are a lot of voices” and various proposals have been put forward on how to secure bitcoin, “there’s no clear proposal that will protect bitcoin holders across the board”.

>Meanwhile, some remain sceptical of the quantum threat. 

>“It’s a theoretical computer that doesn’t exist yet,” said Kostas Chalkias, chief cryptographer at crypto infrastructure company Mysten Labs. “The danger is decades away,” he added, while vulnerabilities to AI are a bigger problem and “far more dangerous than what people believe”. 

>Akinyele said sceptics were ignoring the power of artificial intelligence, pointing to Nvidia’s launch last month of new AI models to “accelerate the path” to quantum computers. 

>“AI is being leveraged to help with the quantum threat,” he said. “This is a threat that we can’t afford to be reactive against.”

>In the wake of gutting USAID, Donald Trump’s administration is rolling out a new “America First” global health strategy that it sees as the future of foreign assistance: granting money in return for data.

>In memorandums of understanding (MOUs) signed with more than 30 nations since December, worth $20.6bn, governments have accepted five years of funding — often much reduced from previous levels — in return for a pledge to provide up to 25 years of patient data and, in some cases, pathogenic specimens, along with a commitment to co-invest.

>Recipient countries have promised to stump up $7.8bn, about a third of the total, and the US can withdraw funding if it determines nations are not meeting their co-investment pledges.

>Critics have likened these transactional agreements to a form of digital and genomic colonialism, warning that data could be made available to unnamed private US corporations, including pharmaceutical companies and big data analytics groups.

>Some African officials have also accused the US of predicating aid money on other demands, including preferential access to critical minerals, though Washington has categorically denied this.

>“It’s a recolonisation of our health system,” said Ayoade Alakija, a Nigerian ministerial health envoy and co-chair of the African Vaccine Delivery Alliance, of the $5bn MOU Nigeria signed with Washington in December. “They can create vaccines and diagnostic tools with our data and we get scraps off the table.”

>The US, which quit the World Health Organization in January, says it needs data and specimens it no longer receives through the multilateral system to protect itself against future pandemics.

>Washington has said it cannot grant benefits that come from any data — such as access to medicines developed from pathogen samples — to origin countries because that would contravene companies’ intellectual property rights, a position it says is shared with other OECD nations.

>“In a suspected outbreak, one of the first phone calls most countries make is to the US CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention],” a senior state department official said. “We want to continue to be partners of choice. We’re saying to countries that if you find you have a pathogen on your hands and you’re not sure what it is, send it to us and we’ll help you figure out what it is.”

>Several African countries, including Ghana, Zambia and Zimbabwe, have publicly rejected the deals, however, saying they violate patient privacy and national sovereignty.

>One senior Nigerian health official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said: “My first thought is we are not going to give the US 25 years of data in return for five years of money, that’s not going to happen.” Washington says, in many cases, countries have successfully negotiated down the 25-year period.

>Muhammad Ali Pate, Nigeria’s health minister, said his country’s deal with Washington, which requires Nigeria to contribute $3bn of the $5bn over five years, was a nonbinding MOU.

>“Any data sharing will have to conform with Nigerian laws and policies [and] either party can withdraw,” Pate told the FT. The agreement marked what he called a “definitive end to US aid dependency by 2030”.

>But health experts warned that Washington was pushing for implementation too quickly to deal with such complex issues. “America is giving countries very little time,” said Serah Makka, executive director for Africa at the One Campaign, which advocates for an end to extreme poverty and preventable diseases. “Even the American government doesn’t work that fast.”

>The new-style MOUs signed with governments in Africa, Latin America and Asia are focused on HIV, tuberculosis, malaria and maternal health. They are designed to replace roughly $44bn of funding from USAID, which was abolished by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) last year.

>The process is being driven by Brad Smith, a former Doge official who is now a global health adviser to the US state department. Cuts to US funding over the next five years range from 12 per cent in the case of Ethiopia to 71 per cent for Rwanda, according to KFF, a non-profit specialising in health policy research.

>Mulambo Haimbe, Zambia’s foreign minister, took to Facebook last month to describe Washington’s attitude towards aid as “patronising”.

>“Key among the reasons for Zambia’s reluctance to accept the terms of the proposed agreement is the insistence on preferential treatment of US companies over Zambia’s critical minerals,” he said.

>The senior state department official said: “There is no linkage in the discussions with Zambia between critical minerals and health. They are not linked.”

>Haimbe also said that US demands for access to Zambians’ patient data were “unconscionable from the perspective of the people of Zambia”. They were “in violation of our citizens’ right to privacy”, he added.

>US officials remained optimistic that a deal with both Zambia and Ghana could be struck.

>“President Trump’s administration is advancing a historic, mutually beneficial approach to global health through the America First Global Health Strategy,” said Anna Kelly, the White House deputy press secretary. “The United States remains the most generous country in the world because President Trump has a humanitarian heart.”

>Some African health officials cautiously welcomed the transactional nature of agreements as more transparent. “Aid has always been conditional,” said Makka of the One Campaign. “What we are seeing is the overt nature of it, and, quite frankly, overt is better than covert.”

>Githinji Gitahi, chief executive of Amref Health Africa, said: “We always knew aid was not charity, so we have no problem with an America First policy.” The problem, he said, was the power imbalance. Recipient countries were desperate for money to keep HIV and other programmes going and were signing agreements in a rush, he said.

>Kenya’s high court suspended implementation of a $2.5bn MOU with the US after a consumer lobby group brought a case. “Let us first determine the issues being raised by civil society around data sovereignty [so] the public can feel safe that their data is being protected,” said Gitahi.

>The US government says it requires data to monitor the efficacy of programmes and recipient governments’ fealty to co-investment commitments.

>Gitahi said it was right that African governments contributed. “Demanding that countries put skin in the game: it is a good thing,” he said. But the US should not be able to determine spending priorities, he added, for example, by diverting money from family planning, which US packages specifically preclude.

>One American health expert said the MOUs came “in the aftermath of the destructive, chaotic and strategic elimination of USAID and vast swaths of the Pepfar [President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief] programme”, which was introduced by George W Bush.

>To offer reduced funding now, the person said, was like “torching your car” and then offering to help pay for a new one.

>Fidel Castro strode triumphantly into Havana in January 1959. That’s 67 years ago—two generations and change. The Cold War, in which Castro played such an outsize part, ended 35 years ago with the fall of his Soviet patrons. Enfeebled by age, the old totalitarian turned the regime over to his brother Raúl in 2008 and died in 2016. Raúl, the last link to the old generation, himself retired in 2021. He is now an unsteady 94.

>The Cuban revolution has become detached from its own history yet continues to grind on, mechanically, as a sort of theme park of 20th-century Marxism-Leninism. It’s the land of animatronic revolutionaries, where tourists, to their amazement, can experience the political repression, economic misery, and infrastructure collapse invariably produced by this system. The parades and slogans are still there, but the feeling has died.

>Even that is coming to an end. When Delta Force snatched Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro and brought him to a holding cell in New York City, Cuba’s last visible means of support vanished. Since the island must import almost all its food and energy but has nothing of value to sell, its economy was totally dependent on subsidized Venezuelan oil. Without it, Cuban society is circling the drain. The electric grid has crashed; blackouts last most of the day. The water supply is also faltering—even in Havana, toilets can go for days without flushing. Food is scarce and difficult to obtain for those without access to dollars. In the dark of night, protesters burn mounds of garbage that have accumulated on the streets and bang on pots to vent their anger.

>The communist regime as it has existed since 1959 is almost certainly doomed. The transformations needed to raise 10 million Cubans out of suspended animation and back into history will necessarily be radical, traumatic, and maybe violent. The great question is whether they will be driven by internal players or foreign intervention.

>In January, after the Maduro raid, President Donald Trump proclaimed “Cuba’s next” and ordered punitive tariffs against any country seeking to deliver oil there. The Navy was sent to enforce the embargo. While the relationship between Trump’s words and his intentions can be shaky, he seemed to believe that the regime was “ready to fall” of its own dead weight. “I don’t think we need any action. . . . It’s going down for the count,” he said. Negotiations began with members of the Castro family to put that notion to the test.

>President Trump has placed Cuba on the list of past American geopolitical mistakes he fully intends to correct. His objective is to scour the Western Hemisphere clean of hostile influence, and the Cubans, stuck in anti-imperialist mode, have allegedly invited Russia and China to spy on the U.S. from the island.

>But if Trump really expected that regime weakness would force change, then he completely misread the dynamics of the situation. Precisely because of its weakness, Cuba’s robotic ruling class lacked the wherewithal—strong leadership, institutional adaptability, tactical intelligence—to depart from the old narrative. U.S. negotiators were met with empty phrases. The talks went nowhere.

>More recently, laboring under the shadow of the Iran war, Trump began to ratchet up the pressure on Cuba. The sanctions package has been strengthened and aimed at Grupo de Administración Empresarial S.A. (GAESA), a shadowy enterprise run by the Cuban military that controls a sizable portion of the country’s economy. This will probably hit the communist elite where it hurts—their bank accounts—but will alter nothing of substance in the short term.

>On a parallel track, the Department of Justice obtained a grand jury indictment of Raúl Castro for his part in the 1996 shoot down of two private aircraft on a humanitarian mission, resulting in the deaths of four persons, three of them American citizens. The indictment was announced in Miami on Wednesday—not coincidentally, Cuba’s independence day. The charges against Castro include conspiracy to kill U.S. nationals, destruction of aircraft, and four counts of murder. This move conforms to the president’s favored tactic of decapitation, as practiced against both Venezuela and Iran—and there can be little question that Castro, who at the time was chief of Cuba’s military, ordered the killings.

>But the Castros have always operated at cosmic levels of paranoia. Fidel rarely slept in the same bed twice. Raúl will be much tougher to snare than Maduro. Even if Delta Force manages to pluck him away to Miami, it’s unclear what the prosecution of a 94-year-old tyrant would accomplish, other than boost the president politically with Cuban Americans. With or without Castro, the ossified Marxist-Leninist structure will rumble along the same rutted path. The disappearance of Raúl Castro was already baked into Cuba’s power calculations.

>In yet another twist to this convoluted tale, we learned that on May 14, even as President Trump communed with Xi Jinping in Beijing, Central Intelligence Agency director John Ratcliffe was paying an unannounced visit to Cuba. If proof were needed that all ideological fervor has fizzled out in the island, this was it: In Castroite mythology, the head of the CIA is something like the Beast of the Apocalypse. More remarkable still, word of the meeting was first leaked to the news media by the Cubans. It was as if they wanted the world to know that they were willing to deal with the devil.

>

>To his counterparts in the Ministry of Interior and military intelligence, Ratcliffe delivered an ultimatum thinly disguised as an offer of assistance. The Cuban government, he said, had a brief window of opportunity to fix its relationship with the United States. If it did so, the Trump administration would make available up to $100 million in humanitarian aid. The catch: Cuba needed to implement “fundamental changes” to the system. No details were shared, but in the past this has meant, at a minimum, an opening up of Cuba’s economy, the release of political prisoners, and the elimination of the Russian and Chinese listening posts.

>A threat was obviously implied—an unstated, unspecific “or else.” Since the U.S. is already blockading Cuban waters, the next conceivable turn of the screw would seem to be some sort of military intervention. But that raises a host of questions. Does Trump really intend to order military action against Cuba while continuing to fight a war with Iran? If so, on what pretext—Raúl Castro’s criminality? If the communist regime is as weak as the president has often remarked, how can it pose any kind of danger to the U.S.?

>Such questions may explain the curious story leaked to Axios by a “senior U.S. official,” claiming that “classified intelligence” showed Cuba had acquired more than 300 military drones and, with the help of Iranian advisers, had begun “discussing plans” to attack the American naval base in Guantánamo. The senior official—who sounded suspiciously like CIA chief Ratcliffe—observed, “When we think about those types of technologies being that close, and a range of bad actors from terror groups to drug cartels to Iranians to the Russians, it’s concerning.” He added pointedly: “It’s a growing threat.” In the same article, however, Axios noted that “U.S. officials don’t believe Cuba is an imminent threat.”

>Here we encounter the profound ambivalence in Trump administration statements about what to do with Cuba. Trump doesn’t like regime change but in this case expects fundamental change. Cuban communism will unravel from sheer incompetence, yet is said to pose a growing threat. The U.S. draws a line in the sand yet refuses to define the “or else.” Economic sanctions have failed to budge an entrenched and robotic system, yet military intervention remains a “last resort.” It’s difficult to say whether these divergent positions are a form of psychological warfare, the result of indecision and contradiction—or possibly both.

>Some basic realities can’t be wished away. Trump will do nothing dramatic with regard to Cuba before he wraps up the conflict with Iran. The Cubans, who are keenly attuned to power relations, understand this. They have few incentives to yield on any front before the Iran war is settled.

>Yet far more than the U.S. side, the Cuban regime is at the mercy of events. Its governing system is disintegrating with all the tragic slowness of historic time, as entropy conquers immobility, contempt overcomes fear, and the silence of the grave finally engulfs the theme-park revolution. The Trump administration would like for this to happen in Trump time—right now, if not sooner. While that would be all to the good—particularly for the long-suffering Cuban people—no one can predict the hour of the death of systems.

I think this gives us a good opportunity to talk about this topic, but I beg of all of you to not be weird about this. I don't care if you defend this stuff and call it sex work or if you want to punish it and call it prostitution. This subreddit is meant for people on both sides, as long as you are being civil. That being said, here you go:

>Do not pity the prostitute. Instead, fight for her rights. 

>So runs the latest mantra on the cultural left, which has embraced people in the sex trade (sellers, buyers, pimps) as a key component of the omnicause. 

>No longer derided as hookers or harlots, mourned as fallen women or sugarcoated as high-end call girls, the “sex worker”—a job title that sounds like the handiwork of an Orwellian HR department but is considered by many progressives the most inclusive and respectful term—is a free-market operative like any other. “Sex work is work,” say those who see prostitution as a form of choice, empowerment and bodily autonomy, inextricably tied to abortion rights, human rights, HIV/AIDS advocacy, trans rights and the broader labor-organizing movement. 

>From the Academy Awards to TikTok to gender studies seminars, any suggestion that prostitution is something shameful, misogynistic or oppressive is dismissed as moralistic pearlclutching, the province of sex-negative “fundamentalist feminists,” right-wingers and SWERFs (Sex Work Exclusionary Radical Feminists). A UCLA course describes it as “erotic labor.” At Tufts, “Sex and Money: Anthropology of Sex Work” interrogates “moral panics about ‘white slavery’ and ‘sex trafficking.’” 

>In an impassioned segment in 2022, John Oliver declared, “Sex work is inarguably labor. It is a job. And people do it for the same reason people do any job,” equating prostitution with making sandwiches at Subway. On a recent episode of “Hacks,” a woman would rather date a sex worker (in this case a man) than an aspiring magician; on the new Apple TV+ series “Margo’s Got Money Troubles,” OnlyFans is a perfectly fine way to pay the bills.

>This ideological reframing may have manifested itself most ardently in 2025, when Sean Baker, who won a best picture Oscar for “Anora,” dedicated his award to “the sex-worker community.” “My hope is that these stories humanize sex workers,” he told the audience several months before at the Cannes Film Festival. “It’s a career, a job and one that should be respected and, in my opinion, decriminalized and not in any way regulated.”

>As Bill Maher put it, “Whores are having a moment.” 

>Like other left-wing theories (police abolitionism, “microlooting”), these attitudes seem to have jetted in from nowhere. But even on the left, the idea that sex work is a career choice is intensely disputed. 

>Many liberals, feminists and anti-trafficking organizations object to reframing prostitution as a liberating enterprise rather than an inherently oppressive system—yet another way men with money and power exploit society’s most vulnerable. In their view, Jeffrey Epstein serves as Exhibit A.

>Their aim is to lower demand for prostitution by strengthening laws against pimps and buyers while treating prostitutes not as criminals but as victims, a framework referred to as the Nordic or Equality model, or partial decriminalization. 

>On the other side are those arguing for total decriminalization, which lifts all laws regulating the buying and selling of sex acts.

>Both sides condemn legalization, which exists in places like Amsterdam and which imposes a strong regulatory system—but for very different reasons: the first, because it normalizes exploitation and the latter because it limits free trade.

>Engaging in this debate requires entering two radically different worldviews. Each side has its own set of experts and data and cites “lived experience.” Each argues that its approach increases safety while the opposing view exacerbates trafficking and violence. The two camps are so bitterly divided, they don’t even speak the same language.

>“Why Deny Poor Women the Option?”

>At 17 and still in high school, Kaytlin Bailey began working as an hourly escort. Legally speaking, this made her a victim of sex trafficking, which includes anyone prostituted under age 18. But Bailey saw her work as exciting and empowering. In her 20s, she moved into “sugaring,” a patronage model in which a wealthier man offers financial support, gifts or services in exchange for companionship and sex.

>“Older dudes are into, like, helping younger women solve their financial problems,” Bailey explained on her “Oldest Profession Podcast” in 2017. “You don’t even have to reveal that you’re a sex worker. That’s what the whole sugaring thing is about. They don’t want you to be a pro, but I mean, you are.” 

>Today Bailey is the founder and executive director of Old Pros, a nonprofit that uses storytelling to advocate for sex-worker rights. She takes a dim view of those who oppose decriminalization. “From the beginning of the feminist movement, there has unfortunately been a cohort of women who want to police other women’s choices,” Bailey, now 39, said in an interview. “It’s mostly white, mostly middle-class women…They often conspire with chauvinist, religious, conservative organizations that they believe will support their rights.”

>Bailey’s views would once have been considered fringe. But what began as a radical movement in 1973 with a group called Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics (COYOTE) and later raged throughout the feminist “sex wars” of the ’80s, ultimately gained broader cultural traction in the 2010s. A growing discourse in academia increasingly wrapped sex workers into the sweep of oppressed and underserved identities, often linked to HIV awareness and prevention, labor rights and LGBTQ issues. 

>Over the next few decades, a smattering of sex-worker-led groups in developing countries sprang up and won the support of NGO workers, progressive reformers and philanthropists. In 2002, prostitution was legalized in Germany and the following year, decriminalized in New Zealand. Human Rights Watch officially staked out a position calling sex work a human right in 2014. Soon it was followed by a bevy of other progressive organizations, including the ACLU, Planned Parenthood and the World Health Organization.

>“All want to end poverty, but in meantime why deny poor women the option of voluntary sex work?” Kenneth Roth, executive director of HRW from 1993 to 2022, tweeted in 2015.

>“For me, human rights in essence is about human agency,” Roth said in an interview. “It’s about respecting the individual to make his or her choices as much as possible. The sex worker can choose to do sex work, or she can choose something else.”

>Whereas traditionally, women’s rights organizations viewed prostitution as a form of commercial sexual exploitation and a crime of abuse steeped in male power on a continuum with domestic violence, sexual harassment and rape, this new framework meant that prostitutes weren’t victims, they were trailblazers. 

>“A Sex Worker Explains Why Sex Work Should Never Be Illegal” ran one headline in Refinery29, a website aimed at millennial women, in 2016, chastising Hollywood celebrities such as Anne Hathaway, Lena Dunham and Kate Winslet for opposing decriminalization. “Why LGBT and Sex Worker Rights Go Hand in Hand” HuffPost explained that same year. “Why Sex Work Is Real Work” Teen Vogue told its third-wave feminist followers.

>These views have prompted outcry among anti-sex trafficking groups and many women’s rights groups. When Amnesty International updated its policy in 2016 to consider sex work a matter of personal agency and implied consent, critics included Jimmy Carter. They noted Amnesty’s historic failure to apply a gender lens, pointing to its longtime delay in considering female genital mutilation a human rights violation. In a statement, Amnesty said its position remains unchanged.

>“Historically, the human rights movement has excluded the real lives of many women by supposing that ‘sex work’ was acceptable—as if women selling their bodies were freely chosen,” Gloria Steinem told The Journal in a statement. “It seems to be long past time to delink ‘sex’ and ‘work.’”

>In the U.S., the decriminalization model is connected to left-leaning efforts against policing and incarceration and in favor of marijuana legalization. Funding comes overwhelmingly from progressive organizations such as the Ford Foundation, the Oak Foundation and the Open Society Foundation, which in 2015 published a report, “Ten Reasons to Decriminalize Sex Work.” Between 2018 and 2023, Open Society dispersed $8.9 million in funds through 97 grants to sex-worker rights and through a spokesperson said it takes pride in “advancing the rights, health and dignity of marginalized communities, including people involved in sex work.”

>MacKenzie Scott has also focused on sexual and gender-based violence, giving millions to multiple organizations that advocate for decriminalization and support sex-worker rights. In 2022, for example, Scott gave $20 million and an additional undisclosed grant in 2025 to Mama Cash, a nonprofit whose numerous aims include decriminalization.

>In 2019 Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley became the first member of Congress to introduce legislation calling for full decriminalization of prostitution. Advocating for sex-worker rights has become a way to prove one’s progressive bona fides, and it’s part of the party platform of the Democratic Socialists of America. On the other extreme, the Libertarian Party likewise supports decriminalization as part of its belief in deregulation. The uniting vision is freedom and choice.

>“I Defined Myself as a High-End Escort”

>If you’d asked Ava Kamdem whether she was a prostitute during the three years she spent having paid sex with men as part of a large-scale trafficking ring, she would have scoffed at the suggestion. “I defined myself as a high-end escort,” Kamdem, who is now 30 and a 2025 graduate of Columbia University, said in an interview. Not a sex worker either? “If someone asked me that I’d have said, ‘What the heck are you talking about?’ I’d never heard that term at the time.”

>Her buyers had no way to know that she was a victim of trafficking. “We were trained by our trafficker from day one to tell buyers, ‘I’m in this by choice. I don’t have a trafficker. I don’t have a pimp. It’s just me,’” she said. “It’s a veil buyers like to hide behind.” 

>Those men are kidding themselves, Kamdem says now. Over the years, her johns beat and raped her repeatedly, held her at gunpoint and threatened her life. (Data varies, but between 45% and 92% of prostitutes experience violence on the job.) Though her trafficker assaulted her multiple times, she saw the trafficking operation as offering a degree of protection, she said. “I perceived the real threat to be the buyers.”

>While prostitution is still illegal in most of the country, in the past five years, several states have come down harder on demand. California, Louisiana, Maine and New Hampshire have increased penalties for sex buyers while in Texas, Montana, Oklahoma, Kansas, Georgia, Missouri and North Carolina, the purchase of sex acts has been made a felony first offense. According to an analysis by World Without Exploitation, an anti-trafficking group, 20 states are currently considering legislation to elevate penalties for buyers. 

>In 2023, Maine went even further, becoming the first state to introduce the Nordic model, also enabling women previously convicted of selling sex to seal their records. 

>Recent efforts to decriminalize prostitution in the U.S. have been less successful. In March, such a measure was abandoned in Colorado the week before it was slated for a vote. Last year, similar bills in Massachusetts, Vermont, Rhode Island and Illinois also failed to pass. 

>In New York, two opposing bills—one decriminalizing prostitution, which was supported by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani when he was still an assemblymember, and the other enacting the Nordic model—are still under consideration.

>State Sen. Liz Krueger, a Democrat and longtime advocate for LGBTQ and women’s rights, has been excoriated by some progressives for supporting the Nordic bill. Having heard from prostituted people about the abuse, drug addiction and rape they endured, Krueger said in an interview, “How could I ever justify supporting a system that was forcing people into horrible lives?”

>Key to the Nordic model, now implemented in Sweden, Iceland, Norway, Northern Ireland, Canada, France, Ireland and Israel, is creating an exit strategy for prostituted people. In France, which includes social services for people leaving the sex trade, data shows that of 2,102 people who have gone through an exit program since 2017, 91% are now employed elsewhere. Under the new law, 11,491 men have been fined for purchasing sexual acts through 2025; between 2016 and 2023 1,243 men were arrested for doing so with minors.

>Advocates of total decriminalization argue that removing laws that regulate and criminalize prostitution helps combat trafficking. They say ready access to the commercial sex reduces the demand for sex-trafficked persons and enables sex workers to assist law enforcement in cracking down on sex traffickers and other bad actors.

>In fact, some research indicates that when prostitution becomes decriminalized or legalized, the market expands, increasing both demand and the flow of trafficking. In Germany, sex tourism has boomed with an estimated one million men buying sex each day, coming from all over the world as sex tourists, a 30% increase in the market. Berlin now has over 500 brothels. Sex-trafficking cases also increased significantly in Germany following legalization. 

>“The relevant question has never been about whether women have a right to sell their bodies,” said Yasmin Vafa, executive director of Rights4Girls, an advocacy group. “It’s always been about whether men should have the right to use their agency and enormous privileges—which are currently on display for the entire country and world to see—to purchase sex acts from some of the most vulnerable in our society.”

>Bekah Charleston, 44, was sexually assaulted in fifth grade, raped at 14 and trafficked at 17. For the next decade, she worked both as a sex-trafficked person and then in prostitution. 

>“You don’t just magically get out at 18,” Charleston, who is now an anti-trafficking advocate, said. “Prostitution is someone using their money and power to get someone else to provide a service for them. You’re literally paid to be a product that is used and discarded.”

>Elon Musk’s SpaceX has unveiled the details of one of the most audacious IPOs in history.

>Its 200,000-word prospectus, released on Wednesday, lays out a vision of asteroid mining and “passenger transport to the Moon and Mars” resting on a business that is still lossmaking and an unprecedented governance structure that gives the mercurial billionaire near total control.

>Musk’s ambition to extend “the light of consciousness to the stars” and harness the sun “to power a truth-seeking artificial intelligence” will be tested next month in the largest flotation of all time.

>Here’s what we learned from the SpaceX IPO filing.

>AI-driven cash burn

>The vast prospectus highlights the extent to which Musk’s 24-year-old rockets-to-chatbot conglomerate has become a bet on AI.

>The world’s richest man has identified the technology as by far the largest market for SpaceX to address, with a potential value of $26.5tn, dwarfing the $2tn or so from the group’s Starlink internet service and space operations.

>He is investing intensively in an area where SpaceX trails market leaders OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. The company spent close to $13bn on AI hardware last year, recording an operating loss of $6.4bn for that business segment. That dragged it to a net loss despite Starlink generating $4.4bn in operating income.

>However, Musk has recently been able to monetise the surplus computing resources he has managed to build. The filing revealed Anthropic will pay $15bn a year to lease space in both of SpaceX’s flagship Colossus data centres.

>The deal could be worth $45bn in revenue to SpaceX between now and May 2029, which would more than offset the outlay on hardware. But the decision to lease to a direct competitor highlights the limited uptake of Musk’s own Grok chatbot.

>Extraterrestrial data centres

>SpaceX wants to leverage this “terrestrial experience” in computing infrastructure to launch a vast constellation of orbital data centres powered by the sun and cooled by the vacuum of space.

>Moving the burden of AI computing into orbit is the first step, on the path to the wider opportunities, including the “emergence of new trillion-dollar markets on the Moon, Mars, and beyond”.

>In the near term, these ambitions rely on the success of SpaceX’s latest Starship rocket — a reusable spacecraft taller than a 35-storey building. The company’s ability to cheaply launch satellites has helped it corner the launch market, ferrying 80 per cent of all the mass lifted into orbit each year since 2023.

>“Over time, especially with orbital data centres, we expect to serve AI at extremely high scale,” Musk wrote on X on Wednesday afternoon.

>One investor said that even if xAI’s models flop, the “orbital data centres work with or without Grok”. If Musk’s chatbot does not need the new capacity, he said, the SpaceX chief still had “CoreWeave in the sky”, referring to the fast-growing cloud computing company.

>Billion-dollar rewards for Musk loyalists

>The blockbuster listing will unlock vast new wealth for SpaceX executives and investors if the company reaches a $1.75tn valuation. Shares held by president Gwynne Shotwell and chief financial officer Bret Johnsen will be worth more than $1bn apiece.

>Longtime Musk backer and SpaceX director Antonio Gracias, head of Valor Equity Partners, holds 503mn shares across several funds, which could be worth $70bn or more. Luke Nosek, who co-founded both PayPal and Founders Fund alongside Peter Thiel and joined SpaceX’s board in 2008, holds a stake worth about $5bn.

>But all of the holdings pale in comparison to the riches that Musk will unlock. He holds 5.1bn vested shares, or about 41 per cent of the total, which could be worth about $700bn. A successful listing could see him become the world’s first trillionaire.

>An unfireable CEO

>SpaceX’s board has gone to unusual lengths to cement Musk’s control. It recently granted him two large batches of super-voting class B shares, 1.3bn in total, which carry 10 votes per share.

>These shares vest in tranches as SpaceX reaches market capitalisation milestones and either builds powerful orbital AI data centres or establishes a permanent human colony on Mars with at least 1mn inhabitants.

>But because the shares were issued to Musk as restricted stock, rather than options or RSUs, the filing shows that he can wield the voting power of these shares immediately, and for as long as he remains employed at SpaceX.

>Musk can only be removed as chair or chief executive by a majority vote of the class B shareholders — and personally controls 93.6 per cent of the share class — in effect guaranteeing his position.

>Musk has agreed to a “lock-up” period — the amount of time before which pre-IPO shareholders can sell their stakes — of 366 days, twice as long as the 180-day lock-up period typical of most IPOs.

>Some other large shareholders will have lock-ups that resemble Musk’s while others will be free to sell out of their positions after the standard 180 days.

>Potential hiccups from Musk’s unchallenged control were highlighted by the disclosure that SpaceX bought $131mn of Cybertrucks from Tesla last year at retail price. That could equate to 1,500 of the poorly selling vehicles.

>Cosmic risk factors

>The concentration of power in Musk’s hands, as well as the chief executive’s potential conflicts of interest, are cited in 37 pages of risk disclosures — alongside the technical complexity of pulling off aims such as lunar power generation.

>The extensive risk warnings reflect a company that operates across three distinct sectors having swallowed Musk’s social media site X and AI lab xAI. The S-1 lays out dangers ranging from onerous regulation to “space-related risks” including “radiation from solar and cosmic sources; micrometeoroids and orbital debris” and “human injury or death”.

>The company also points to ongoing litigation and regulatory probes into the creation of non-consensual explicit images and “content representing children in sexualized contexts”.

>Wednesday’s filing also warns: “We have a history of net losses and may not achieve profitability in the future.”

>Goldman beat most of Wall Street to lead position

>Goldman Sachs pipped rivals Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Citigroup, Bank of America and UBS to lead the IPO, which features a total of 23 Wall Street lenders that will act as underwriters on the deal.

>Retail investors will be allocated a chunk of the freshly listed shares via Charles Schwab, Fidelity’s brokerage unit and Robinhood, among others.

>Legal advisers on the deal include Gibson Dunn and Davis Polk.

>In Africa, an Al Qaeda militia has surrounded a capital city, killed a defense minister, and blockaded 3 million people, and it is just getting started.

>On April 27, fighters from Al Qaeda affiliate Jama’at Nusrat Al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) helped overrun Russian forces in the northern Malian town of Kidal, seizing weapon caches. On the same day, JNIM killed Mali’s pro-Kremlin defense minister. Days later, JNIM stormed a Malian maximum-security prison dubbed “Africa’s Alcatraz” just 60 miles from the capital of Bamako in an attempt to free high-value JNIM prisoners. Now, the jihadi militia has the capital Bamako—and its 3 million inhabitants—under a partial blockade.

>Some 2,000 miles to the southeast, Nigeria’s defense minister is warning that violence from Mali could spill into his country. And he is right to be worried. But these developments also give the United States an opportunity to re-engage in West Africa productively—before a terrorist caliphate can fully take root.

>For the past three years, Mali’s military junta has taken a gamble by kicking out Western security partners and inviting in Russia. French forces were expelled in 2022. American forces drew down from the region at the request of neighboring governments in 2024. Russia’s Africa Corps, the rebranded Wagner Group, arrived with fanfare and delivered failure. With its attention and resources consumed by Ukraine, Moscow never had the capacity to fill the void it encouraged Mali to create. JNIM filled it instead.

>

>Iyad Ag Ghali, the man leading the JNIM charge, was once a whiskey-drinkingpunk-rocker from northern Mali’s ethnic Tuareg elite. Having come to jihadism later in life, he is now strangling the capital city, eliminating government leadership, and raising funds illicitly. In November 2025, the United Arab Emiratespaid more than $20 million to secure the freedom of an Emirati prince kidnapped by JNIM. Now, the jihadi group is also reportedlyrunning a major node of the trans-Saharan cocaine trade.

>As it consolidates power and gains territory across Mali, JNIM is positioned to export its model eastward to Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, with just under 250 million people and one of its largest economies. A society already walking on a knife’s edge between its Muslim north and Christian south cannot afford to be next.

>Terrorism in Nigeria’s north is already on the rise. Jihadist networks in the Sahel region of Africa are exploiting the country’s religious fault lines, framing their campaigns in the language of holy war. Christian farming communities are under direct and growing pressure. For JNIM, the goal in Nigeria is not conquest. It is chaos. Abuja does not have the capacity to provide reliable security along its north-south fault line alone. Intensified inter-religious violence creates the conditions for jihadist expansion.

>Meanwhile, the Trump administration has made protecting persecuted Christians in Nigeria a priority, carrying out one-time strikes against Islamic State targets in northwest Nigeria on Christmas Day 2025. There could now be an opportunity for more systemic security cooperation with Nigeria to contain the rise of JNIM and similar groups through more cost-effective, sustainable training and drone operations.

>

>None of this requires boots on the ground. It does not require nation-building, regime change, or an open-ended commitment. What it calls for is targeted, strategic reengagement with the West African partners that want it. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) has been weakened by the wave of coups that swept the Sahel, but it has not collapsed.

>Nigeria, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, and others remain functional states with capable security forces but are under-resourced and under-supported. The United States has the intelligence assets, the training capacity, and the relationships to make a meaningful difference without a significant footprint. The joint US-Nigerian strike on May 15 that killed Abu-Bilal al-Mainuki, a senior Islamic State commander operating out of the Lake Chad Basin, is proof of concept—targeted intelligence sharing and partnership can deliver results without a large American presence on the ground.

>The mission is containment. Reestablish security cooperation in the wake of Russia’s failure. Provide intelligence sharing and potentially drone operations targeted at degrading JNIM’s ability to project over borders. Expedite arms and equipment to Nigeria and other at-risk states. Push for confirmed US ambassadors to reconstitute a regional security architecture that Russia’s failure has shattered.

>America has made this mistake before. It disengages and watches as a malign actor fills the void. This exact pattern is playing out in the Sahel. Washington can still break it through intelligence sharing, drone operations, arms transfers, and confirmed ambassadors, but the window of engagement gets slimmer by the minute.

>Iran's Supreme Leader has issued a directive that the country's near-weapons-grade uranium should not be sent abroad, two senior Iranian sources said, hardening Tehran's stance on one of the ​main U.S. demands at peace talks.

>Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei's order could further frustrate U.S. President Donald Trump and complicate talks on ending the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran.

>Israeli officials have told Reuters that ‌Trump has assured Israel that Iran's stockpile of highly enriched uranium, needed to make an atomic weapon, will be sent out of Iran and that any peace deal must include a clause on this.

>Israel, the United States and other Western states have long accused Iran of seeking nuclear weapons, including pointing to its move to enrich uranium to 60%, far higher than needed for civilian uses and closer to the 90% needed for a weapon. Iran denies seeking nuclear weapons.

>Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ​has said he will not consider the war over until enriched uranium is removed from Iran, Tehran ends its support for proxy militias, and its ballistic missile capabilities are eliminated.

>"The Supreme ​Leader’s directive, and the consensus within the establishment, is that the stockpile of enriched uranium should not leave the country,” said one of the two Iranian ⁠sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

>Iran's top officials, the sources said, believe that sending the material abroad would leave the country more vulnerable to future attacks ​by the United States and Israel. Khamenei has the last say on the most important state matters.

>The White House and Iran's foreign ministry did not respond to requests for comment.

>DEEP SUSPICION AMONG TOP IRANIAN OFFICIALS

>A ​shaky ceasefire is in place in the war that began with U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran on February 28, after which Iran fired at Gulf states hosting U.S. military bases and fighting broke out between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon.

>But there has been no big breakthrough in peace efforts, with a U.S. blockade of Iranian ports and Tehran's grip on the Strait of Hormuz, a vital global oil supply route, complicating negotiations mediated by Pakistan.

>The two senior Iranian sources said there ​was deep suspicion in Iran that the pause in hostilities was a tactical deception by Washington to create a sense of security before it renews airstrikes.

>Iran's top peace negotiator, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, said on ​Wednesday that "obvious and hidden moves by the enemy" showed the Americans were preparing new attacks.

>Trump said on Wednesday the U.S. was ready to proceed with further attacks on Tehran if Iran did not agree to a peace deal, ‌but suggested ⁠Washington could wait a few days to "get the right answers."

>The two sides have started to narrow some gaps, the sources said, but deeper splits remain over Tehran's nuclear programme — including the fate of its enriched uranium stockpiles and Tehran's demand for recognition of its right to enrichment.

>IRAN HARDENS STANCE ON ENRICHED URANIUM STOCKPILE

>Iranian officials have repeatedly said Tehran’s priority is to secure a permanent end to the war and credible guarantees that the U.S. and Israel will not launch further attacks.

>Only after such assurances are in place, they said, would Iran be prepared to engage in detailed negotiations over its nuclear program.

>Israel is widely believed to have ​an atomic arsenal but has never confirmed or denied ​it has nuclear weapons, maintaining a so-called policy ⁠of ambiguity on the issue for decades.

>Before the war, Iran signalled willingness to ship out half of its stockpile of uranium which has been enriched to 60%, a level far higher than what is needed for civilian uses.

>But sources said that position changed after repeated threats from Trump to strike Iran.

>Israeli officials ​have told Reuters it is still unclear whether Trump will decide to attack and whether he would give Israel a green light to resume ​operations. Tehran has vowed a ⁠crushing response if attacked.

>However, the source said there were "feasible formulas" to resolve the matter.

>"There are solutions like diluting the stockpile under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency," one of the Iranian sources said.

>The IAEA estimates that Iran had 440.9 kg of uranium enriched to 60% when Israel and the U.S. attacked Iranian nuclear facilities in June 2025. How much of that has survived is unclear.

>IAEA chief Rafael Grossi said in March that ⁠what remained of ​that stock was “mainly” stored in a tunnel complex in its Isfahan nuclear facility, and that his agency believed slightly more than ​200 kg of it was there. The IAEA also believes some is at the sprawling nuclear complex at Natanz, where Iran had two enrichment plants.

>Iran says some highly enriched uranium is needed for medical purposes and for a research reactor in Tehran which ​runs on relatively small amounts of uranium enriched to around 20%.

>The Stanford Faculty Senate voted last week to extend Civic, Liberal, and Global Education (COLLEGE), a program of three general-education courses—Why College?, Citizenship in the 21st Century, and a Global Perspectives menu—that all undergraduates take in their first year. The vote was nearly unanimous. I voted no.

>I did not take the vote lightly. Many colleagues have worked on this program for years, and I acknowledge these efforts. But I cannot support a program I believe will be detrimental to the education we offer our students.

>My objection is not to general ed requirements. The humanities are indispensable to an undergraduate education, and a Stanford degree is incomplete without some exposure to the best of them.

>My objection to COLLEGE is, first and foremost, about rigor and quality and, second, about balance. These are not the courses one expects from one of the world’s best universities. If these courses were electives, I would not recommend them; I would tell students to seek out the best courses Stanford offers in the humanities instead.

>Take Why College?, the course meant to introduce students to the idea of liberal education and the good life. The syllabus assigns six required books—by W.E.B. Du Bois, Paulo Freire, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Tara Westover, Brian Lowery, Robert Sapolsky, and Mary Shelley—and roughly two dozen shorter readings. With the partial exception of Frankenstein, none of the books is a classic of the Western tradition of liberal education. The list is mostly contemporary and largely progressive.

>The syllabus is not entirely without canonical authors. Students read about eight pages of Plato’s The Allegory of the Cave in week two, a short selection from Epicurus and Seneca, and a single aphorism from Nietzsche’s The Gay Science in week eight. By my count, the syllabus assigns roughly 45 pages of canonical Western philosophical writing across the entire quarter, against more than 500 pages of contemporary work organized around identity, oppression, and indigenous ways of knowing—Freire, Dangarembga, Westover, and Kimmerer. The ratio is 11:1. There is no Aristotle, no Augustine, no Aquinas, no Montaigne, no Locke, no Mill, no Newman, no Steiner, no Bloom—none of the writers who built the case for liberal education that the course claims to defend. A course advertised as a defense of liberal education has been built without the thinkers who defined it.

>The intellectual frame the course offers in their place is narrow. Students are introduced to two flavors of determinism—biological (Sapolsky argues free will is an illusion) and social (Lowery argues the self is a social construction)—and to a sustained critique of Western education as an instrument of power (Freire, Dangarembga). Is this the first philosophical orientation we want to offer 18-year-olds arriving at Stanford? Should we not also tell them about virtue, agency, freedom, and responsibility? That case has been made by serious thinkers from Aristotle to Kant to Mill to MacIntyre. It is not made in this course.

>The pattern extends beyond philosophy of education to philosophy of knowledge itself. Week seven of Why College? assigns three pieces by Robin Wall Kimmerer, an indigenous botanist who argues that Western scientific epistemology should be supplemented or corrected by indigenous ways of knowing. Stanford is the university of the linear accelerator, the recombinant-DNA revolution, and a quarter of the Nobel Prizes in physics awarded to American institutions in the last 50 years. Whatever one thinks of Kimmerer’s critique, it is striking that a course introducing Stanford freshmen to the life of the mind assigns 50 pages of a contemporary critique of Western science and not a single page of a contemporary defense of it. The students arriving at this university—many of them on their way to becoming the scientists who will extend the tradition Kimmerer is questioning—are introduced to that tradition primarily through its critics. This is not balance. It is not even pedagogy.

>A colleague argued during the Senate debate that a Burkean conservative should be inclined to preserve what has worked. That is precisely what is wrong with this program. The Why College? reading list is not a preservation of our intellectual tradition; it is closer to a repudiation of it. The course discusses social and biological determinism but assigns nothing from the tradition that took the opposite view—no Aristotle on the virtues, no Aquinas on natural law, no Kant on autonomy, no Mill on liberty. Students are offered several varieties of contemporary materialism by authors few outside the academy have read, in place of the writers whose arguments have shaped Western thought for 2,000 years.

>Quality is my primary concern, but one cannot avoid the question of tendentiousness. The Why College? syllabus is organized around the power-and-identity framework that has done so much to divide our campuses and our country. Selecting Freire, Du Bois, and Dangarembga in the same course, without including a defender of a more classic universalist view of the human condition, is tendentious. The choice of Tara Westover’s Educated fits the same pattern: The only book in the course that depicts a religious, conservative family in any detail presents it as a horror story of right-wing fundamentalism from which the protagonist must escape in order to be educated at all. The fixation of universities on identity politics is one of the reasons they have lost the confidence of the public, and COLLEGE does nothing to address this. It doubles down.

>The Global Perspectives menu has a different but related defect: It is not, in any recognizable sense, general education. The menu is a list of narrow electives—on the ethics of eating meat, on avoiding human extinction, on the global history of queer life, and so on. Some of these may be fine electives. But no coherent argument places any of them at the foundation of a Stanford education, alongside the works and questions that every educated person should encounter. They are general only in the sense that they are required.

>It has been suggested that the program’s defects can be ironed out over time. I would agree if the starting point were high and the intellectual lodestar were clear. Neither is true. The deeper problem with COLLEGE is that it has no intellectual anchor, and I suspect this is by design. In the absence of any commitment to an intellectual tradition, the program will drift wherever the prevailing ideological winds push it, and the direction of those winds on American campuses is not in doubt.

>What makes this a particularly missed opportunity is that COLLEGE comes at a moment when Stanford’s broader curriculum has already drifted further from the Western tradition than that of any peer institution I have been able to measure. Working with a colleague on a systematic text analysis of 15 research-university course catalogs (similar to one conducted for the University of Chicago), I find that the share of Stanford courses whose titles or descriptions are organized around progressive identity themes—race, gender, sexuality, decolonization, and similar categories—has risen from 4.3 percent in 1999 to 2000 to 18 percent in 2025 to 2026. Over the same period, the share of courses engaging the canonical Western tradition—Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Kant, the Enlightenment, classical antiquity—has barely moved, from 3.9 percent to 5.7 percent. In other words, the ratio of progressive to canonical course content at Stanford has tripled, from 1.1 to 3.1.

>The same pattern appears in the cross-university comparison. In 2024 to 2025, Stanford’s progressive-to canonical ratio is 3.3, higher than Harvard’s 1.6, Yale’s 1.8, Princeton’s 1.0, Columbia’s 1.6, Berkeley’s 2.5, and the University of Chicago’s 2.4. In other words, Stanford is not merely participating in a national curricular drift; it is leading it. Among the peer institutions for which same-year comparisons are available, Stanford seems to have moved further from the Western tradition while retaining less canonical content to counterbalance that movement. COLLEGE was an obvious place to begin correcting this imbalance. Instead, it entrenches it.

>Stanford deserves better. Our students deserve better. I voted against this program because I believe a great university can still teach the works that have made our civilization worth defending, and that it should. The question is whether we still have the confidence to do so.

>As the country grapples with the recent spike in fuel costs, members of both parties are calling for a temporary suspension of the federal gas tax (the 18.4 cents per gallon that Americans pay at the pump, or 24.4 cents on diesel). The idea isn’t new. In 2008, then–presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and John McCain proposed a suspension of the gas tax between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Then, as now, the gas tax holiday proposals were more about political theater than improving the lives of drivers.

>The historical record on gas-tax holidays is clear: They tend to create shortages, generate windfalls for some fuel sellers, and expand federal deficits that will drive inflation and interest rates even higher. In the end, there’s always a real price paid by American families for paper economic solutions.

>While legislators should always be working to reduce the burden of government on Americans, and the federal gas tax is long overdue for critical reforms, the devil is in the legislative details. Instead of getting distracted by gimmicks, half measures, and populist shams, Congress should stay focused on the root causes of energy prices and advance permanent solutions for the American people.

>With the global oil supply tightening after the Strait of Hormuz disruption, rising prices are a result of real scarcity. Price increases serve a critical function in the economy: helping avoid and mitigate shortages. When global shocks occur, price changes steer resources where they’re most needed so the economy can get back on track. A short-term suspension of the federal gas tax avoids addressing and could even exacerbate the underlying supply crunch. Meanwhile, Washington would continue spending the cash anyway, adding it to the national debt and raising interest rates on consumers and businesses while inaccurately claiming to have delivered “relief” to the American people.

>The current price spike stems from a supply constraint: the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of the world’s oil flows. Normally, producers respond to higher prices by pumping more. But now, much of that capacity is trapped in the Persian Gulf. Alternative pipelines are at maximum capacity. U.S. production is ramping up, but total output takes time to adjust.

>Companies would foresee the suspension of the gas tax as a fleeting change, so their prices would barely budge as they anticipate the supply crunch staying the same or worsening down the road. Bottom line: Consumers would see little to no relief at the pump, but companies would get a small deficit-financed boost in cash.

>For some, the solution is for the government to seize or redistribute the “windfall” profits that companies would receive from the tax holiday. That would create an identical burden to simply leaving the tax in place and would only make matters worse. Determining the portion of any given wholesaler’s or retailer’s price that constitutes a windfall is nearly impossible. More fundamentally, it would set a dangerous precedent. Energy companies endure boom-and-bust cycles. The prospect of profitable years compensating for losses in lean years is precisely what incentivizes private investors to provide capital for exploration, extraction, and refining. Seize profits when it’s politically convenient, and you’ll scare off investments, guaranteeing less future supply.

>Instead of papering over issues with a temporary gas-tax holiday, lawmakers should permanently reduce the many layers of taxes, fees, and regulations that federal and state governments impose on oil companies in the United States. Contrary to left-wing talking points, companies in the oil and gas industry are heavily taxed, especially the upstream producers focused on oil exploration and drilling. They often pay as much in special taxes such as severance taxes as they do in corporate income taxes. While a corporate-income-tax reduction could expand supply generally, lawmakers could ease the particular burdens on upstream producers through some combination of lower state severance taxes on oil extraction, reduced royalties or lease payments for drilling rights on federal lands, lower federal excise taxes on oil producers, streamlined permitting, and full and immediate expensing of intangible drilling costs.

>There are legitimate grievances against the federal gas tax, and there’s an argument for getting rid of it entirely and shifting highway financing and taxing entirely to the states, as was the case for most of our nation’s history. Too much of the revenue from the gas tax is diverted from highways to environmental reviews, mass transit, bike trails, or green energy projects. Prevailing wage mandates inflate construction costs. And, of course, electric vehicles and hybrids get a free (or relatively free) ride, despite causing more wear and tear on the roads because they are heavier than comparable gasoline-powered vehicles.

>These are real problems worth solving. Simply shifting highway costs to the national credit card isn’t a solution.

>Tax holidays are bad policy.

>Our tax system should have as little day-to-day political interference as possible. Politicians shouldn’t be switching taxes on and off for electoral reasons. Temporary price increases help avoid rampant shortages and ensure that producers are incentivized to invest in expansions of their own production output.

>A short-term gas-tax holiday is ultimately unhelpful because suppliers won’t make long-term changes in response to a temporary tax tweak. Moreover, an overly interventionist government can become a wild card that prevents markets from correcting, and that can lead to the situation going further off the rails.

>The American public deserves better than policies that will exacerbate the problem and serve only as political messaging.

>Opposition to data centers is all the rage among populists of all stripes. On the left, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) has proposed a national moratorium on new data center construction; on the right, Tucker Carlson describes them as "dystopian" and "devouring American energy and jobs." In recent days, X has become flooded with images of pristine American forests, plains, beaches, and lakes alongside captions warning that no data center is worth losing this. (The images are often AI-generated, and many of the accounts sharing them are foreign.)

>Data center panic is fueled by concerns about electricity and water usage. Many Americans wrongly believe that data centers are driving up their electric bill, even though evidence suggests the exact opposite: Data centers may actually decrease electricity costs for their neighbors. Water use fears are even more unreasonable. Data centers don't actually use all that much water.

>For example, a chart comparing data centers' water requirements to almond farms helps put things in perspective.

>California's almond farms consume 4.2 billion gallons of waters per day, according to *Reason'*s Christian Britschgi. Data centers consume just 46 million gallons per day. Those numbers will certainly rise over time, but compared to all the other things that use water—golf courses account for 1.4 billion gallons per day—it's just a drop in the bucket.

>Unfortunately, many foes of data centers do not find this comparison very compelling. Speaking for the opposition, The Federalist's Sean Davis points out that almonds are, you know, food. People eat almonds. They can't eat data. Thus, almond farms are a good use of water and data centers are not.

>Carlson made a similar argument during his debate with Kevin O'Leary, in which he took it as a knock against data centers that they wouldn't provide as many jobs as the city of Manhattan despite taking up more space and using about as much power.

>It's a problem for data center advocates, I suppose, that the good being produced is not as obvious as a job or an almond. But you have to be pretty dense not to realize that the data centers make possible a huge amount of economically beneficial activity. Storing massive amounts of data is a necessary precondition for the modern economy. It will be used to power and train AI models that will improve everyone's lives. AI is already making medical diagnoses more accurate and reducing car crash fatalities via driverless vehicles. AI can swiftly navigate legal, regulatory, and licensing issues, making it easier to start a business or buy a home. As a research tool, it can cut down on time spent learning about a complicated issue.

>Reducing the time it takes to complete an annoying (or dangerous) task is a huge benefit that allows people to spend their time—the ultimate finite resource—more effectively, if only for leisure. If this doesn't seem obviously beneficial, then consider where we would be without search engines at all. Not so long ago, people had to trek to the library and consult an encyclopedia when they wanted information. They had to obtain physical copies of relevant documents: books, newspapers, etc. Being able to summon these things instantly—electronically—has inarguably led to huge gains: There are countless jobs that simply would not exist without it (including internet commentator).

>The United States' economic future is inexorably tied to the tech sector. Gains from AI are vital to the country's stability. In that sense, it's not very surprising to discover that some of the arguments against AI are being made in coordination with the Chinese government. According to the Bitcoin Policy Institute, the Chinese Communist Party has indirectly encouraged a pause or slowing of AI developments *in the U.S.—*but not in China. That's one reason Sen. John Fetterman (D–Pa.), a self-described "pro-capitalist Democrat," called Sanders' data center moratorium proposal "China first."

>In any case, you can't eat an oil rig, a suspension bridge, or a satellite. Yet it should be obvious that these are no less useful—even factoring in land, energy, and water use—than almonds, even if the benefits are slightly less straightforward. This is plainly true for data centers as well, and anyone arguing otherwise deserves suspicious looks.

>The UK Treasury is pushing large supermarkets to introduce voluntary price caps on key groceries in return for lifting some regulations, according to people familiar with the situation.

>Supermarkets have reacted furiously to the proposals, under which grocers would agree to identify and cap the prices of essential goods such as eggs, bread and milk.

>In return, the government has said it would offer “incentives” to the supermarkets, which the people briefed on the matter said could include easing packaging policies and potentially delaying costly changes to rules around healthy food. Some of these measures, such as the packaging regulations, generate revenue for the Treasury.

>The Treasury has suggested to the supermarkets that they reinvest the savings to freeze grocery prices. One person close to the situation said that officials were working with retailers to keep prices down.

>The proposals come as Sir Keir Starmer’s government is battling to address public concern over the cost of living.

>Scottish retailers recently condemned a similar policy by the Scottish National Party as a “1970s-style” gimmick.

> One person close to a supermarket said the Treasury’s initiative was “a rubbish, knee-jerk reaction to the SNP”. Unlike the SNP policy, the UK government’s proposed price caps would be voluntary.

>UK food inflation rose to 3.7 per cent in April, and the foreign secretary Yvette Cooper has warned the world is “sleepwalking into a global food crisis”, with the Middle East war throttling supply chains.

>The Treasury has also told supermarkets that it would like guarantees that British farmers would not lose income from shop price caps.

>Chancellor Rachel Reeves is scheduled to announce measures to help households with the cost of living on Thursday, and the Treasury is pushing for her to be in a position to announce the policy. However, people close to the talks said there had yet to be any agreement.

>“It is a completely ill-thought-out, last-minute idea . . . The idea that the government can set prices better than the market is for the birds,” one person familiar with the discussions said. The Treasury said: “The chancellor has been clear we want to do more to help keep costs down for families, and will set out more detail in due course.”

>Reeves last month met supermarket bosses following industry warnings that food inflation could rise as high as 10 per cent as a result of the Iran war.

> The meeting initially had to be rescheduled after bosses balked at being summoned by the Treasury. When it took place, retailers asked ministers to address government policies that they blamed for contributing to inflation.

>Large supermarkets typically stock between 30,000 and 60,000 individual products. Basic items such as milk, bread, eggs, potatoes, butter and bananas are the most frequently bought.

>Supermarkets have long complained about operating on tight profit margins in the UK. However, Tesco, Britain’s biggest supermarket, recently posted an 8.5 per cent rise in annual pre-tax profits to £2.4bn, on revenues of £66.6bn.

>In Scotland, SNP leader John Swinney responded to industry criticism of his party’s price cap proposal by hinting that it could be implemented voluntarily.

> He has since hardened his position again to insist that he would legislate for a cap during this parliamentary session.

> Swinney, who was re-elected as Scotland’s first minister on Tuesday, previously acknowledged that the UK government could block the proposal. That would create a constitutional dispute.

>Meanwhile Reeves is to introduce what the Treasury called “rapid investigatory powers” for competition watchdogs to crack down on alleged price gouging by companies during the energy crisis sparked by the Iran war.

>Reeves has previously clashed with fuel suppliers who deny they have been engaged in such practices, but the chancellor insisted that the alleged problem must be tackled. “I will not tolerate anyone exploiting a crisis to make a quick buck off the back of hard-working people,” she said.

>It’s about to get harder to earn an A at Harvard.

>The faculty voted to approve a cap on the number of A’s per course, part of the undergraduate college’s yearslong effort to curb grade inflation. The change comes despite sharp backlash from students.

>Administrators and many faculty members argued that the A-cap would challenge students to invest more in coursework by restoring grades as meaningful indicators of academic performance. They say it protects the value of students’ degrees by preserving Harvard’s reputation. 

>The cap limits the number of A’s per course to 20%, plus an additional four A’s to account for smaller courses with more variability. It won’t apply to A-minuses, which committee members predict will take over as the most awarded grade.

>Joshua Greene, a member of the committee behind the grade proposal, compares the current status quo to a marketplace where professors use A’s as currency to buy effort and engagement from students—but professors are also free to print as much money as they want.

>“You need to have a limit on how much currency you can print up, right? That’s what we’re trying to do,” said Greene, also a psychology professor at Harvard.

>Harvard spent years researching ways to fight grade inflation, including examining prior efforts at Princeton and Wellesley.

>A Harvard committee looked at 25 years of grades to model a range of possible remedies, including introducing A-pluses, according to Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh.

>Their conclusion: “Anything short of a cap doesn’t work,” she said. 

>Campus debate increased in the fall, when Claybaugh released a report noting that about 60% of grades were A’s during the 2024-25 school year, a jump from about 25% in 2005-06.

>A student government poll found that most students oppose a cap on A’s, arguing that it would discourage academic exploration and increase stress. Students say the cap treats the symptoms of grade inflation rather than the root cause.

>“You are punishing students for their peers’ performance,” one student surveyed said. “And you aren’t raising rigor, just forcing relative grading.”

>Students’ concerns prompted administrators to delay implementation until fall of 2027, not this fall as originally planned, so professors have time to redesign exams to allow for more differentiation.

>The faculty also voted to replace GPA with percentile rank as an internal metric for prizes and honors such as cum laude. 

>The faculty rejected a measure which would’ve allowed professors to petition to have a course exempted from the cap, instead offering it pass-or-fail, with some nuances to permit further distinction.

>That’s because GPA has become so compressed that distinction is increasingly challenging. For years, Harvard’s Sophia Freund prize—given to the student with the highest GPA—had just one or two winners. Last academic year, there were 55.

>Artificial intelligence is worsening the grade inflation problem, a recent study found. The paper from the University of California, Berkeley found professors teaching AI-exposed classes handed out around 30% more A’s. 

>Harvard hopes other schools will follow its lead—and peer institutions have already indicated they are paying close attention. Yale College Dean Pericles Lewis told the student newspaper that he didn’t want an A at Yale to be seen as lesser than those of its competitors. A report from Yale University released in April found that grades are no longer communicating what students have learned.

>The Yale committee’s recommendation: “Grade like we mean it.”

>Anyone who buys a home without an inspection is asking for trouble. Yet that’s essentially what the Trump Administration wants Congress to do by passing housing legislation so Republicans can claim a victory on “affordability.”

>The House on Wednesday will vote on legislation that makes partial repairs to a ramshackle housing bill the Senate passed this spring. But even with the piecemeal fixes, the legislation’s ban on institutional investors buying single-family rental homes will harm housing investment and lead to unintended consequences.

>Under the Senate bill, investors that own 350 or more homes would be prohibited from acquiring new rental properties with limited exceptions—namely, buying them from other large institutional investors or building with the express purpose of renting them out. Even then, investors would have to sell homes they acquire after seven years.

>This often isn’t enough time to recoup investment, and investors would have to evict renters to sell the homes. Construction on build-to-rent projects stalled after the Senate bill passed amid uncertainty that the developments could be effectively banned.

>Enter House Republicans, who have tried to patch the Senate’s worst flaws. The House bill would eliminate the seven-year divestment requirement, which would save build-to-rent programs, as well as add minor exemptions to the acquisition ban.

>Over the last decade, large investors have renovated some 300,000 distressed homes to rent out. The bill would make it harder to do so, while at the same time providing grants to local governments to award to low-income homeowners to repair dilapidated homes. Why would Republicans want to replace private capital with government management?

>Perhaps because House Republicans are trying to please Mr. Trump. But in doing so, they would also be giving a future Democratic Administration sweeping new powers over housing. Both chambers’ versions of the bill would also give the Treasury Secretary carte-blanche power to rewrite the legislation “to minimize market disruptions” and “mitigate, to the extent possible, negative impacts” on consumers, and communities. If they recognize the ban will do harm, why pass it in the first place?

>Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren championed the ban on investor-owned rental homes, and Mr. Trump embraced it because it polls well. But it rests on the misconception that institutional investors are driving up home prices. They make up only 0.65% of the nation’s single-family housing stock and have been selling properties on net for two years.

>The Federal Reserve’s uber easy monetary policy during the pandemic combined with government stimulus drove up housing prices. Now higher mortgage rates have created a lock-in effect limiting homes for sale. Most single-family home renters lack the savings or credit profiles to buy homes.

>House Republicans have improved other parts of the Senate bill, and their version is a marked improvement. But the investor ban is too problematic to salvage. The original bipartisan housing bill the House passed this year didn’t include the provision. But then Mr. Trump insisted on it to Democratic glee.

>Now we’re told Democrats are refusing to vote for the bill without it. They are also trying to extort Republicans by making more demands like Davis-Bacon prevailing wage requirements for housing construction because they know the White House is desperate to pass anything called a housing bill.

>The White House is pressing Republicans to accept the Senate bill rather than work out differences in a conference committee. But it would be better if the legislation collapsed than for the Senate bill to become law. Mr. Trump may want to tout the bill, but as it stands the biggest winners would be the political left.

>The Justice Department on Tuesday expanded the agreement it reached this week with President Trump to resolve his extraordinary lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service to include a provision that would bar the agency from pursuing tax claims against the president, his family or his businesses.

>In a one-page document signed by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and quietly posted on the department’s website, officials vowed not to pursue any matters, including those involving Mr. Trump’s tax returns, that are currently pending.

>The new provision was released just one day after Mr. Trump agreed to drop his suit in exchange for the creation of a $1.8 billion compensation fund for people he believes were wronged by federal investigations or prosecutions. The fund drew repeated criticism from Democrats when Mr. Blanche appeared before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee for a hearing on Tuesday morning.

>The New York Times reported last week that Mr. Trump’s talks with the Justice Department and the I.R.S. had included a measure calling on the I.R.S. to drop any audits of the president, his relatives or businesses. But that provision did not appear in the nine-page agreement laying out the terms to dismiss the lawsuit, which the department released Monday.

>In January, Mr. Trump, along with two of his sons and the Trump family business, sued the Internal Revenue Service for at least $10 billion over the leak of their tax returns during the president’s first term. The Trumps argued that the I.R.S. should have done more to prevent a former contractor from disclosing tax information to The New York Times and ProPublica.

>Neither the Justice Department nor the I.R.S. immediately responded to requests seeking comment. The top lawyer at the Treasury, Brian Morrissey, resigned on Monday after the Justice Department announced the settlement with Mr. Trump.

>Justice Department officials have in part defended the creation of the “anti-weaponization” fund by pointing to the fact that Mr. Trump and his family members will not be paid by it.

>But protection from audit could be quite remunerative for Mr. Trump. In 2024, The Times reported that a loss in an I.R.S. audit could cost Mr. Trump more than $100 million.

>It is unclear if that examination has concluded or if Mr. Trump, his family members or affiliated entities are under other audits. I.R.S. procedures call for the mandatory audit of the president’s tax returns annually.

>Federal law prohibits the president, vice president and other executive officers from instructing the I.R.S. to start or stop specific audits. But that broad prohibition does appear to include a carve out for the attorney general.

>With Ukraine stabilizing the front line and striking more and more targets deep inside Russia—while Russia’s spring offensive has hit a wall—perhaps it is true what Col. Nicholson said in The Bridge on the River Kwai: “Suddenly you realize you’re nearer the end than the beginning.”

>With prospects that the war may be approaching a ceasefire, if only a temporary one, toward the end of this year or in 2027, European policymakers should be clear-eyed that once the fighting stops in Ukraine, Europe will enter its most dangerous period vis-à-vis Russia. Europe’s military capabilities—and thus ability to deter—will likely be at their weakest point relative to Russian power. Allies will face a Russian military that has grown in size, absorbed nearly five years of combat experience by then, and built real advantages that Europe has been slow to match and will need years to catch up to, especially stand-off warfare and dynamic targeting from behind the front line. What’s more, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s only instrument for forcing his demands to restore Moscow’s Soviet-era sphere of influence is his military. Europe thus faces a hammer-and-nail dilemma: For Putin, every problem looks like one that he can solve with war. That makes the risks very clear.

>It is thus worth revisiting my role in a December 2025 war game, when I attacked NATO and won. That is, I played the role of the Russian chief of the general staff in a war game at a German military college. Although the game involved battles, it was not an operational war game testing a campaign plan, military doctrine, or force design. Rather, the focus was on political decision-making. My task as a member of the Red Team was to create a military crisis on NATO’s eastern flank and force the Blue Team, the German government, to react to it. By attacking Lithuania in my first move, I so overwhelmed German political and military decision-making that NATO’s most important European ally did nothing.

>Held at the German Bundeswehr’s Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg and produced as a podcast by the Berlin newspaper Die Welt, the war game received outsized media attention—including when a journalist asked NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte about its outcome during a press conference.

>The interior of a dimly lit, modern operations center filled with multiple computer monitors and large wall displays. Personnel in military uniforms sit at workstations, and one woman in the foreground gazes toward the screens. The displays show various digital maps, aircraft footage, and organizational logos.

>French soldiers participate in a NATO war game exercise at an airbase near Lyon, France, on Dec. 3, 2025. Olivier Chassignole/AFP via Getty Images

>To beat and essentially break NATO, I focused on three simple points where I believe Russia holds an advantage.

>First, speed. The fundamental problem for NATO is that in a military scenario involving one or more of its Baltic members, Russia will already have a large number of troops in the area. NATO, as of 2026, does not. Along the Russian and Belarusian border with NATO, sizable Russian formations will be positioned in the event of a crisis. NATO, by contrast, needs time—days at best, weeks or more at worst—to bring up reinforcements. Second, if Russia acts quickly, it can seize ground in a limited offensive before a counter-attack materializes. Third, Russia should be able to hold that ground and threaten to escalate to the nuclear level, deterring NATO from counterattacking. Why do I believe this? Because Germany’s political leaders dare not pose a fundamental question head-on: Would they actually risk a direct war, possibly a nuclear one, against Russia for a Baltic state?

>The scenario was pretty straightforward, if not to say standard, for these types of games: After a hypothetical Russia-Ukraine ceasefire in the summer of 2026, Moscow offers Berlin economic cooperation and a return to pre-war relations, even as the Kremlin escalates its threats against the Baltic states and claims that there is a humanitarian crisis in Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave. Following joint Belarusian-Russian military exercises in western Belarus, NATO observes that Russia and Belarus keep 12,000 soldiers stationed there. Vilnius warns of an impending “emergency” in Kaliningrad. The war game begins at the end of October 2026 with Russian troops still in Belarus.

>The first question I asked “Putin” as the Red Team military leader was whether that was all the troops I had at my disposal. I was told no. So I quickly went about expanding my attacking force, drawing from four Russian combined arms armies to maximize our military options. There was the anvil from Kaliningrad: the 11th Army Corps. The hammer from Belarus: elements of the 1st Guards Tank Army, around 12,000 troops as the advance force, combined with elements of the 76th Guards Air Assault Division and several thousand troops in support. Right behind them would be the 20th Guards Combined Arms Army to provide mass and flank protection against Poland, while the 6th Combined Arms Army from the Leningrad Military District would tie down NATO forces in Estonia and Latvia on the northern flank.

>A close-up of several individuals in camouflage military uniforms seated at a table. One man in the center looks intensely toward another person whose back is partially to the camera. On the table, several papers with tactical diagrams and a pair of binoculars are visible.

>Russian President Vladimir Putin inspects joint Russian-Belarusian military drills at a training ground in Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, Russia, on Sept. 16, 2025.Sergei Bobylyov/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

>The plan was simple: Elements of the 1st Guards Tank Army and the 76th Air Assault Division would push from Grodno, Belarus, through Druskininkai, Lithuania, northward toward Marijampole, Lithuania. Simultaneously, the 11th Army Corps would advance with a couple of thousand troops eastward from Kaliningrad. Within 24 hours, they were to link up at Marijampole with the 20th Guards Combined Arms Army securing the flanks of that force. Once that is achieved, a second echelon of forces would move in and dig in. The Baltics would then be effectively cut off from Poland and the rest of NATO.

>All of this would be preceded by special operation forces trying to secure important bridges and intersections needed for the advance. The Russian force would be mobilized under the cover of military exercises with troops leaving and going over months and leaving equipment behind in select assembly areas.

>My two Red Team colleagues—Alexander Gabuev, the director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, who played Putin, and Arndt Freytag von Loringhoven, a former German diplomat and intelligence official, who played Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov—in a sense dictated all of this with their political strategy. We went through the military plan in an online meeting a week before the game. Our objective: Destroy NATO but keep the Americans out. Put otherwise: Render NATO discredited and incapable of keeping Russia from dictating the terms of a new security order in Europe. The main objective was therefore to destroy the credibility of NATO and the European Union through a limited incursion. Hybrid warfare alone, although it played an important role in the run up to the conventional campaign, would not get us there. Why not use the best instrument in our arsenal, Russian conventional military power? Taking my cue from what Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby told the Europeans at this year’s Munich Security Conference, I wanted to stay clear of hitting Americans—at least deliberately—to make sure Washington would stay out and tell the Europeans to take the lead. In the game this worked. In reality, of course, this could theoretically turn out different.

>The game designers, from what I gathered, did not anticipate a conventional attack; perhaps their focus was on Russian hybrid warfare involving “little green men” like in Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine. But a conventional attack seemed reasonable given the state of NATO defenses in Lithuania and how fast I would expect at least a part of Russia’s forces to reconstitute after a potential ceasefire in Ukraine. Learning from Ukraine and drawing on the much improved Russian military proficiency in dynamic targeting to prevent a NATO counterattack through the Suwalki Gap, I would turn the corridor into a kill zone by exercising fire control through drones integrated with artillery, with permanent surveillance and hundreds of strike drones and mine-laying drones supported by a robust air and missile defense umbrella.

>A large, colorful relief map lies on a grassy field, enclosed by a white concrete frame. The map features sections of yellow, green, and blue, marked with various tactical symbols, small flags, and miniature military models. A person in camouflage uniform leans over the map, placing a small white marker near a cluster of symbols.

>A Ukrainian officer examines a large tactical map during military exercises near Rivne, Ukraine, on Sept. 18, 2008.Sergei Supinsky/AFP via Getty Images

>I knew that as long as we kept the Americans out for 48 hours, there was little risk of an immediate European response. European NATO forces would certainly not attack without first degrading Russian air defenses, which they could not do in the fall of 2026 given the limited offensive power of their air forces and a lack of SEAD/DEAD capabilities, including the shortage of anti-radiation missiles and the lack of equipment for breaching operations. These known European shortcomings were exactly why I had the Russians dig in and fortify the corridor immediately once the incursion was successful. I asked repeatedly during the game: Is no NATO counterattack coming? But no NATO forces were anywhere to be seen.

>I certainly pointed out to my political leaders that the attack came with a high risk of failure. The roads in Lithuania are narrow, and there are too few of them. The surrounding terrain is forested and partly swampy. There are chokepoints where our advance could certainly have been stopped. And there were at least two brigade-sized Lithuanian troop formations to deal with during the initial incursion. I planned to degrade these with a combination of drone and artillery strikes, given their and NATO’s lack of adequate drone countermeasures and air defense.

>The game ended before a NATO counterattack and before the Lithuanians mounted a counterstrike. Had those played out, a Russian failure would have been possible and perhaps likely. But the question of whether a counterattack might cause Russia’s plan to collapse misses military reality: In an age of drone, artillery, and missile proliferation, Russia does not need to physically control terrain in order to cut off the Baltics. It can exercise fire control with long-range precision strikes, rocket artillery, drones, and remote mining. Exercising fire control over the Suwalki Gap today is much easier for Russia than over the Ukrainian frontline in 2023 and 2024. Since then, Russia has made great strides in dynamic targeting, and this advantage would be boosted by the absence of U.S.-deployed SEAD/DEAD capabilities during the first 48 hours of a Russian operation.

>Strategically, the war game’s successful incursion into Lithuania was a nice add-on, but whether it failed or succeeded was of secondary importance when even fire control from outside Lithuania’s borders can cut off the Baltics from the rest of NATO and impose a dilemma on NATO decision-making. If Washington holds back to let the Europeans take the lead, will they accept excessive casualties caused by their lack of U.S.-level capabilities to disintegrate Russian air defense and ground-based precision strike complexes in a counterattack? Would the Europeans still attack—or yield to Russian political demands in order to avoid a potential bloodbath? Would Poland attack on its own, despite those missing capabilities? In the event of a NATO counterattack, I had prepared a plan that used nuclear brinkmanship to frighten the German political leadership: The activation of tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, Kaliningrad, and western Russia would have accompanied an ultimatum that the corridor was not negotiable. We did not need that phase in the game. We achieved our objectives without it by paralyzing the German political leadership while the Americans stayed out.

>

>In total, the operation drew on roughly 100,000 Russian troops in the wider theater, including air defense, logistics, aviation, and second‑echelon formations. Of those, about 12,000 ground troops formed the forward advance force from Belarus on the main axis, reinforced by a few thousand additional maneuver elements from Kaliningrad. I also realized that without an immediate U.S. response—such as air strikes against Russian forces in Kaliningrad, Belarus, and Lithuania—an attack on NATO in the Baltics is in some respects militarily simpler than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The distances are shorter, the military objectives more limited, and Russia’s opponents—at least in the initial phase—weaker, even if they constitute the most powerful military alliance in the world.

>But above all, what I take away is that Germany and especially its political leaders must confront uncomfortable yet fundamental questions if Europe is to persevere in such a crisis. Forget the sermons about being committed to NATO’s Article 5. The single, underlying question is whether Germany believes that it’s worth going to war with Russia over the Baltics, even without U.S. help. Is there a genuine consensus on an answer to this question? Is Berlin willing, in the extreme, to endure Putin’s nuclear brinkmanship? Are Germans mentally ready for war?

>If those questions cannot be clearly answered before a crisis takes place, then Germany and NATO risk being simply overwhelmed by Russia’s speed and resolve in a real-world military crisis, especially during the initial phase. Deterrence depends not only on military capabilities—which are lacking—but also on what the enemy believes about your resolve. In the war game, my “Russian” colleagues and I knew: Germany will likely hesitate. And that was enough to win.

>Many on the right have joined President Donald Trump’s heated ridicule of the behavior of our European allies during Operation Epic Fury: their risk aversion, penchant for process over decision and action, and overall lack of preparedness and capability to confront the Iranian terror threat, while simultaneously criticizing the one ally with the will and capability to do so. The transatlantic alliance has in fact been unhealthy for some time, dating back to before the Obama administration conspired with German Chancellor Angela Merkel to reset relations with Russia and pursued policies, including the Paris Climate Accords, that weakened the West to the advantage of China. But there is much more to the story, and today both sides of the Atlantic should grapple with some hard truths and work to end the feuding. The United States needs NATO allies and is the indispensable leader of the alliance for the foreseeable future.

>“I am not currently recommending any additional changes to our posture in Europe.” That was the congressional testimony of General Alexus Grynkewich, commander of the U.S. European Command and the NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe, on March 18. Roughly six weeks later, the Department of Defense announced that it would withdraw 5,000 American troops from Germany. The announcement followed President Trump’s Truth Social post suggesting that he was considering withdrawing troops after German Chancellor Friedrich Merz claimed that Iran was “humiliating” the United States.

>The Department of Defense then sent a notice to Congress specifying that the planned deployment of a Long-Range Fires Battalion (LRFB) to Germany was also canceled. That deployment was possible only because Trump rightly withdrew the United States from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty during his first term, after Russia deployed prohibited systems in violation of it. He did so over intense opposition from Democrats. The Biden administration was later forced to grapple with the same acute Russian threat to Europe and, remarkably, initiated the deployment of the LRFB to strengthen deterrence and prevent Russia from expanding its war beyond Ukraine. The LRFB deployment could have been a masterly strategic accomplishment of Trump’s second term. But it is now poised to be undone by his own war department — if Congress permits it. There is already bipartisan objection to the announcement.

>In early March, Merz said that he and Trump were “on the same page in terms of getting this terrible regime in Tehran away.” He was right. The Islamic Republic’s terrorism exports and missile force have posed as great a threat to European security as they have to American and Israeli security. But the war is unpopular in Germany, and Merz’s claim that the Iranians were “humiliating” the United States was aimed at a domestic audience. As bad as the comment was, removing U.S. troops from Germany isn’t a reasonable punishment in part because, despite Merz’s public kvetching, Germany has been quietly and steadily enabling Trump’s ongoing war against Iran. General Grynkewich explained during those recent congressional hearings that, despite the initial and highly publicized British refusal to permit the United States to initiate bomber strikes against Iran from the joint base at Diego Garcia, and despite complaints from some European politicians, the reality is that European countries are helping, and more than passively so.

>Merz’s public insistence that “Germany is not a party to this war, and we do not want to become one” does not change the fact that Germany has been key to Operation Epic Fury. Ramstein Air Base is a central command-and-logistics hub for the military campaign, and there are no flight restrictions at German bases. Germany under Merz has also been receptive to the United States’ urging that Europeans share more of the defense burden across NATO and shoulder more of the help for Ukraine. Germany is the largest European buyer of American weapons and the largest supplier of weapons to Ukraine. Under Merz, Germany has agreed with Trump’s criticisms of previous German policies to dismantle nuclear power plants in favor of dependence on Russian gas. Friedrich Merz is no Angela Merkel.

>In London, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s ghastly decision to prevent the United States from operating freely from Diego Garcia was reversed within days. The United States has since operated freely out of the joint base, as well as out of RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire and a network of other U.K. bases, including RAF Menwith Hill, RAF Molesworth, RAF Croughton, and RAF Digby. And, despite Starmer’s condemnations of the United States’ war against the Iranian regime, the U.K. military is working closely with the Americans on providing intelligence. British politicians may have pandered to domestic audiences who oppose the war, but British air defenders have been busy intercepting hundreds of Iranian drones heading toward Gulf states where American forces are deployed, and the Royal Air Force is flying sorties in the Middle East to help counter Iranian attacks.

>France’s Emmanuel Macron has also aggravated Trump. At a dinner, Trump said Macron was willing to help with the Strait of Hormuz, but only after the war ended. Trump mocked the French president and derided NATO as a “paper tiger.” But France is also playing an important role in support of Operation Epic Fury. The French are giving the United States access to sovereign French bases and granting overflight access to hundreds of sorties. They sent air-defense systems, including a SAMP/T and multiple helicopters, to the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Kuwait. This is in addition to the dozens of Rafale fighters they have deployed to the UAE for air-to-air defense. The French armed forces have moved their sole aircraft carrier from the Baltic Sea to the Eastern Mediterranean, positioned eight frigates in the wider Northern Indian Ocean, and are currently routing two minesweepers to the region.

>Among NATO’s smaller members, public support from their governments has been clearer. Belgium’s defense minister called the U.S. war “a righteous cause to try to decapitate the Ayatollah regime.” All three Baltic states have expressed support for the United States. Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna of Estonia stated that Estonia backs the United States and Israel in “every action that curbs the Iranian regime’s capabilities,” and dozens of Estonian parliamentarians signed a statement of support. Lithuania’s president put the matter bluntly: “We cannot say with one hand that the presence of U.S. troops on the territory of Lithuania is a matter of course and we simply accept it as a given, but when we are asked to contribute to international missions, we say that this is none of our business.” No doubt if they weren’t rightly prioritizing the acute threat from Russia, they would send whatever military forces they had.

>Asign of the strange times is that some commentators, taking cues from President Trump’s public haranguing of European allies, now suggest that the Gulf states are more helpful allies than old Europe. Sure, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE are cooperating with the United States and Israel by sharing intelligence and allowing logistical access. It represents a welcome change in the region. Still, this new and bolder support does not come close to the contributions the United States receives from European allies, whose integration with the U.S. military reflects decades of joint planning, earned trust, and military competencies forged through combat in the Middle East and coordinated war-gaming exercises as part of active deterrence against Russia.

>Even so, Trump has threatened to punish Europeans for not doing enough or for their political leaders’ public criticisms. Beyond removing troops from Germany, ideas have ranged from withdrawing troops from Spain — despite the indispensability of Naval Station Rota — to no longer recognizing the Falklands as British territory, a report mercifully dismissed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Redeploying U.S. forces may sometimes be necessary as threats change, but removing troops as punishment from host nations that enable U.S. power projection amounts to cutting off America’s nose to spite our face.

>This does not mean that American frustrations with European allies aren’t legitimate. Starmer’s public criticisms of the war, antagonistic remarks about Israel, and initial refusal to grant full access to Diego Garcia earned anger not only from President Trump. Republican members of Congress who value NATO and the special relationship were dismayed by London. Spain was — and remains — the European ally most defiant of Trump and opposed to seeing the United States win Epic Fury. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez not only condemned the war; the socialist leader also lambasted Trump and has refused to permit United States strikes from Spanish bases. Spain has long been an obstinate NATO member and was the only ally to refuse Trump’s call for defense spending at 5 percent of GDP, the alliance’s stated standard.

>The fact is, though, that while NATO’s members share a national security interest in an American victory, Operation Epic Fury is not a NATO mission. The United States neither informed nor consulted allies, nor did it ask for assistance, before it and Israel went to war. There were sound reasons for acting this way, but it nonetheless makes it politically difficult for European leaders to express enthusiasm at the start of the war. Compounding matters, Trump initiated Epic Fury mere weeks after threatening to forcibly take control of Denmark’s territory of Greenland and publicly humiliating ally leaders who opposed those threats.

>Trump’s focus on Greenland has shone a spotlight on the United States’ profound national security interest in preventing Russia or China from taking control of the Arctic. But the threat to forcibly seize Greenland — even if one believes it was a Trumpian maximalist bluff — created a serious rupture of trust among allies who had been willing to bear with tariffs and public rebukes, and it collapsed goodwill among the most pro-American factions in European capitals, where favorable views of the U.S. dropped to an all-time low.

>European conservatives from the U.K. to Germany to Poland who otherwise expressed solidarity with Trump and the American right on border security and immigration also condemned the Greenland gambit and did so forcefully. And there is no political support in the United States for seizing Greenland, which likely explains why the president dropped the issue and left it to Rubio and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte to pursue a diplomatic resolution with Denmark.

>What made the episode especially breathtaking was its timing. Just months earlier, Trump had been praising Europe’s willingness to invest more in conventional defense and shoulder a greater share of NATO’s burden. The Greenland crisis also followed immediately after the highly successful U.S. raid to capture Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro. That achievement should have dominated the news cycle, allowing the administration to highlight its military competence and deter adversaries. Instead, Trump’s Greenland threats had a serious negative impact on U.S. influence and worked directly against his broader objectives, including rallying allies to help open up the Strait of Hormuz.

>It is one thing to demand that allies rebuild and invest in their militaries and carry a greater share of the collective defense burden; it’s quite another to castigate them, let alone threaten their sovereignty. It should surprise no one that European democratic leaders now lack domestic political mandates to openly join the war. And yet, because of abiding shared interests, Europeans have been working with the United States to execute Epic Fury, if only quietly.

>So what now? Europeans are at least a decade or more from having the military capabilities to replace what the United States provides. They need the United States to remain the backbone of NATO for the foreseeable future. And the United States needs the collaboration of its European allies not only to help provide security against Russia but to project power into Africa and the Middle East from European bases. Again, Grynkewich explained this to Congress. He said, “To fly bombers from the United States, or even from locations in the theater, and project power into the Middle East requires a tanker bridge. That tanker bridge is projected from USEUCOM bases.” In plain English: we refuel, safely, from supportive and trustworthy European allies. To remove the infrastructure in Europe that gives U.S. forces communications, weapons-detection abilities, intelligence, and logistics would cost the United States dearly.

>It’s time for the U.S. and Europe to cease the feuding.

>The United States is winning against the Islamic Republic, but to turn military success in the campaign into a geopolitical masterstroke, Trump will need an international armada to escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz. And to get that, he will have to adjust his diplomatic approach — not toward our enemies but toward our allies. Rather than publicly berating allies, he should move the disagreements to private channels. It should go without saying, but there should be some formal acknowledgment on the U.S. side that there will be no more threats over Denmark’s territory. And on the other side of the Atlantic, European leaders should explain to their skeptical publics that the American campaign against the Iranian regime has served their interests, has made them safer, and merits support.

>Security conditions in the Strait of Hormuz are sufficient for the mission to be underway, which is why the United States is more forcefully transiting the strait with U.S. Navy destroyers. Operation Epic Fury has eliminated most of Iran’s defense-industrial base, including its ballistic missile arsenal, launchers, and long-range drones. Iran’s navy has been largely neutralized after losing 150 warships and the bulk of its naval mine inventory. More than 250 senior Iranian officials have been killed and some 2,000 command-and-control structures struck.

>Even so, the rump Iranian regime continues to try to attack U.S. ships, and it appears that Trump is prepared to resume military operations against Iran to further degrade the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ ability to terrorize the strait. European leaders should support the resumption of U.S. strikes and stand ready with a multinational armada as soon as the last wave of operations concludes. The more the United States can internationalize its efforts to restore and maintain a free and open maritime corridor through the strait, the faster — and more permanently — it can reopen a choke point that carries roughly 25 percent of global seaborne energy. The official position of the U.K. is that it is willing to help keep the strait open, and the French defense minister has said that the French, Belgians, and Dutch have a joint mine-clearing program that they could contribute. They’re not the only potential partners. Bringing more allies into the campaign would help overwhelm whatever IRGC elements remain willing to harass shipping along the coast.

>Although U.S. energy dominance enables the United States to absorb disruptions caused by Iranians terrorizing the strait, it remains politically desirable for Washington to end the war decisively — and as soon as possible — and to bring gasoline prices below $3 per gallon. For U.S. allies and partners, reopening the strait is not merely desirable but imperative.

>India, for example, sources nearly half of its crude oil through the strait, and the conflict is already inflicting costs on the population of this crucial U.S. partner. While only about 4 percent of European crude oil imports pass directly through Hormuz, Europe has reduced its dependence on Russian energy by sourcing roughly 8 percent of its liquefied natural gas import requirements from Qatar, shipments that must also pass through the strait. That shift followed pressure that began during the first Trump administration to end reliance on Russian energy, including sanctions implemented on the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline. To complete the picture, 75 percent of Europe’s jet-fuel imports come from the Gulf region. For Japan, around 95 percent of oil imports pass through the strait; for South Korea, roughly 70 percent of crude imports do so.

>It is intolerable for the United States or any of its allies to permit Iran to run an extortion racket by charging fees for safe passage. Doing so would concede unacceptable leverage to Tehran — and by extension, to China, Iran’s most powerful backer — and set a dangerous precedent for Chinese ambitions in the South China Sea. Whether or not Trump says he needs allies and whether or not allies want this war to be their war, shared interests remain clear: The Islamic Republic must lose and the United States and Israel win.

>Trump is at his best when he urges Europeans to be strong and to work with the United States. As Secretary Rubio said in his Munich speech, “We believe that Europe must survive, because the two great wars of the last century serve for us as history’s constant reminder that ultimately, our destiny is and will always be intertwined with yours. . . . We should be proud of what we achieved together in the last century, but now we must confront and embrace the opportunities of a new one — because yesterday is over, the future is inevitable, and our destiny together awaits.”

>King Charles III recently concluded a warm state visit to the United States, which could not have been timelier. Trump and Charles got along very well, and Trump even lifted sanctions on Scottish whiskey as a favor to Charles — even after Charles delivered a speech to a joint session of Congress extolling Ukrainian bravery and underscoring the need to support NATO. The address elicited a bipartisan standing ovation and compliments from Trump. The visit gives Europeans something to build on. Repairing transatlantic relations is necessary, and Trump has shown he is willing to change course if it serves his interests. Trump’s direction to remove 5,000 American troops from Germany may be redeemed, if, for example, the president shifts them to NATO’s eastern front — Poland or Romania — and he can easily reverse the decision not to deploy the LRFB missile battalion. Poland has already publicly signaled it would be happy to host additional U.S. forces. The threat from Russia against Europe remains acute, and this move would go a long way to assure allies and Putin that the United States is committed to NATO.

>We have heard often that “America First” does not mean America alone. But if the United States behaves like a bully toward its allies, we may find ourselves feeling increasingly lonelier than we’d like. Trump has initiated a war that American and Israeli forces have executed with the help of allies — privately — to the benefit of the entire world. Allies will be needed in a much more public way to help win the peace.

>The ​Trump administration is planning to tell NATO allies this week that it will shrink the pool of military capabilities that the U.S. would ‌have available to assist the alliance's European nations in a major crisis, three sources familiar with the matter said.

>Under a framework known as the NATO Force Model, the alliance's member countries identify a pool of available forces that could be activated during a conflict or any other major crisis, such as a military attack on a NATO member.

>While the precise composition of those ​wartime forces is a closely guarded secret, the Pentagon has decided to significantly scale down its commitment, said the sources, who requested anonymity to ​speak candidly about the plans.

>U.S. President Donald Trump has made clear he expects European countries to take over primary responsibility for ⁠the continent's security from the United States. The message to allies this week is a concrete sign of that policy being implemented.

>Several details were unclear, such as ​how quickly the Pentagon plans to shift crisis-mode responsibilities onto European allies. The sources said, however, that the Pentagon plans to announce its intention to lessen its ​commitment at a Friday meeting of defense policy chiefs in Brussels.

>Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby has said publicly that the United States will continue to use its nuclear weapons to protect NATO members, even as European allies take the lead on conventional forces.

>The U.S. will likely be represented by Alex Velez-Green, a key aide to Colby, the sources said. Adjusting the NATO Force ​Model has emerged as a key priority of Colby's team heading into the next NATO leaders' summit, which will take place in Turkey in July, one of ​the sources added.

>Speaking to reporters in Brussels, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said he was not allowed to disclose the upcoming U.S. announcement but the move was "to be expected" as ‌the alliance ⁠seeks to "end the over-reliance ... on one ally" for its defence.

>"This was to be expected, I think it's only right that it happens," Rutte said.

>The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

>ALLIANCE UNDER STRAIN

>The NATO alliance is under unprecedented strain, with some European countries concerned that Washington may withdraw outright. A major adjustment to the forces the U.S. would make available during wartime will only intensify those concerns.

>In the past few weeks, the Trump administration has announced plans to cut about ​5,000 U.S. troops from Europe, including a ​decision to cancel a deployment of ⁠an Army brigade to Poland - a surprise decision that was slammed by U.S. lawmakers.

>One of the sources and another source familiar with the matter said aides on Capitol Hill were aware of and concerned about the Pentagon's plans to narrow its ​commitments under the NATO Force Model.

>A senior NATO diplomat said, however, they still believed there is an understanding that the ​United States would come ⁠to Europe's aid if it was in trouble.

>Trump and many of his aides have slammed European allies for not spending enough on their militaries and relying on the U.S. for conventional defense, and they point out that the U.S. still has tens of thousands of troops in Europe.

>The president's ambition to take control of Greenland, a Danish overseas ⁠territory, has ​further inflamed transatlantic tensions, as has an ongoing spat between Trump and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, ​who has sharply criticized Trump's war with Iran.

>European allies generally counter that they are rapidly beefing up their military capabilities, but that doing so cannot be done overnight.