r/DeepStateCentrism

>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.

Weekly get-it-out of your system post.

>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.

>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.

>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%.

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The Country of the Week is: the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia.

>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.

Pakistan has sent 8000 troops to Saudi Arabia, honoring a defense treaty. This is part of the emerging Mogadishu axis between Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt. These are all Sunni powers that value stability in the Middle East, because they stand to gain from it by being larger powers. By contrast, the Berbera axis consists of the UAE, Israel, and Ethiopia. These are regional powers that are strongly anti-Islamist and militarily powerful in their own right but stand to gain from a shifting balance of power in the Middle East. The UAE funds secular militias like the RSF in Sudan and STC in Yemen, hoping to find routes to import gold. They ally with Ethiopia and Israel to assert Somaliland’s independence, so Israel can counter the Houthis and Ethiopia can have greater port access through Somaliland (it is a landlocked country). This has put them at odds with Somalia, which is backed by Saudi Arabia who does not want greater UAE control of the Red Sea straits, and also supports anti-UAE factions in Sudan and the Yemen. Egypt and Turkey also side with Saudi Arabia, as Turkey has major investments in Somalia and opposes Israel, while Egypt is threatened by the dam being built by Ethiopia. Both alliances are seeking new alliances from abroad. Pakistan’s close religious and cultural ties have made it a natural ally for Saudi Arabia and the Mogadishu axis. India, in opposition to Pakistan and supportive of Israel, has moved closer to the Berbera Axis, including the UAE

For a moment on Saturday night, Israel was in first place at Eurovision.

I was watching from London, refreshing the votes. The public count had just come in for Israel, two hundred and twenty points on top of a strong jury score, and for a brief minute, the leaderboard rearranged itself. Israel at the top. Bulgaria second. A boy from Ra’anana, in a leather jacket, was briefly the winner of a contest a thousand artists had spent a year demanding he be excluded from.

The crowd in the arena booed.

You could hear it through the broadcast, the sound of a room realizing what the rest of Europe had just done in private. Then Bulgaria’s televote came in, the order corrected, and the night was over. Bulgaria won. Israel came second. The headlines, by the time I’d brewed a pot of tea, were already calling it a defeat.

I want to tell you why those headlines are wrong, and why the reason is bigger than Israel. What happened on Saturday in Vienna is one of the most revealing political events in Europe this year, and almost nobody is going to tell you what it means.

The seventieth Eurovision Song Contest was almost the same as the previous. Sequins, key changes, the whole camp ritual that turned the most-watched non-sporting broadcast on earth into a punchline decades ago.

This year, the ritual was haunted. For months, activists had promised that Vienna would be the site of a reckoning. Three thousand protesters would form a wall of bodies around the arena. The world would see Europe reject Israel in real time.

A few hundred showed up on Saturday. A similar protest earlier in the week drew a couple of dozen for what was supposed to be the great anti-Israel rally of the European spring.

Inside the arena, the production team braced for chaos. Noam Bettan, Israel’s twenty-eight-year-old contestant, had spent months rehearsing his performance against simulated boos played through his in-ear headphones so his voice wouldn’t crack when the crowd turned against him. A young man practicing his vocal performance to a soundtrack of his own audience hating him. Try to think of another industry where the artist trains for hostility before the performance. There isn’t one. Eurovision has become a war zone with a glitter cannon.

Five countries had pulled out entirely. Spain, Slovenia, the Netherlands, Iceland, and Ireland. It was the largest political boycott Eurovision has seen in more than fifty years. Their broadcasters made the decision for their audiences, on their behalf, with no public vote. The very people who had spent a year demanding Israel be silenced silenced their own people first. Almost no one found this strange.

Look at who stayed in.

Norway recognized a Palestinian state two years ago and still showed up to sing. Belgium is currently lobbying the EU to sanction Israel, and still showed up to sing. Norway, the country that gave the world Munch and Grieg. Belgium, the country that gave the world Rubens and Jacques Brel. Countries with serious cultural traditions, countries whose histories taught them what it costs to silence an artist. They disagreed with the Israeli government as loudly as anyone in Europe, and they still understood that disagreement is not the same thing as a boycott. You can criticize a country’s government and still let its singer compete. Norway got that right. Belgium got that right.

Spain didn’t. Spain boycotted, and then, when its broadcaster did cover the contest, it broke EBU rules on air by putting a political slogan on screen during the live broadcast. The countries with the moral confidence to disagree played by the rules. The country that wanted to perform its disagreement broke them. Tell me which has more integrity.

Noam Bettan is the son of French immigrants. He grew up in Ra’anana. He has the kind of face Israeli mothers describe as a good boy, which means handsome enough to be on a billboard and earnest enough to be at the Shabbat table.

The night before the final, he was photographed praying. Kiddush, Friday evening, in a Vienna hotel, while two hundred protesters chanted outside. There is something almost unbearable about the image. A young Jewish man making the blessing over wine while the city outside negotiated whether he was allowed to sing.

He performed third. “Michelle,” a love song about a fictional woman, sung in a voice that, against every prediction, did not crack. The crowd that was supposed to drown him out sang along. There were boos. There were also thousands of people in that arena who had come specifically for him, who waved flags he wasn’t allowed to bring on stage, who shouted his name when the cameras cut to him in the green room.

He finished his performance. He thanked Europe. And then he said, on live international television, Am Yisrael Chai.

The people of Israel live.

A boy from Ra’anana, in leather, on the stage where Europe was supposed to humiliate his country. He said it. And then he waited for Europe to vote.

Before I tell you what Europe did, I want you to hold something in mind.

Boycotting art is not new. Threatening artists is not new. We could easily be living in a world today where Picasso was erased because he painted Guernica against Franco. A world where Michelangelo was buried because the Church decided his nudes were pagan. Where Beethoven was silenced because his politics offended the wrong court. Pussy Riot, in our own century, was jailed for a song.

Every one of those artists had a political agenda. Picasso was a communist. Michelangelo was a heretic by half the standards of his age. Beethoven dedicated and undedicated symphonies based on who was invading whom. Pussy Riot showed up in a Moscow cathedral specifically to provoke.

Noam Bettan had one agenda. To sing.

He didn’t write a protest song or call out a government. He sang a love song called “Michelle” in a leather jacket on a stage in Vienna. And a coordinated international movement spent a year trying to make sure he couldn’t.

This is a categorical shift, and we should name it. The boycott campaigns of history we now teach as cautionary tales were aimed at artists whose art was political. The campaign against Noam was aimed at an artist whose only offense was the passport on his entry form. There was no song to object to and no statement to denounce. There was only a young man with a microphone and the wrong nationality.

If you can boycott an artist for existing, you have abandoned the principle that art is judged on its merits. You have decided that some artists are not entitled to be heard at all. We used to call that a blacklist, and we used to feel proud of ourselves for opposing it.

We have one now. It is pointed at Jews.

When you stop and ask what the campaign against Noam was actually about, you arrive at a question that should not need to be asked in 2026. Should Jews be allowed to sing in Europe?

A thousand artists signed letters saying no. Five broadcasters and the activists outside the arena said no.

Europe, in the privacy of its own televote, said yes.

Eurovision works in two parts. National juries, panels of music industry professionals whose names are kept secret, award half the points. The public, voting privately by phone, awards the other half. The system was designed to balance critical expertise against popular taste. This year, it accidentally became something else, a referendum on whether Europe’s institutions still represent Europe.There is something the headlines missed entirely. Eurovision doesn’t vote once. It votes three times. There are two semifinals before the final, each one a separate count of juries and public across the participating countries. Israel performed in the second semifinal earlier in the week, and Noam topped it. First place. The highest score of any country in his group. Three nights later, in the grand final, Europe voted again and put him second only to a once-in-a-decade Bulgarian dance hit. Twice in one week, in separate votes, with separate juries and separate publics, Europe placed the Israeli at the top of his group. Once is a moment. Twice is a verdict. Now the final itself.

The juries went first. Last year, most of them boycotted Israel and refused to award a single point. The boycott was so coordinated that it became a story in itself. This year, twenty-two of the thirty-four national juries gave Israel points. Poland’s jury gave the maximum twelve. Ukraine, Moldova, Albania, Austria, and Lithuania all gave eight or above. The boycott broke quietly. No press release. No apology for last year. No admission from anyone in the industry that they had been wrong. The juries simply, individually, decided they couldn’t keep doing it.

Then came the public vote, the part that the institutions can’t control. A hundred and seventy million people in their living rooms, with their phones, voting privately. No broadcaster to please. No activist to perform for. No coworker to justify it to on Monday morning. Just a person and a button.

Israel finished third in the public vote out of thirty-seven countries. Two hundred and twenty points from the audiences of Europe.

Six countries gave Noam the maximum twelve points from the public. France, Finland, Azerbaijan, Switzerland, Portugal, Germany. Look at that list. No bloc, no shared diaspora. Six different corners of the continent, plus a Muslim-majority country, plus Germany, which, given its history, has every institutional reason to keep its distance from Israeli politics and every emotional reason not to.

Total result: 343 points. Second place for the second year running.

Here is something almost nobody reported. On Eurovision’s official Instagram account, the platform where the institution itself chooses what to amplify, Noam Bettan’s performance was the most-watched video of the entire contest. The contestant a thousand artists wanted banned, who five countries boycotted, who the New York Times tried to frame as a marketing operation rather than a musician, was the contestant that the most people chose to watch.

You can’t organize that. You can’t buy it or bot it. That is the audience telling you, in raw numbers, what they wanted to see.

To understand why this matters, you have to understand how Eurovision actually works. Voting patterns are one of the most studied datasets in European cultural sociology. Bookmakers factor them into odds. Researchers build models around them. They have a name: bloc voting.

Greece and Cyprus give each other twelve points so reliably that it has become a running joke. They’ve done it for decades, on shared history and a shared grievance over Turkey. The Nordics cluster, exchanging high points like family members passing dishes at a table. The former Yugoslav states fought each other in living memory and still award each other points, because culture moves more slowly than politics. The Baltics are a bloc.

These aren’t conspiracies. They’re soft power maps. They show you who Europeans feel cultural proximity to, who has neighbors, and who has a community willing to vote on autopilot.

Think of Eurovision voting like a high school cafeteria. Everyone has a table. The Nordics sit together, the Yugoslavs sit together, and Greece and Cyprus have been best friends for years.

Israel sits alone.

There is no Israeli bloc because there is no Israeli neighborhood. The closest countries geographically are Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and none of them compete. The countries with the largest Jewish populations after Israel itself are the United States and France, and the United States doesn’t compete either. Israel walks into Eurovision every year as the kid with no lunch table, hoping someone across the room will wave them over.

And what just happened is this. The kid with no table got picked third by the entire cafeteria.

Bulgaria won this year because it had a song that crossed blocs. “Bangaranga” topped jury and public votes simultaneously, which almost never happens. It was, on the merits, the song of the year, and Bulgaria deserves the win. I want to be clear about that.

What I want you to notice is something else. Every point Israel earned, it earned on its own. There was no bloc to inherit and no neighbor returning a favor. Twelve from France. Twelve from Germany. The Swiss, the Portuguese, the Azerbaijanis, and the Finns all gave Israel twelve. These are not countries with historic obligations to vote for Israel, and not countries with large Jewish populations driving the result. These are countries whose general public, in a private vote, decided that the Israeli song was the song they wanted to win.

The campaign against Israel framed every Israeli high finish as suspicious. Bought, driven by bots, or manipulated by the state. The New York Times wrote two stories suggesting exactly that, and admitted in both that there was no evidence for any of it.

Here is the thing about Eurovision that the campaign never wanted to admit. The public vote is the most honest political instrument in Europe. No polling bias. No social desirability effect. Just a phone and a button and a private moment of preference.

When Europeans were given that private moment, they chose Israel third out of thirty-seven. Despite everything.

That is not a result you can spin. That is a confession.

Which brings me to the New York Times.

The Times spent the last week of the Eurovision cycle publishing what it called an investigation into Israel’s Eurovision campaign. The piece suggested, without ever quite saying so, that Israel had used Google ads and state-backed promotion to manipulate the public vote. The phrase used was “embraced Eurovision as a soft power tool.”

Buried in the article was a sentence that should have killed the story before it ran. There was no evidence Israel had used bots or covert tactics to manipulate the vote.

Every country promotes its Eurovision act. Every Eurovision entrant films a glossy postcard showcasing their country’s most beautiful locations, with no mention of unemployment or government corruption. Israel did what every country does. The Times turned it into a scandal.

The night of the final, the Times posted an Instagram carousel summarizing the contest. Ten photos. Every other country got a performance shot. A singer mid-note, an artist on stage, a moment from their three minutes in front of Europe.

Israel got Noam holding a flag.

He wasn’t singing or on stage. He was a photograph of a man and a symbol. The caption explained that the contest had been overshadowed by protests over Israel’s participation.

The Times could not bring itself to show an Israeli singing. It could only show a Jew holding a flag, captioned with controversy.

Imagine the New York Times covered the Olympics this way. Every American gold medalist photographed with a flag rather than crossing a finish line. Every American victory paired with a paragraph about what activists thought of America. Every profile of an American athlete spending more time on what the country had done wrong than on what the athlete had accomplished.

We would notice. We would suspect, correctly, that the people making those editorial choices had a position they were not quite willing to say out loud.

That is how the New York Times covers Israel. Not just at Eurovision. Always.

The pattern in Times coverage of Israel is not random or coincidental. It is a house style. The institution has developed, over the years, a way of writing about Israel that treats it as a perpetual exception. In the New York Times’ rendering, every other country is a contestant. Israel is a problem.

In the actual contest, Europe voted for Israel third. The most-read newspaper in the world could not bring itself to tell its readers that. So it told them, instead, that he was something to apologize for.

Here is the gap that Eurovision exposed.

Official Europe, meaning the broadcasters and the activists and the newspapers and the artists’ letters, spent a year insisting that Israel should be banned, ostracized, treated as a pariah.

Actual Europe, meaning the people in their living rooms with their phones, voted Israel third out of thirty-seven.

That gap is the most important political fact on the continent right now. The institutions that are supposed to represent European opinion have decoupled from European opinion. The people who write the letters and run the broadcasts and edit the papers are no longer in alignment with the public they claim to speak for.

Think about it the way you’d think about a marriage where the couple’s friends keep insisting they’re miserable. The friends post about it. They write op-eds. They organize interventions. And then you actually ask the couple, in private, and they say they’re fine.

At some point, you have to stop listening to the friends and start listening to the couple.

Eurovision is Europe answering the question in private. The friends have been screaming for a year. The couple just said: We like the Israeli singer. We voted him third.

This is not unique to Israel. You see it on migration, on free speech, on climate, on the cost of living. The institutions and the public have separated. The Eurovision result is just an unusually clear data point, because the public got to vote without a filter.

What Eurovision told us is that the campaign to make Israel toxic in Europe is succeeding institutionally and failing publicly. The broadcasters can boycott, the artists can sign letters, the newspapers can write framing, and the activists can organize. And the public, in private, will still vote for the Jew.

That isn’t a victory for Israel. Israel came second.

It is something stranger and more interesting. It is evidence that Europe, when you actually let Europe speak, is not the place its institutions have been telling us it is.

The campaign to delegitimize Israel relies on the idea that there is a consensus. That all decent people agree. That the only thing standing in the way of justice is a few stubborn Zionists and the politicians they’ve bought.

Eurovision said: There is no consensus, and there never has been. The consensus was manufactured by the people who already had the microphones.

Eurovision is supposed to be the silliest night of the year. The campy one, where everyone gets drunk and votes for the country with the best costume.

But it isn’t that anymore.

Now it’s the only night Europe tells the truth.

Watch what people choose when no one is watching them. That is where the actual continent lives. Not in the headlines. Not in the press releases or the boycotts. In the private vote, on a Saturday night, when a Jewish kid from Ra’anana sings a love song and three hundred and forty-three points come back.

That is the Europe that actually exists.

The rest is theater.

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The Country of the Week is: the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia.

US forces operating from bases in Middle Eastern nations invited attacks from Iran, forcing a realignment with the US. Given the US interpretation of the mutual defense treaty between the US and the ROK, where forces stationed in Korea can be used in contingencies in the wider region, the author argues that South Korea may find itself a target regardless of its preconflict signalling, and therefore should become more involved in US defensive operations, while refusing to participate in or aid offensive actions.

>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.”

In 1788, Virginia convened a convention to debate the ratification of the new U.S. Constitution, promulgated in Philadelphia the year before.

The pardon power proved to be a sticking point for some delegates. George Mason, the primary author of Virginia’s own constitution, was among those worried that the unchecked ability to unilaterally pardon criminality could lead to abuses of power. What if the president “may frequently pardon crimes which were advised by himself”?

James Madison acknowledged that this would be a serious abuse, but argued there was a remedy.

“There is one security in this case to which gentlemen may not have adverted,” Madison said, “if the president be connected, in any suspicious manner, with any person, and there be grounds to believe he will shelter him, the House of Representatives can impeach him; [and] they can remove him if found guilty.” 

This episode has gathered fresh attention in the wake of the January 6 riots, and the impeachment trial it ignited. President Trump was impeached but not convicted.

That was a mistake in my opinion. But I’m not here to relitigate it. I want to be forward-looking.

The British statesman Edmund Burke famously argued that one of the “fundamental rules” of a decent society was that “no man should be judge in his own cause.”

For the Founders, this insight informed the logic of the entire constitutional project. Burke’s observation was so universally agreed upon it often came up—sometimes without attribution— in debates at the Constitutional and ratifying conventions.

Madison invokes the idea in Federalist 10, in the context of faction and the need to have separation of powers. “No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause; because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity.” 

Alexander Hamilton cites it in Federalist 80 as the reason why federal courts should adjudicate disagreements between states—it was assumed that state judges might be biased toward their own side of the dispute.

This idea lurks behind all of Congress’ powers and responsibilities, including advice and consent, the sole authority to tax and spend, the power to declare war, and, of course, impeachment. Presidents are not arbitrary rulers. They are stewards, with defined and limited powers.

On Monday, President Trump settled a $10 billion lawsuit brought by himself. In his first term, Trump’s tax returns were illegally leaked. When Trump returned to the presidency, he filed suit against the Internal Revenue Service. So, as a constitutional matter, Trump is suing the executive branch he runs for a crime committed by the IRS back when he ran it in his first term.

Realizing that the courts might find this too cute to countenance, the Justice Department and IRS—both, again, run by Trump—compromised by creating a $1,776,000,000 fund (that “1776” before all the zeros is a play on the country’s 250^(th) birthday) that Trump will control. Its primary function would be to compensate the January 6 rioters, all of whom he has already pardoned.

 On Tuesday, the DOJ announced that Trump, his family and business will be functionally exempt from IRS audits or prosecutions from any past tax returns, literally placing him above the law.

The president recently said that if China invades Taiwan, he alone will determine whether the U.S. will defend Taiwan. “Me. I’m the only person,” who decides. Last summer, Trump told The Atlantic that the difference between his first term and his second was that he didn’t have anyone in his administration to hinder him. This time, “I run the country and the world.” Congress and the courts don’t enter into it.

After Trump unilaterally replaced at gunpoint the president of Venezuela with a pliant satrap, without the approval of Congress, the New York Times asked if there were any limits on his will: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

I began with a discussion of the pardon power and impeachment for a reason. Contrary to thousands of hours of impeachment legal punditry going back to the Nixon administration, a president doesn’t have to commit a crime to be impeached. As Hamilton writes in Federalist 65, impeachment involves “the misconduct of public men” and “the abuse or violation of some public trust.” Impeachments are “POLITICAL” (Hamilton’s all-caps) because they injure “society itself.”

It may, in fact, be legal for the president to be the judge in his own cause and create a taxpayer-financed slush fund for him to reward cronies and henchmen on a whim. It is already clear that presidents can launch wars without Congress or the courts unduly getting in the way. But I struggle to think of hypothetical scenarios that would be more likely to arouse in Madison and his contemporaries the—now misplaced—reassurance that impeachment was an available remedy.

>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.

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>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.

American Jews have achieved unprecedented safety, integration, and success in the United States, yet we carry a long historical memory in which periods of apparent security elsewhere, again and again, ended abruptly in exclusion, violence, murder, or expulsion. I grew up with a deeply personal connection to the Holocaust and with sensitivity to how the erosion of democratic institutions and the descent into fascism enabled the rise of Nazism. My father, Richard Sonnenfeldt, was a German Jewish refugee who fled to England in 1938 and then, at 23, became the chief interpreter for the American prosecution at the Nuremberg trials, and ultimately Hermann Göring’s personal interpreter.

Intellectual honesty requires acknowledging that the United States is not Weimar Germany or Eastern Europe’s Pale of Settlement, where deadly pogroms against Jews were a regular feature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. America’s constitutional order—independent courts, federalism, a free press, and a robust civil society—provides formidable safeguards against the translation of social hostility into state persecution. Jews are not a tolerated caste here but full participants across every sector of civic life: business, academia, media, the professions, government, the arts. Jewish confidence in America’s resilience is not foolish. The challenge is to hold that warranted confidence alongside a warranted fear.

And yet, for Jews, the question of security for Israel requires its own response to that historical vulnerability, and Israel’s founding created a moral and political tension that many of us find it difficult to reconcile. In 1947, the United Nations adopted a partition plan that contemplated two states, one Jewish and one Arab. It treated that decision as a legal basis for Jewish sovereignty, even as it was rejected by the Arab world, which responded by invading the just-born Jewish state. The invasion failed.

Though the ideas of modern political Zionism long predate the Holocaust, Israel was established by the world community in response to the unimaginable atrocities and extermination perpetrated by the Nazis, who murdered one out of every three Jews on the planet. Perhaps no other people in history suffered such losses. The United Nations General Assembly affirmed the legality and necessity of a Jewish state, and its founding was supported by a majority of UN member states. Even so, the Palestinians who were displaced by the establishment of the state of Israel deserve a chance at freedom and normalcy, too.

Israel’s traditional response to the events of 1948—that the displacement of Palestinians was a tragic consequence of a war Arab states started, and that it was paralleled by the expulsion of roughly 850,000 Jews from Arab countries—is true, but inadequate. There are moral issues about those Palestinians who lost their home that are not solved by the fact that the Arab states fought to destroy Israel from its inception. It is particularly necessary to ask whether the relentless Jewish settlement of the West Bank—the core of any future Palestinian state—is meant to deny Palestinians what they deserve.

But if the declarations and recognitions of Israel’s right to exist by the world at Israel’s founding do not constitute that right, then we have no international norms or laws that can be relied on. And yet, if one believes the world did give Israel the right to exist as a Jewish homeland, the question remains: What does justice require for the Palestinians who were displaced? I do not have solutions, and I am unsure this circle can ever be fully closed, because the world granted Israel a right to exist that the population of Arabs never agreed to. But that right was granted, and millions of Jews have immigrated to Israel, and for 80 years Jews around the world have supported Israel and its reliance on that right and recognition. To argue that the 8 million Jews of Israel have no right to exist as a polity, and must be exterminated or displaced, is, of course, genocidal in intent.

What I know for sure is that there will be no perfect outcome for either party. The goal is to avoid more bloodshed and displacement on the path to a reality in which both Jews and Arabs can live in peace and dignity in the two states that ought to exist between—as the saying goes—the river and the sea.

For much of modern American history, anti-Semitism followed a well‑understood pattern. It was most visibly rooted in the nationalist and authoritarian right, while the political left, broadly conceived, was a coalition of progressive activists focused on labor, civil rights, women’s rights, minority rights, environmental protection, and social justice. Jews were not only part of that coalition; we were among its most ardent institutional builders and philanthropic supporters. Jewish lawyers litigated civil‑rights cases. Jewish donors funded Black‑led organizations. Jewish students and clergy marched alongside Martin Luther King Jr. Let’s not forget the memories of Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, Jewish activists who were killed with James Chaney in Mississippi in the cause of civil rights during the Freedom Summer of Mississippi in 1964. For decades, most American Jews understood ourselves as allies—and often champions—of progressive causes well beyond our own communal interests.

In recent years, that moral and political alignment has frayed. Many American Jews now experience anti-Semitism not only from the nationalist right but from growing segments of the left as well. Progressive coalitions we once helped build have weakened, and in some cases Jews experience hostility or exclusion from organizations we supported for generations. This is not simply a story about disagreement over policy; it is also about the emotional shock of betrayal.

That sense of alienation and dislocation intensified after the October 7, 2023, attacks in Israel. Jews around the world identified instinctively with the victims of mass murder, rape, and kidnapping. Yet in the immediate aftermath, many found themselves not merely criticized but implicitly blamed. Jewish students were harassed on campuses; Jewish institutions required heightened security; even expressions of grief were sometimes met with suspicion. The shock was not only the scale of anti-Semitism but its moral inversion: Jews felt ourselves cast as perpetrators even while mourning Jewish victims of barbaric violence. As but one example of many, more than 30 student organizations at Harvard signed a statement after October 7 that held “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” At once, we became both victim and defendant.

The Anti‑Defamation League reported 8,873 anti-Semitic incidents in 2023, a 140 percent increase from the prior year and then the highest number on record since the ADL began tracking such incidents in 1979. In 2024 the number of incidents rose again, but at a slower pace. The dramatic increase took place primarily in the period following October 7, but the larger point is that what felt, for many years, like a marginal social pathology has returned as a visible feature of public life. Even when anti-Semitism appears as “mere rhetoric,” Jews have learned to take that rhetoric seriously, because it is often the early stage of a darker sequence.

For many American Jews, another source of estrangement has unfolded in parallel: a growing distance from Israel’s current government. American Jews who largely inhabit the center and the left—politically, culturally, and morally—feel disillusioned and betrayed by an Israeli leadership that appears intent on blocking the creation of a Palestinian state and seems committed instead to permanent domination. This estrangement is further complicated by the widening regional confrontation with Iran. I profoundly disagree with the direction of Israel’s government but still believe that Iran must be prevented from acquiring a nuclear weapon. And although I may feel alienated from Israeli leadership, I do not feel alienated from Israelis themselves. I am deeply sympathetic to civilians whose daily life is being turned upside down by rockets, sirens, bereavement, and sustained mobilization. Solidarity with people living under existential threat is not the same as endorsement of the policies of those who govern them, even if that distinction has become difficult to articulate.

My discomfort is exacerbated by an inability to reconcile my steadfast belief in the need for Israel to survive and thrive with a lack of clarity about what solutions could ever evolve to produce a durable peace with the Palestinians. I reject both the illusion that Israel can secure itself through permanent domination and the dark fantasy that dismantling Israel would produce justice or peace.

These contradictions place many American Jews in an untenable position. Many of us believe deeply in Israel’s right to exist, and many of us believe the United States should help Israel defend itself against existential threats, because as America’s only democratic ally in the Middle East, Israel’s survival is in the United States’ interest. At the same time, we cannot ignore the profound moral questions raised by the conduct of the war in Gaza, or dismiss the concerns of those who fear that American arms are being used in ways that violate humanitarian law. Understanding the impulse to condition military support is not the same as abandoning Israel; it can be an expression of anguish about what Israel, under its current leadership, is becoming.

I have long been invested in Israel’s security and its pursuit of peace. In the 1990s, at Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s request (and in coordination with Prime Ministers Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak after Rabin’s assassination), I led dozens of missions to the Middle East as a leader of the Israel Policy Forum, meeting with most of the region’s leaders, and specifically with Yasser Arafat on seven occasions. That experience left me firmly committed both to Israel’s right to exist free of concerns about security and terrorism and to the moral and strategic necessity of a just peace. It also left me with humility about how hard peace is to achieve, and how easily events can make reasonable positions seem naive.

Many American Jews, some reluctantly, others more enthusiastically, have gravitated toward the political right, often drawn less by domestic policy than by what now appears to be clear and forceful Republican support for Israel, and by a perception that Republicans have been more aggressive in confronting anti-Semitism on college campuses that have lost their way.

I am unlikely to become a Republican, given how sharply many core Republican policies diverge from my values and from those of the large majority of American Jews. Some Jews lean Republican to minimize taxes as part of a belief in conservative economics and smaller government, while others are attracted to the Republican Party’s right-to-life, marriage, or immigration policies. But what is most clear is that a higher percentage of Republican Jews support Israel when compared with Democratic Jews. In recent years, Republican rhetoric and actions toward Israel, particularly in confronting Iran, have often been more unequivocal than those of Democrats. Too often, Democrats have minimized anti-Semitic excesses on campuses and within parts of the progressive ecosystem out of fear of splintering a coalition that includes activists whose politics have become intertwined with Palestinian solidarity.

Many young Democrats have explicitly called for suspending weapons sales to Israel, motivated by a genuine belief that Israeli military actions have crossed moral and legal lines. I understand this impulse. The scale of Palestinian-civilian suffering is unbearable, and the restraint expected of a democratic state at war must be higher, not lower. Israel’s extraordinary technological, military, and economic success has altered perceptions. Today, Israel is often understood to be the aggressor rather than a besieged democracy fighting for survival. And yet, historical memory complicates that moral clarity. For most of its nearly 80 years, Israel was not a regional superpower but a vulnerable state surrounded by enemies openly committed to its destruction. Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran’s leadership are no less dedicated to Israel’s destruction today than they were during the decades when Israel’s survival, not dominance, defined its strategic posture. That history shaped a belief, deeply ingrained in my generation, that Israel required some flexibility and understanding from its allies as it defended itself against existential threats.

Younger Jews, especially those in the secular, liberal-leaning Jewish mainstream, feel less attachment to Israel than American Jews of my generation do. This is not simply because many care less about Jewish identity, but because they have grown up in what has been, historically, the safest, freest, and most tolerant period Jews have ever experienced in the Diaspora. In America, the past 80 years have been the most favorable environment for Jewish flourishing in two millennia. Younger Jews have not felt flagrant anti-Semitism directly, so they often feel more secure in America and less reliant on Israel as an existential safeguard than members of my generation do. When confronted with images of devastation in Gaza and with an Israeli government they view as right‑wing and extremist, they feel less solidarity with a state they do not recognize and whose leadership they reject.

That distance is understandable, but it is also shaped by distance from the Holocaust and from periods when Jewish safety in liberal societies proved tragically fragile. Anti-Semitism has reappeared, in varying forms, in almost every diasporic society where Jews have flourished over the past two millennia, including societies that once seemed secure, enlightened, and permanent. My disagreement with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies is vehement. But my belief in Israel’s central importance to the survival and dignity of the Jewish people remains unshaken. I hope for and work toward a future Israel led by more balanced, moral, and pluralistic leaders. But I have concerns about a Jewish future without Israel’s continued existence and strength.

Anti-Semitism is rising sharply in the United States at the same time that traditional alliances with progressive organizations are weakening, political identities are being reshuffled, and emotional ties to Israel are strained by policies that clash with deeply held democratic and ethical commitments. The simultaneity of these pressures—political, moral, and psychological—is what makes the present moment feel so destabilizing.

Holding multiple truths does not require treating them as morally equivalent. Jewish history teaches with devastating clarity that democratic institutions are not merely another value, but the condition that makes a minority’s safety possible. We can debate policy, argue strategy, and tolerate contradiction. We cannot accept the erosion of pluralistic democracy as the price of order, security, or ideological victory. That lesson, more than ideology, anchors where I ultimately stand. Democracy is not merely one cause among many. It is the condition that makes all other fights possible, the one condition on which American Jews (and other minorities, too) depend most to ensure our continuance as full citizens with rights protected by our Constitution.

If that hierarchy is true, it carries obligations. It means investing in the unglamorous work of democratic maintenance: strengthening the rule of law, supporting free and fair elections, protecting independent courts, defending a free press, and reinforcing a civic culture capable of disagreement without dehumanization. It means continuing to build institutions that expand opportunity through education, economic mobility, and inclusion, because societies that allow despair to fester are easier to polarize and harder to govern democratically. Above all, it requires insisting that fighting anti-Semitism means not retreating into sectarian isolation, but rather engaging pluralistic coalitions more honestly: calling out anti-Semitism on the left and the right without ideological exception, and refusing to excuse it for the sake of tactical convenience.

We cannot trade constitutional norms for partisan advantage, or confuse forceful rhetoric with moral seriousness. Jewish history does not require us to choose strongmen over institutions; in fact, it warns us what happens when we do.

America remains the only large country in history where Jews have become fully equal citizens under a constitutional order strong enough, so far, to withstand waves of hatred and scapegoating. If that order weakens, Jews will not be the only victims, but we have more reason than most to understand what follows when minorities lose the protection of the law.

Preserving and strengthening democratic institutions also means fighting for a pluralistic, democratic Israel: an Israel not dominated by a right‑wing religious government that has alienated many, if not most, American Jews; an Israel capable of moral self‑correction; and an Israel that continues to pursue the possibility, however remote, of a just and enduring peace with the Palestinians. That may be too much to ask of any generation. But Jewish history suggests that the price of asking for less is higher still.