The Social World

Category: Politics

  • Elon Musk is in exile

    Elon Musk is in exile

    Elon Musk is in exile. He’s forgotten by friends, embattled by enemies. He now quietly (for him) goes about his business, fighting non-government battles after those strange few months he spent standing behind the President’s desk with his toddler son X, who punched Musk in the face while he was seemingly running the country.

    Musk’s fate is a case study in what happens when Donald Trump rolls up the red carpet. Trump operated his first term as President more like a season of The Apprentice and less like an administration. It was a revolving door of exile. Reality-show worthy characters like Omarosa Manigault Newman and Anthony Scaramucci came and went with drama that fell just short of an episode-ending boardroom ceremony.

    The second attempt has been more controlled and disciplined. Trump’s original cabinet is more or less intact eight months into the term. There has been a little fraying around the administration’s edges, with the sudden dismissals of IRS head Billy Long after two months and CDC head Susan Monarez after a few weeks, but considering the man in charge, it’s been pretty much business as usual, with no major exiles from his court.

    With one notable exception: Elon Musk. Musk’s brief turn as shadow co-President already seems a distant history. But it filled our lives with intrigue. Who can forget his “Nazi salute” the day before Trump’s inauguration, accompanied by the very un-Nazi-like utterance “my heart goes out to you”? That induced a moral panic unlike any other we’ve seen in our time. Then in February, wearing sunglasses and a black baseball cap bearing the “Make America Great Again” slogan in gothic lettering, Musk waved the “chainsaw for bureaucracy” on stage, causing millions of angry liberals to soil their adult diapers.

    Musk has learned the hard way that America, like a Tesla robotaxi, can pretty much drive itself

    For months, the world’s richest man functioned as Trump’s useful idiot, his ketamine-huffing court jester, making showy noises about reducing the size of government through his newly formed Department of Government Efficiency (DoGE), introducing us to sub-jesters like “Big Balls,” sleeping on a cot in his makeshift DC headquarters, and causing USAID and State Department employees to weep into their potted plants on the way out the door. While Trump began enacting his aggressive second-term agenda, Musk drew much of the flak. Angry vandals and protesters set Teslas on fire and scratched swastikas into their doors. We didn’t elect this man, the people (some people) screamed. Get him away from our Social Security numbers!

    Then, weeks before the summer solstice, it was over. On Memorial Day weekend, Trump said a fond goodbye to Musk, who was wearing a black T-shirt that read “The DOGEFATHER,” in the Oval Office. Trump said that Musk had brought about a “colossal change in the old ways of doing business in Washington.” It was the “most sweeping and consequential government reform effort in generations.” Also, Trump added, Elon was “really not leaving.” “This will be his last day, but not really, because he will, always, be with us, helping all the way,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “Elon is terrific!”

    “DoGE is a way of life,” Musk told reporters. “Like Buddhism.”

    Immediately after, Musk veered off the eightfold path. He started criticizing Trump’s tariff policies and called the Great Big Beautiful Bill “a disgusting abomination.” In response, Trump threatened to sell the “everything is computer” Tesla that he’d purchased in a showy Rose Garden ceremony. He called Musk “the man who has lost his mind.” Musk, in response, said he was starting a third political party, the “America party,” and said that Trump was named in the Epstein Files.

    After a few brief détente tweets, the Musk administration was over, and the Musk Exile had begun. By July, the Wall Street Journal was reporting that Musk was “burning through executives.” Around the time that Musk’s Grok AI on X transformed itself into “MechaHitler,” Musk announced that Linda Yaccarino, the head of X, was leaving. “Thank you for your contributions,” Musk said, in a decidedly non-Trumpian way. Around the same time, Omead Afshar, head of sales and operations for Tesla North America, also left Musk’s orbit. In order to stabilize matters, Tesla’s board of directors offered Elon a $29 billion stock package to stay on at the company, and to stay focused, an amount of money that, even for Musk, had to reduce his attention deficit.

    As for the “America party,” it appears that will never get off the ground. The Wall Street Journal reported in late August that “Musk and his team haven’t engaged with many prominent individuals who have voiced support for the idea of a new party or could be a crucial resource to help it get off the ground, including by assisting with getting on the ballot in crucial states.” That doesn’t seem promising. “It’s almost an eerie silence,” said a previously hopeful Libertarian party official.

    Instead, rumors abound that Musk, who spent $300 million to help Trump get re-elected, including handing out random million-dollar checks to voters, is planning to throw his support behind J.D. Vance’s 2028 campaign. The world’s richest man, no longer allowed at Trump’s court, is back to courting favors with his checkbook again. Meanwhile, Trump has quietly not cut any of Musk’s government contracts, and Musk himself has been relatively silent in public. His X feed has been reduced to endless complaints about the world’s declining birthrate and wan retweets of “England has fallen” threads.

    The most manic episode in American history is over. Elon Musk has gone from shadow President to shadow-banned, but the “I bought this car before he went insane” bumper stickers remain on Teslas all around blue ZIP codes. It’s time for Elon to get back to colonizing Mars. He’s learned the hard way that America, like a Tesla robotaxi, can pretty much drive itself.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15, 2025 World edition.

  • Liberalism is a lost cause

    Liberalism is a lost cause

    The worst book title of the modern age actually belongs to a superb work: The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism, which the English sociologist Colin Crouch wrote in 2011. The title was meant to play off the historian George Dangerfield’s 1935 book about the politics of the United Kingdom before World War One, The Strange Death of Liberal England. Alas, after almost a century, not many people remember Dangerfield. A larger problem is that it is hard to say what liberalism is, neo- or paleo-, dead or alive. In Europe, it mostly means the free market. In the United States, it mostly means various movements for social betterment pushed by those skeptical of the free market. Liberalism thus comes to mean every political tendency and its opposite.

    Fourteen years after Crouch, in The Collapse of Global Liberalism, the Irish economist Philip Pilkington argues that liberalism is finally on its deathbed. Pilkington views liberalism as earlier generations of political philosophers did: as one long process of replacing relations based on “status” with relations based on “contract.” Since the days of John Locke, the heart of the liberal idea is that every human being is free to make his own choices: why should I have to worship in the state church if Father X is preaching next door and I wish to listen to him?

    Liberalism aims to increase happiness by smashing every rule and razing every institution that keeps individuals from contracting freely with one another. If we were all only individuals, that would be great. But we also belong to institutions that care for us and allow us to care for others – families, churches, fraternities – and liberalism has destroyed these as well. Liberalism, Pilkington argues, has a decidedly dark side and he has a theory that ties together the seemingly disparate phenomena that people hate about it, from credit default swaps to the Iraq War to Drag Queen Story Hour.

    Liberal economies, which promise prosperity, cannot produce the main thing they need to guarantee it

    There are many paradoxes about liberalism. Breaking all these traditions and keeping voluntary organizations from re-emerging requires a huge role for law and lawyers. So it never feels like we’re getting freer. A country is forbidden to subsidize industry if it wants to join the World Trade Organization or the EU or some other institution of “free” trade. A businessman is forbidden to hire his old friends according to the anti-discrimination laws that govern the “free” market. For Pilkington, liberalism is a bit like communism – a set of sweet ideals realizable only through ruthless measures.

    And like communism, it is failing. American deindustrialization started the avalanche. When American businessmen broke their contracts with their own workers to profit from cheap labor abroad, liberals were ready with excuses. The world was “embracing our liberal values.” Except it wasn’t. Deng Xiaoping’s xiaokang system of “moderate prosperity” in the 1970s, Beijing’s “Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign” against pornography in the 1980s, Zhu Rongji’s fight against western speculation in the 1990s – China thinks its illiberal path was the better one. Pilkington agrees. One of his darker conclusions is that it is too late to do anything about it. China took over the synergistic culture of technological innovation the United States possessed till this century, and it would take us decades to get it back.

    For Pilkington, the Russo-Ukrainian war is a turning point. The US underestimated the industrial base that the now thoroughly deindustrialized West would require to keep Ukraine in the fight. And it overestimated its ability to bring Russia to heel through sanctions. Cutting off Russian energy to Europe undermined our allies’ economies; freezing (and considering stealing) Russia’s currency reserves undermined our own status as an honest broker in the global marketplace, and the power of the dollar along with it. “So what?” one might reply. The US has been screwing up all century long – but it doesn’t seem to stop us. The difference is that an anti-liberal alliance has formed (that of the BRICS countries) which, if not more powerful than the liberal West, is at least strong enough to circumvent American-controlled institutions and resist US intimidation.

    It all happened so quickly. “The global liberal world order should have been able to put up a better fight,” Pilkington observes. He blames “the bizarre upside-down culture and morality of late liberalism,” and he has a smart, simple theory about this, too. As Pilkington sees it, “the liberal political order flows directly from the liberal economic order.” Unfortunately, the contractual basis of liberalism cannot really be applied to sex. The problem this creates is fatal. Liberal economies, which promise prosperity, cannot produce the main thing they need to guarantee it: new generations of human beings. No longer self-sufficient in population growth, societies must trade for it. This is what we call mass migration. Where people stop having children, the young (who possess the vital energy) are pitted against the old (who possess the democratic majority), so democracy tends to lose its legitimacy. Alternative solutions to the population problem bubble up, though no one dares speak their name: Pilkington believes the current fad for euthanasia is one of these.

    Those who design liberal systems are often the last to see this decline coming. This is due to another element of liberal order: “Liberals,” Pilkington writes, “have an almost magical belief in the power of perception.” One can complain about the elites of the old days – magnates, clerics, military barons – but at least their business was reality. Today’s leaders tend to be “symbolic analysts,” to use Robert Reich’s term – or “bullshit artists,” to use the more common one. Their professional experience has convinced them that reality can be whatever you want it to be. And it can. Until suddenly it can’t. Things fall apart. The lack of a center cannot hold.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15, 2025 World edition.

  • America is obsessed with the UK’s decline

    America is obsessed with the UK’s decline

    As Sigmund Freud pointed out way back in mid-June 1905, everyone feels a bit schizo about Mom. On the one hand, she carried you in the womb, she probably nursed you at the nipple. She made the greatest of sacrifices for you to exist. Heck, maybe you really love her cooking.

    On the other hand, you have to escape her. The Italians have a brilliantly pejorative word for the man-child who stays in the maternal home far too late in life: mammoni. No one wants to be that guy. And to get away from this menace, sometimes you have to scorn your mother, to break the psychological apron strings.

    So it is with American attitudes to the Mother Country. Whereas the US had many midwives, its mother was unquestionably Britain. It was Britain that seeded the first colonies in Virginia. Britain that gave America her mighty language. It was largely Britons who drafted the US Constitution – indeed the Founding Fathers saw themselves, quite overtly, as more British than the British: more honorably in love with their freedoms.

    As a patriot, I’d like to rebut this barbaric assault on my own country. The trouble is, I can’t

    It is, therefore, perhaps not surprising that Americans have an Oedipally schizoid relationship to Britain, even today. On the one hand you have that entire Downton Abbey strand of American desires. Our accents are adored, poshness is weirdly revered, an idealized concept of echt Britishness – from manners to furniture to clothes (Ralph Lauren built a billion-buck business on this) – is admired and aped, or created ex nihilo. Donald Trump’s White House is probably the most pro-UK administration in several generations. Trump celebrates his Scottish roots; J.D. Vance holidays in the Cotswolds. Winston is back in the Oval Office.

    At the same time, America has often scorned Britain, mocked her, bossed her around and generally treated Mum something terrible. And right now, and from the same Trumpite wing of US politics, the UK is facing a lot of this pitiless scorn. Across conservative social media we Brits are seen as decrepit, weak, cucked, lame, broke, snaggletoothed losers who are utterly doomed to extinction.

    You’ll find this discourse everywhere. From Tucker Carlson lamenting that Britons are “slaves,” to Elon Musk calling us a “tyrannical police state” to internet pundit Charlie Kirk describing us as “a husk” and “a conquered country.” Earlier this month, after comedian Graham Linehan was arrested for his views at Heathrow Airport, the British politician Nigel Farage went to Washington to tell members of Congress that Britain had turned into North Korea. Americans listened avidly.

    Whatever the provenance of these critiques – and plenty come from a place of grief, or regret, not mere contempt – they hit home. They can make Brits wince. And one of the times I’ve winced the most came via a much less well-known voice: a Substack called Starstack, created by – as far as I can see – a firmly right-wing but not crazy Republican, known on X as @youngtroon.

    The particular essay about the impending doom of the YooKay (and he uses this demeaning nickname quite deliberately) is entitled “Mind the Gap,” but the subhead gives us the gist: “A powerful set of systemic factors are threatening to bring chaos unseen in centuries to the shores of the United Kingdom.”

    I advise you to read the entire essay yourself. It is articulate, considered, perceptive and, if you are British, quite harrowing. He has given us the gift to see ourselves as others see us. And, my God, it is a dismal portrait. And it therefore deserves a close analysis, as a shining example of the genre.

    The author attacks us from all sides. Not with pointless venom, but with outright astonishment at our grotesque and self-harming stupidity.

    Here are a few choice descriptions: to him, Britain is “a laughable caricature of what the government would be like if it were run by your neurotic mother-in-law.” Parts of the North resemble “a collapsing civilization.” The National Health Service is “a black-hole money pit with some of the worst dollar-per-dollar outcomes.”

    We also have “some of the nuttiest benefits handouts in the entire world.” He notes that our Chancellor recently broke down weeping in parliament. He says the economy is “effectively stagnant, and there is little or no plan to resolve underlying systemic factors.” He adds that Britain is a country “where tens (hundreds?) of thousands of white girls were systematically sexually exploited by gangs of Mirpuri Pakistanis” – a fact which was then covered up. Meanwhile, we are also a nation that “received well in excess of 1 percent of its population for several years straight during the ‘Boriswave.’” Mr. Troon does not see this as a good thing.

    Then he really gets going. I’ll spare you the gory fiscal details, but it’s when the essay turns to our growing debt crisis – those gilt yields soaring over 5 percent – that the apocalypse promised by the subtitle begins to loom. It is not pretty.

    Naturally, as a patriot, I’d like to rebut this barbaric assault on my own country. The trouble is, I can’t. I have been through the essay, insult by insult, and I’ve found only two arguable errors. Firstly, the UK does not – thank God – suffer weekly or daily terror attacks. Secondly, Britain does not have a “uniquely violent street gang culture.”

    Apart from that, I cannot find major flaws. Which makes it all the more depressing, and makes me wonder whether the author’s prognosis is correct and Britain is, actually, “rapidly heading toward a grand and brutal reckoning” and that “the United Kingdom is undergoing severe stress-testing that now threatens to sink the entire enterprise entirely.”

    To make it worse, the author does not see a savior anywhere, not in Reform, Labour, the Conservatives, because we have “one of the most clownish and intolerable political castes that presently exist anywhere on the planet.” Ouch.

    However, he does offer the motherland one brief filial hug at the end. The author states that, despite all the above, the native Britons have somehow managed to keep a functional country together, so far. And on that basis he predicts that, after the inevitable revolution, our innate virtues should prevail and we will rebound.

    Nonetheless, as things stand, let’s just say, from a certain American perspective, Mom has drenched herself in gasoline. And is about to light a cigarette.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15, 2025 World edition.

  • What is Charles Kushner doing in Paris?

    What is Charles Kushner doing in Paris?

    When Charles Kushner took up his appointment as American ambassador to France this summer, his first official visit was to the Shoah Memorial in Paris. As a child of Holocaust survivors, he tweeted, “fighting anti-Semitism will be at the heart of my mission.” So it has proved. Last month, Kushner published a letter in the Wall Street Journal in which he accused Emmanuel Macron of insufficient action in the face of soaring anti-Semitism in the Republic.

    The ambassador was summoned for a dressing down. He didn’t attend as he was on vacation

    Kushner also castigated the French President for his imminent recognition of Palestinian statehood. “Public statements haranguing Israel and gestures toward recognition of a Palestinian state embolden extremists, fuel violence and endanger Jewish life in France,” wrote Kushner. “In today’s world, anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism – plain and simple.”

    The American criticism of Macron mirrors that of Benjamin Netanyahu. Last month, the Israeli Prime Minister claimed the decision to recognize Palestine “pours fuel on this anti-Semitism fire.” Macron described Netanyahu’s remarks as “abject.”

    Macron didn’t respond personally to Kushner’s criticism, but the ambassador was summoned to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs for a dressing down. Kushner didn’t attend, as he was on vacation. In his place he sent his chargé d’affaires. The magazine Paris Match described the move as “a deliberate diplomatic affront.”

    Paris said it regarded Kushner’s remarks as not only inaccurate but also undiplomatic, not being “commensurate with the quality of the transatlantic link between France and the United States and the trust that must result from it, between allies.” The ambassador’s criticism, it said, also contravened the 1961 Vienna Convention, which stipulates that diplomats are duty bound “not to interfere in the internal affairs of the state.”

    This convention was ignored in 2016 by France’s ambassador in Washington. In responding to Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in the presidential election, Gérard Araud tweeted: “After Brexit and this election, anything is now possible. A world is collapsing before our eyes. Dizziness.” He later deleted the post.

    Araud returned to the attack in 2019 when he left Washington, declaring that Trump was a “whimsical, unpredictable, uninformed” President. The passage of time has not mellowed Araud. On learning last November that a re-elected Trump had nominated Kushner as ambassador to France, Araud tweeted: “I recommend reading his CV. ‘Juicy,’ as the Americans would say… Needless to say, he doesn’t know the first thing about our country… we console ourselves as best we can.”

    Araud was not alone in objecting to the appointment of Kushner, whose son Jared is married to Trump’s daughter Ivanka. The French media expressed surprise that a man who had spent a year in a federal prison for tax fraud (and was pardoned by Trump during his first term as President) was considered suitable for the post.

    The left-wing newspaper Le Monde wondered what exactly qualified Kushner to the post of ambassador, noting his response to the Senate when asked a similar question: “I don’t know much about French art or wine, but I understand business.”

    Democrats in America were also unimpressed by Kushner’s appointment. Severin Beliveau, a stalwart of the party in Maine and an honorary consul of France, penned a furious op-ed earlier this year explaining why Kushner should not be Uncle Sam’s man in Paris. “It is hard to find anything that qualifies Mr. Kushner for the appointment,” wrote Beliveau. “He is a convicted felon, has no diplomatic experience and can be expected to personalize the existing tensions between President Trump and the President of France.”

    Kushner, 71, does indeed have little to recommend him for the role. But the same applied to some of his predecessors in Paris. George W. Bush appointed Howard H. Leach as ambassador to France in 2001, a man whose area of expertise was food-processing. And in 2009, Barack Obama gave the job to Charles Rivkin, who had made his name as a producer of The Muppet Show. The appointment raised eyebrows in France, although it was noted that he had been one of Obama’s principal financial supporters during his presidential campaign.

    Despite his lack of diplomatic experience, Rivkin’s appointment was welcomed by the Paris elite, as mesmerized by Obama as the rest of Europe’s movers and shakers. “We couldn’t have dreamed of a better choice,” simpered Jean-David Levitte, the diplomatic advisor of president Nicolas Sarkozy. “Charlie Rivkin is the epitome of American professional success.”

    In attacking Charles Kushner, France is shooting the messenger. His criticism is not unfounded

    Once in Paris it became evident that Rivkin had one particular mission, which was to spread American-style identity politics into the suburbs. This soon came to the attention of the French press. Le Monde published an article in the summer of 2010 entitled “Washington conquers the 93” (93 is the administrative designation of the turbulent Seine-Saint-Denis département north of Paris).The paper described how Rivkin liked to visit these suburbs, sometimes with a famous face in tow, such as actor Samuel L. Jackson. According to Le Monde, “these symbolic and media junkets conceal the extent of the networking that has taken place in France in recent years to identify the elites of the neighborhoods and ethnic minorities.” Once they’d been identified, the American embassy invited these “elites” to Washington in order to “deepen their reflections on their subjects of interest.”

    The extent to which Rivkin was importing identity politics into France was exposed by WikiLeaks in 2010. On January 19 of that year, Rivkin sent a confidential report to Washington entitled “Minority Engagement Strategy.” “French institutions have not proven themselves flexible enough to adjust to an increasingly heterodox demography,” wrote Rivkin. One initiative was to work “with French museums and educators to reform the history curriculum taught in French schools, so that it takes into account the role and perspectives of minorities in French history.”

    This was clear interference, yet it raised barely a murmur in Paris. Not so the intervention of Kushner, which has caused outrage among the French elite. Jean-Noël Barrot, the minister of foreign affairs, described his criticism as “unjustifiable and unjustified… because it is not the place of a foreign representative to come and lecture France on how to govern its own country.”

    Someone has to, because Kushner is right: France is taking insufficient action to protect its 500,000 Jews. Macron’s political adversaries accuse him of abandoning the country’s Jewish population in order to pacify the violent minority within France’s large “Algerian diaspora.”

    In November 2023, Macron declined an invitation to attend a rally in solidarity with France’s Jews, who were already experiencing a surge in anti-Semitism. Allegedly he made his decision after he was warned from a Muslim advisor that his attendance might “give the neighborhoods cause to catch fire.”

    The following year, Macron vowed that France would be relentless in combating anti-Semitism, which he admitted had increased “in an absolutely inexplicable, inexcusable, and unacceptable manner.”

    In reality, the rise is eminently explicable. Once the preserve of the far right, French anti-Semitism is today most commonly found among the far left and their Islamist allies. Among the many recent anti-Semitic acts in France are the assault of a teenage boy as he left a synagogue in Lyon and the refusal of an adventure park to admit a party of Israeli children. There was also the chainsaw attack on an olive tree planted in memory of Ilan Halimi, a young Jewish man who was tortured to death in 2006 by an inner-city gang. Two Tunisian brothers have been charged with the desecration.

    Halimi’s sister says “no lessons have been learned” from her brother’s death. Increasingly she fears for her children’s safety in France and says she is thinking of emigrating to Israel. Macron, she says, is “doing nothing” to protect France’s Jews.

    In attacking Kushner, France is shooting the messenger. His criticism – supported by Washington – is not unfounded.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15, 2025 World edition.

  • The defense industry and the US government are inextricably linked

    The defense industry and the US government are inextricably linked

    Fresh on the heels of news that the government will take a 10 percent stake in failing chip company Intel, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has floated the possibility of commanding a direct stake in Lockheed Martin and other large defense corporations. Speaking on CNBC, and extolling the “exquisite” proficiency of Lockheed products, he claimed “my Secretary of Defense and Deputy Secretary of Defense are thinking about it.”

    The proposal obviously fulfills a key requirement, which is to appeal to the transactional proclivities of the boss. Donald Trump had greeted the Intel arrangement as a “good deal” criticized only by “stupid people,” and suggested that there will be more such investments. (As is already happening with the injection of Pentagon funds into rare-earth producer MP Materials.)

    The Intel deal at least involved no further investment of taxpayers’ cash, since it involved merely the conversion of Biden-era CHIPS Act bailout money into a stock holding. But it is hard to discern merit in turning weapons production into more of a government-run enterprise. The prospect has certainly excited alarm among free-market partisans. “I don’t really understand why they would want to do this,” Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told Defense News. “This is basically abandoning the free market for national security. This becomes state capitalism, much more in the model of China than in the American tradition.”

    But Harrison and other such complainers miss the point. The free market in national security went away a long time ago; major defense firms already enjoy a symbiotic relationship with Uncle Sam. As Lutnick himself told CNBC, “Lockheed is basically an arm of the US government” deriving 97 percent of its income from government contracts. Much the same applies to the rest of the defense-industrial sector, with sellers and the buyer enjoying a seamless relationship in which a perpetually revolving door spins defense officials into the corporate world, including as lobbyists, and back.

    Close examination indicates that in the US, one branch of the bureaucracy buys weapons from another

    A 2023 report by Senator Elizabeth Warren detailed how the top American defense contractors employed no fewer than 672 former officials, military officers, along with former members of Congress and staffers as board members, lobbyists and senior executives, with Boeing leading the way. A total nationalization of the defense industry could potentially eliminate the current army of lobbyists. Yet, as one longtime critic put it, “I’m not crazy about replacing private sector lobbyists with government official lobbyists. With even more politicians having a finger in the pie, what could possibly go wrong?”

    Though Lutnick would hardly care for the comparison, our system has broad similarities with the way the Soviets ran defense, a system replete with bloated and inefficient enterprises staffed by an army of dependent bureaucrats and workers insulated from competition or failure. It ultimately bankrupted the Soviet economy.

    Close examination indicates that in the US, one branch of the bureaucracy buys weapons from another branch. This arrangement does not allow for failure, since those who lose out in bidding for a particular contract can customarily be assured that they will be compensated next time around. Thus Boeing lost to Lockheed in the competition for the lightweight fighter contract that spawned the ill-famed F-35. But now it is Boeing’s turn as winner of the contract for the next multi-billion US Air Force fighter contract, the F-47. Sometimes the process is short-circuited, as in the case of the Navy’s littoral combat ship (LCS), for which Lockheed and General Dynamics submitted competing designs. Under pressure from the contractors’ congressional offshoot, the Navy bought both rather than picking a winner. The program was beset by gigantic overruns in cost and produced a fleet of ships prone to breakdown and equipped with deficient weapons systems.

    The problem is exacerbated by the domination of our defense industry by an oligopoly of five “prime” contractors – Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon), Boeing, General Dynamics and Northrop-Grumman.   In its present form, the oligopoly was fostered by Clinton’s defense secretary William J. Perry. Following the end of the Cold War, he thought it a fine idea for these corporations to absorb multiple weapons producers – at least 40 at the time – on promises of efficiency and cost-savings.

    The mergers Perry promoted were lubricated with attractive tranches of government cash. As the sorry saga of the Lockheed-General Dynamics LCS program ($100 billion lifetime cost), not to mention the US Army’s Future Combat Systems program supervised by General Dynamics ($20 billion, but nothing actually produced) or the Air Force and Navy’s F-35 deal with Lockheed (years late, multiple shortfalls and a doubled cost) might indicate, these promises remain unfulfilled.

    Meanwhile, unlike the hapless Intel corporation, which lost almost $19 billion last year, the surviving defense giants are extremely profitable. In 2024, Northrop, for example, had an overall operating profit of just over 10 percent; Lockheed, though doing less well than in recent years, still turned in a profit of just over 7 percent, with chief executive James Taiclet taking home more than  $23.8 million in total compensation. Even Boeing, hobbled by spectacularly inept management in recent decades, is back to making money on its defense business.

    Pentagon shortcomings have attracted vehement criticism of late, and there is the threat of competition from the burgeoning tech industry centered in Silicon Valley, where companies large and small are eager to get a slice of the $1 trillion defense budget. The software company Palantir, for example, was founded by entrepreneur Peter Thiel with the express intention, according to his biographer, of bringing “the military-industrial complex back to Silicon Valley, with his own companies at its very center.”

    Last year, Shyam Sankar, Palantir’s chief technology officer, penned “The Defense Reformation,” a trenchant critique of current defense procurement practices, complete with an excoriation of Perry’s rearrangement which, he wrote, had led to a “monopsony”  in which “one entity is the sole buyer of a given product or service,” thus stifling innovation. Highlighting the need for competition, Sankar called for an overhaul of the way the Pentagon does business and demanded the deployment of artificial intelligence (central to Palantir’s business) across the board.

    Pentagon shortcomings have attracted the threat of competition from the burgeoning tech industry

    Yet there are telling signs that the disruptors of Silicon Valley will not bring about significant change to business as usual. The company’s roster is already festooned with a host of former Pentagon officials and politicians, including former congressman and noted China hawk Mike Gallagher, heading its defense business. Meanwhile, Palantir’s sister company Anduril is set to garner a contract enjoined by the “Big, Beautiful Bill” that has been carefully crafted to benefit the Thiel-founded firm – and none other. Buried deep in the bill is a section authorizing border surveillance towers that specifically requires they be “autonomous,” i.e., controlled by AI, a technology for which the company is the sole vendor, thus granting Anduril a profitable monopoly.

    Partisans for further government support and control of the defense business may point to China, where major defense firms are government-owned, as a worthy example of the benefits of such a system. The expanding Chinese military, supplied by giant government-owned firms such as Norinco and Avic, do indeed get glowing reviews on this side of the Pacific, not least from tech industry hawks such as Gallagher and Anduril president Christian Brose. But since China has not fought a war since 1979, we know very little about its actual military abilities. Xi Jinping feels the need regularly to purge his military high command on grounds of corruption, notably including the People’s Liberation Army’s Equipment Development Department, which is responsible for developing weapons and widely cited as a hotbed of graft. The actual performance of Chinese weapons systems is a matter of conjecture and hype. There have been complaints out of Pakistan, a major customer for Chinese hardware, about reliability, including in frigate warships, although the recent Pakistani success in downing French-supplied Indian Rafales with their Chinese J-10 fighters (reportedly thanks to longer-ranged air-to-air missiles) was a significant publicity boost.

    DJI, a privately owned Chinese company, is by far the most successful drone company in the world and has done thumping business supplying both sides in the Ukraine war. Its DJI Mavic 3 drone ($3,500 on Amazon), when suitably adapted, is held in high esteem by Ukrainian and Russian soldiers alike and remains in demand more than three years into the war. Other recent reports out of Ukraine reference a formidable attack drone recently deployed by the Russians, dubbed the V2U by Kyiv. That machine carries an AI chip, the Jetson AGX Orin processor, made by none other than US chip powerhouse Nvidia. That’s private enterprise at work. So, for a real payoff, Lutnick and “his” defense secretary might consider putting more money into Nvidia – or even DJI.

    Andrew Cockburn is Washington editor of Harper’s Magazine. This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15, 2025 World edition.

  • Trump’s battle against the tyranny of lawfare

    Trump’s battle against the tyranny of lawfare

    A buzzword of the moment is “lawfare.” What is lawfare? It’s one of those portmanteau words that Lewis Carroll taught us about. A combination of “law” and “warfare,” “lawfare” is distinctly less clever an invention than “chortle” – one of Carroll’s coinages, my beamish boy, which combines the words “chuckle” and “snort.”

    The word “lawfare” apparently dates back to the late 1950s, though the phenomenon – using and abusing the law in order to conduct political warfare – has come into its own only in the past couple of decades. The fact that there is now an eponymous website devoted to the subject is but one patent of its currency.

    Donald Trump has to be one of the most punished people in American history

    We are supposed to deplore lawfare as a perversion or misapplication of the law. Which it is. But the temperature and asperity of public disapproval varies widely depending on who is directing the process. In part, it is a matter of political coloration. If you are on the side conducting the lawfare, you are likely to describe the process as a “no-one-is-above-the-law” form of accountability. If you are on the receiving end, you are likely to point out the partisan and selective nature of the assault. Given the political biases of our establishment culture, lawfare directed at Donald Trump and his allies earns an automatic quota of indulgence. It is excused, or half excused, as at least an attempt to pursue justice, to find “truth.”

    Lawfare prosecuted by Trump and his allies, however, finds itself instantly saddled with morally charged obloquy. Two wrongs, you will have often heard, do not make a right. It was unseemly of Joe Biden & Co. to go after Trump and those in his orbit – but Trump’s response, we are told, is simply appalling. The swishing sound you hear in the background is the word “retribution” being dusted off and prepped for prime time.

    Kimberley Strassel, writing recently in the Wall Street Journal, provided one version of this line of argument. Trump “insisted that his ‘retribution’ would be through winning office and making ‘our country successful.’ Conservatives in particular were eager to see the President remove the Justice Department from the political sphere. That hope is out the window seven months in.”

    I wonder whether the history of actual warfare might be more illuminating. When the Germans decided to start World War One, their plan of attack, formulated by Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen, called for them to mount a lightning assault against France through Belgium and the Netherlands. The plan called for the Germans to destroy the French army and occupy Paris within 40 days.

    Then came the first battle of the Marne early in September 1914. “The Miracle on the Marne” halted the German advance. It also condemned Europe to four years of attritional warfare that left millions dead and large swaths of France in ruins.

    The Democrats had their own Schlieffen plan to be used against Trump after 2020.  They would conduct what amounted to a Blitzkrieg of total lawfare against him. Letitia James, the New York Attorney General, commanded one division. Alvin Bragg, District Attorney in New York City, commanded a second. Special Counsel Jack Smith, who went after Trump in Florida and in Washington, DC, commanded two others.

    If the process is the punishment in legal proceedings, as we are often reminded, Trump has to be one of the most punished people in American history. But it is worth remembering that the aim of the lawfare was not simply to punish Trump but to destroy him. It was a multi-front assault. Bankruptcy loomed on one front, jail on another. Then came at least two assassination attempts, not officially part of the lawfare, but spiritually adjacent.

    The Kaiser miscalculated when he went to war in Europe. I think that the battalions of anti-Trump activists, in the media and our political establishment as well as in the law, miscalculated when they took up arms against Trump. His response has not been to dig trenches and hunker down. What he has done resembles the D-Day invasion of Normandy more than the pointless slaughter of the Somme or Verdun.

    Anti-Trump commentators are up in arms because the President has stormed the beaches of the Deep State and overrun many of its defensive positions. They skirl hysterically when he fires a governor of the Federal Reserve (“But she’s the first black woman to hold the position!”). Trump removes Secret Service protection for Kamala Harris. “A petty, vindictive move from a small man,” quoth a group called “Republicans Against Trump.” But then it turns out that Harris enjoyed the posse longer than any former vice-president in history.

    Trump’s former national security advisor John Bolton wakes up to find his home and office raided by the FBI. “Retribution” screams the anti-Trump press. But then it turns out the FBI had been investigating Bolton at least since the Biden administration, which eventually shut down the inquiry – possibly, just possibly, because Bolton was such a vocal anti-Trump critic. Two separate magistrates, one in DC, one in Maryland, approved the FBI search warrants. Why? Because, as the New York Times grudgingly acknowledged, data gathered from the spy service of an “adversarial country” included “sensitive,” i.e., classified, information that Bolton, “while still working in the first Trump administration, appeared to have sent to people close to him on an unclassified system.”

    The list goes on. The Dems perfected lawfare and unleashed it against Trump under the twin assumptions that it would succeed and that the Republicans would never retaliate in kind. Trump has upended both assumptions. Which is why I believe that what Trump is doing is not a matter of “retribution” or lawfare. It is a battle of liberation from the tyranny of lawfare.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15, 2025 World edition.

  • How the right learned to love the state

    How the right learned to love the state

    These are dark days for free-market conservatives. A socialist, Zohran Mamdani, leads most polls in the race to become the next mayor of New York. The Republican President, meanwhile, is not only a “tariff man,” he’s lately been directing the federal government to take a stake in ownership of companies such as US Steel and Intel. Even before the rise of Donald Trump, the Republicans were increasingly becoming the preferred party of America’s working class. But before Trump, the free-market right could imagine the GOP’s blue-collar voters were only interested in social conservatism and wouldn’t demand a change in the party’s economic orientation. Now, things look very different.

    Yet the signs of what populism would mean for the right’s economic philosophy should have been obvious. Richard Nixon’s appeal to the “silent majority” and the working-class “hard hats” among them, meant keeping free-market thinkers at arm’s length. Ronald Reagan was just what capitalist conservatives had hoped for. Yet both George Bushes retreated from Reagan’s economic individualism. The elder Bush called for a “kinder, gentler America” while the younger branded his politics as “compassionate conservatism.” The implication behind both slogans was that the Reagan right had been too harsh in its criticisms of big government.

    Then there were the populist challengers who persisted in Republican presidential primaries through the 1990s and 2000s. Pat Buchanan is deservedly the most famous of these figures, chiefly for his bids for the GOP nomination in 1992 and 1996 but also for his doomed third-party run in 2000 as the nominee of the Reform party. That election was the end of his political career, but he continued to write bestsellers.

    After George W. Bush went without a serious challenger in 2004, a populist of sorts gave John McCain and Mitt Romney a run for their money in 2008. Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee was that year’s working-class voters’ hero in the GOP.

    Four years later, in the cycle before the Trump revolution, former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum ran for the Republican presidential nod as a paladin of pro-family economic policy and blue-collar sensibilities. He did surprisingly well, considering he had lost his last Senate race, in 2006, by more than 17 points. Santorum was best known as a foe of gay marriage and opponent of abortion, but he cultivated a pitch to the working-class pocketbook as well.

    American voters, not just Republicans, want two somewhat contradictory things. They want the opportunity to get rich, but they also want insurance against falling into penury. In economic terms, there’s a trade-off: lower risks typically mean less potential for reward, while providing a safety net for those who don’t prosper comes at the expense of those who do. It’s the wealth generated by risky entrepreneurship that makes welfare states possible, while the more the risk-averse mentality spreads, the less money there is to support middle-class entitlements or programs for the poor. A smart politician who supports economic freedom knows they must provide the public with economic reassurances, too – while one whose priorities are nationalist or even “democratic socialist” should be wise enough not to kill the capitalist goose that lays the golden eggs. New York’s future may depend on whether Mamdani understands that.

    Make government agencies serve social conservative ends and what will be the left’s response?

    On the right, several varieties of “postliberal” thinker dream of making government great again. If birth rates are in decline, can’t we just pay people to have children? Couldn’t there be a right-wing version of the New Deal? It’s not a novel idea: neoconservatives in the late 20th century dreamt of a conservative welfare state and some traditionalist social conservatives, such as the historian Allan C. Carlson, argued there was a pro-family bent to much of the New Deal.

    But free-market conservatives who dread a new era of right-wing big government have a powerful force on their side. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s America was a nation with tremendous confidence in technocratic expertise and one that had not yet had the disillusioning experience of living under a welfare state, which never delivers a paradise and only creates new things to worry about – such as crushing intergenerational debt. The trust or naiveté that made the New Deal possible has vanished. And to the extent that the postliberal right does make inroads into the federal bureaucracy, the effect will only be to diminish trust in federal authority. The one thing sustaining the federal government’s prestige in the early 20th century was the fact that only one side of politics – the right – was against it, while the left had few criticisms beyond the complaint that big government wasn’t big enough.

    But make government agencies serve social conservative ends and what will be the left’s response? It will develop an anti-government ideology of its own. The welfare state will face attacks from two directions. There’s no escaping this because Americans themselves are divided about the ends of government. The ship can’t sail one way without stirring up a mutiny among those who want to go in the opposite direction.

    What President Trump has in mind is in any event rather different from what many “New Right” intellectuals would like to see. Trump doesn’t concern himself with anyone’s theory of capitalism or welfare statism. He thinks like the real-estate baron he was – and is. In Trump’s line of business, companies build. He wants a country that constructs and makes real things. Yet his business is also about salesmanship and dealmaking, and that looms at least as large in Trumponomics. As Trump sees it, the country is a company and as it prospers so will its employees – the citizens. He’s a populist, but he’s no socialist.

    Read Kate Andrews on Trumpian nationalization in this issue.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15, 2025 World edition.

  • The West can’t afford to shun Russian oil

    The West can’t afford to shun Russian oil

    Donald Trump is a radical foreign-policy innovator. Over the past few decades, the US has tried a range of non-military means to nudge, squeeze and occasionally strangle its adversaries. These range from travel bans and banking restrictions, to export controls and trade limitations. But never has the US – or indeed anyone – tried to use import tariffs as a species of economic sanction.

    Trump has threatened Vladimir Putin with introducing “secondary sanctions” against countries that import Russian oil – a threat intended to strike at the heart of Russia’s war economy. And on August 4, Trump appeared, for the first time, to make good on that threat. To the surprise of diplomats and trade negotiators in Washington and Delhi alike, Trump abruptly announced that he would be imposing a 50 percent tariff on India as a punishment for its importing Russian crude. “India… doesn’t care how many people in Ukraine are being killed by the Russian War Machine,” Trump wrote on social media, blindsiding officials who had been negotiating for months to reduce the $44 billion trade deficit with India. “Because of this, I will be substantially raising the Tariff paid by India to the USA.” US courts have challenged Trump’s right to tariff by executive order – but for the time being the punitive import tax stands.

    China and India are the world’s biggest importers of Russian crude, but the EU pays more into Putin’s coffers

    India was angry – and baffled. Since the outbreak of war in Ukraine, India has indeed become the second-largest buyer of Russian crude in the world after China. Between March 2022 and May 2023, crude oil from Russia rose from 0.2 percent to 45 percent of India imports. That leap was largely thanks to hefty discounts offered by Moscow that made Urals crude a bargain compared to full-priced oil from India’s traditional suppliers such as Saudi Arabia and Iraq. But buying Russian crude did not violate any US or EU sanctions, which merely fixed the price at $60 a barrel. The intention of the sanctions was to squeeze the revenue Moscow received from oil exports without disrupting the world’s oil supplies. Indeed, in May last year, US ambassador to India Eric Garcetti admitted that India “bought Russian oil because we wanted somebody to buy Russian oil at a price cap; that was not a violation.” The idea was “to ensure the prices did not go up globally,” Garcetti added, and “India delivered on that.”

    There have been widespread allegations that Indian buyers have actually been paying amounts over the agreed price cap through various creative accounting tricks known as attestation fraud – for instance by inflating transportation costs or using networks of middlemen to launder the price differential. But the bottom line is that Russia’s war on Ukraine has brought India a major economic windfall in the form of cheap energy for the domestic market and massive profits from re-exporting oil products refined from Russian crude to Europe, with sales worth more than $130 billion per year. India currently supplies 15 percent of Europe’s diesel, for instance, as well as a similar amount of Ukraine’s. And the Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries, whose refinery in Jamnagar is the largest in the world, has seen its stock price jump by 34 percent since 2022.

    Will Trump’s dramatic 50 percent tariff on many (though not all) Indian imports to the US force Delhi to stop importing Russian crude? That seems unlikely, since Indian companies are making so much money from refining and reselling Russian oil. India is the world’s fastest-growing economy and has no oil supplies of its own.

    The 50 percent tariff on India is double that imposed on most Asian countries. But it is in line with an equally severe rate he applied against Brazil in an attempt to pressure the leadership to end the detention of former president Jair Bolsonaro. But while Trump describes his tax on Indian exports to the US as a “secondary tariff,” in practice there is no such thing. There’s just tariffs with a political label attached.

    China and India are indeed the world’s biggest importers of Russian crude. But it’s actually the EU that pays more money into Putin’s coffers. Russia continues to be Europe’s second-largest supplier of liquefied natural gas (LNG). And before Ukrainian attacks on the Druzhba pipeline disrupted supplies last month, Russian crude oil flowed through it and into Slovakia. Yet Europe has not been threatened by Trump – nor for that matter have US allies Turkey and Japan, also major customers of Moscow’s. Europe repeatedly announces its intention to free itself from its fatal addiction to Russian gas. Yet despite 18 packages of sanctions on Russia, there are as yet no actual European restrictions on buying Russian gas.

    Brussels has attempted to ban the import of refined oil products originating from Russian crude. But as well as being technically impossible to verify, a long series of carve-outs and exceptions for Canada, Norway, Switzerland, the UK and the US are buried in the small print of every one of the EU sanctions packages.

    The paradox that makes both EU and US attempts to sanction Russia incoherent and ultimately toothless is that the West cannot afford to stop Russia from exporting energy. Russia is the world’s second-largest crude oil producer and exporter (after Saudi Arabia), with an output of around 9.5 million barrels a day – nearly 10 percent of global demand. In the immediate aftermath of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, fears of Russian oil being pushed out of the market drove Brent crude prices soaring to $137 a barrel – nearly double today’s prices. Fears of a sharp, energy price-driven recession twisted both the Biden administration and European leaders into the mental pretzel that prevails today. Washington and the EU keep threatening to suffocate the Russian economy, but are in practice unable and unwilling to pay the price of losing Russian oil.

    The EU has implemented a new, lower, flexible oil-price cap for Russian crude of $47.60 per barrel, effective from September 3. This floating cap is set at 15 percent below the average market price of Russian Urals blend – but this will affect only European importers. It’s also wide open to fraud – for instance, the Druzhba pipeline carries Kazakh oil as well as Russian, allowing customers to claim they are buying from Kazakh producers.

    To date, Ukrainian saboteurs, rockets and drones have been far more effective than EU or US economic sanctions in denting Russian energy exports with attacks on the Nord Stream pipeline in September 2022 and recent raids on Russian oil refineries and oil export terminals. For much of the conflict, the Biden administration consistently blocked Ukrainian attacks on Russia’s oil infrastructure for fear of a price shock. But from the frequency of Ukrainian attacks it now seems those gloves have been taken off (as long as Kyiv doesn’t use US weapons inside Russia).

    Fears of an energy-led recession twisted the Biden administration into the mental pretzel that still prevails

    Russia’s economy has also, for the first time in the war, officially slid into recession, having shrunk for the past two quarters. But that’s still very far from a deep economic crisis of the kind that could begin to threaten Putin politically. “As long as the war machine of the aggressor does not stop, we must be ready to implement new harsh measures to increase the cost of aggression,” Kaja Kallas, then prime minister of Estonia, told European leaders in March 2022. Days later, Joe Biden also claimed that “the totality of our sanctions and export controls is crushing the Russian economy.”

    Yet three and a half years into a war that consumes a staggering 45 percent of Kremlin spending, Russia’s economy is damaged, but far from crushed. Moreover, Putin himself continues to strut the world stage, treading the red carpets laid out for him from Anchorage to Beijing.

    It’s time, perhaps, to admit that economic sanctions have failed to change Putin’s behavior or destroy his ability to fight. The reason is that neither Trump nor his allies in the West have been willing to accept the economic pain of imposing any sanctions that could materially hurt Russia.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15, 2025 World edition.

  • How powerful is the China-Russia alliance?

    How powerful is the China-Russia alliance?

    This summer’s big security summit in Tianjin, followed by the military parade in Beijing on September 3, has been widely interpreted as a sign of a new global realignment. At a time of growing friction within the US alliances in East Asia and Europe, President Xi Jinping of China, President Vladimir Putin of Russia and about 20 leaders mostly from Central Asia have not just reaffirmed their nations’ close ties. They sought to strengthen the emerging multipolar system, which they see as a rejection of the US-dominated global order.

    This idea is hardly new. Three decades ago – when the bipolar Cold War gave way to what the neoconservative pundit Charles Krauthammer called the “unipolar moment” – the then-leaders of China and Russia pledged to work together to limit American power and influence in the world.

    When Boris Yeltsin visited Beijing in April 1996, the rhetoric on both the Russian and Chinese sides was extraordinarily blunt. The joint communiqué of that visit, signed by Yeltsin and Jiang Zemin, all but branded America a threat to international peace: “The world is far from being tranquil. Hegemonism, power politics and repeated imposition of pressures on other countries have continued to occur. Bloc politics has taken up new manifestations.” A year later, during a five-day summit in Moscow in April 1997, Yeltsin and Jiang signed a “Joint Declaration on the Multipolar World and a New World Order,” which stated: “No country should seek hegemony, practice power politics, or monopolize international affairs.” It was clearly alluding to US predominance in global affairs. Citing the end of the Cold War, the declaration called for promotion of “multipolarization of the world and establishment of a new international order.”

    Once bitter rivals, Moscow and Beijing were united by their fear of Washington’s interference in their domestic politics for purposes of promoting democracy as well as its plans to expand NATO toward Russia’s borders and reaffirm its alliance system across East Asia. These developments reflected the belief in Washington that, having just won a great victory which left the US as the sole great power on the planet, America should exploit its primacy to shape the world in its own interests. “Some are pushing toward a world with one center,” Yeltsin said. “We want the world to be multipolar, to have several focal points. These will form the basis for a new world order.”

    Former US cabinet secretary James R. Schlesinger caught the significance of the prevailing mood in 1997 when he cited “the historic tendency” of rival powers – in this case, China and Russia – to “cut a leader down to size.” The logic was clear: if a great power tries to achieve global hegemony, other states will feel threatened and combine against it. Intriguingly, Washington at the time welcomed the growing closeness between China and Russia. President Bill Clinton described the development as “positive,” saying: “I don’t think we should approach these things with paranoia.”

    There are limits to even US power, especially when Washington spends more servicing its debt than on defense

    From today’s perspective, such remarks appear Pollyannaish. Back in the 1990s, however, neither Russia nor China was able to challenge American military supremacy because Russia, which succeeded the mighty Soviet Union, was militarily weak relative to the United States – as was China. Given American dominance, neither Moscow nor Beijing could afford to alienate Washington, especially since they were both increasingly dependent on western trade and investment. These were the salad days of America’s “unipolar moment.”

    But it was just a moment. Before the 1990s were over, challengers began to appear. Moscow began moving toward Beijing after Russia’s honeymoon with the West ended over the decision to expand NATO eastwards, which united Moscow’s diverse political factions unlike any other issue. Even Western Europe, resentful of its dependence on Uncle Sam during the 45 years of Cold War, set out to make itself an equal of the US. For instance, when fighting broke out in Yugoslavia in 1991, Jacques Delors, then president of the European Commission, declared: “We do not interfere in American affairs. We hope they will have enough respect not to interfere in ours.” A few years later, after Europe had failed to end the wars in the Balkans, Brussels called on the US to intervene and stop the fighting.

    Three decades later, Europe remains disturbingly dependent on the US for security, but the efforts of Russia and China to create a more multipolar world have succeeded and have altered America’s position in the global balance of power. Although Russia is the weakest of the three great powers, it has made clear with its brutal invasion of Ukraine that it will not tolerate a western bulwark on its border.

    China, on the other hand, is a rising great power that is determined to challenge US preeminence. By converting its economic power into miliary might, Beijing is increasingly imposing its influence across East Asia to ensure its future security. For the Chinese Communist party, a sphere of influence is a badge of great-power status. Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s doubling of tariffs on Indian goods to 50 percent appears to have driven New Delhi into the arms of the Chinese.

    But for all the talk of a new global realignment in Beijing, there is a danger in overstating. The US remains the most powerful economic and military power whereas China and Russia have their fair share of serious problems. Moreover, both still have reasons to forge closer relations with Washington. Moscow wants to end crippling sanctions while Beijing seeks a reduction of US tariffs. Nonetheless, the days of unipolarity, where the US could maintain a large military footprint in almost every region of the world, are long gone. There are limits to even US power, especially when Washington spends more servicing its debt than on defense.

    In a multipolar world, it makes strategic sense for the US to place less emphasis on Europe and the Middle East and instead fully pivot toward East Asia. Keeping China’s regional ambitions in check is in America’s national interest. The US cannot afford to be the global policeman, but it can and should be heavily engaged in the region that is of the greatest strategic importance: East Asia.

    Read David Whitehouse on the coming space wars in this issue.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15, 2025 World edition.

  • How my sister Ghislaine beat the Epstein conspiracy theories

    How my sister Ghislaine beat the Epstein conspiracy theories

    The nine-hour interview of my sister Ghislaine, conducted under limited immunity by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche over two days in late July, generated an all-too predictable uproar. The reaction became still more intense following the release of the associated transcripts and audio late last month.

    Having held Ghislaine in torturous conditions of solitary confinement in the run-up to her trial – including waking her up every 15 minutes during the night for 30 months at the same time as they deliberately deprived her defense of exculpatory “Brady” material – prosecutors ensured both Ghislaine and her legal case were effectively hollowed out. Under the circumstances, she could not and did not take the stand. The rest is history.

    Her encounter with the Department of Justice’s Blanche was the first time ever she had spoken to a US law enforcement official. In the interview, Ghislaine challenged – if not demolished – the multiple prevailing conspiracy theories and myths surrounding Jeffrey Epstein: from the notorious “client list” to a supposed blackmailing scheme to the way he made his money and the alleged involvement of the Mossad intelligence agency. In regard to the creation of the nonexistent client list, in particular, and other fictions, she highlighted the insidious (and hugely profitable) role of the accusers’ lawyers and the foundational (and also hugely profitable) role of Virginia Giuffre in the whole Epstein mythology. Ghislaine calls it a “narrative” that was “built upon and just mushroomed – basically… a Salem Witch trial.”

    We learned late last month that Giuffre’s posthumous autofiction is to be published, which suggests that the Epstein gravy train is still chugging away.

    Poor old Todd Blanche. He seems to get parachuted by his ultimate boss into “hot-button” situations: just over three months ago, the President fired the librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, citing concerns of “diversity, equity and inclusion,” and appointed Blanche as the new acting librarian of Congress. The trouble is that Hayden’s deputy, Robert Newlen, assumed the role of acting librarian by default on her termination and is publicly contesting the legitimacy of Blanche’s appointment.

    Blanche is not the only Todd in the news. Over in France, where I’ve spent the better part of August in Provence, home to my mother’s Huguenot Protestant ancestors – and incidentally, where she is buried – Emmanuel Todd, a public intellectual and commentator, is making headlines. Todd is perhaps the primus inter pares of declinist thinkers, who predicted the fall of the Soviet Union and is now suggesting the US is in decline. He has a book, The Defeat of the West, in which he attributes the decline of western civilization largely to the collapse of Protestant values, principally of the work ethic, as well as education and social discipline. Alas, Todd offers no quick “Trumpian” fix, telling us instead we’re all going to hell in a handcart. He may well have a point.

    The concept of being “wheeled to hell” as punishment is an old one. In the early 14th century, to escape political turmoil in Rome, Pope Clement V moved the papacy from Rome to Avignon. One morning this summer I found myself wandering the old town, which Petrarch called “Babylon on the Rhône.” But the efforts of various Avignon popes endowed the city with a seriously impressive collection of architectural landmarks. On the opposite side of the river, I would recommend a detour to Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, the resort of the French cardinals during the 70 years of schism. The view across the river to the Papal Palace is wonderful.

    Provence experienced a heatwave for most of last month, with average daily temperatures well over 90 degrees. Everything and everybody had to slow down just to cope which, to be frank, is not that hard in rural, provincial France with its traditional agricultural landscapes and quiet villages that seem eternal, made for sipping a cool glass of wine in the shade and leaving the world’s troubles to one side.

    For whatever reason, however, I found I could not shake the name Todd from my mind. I discovered it comes from the Middle English word “todde” which translates as “fox.” So the name is indelibly associated with the rather foxlike qualities of cunning, intelligence and adaptability.

    The late 19th-century American jockey Tod Sloan, the US’s first international sports superstar, had all those qualities in spades but his career finished badly and he was banned from racing and given the cold shoulder. He left his mark on the English language, though, when his first name was adopted into the rhyming slang used by London’s East End cockneys, giving rise to the expression: “Tod Sloan, on your own.” Over the years, the rhyme was lost, but “on your tod” came to mean being on one’s own. That’s a state which, whiling away time on holiday to beat the heat, I can certainly recommend.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15, 2025 World edition.