Foreign policy Wars in Ukraine, Iran Undermine Nuclear Security More nations seek nuclear protection outside the U.S.-led order. The U.S. proxy war in Ukraine and the direct U.S. war in Iran have made the world a more dangerous place, raising nuclear risks. Ukraine is the dam, we were repeatedly told, that would hold back the Russian invasion of Europe. We were told that by Ukraine, by the U.S., and by NATO. To keep the world safe from Russia, Russia needed to be fought in Ukraine. It was never true, as even Western officials sometimes admit. As early as two years ago, America’s then-Ambassador to NATO Julianne Smith said, “we do not have indicators or warnings right now that a Russian war is imminent on NATO territory.”  And now, after years of war and hundreds of thousands of lives destroyed, General Alexus G. Grynkewich, the head of U.S. European Command, says concern about Russia expanding the war by attacking a Baltic country is not necessary because “Russia is not looking for a conflict” and that they wouldn’t “risk” something when they “understand that…  they won’t succeed.” Asked about the constant warnings of Russia attacking a Baltic country, Ulf Kristersson, the prime minister of nearby Sweden, agreed with Grynkewich: “We don’t see any signs of that.” So, the war has not made Europe safer. But it has created a European security architecture that is antagonistic to Russia and that keeps Russia on the other side of a rigid line. That, as we have seen, is a dangerous situation. Worse, it has allowed nuclear risks to proliferate along that line. Finland, which shares an 830-mile border with Russia, has overturned a decades-old ban by allowing its territory to be used to host nuclear weapons. And it will permit its NATO allies to transport NATO weapons through its territory or hold them there. Moscow has taken note. “By placing nuclear weapons on its territory, Finland will begin to pose a threat to us. And if Finland threatens us, we will take appropriate measures,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. And the dangerous situation is spreading. Last week, Lithuania’s parliament began to lift a three decade’s old constitutional ban on NATO deployment of nuclear weapons on its territory. Lithuania shares a border with the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad. The Polish government has declared an interest in participating in the U.S. nuclear sharing program that is under consideration. If implemented, that program would allow the U.S. to deploy nuclear weapons to additional NATO states. Poland has expressed a strong desire to host nuclear weapons. Like Finland and Lithuania, Poland shares a border with Russia. Poland has also joined France’s forward nuclear deterrence scheme. France is the only nuclear power in the European Union and the only fully independent nuclear power in NATO other than the United States. Under the plan, France would allow partner European nations to temporarily host French strategic air forces. Poland is joined by Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Norway. The war in Iran has also led to nuclear proliferation. It has critically harmed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) by exposing its hypocrisy and impotence. As a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran was supposed to be protected by the “inalienable right” to a civilian nuclear program. And yet, though Rafael Grossi, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, declared that the organization “did not find in Iran elements to indicate that there is an active, systematic plan to build a nuclear weapon,” the IAEA did not condemn the attack or come to Iran’s legal defense. The NPT is the best thing the world has for preventing the spread of nuclear weapons. Its discrediting does not make the world a safer place. The bombing of Iran’s civilian nuclear program has destabilized the nuclear order and put upward pressure on proliferation. Iran may conclude it has more incentive to acquire nuclear weapons, as may neighboring nations. Though the U.S. had promised to protect the Gulf countries under its security umbrella, their partnership with the U.S. made them targets for Iranian missiles instead. Their confidence in American defense arrangements has been shaken, and some have begun considering diversification.  In September of last year, months after the Twelve Day War and America’s bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities, Saudi Arabia signed a Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement with Pakistan. It is a full alliance that commits “that any aggression against either country shall be considered an aggression against both.” Pakistan is the only Muslim nation with nuclear weapons. “What we have, and the capabilities we possess, will be made available to [Saudi Arabia] according to this agreement,” said Pakistan’s defense minister. The war against Iran has shaken confidence in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and may incentivize nations to acquire nuclear weapons or ally with nations who possess them. The war on Russia has led to the proliferation of nuclear weapons along the Russian border, which can only be seen by Russia as threatening.  Both wars could have been avoided. NATO could have agreed to keep its promise and not expand to Ukraine. Ukraine and its Western partners could have used the Minsk Accord as a path to peace and implemented it instead of using it as an opportunity to arm for war. As for Iran, it had already signed a nuclear agreement that clearly stated that “Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons.” Diplomacy was an option. Both wars were supposed to make the world a safer place. Both have increased nuclear risks. The post Wars in Ukraine, Iran Undermine Nuclear Security appeared first on The American Conservative.

Economy Trump Turns Down USMCA Renewal The president has declined to renew the United States’ largest free-trade agreement. President Donald Trump has decided not to renew the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA), which was up for review this year. The agreement will remain in force until 2036, at which point it will expire unless all three signatory countries have agreed to renew it for another 16 years. The country’s largest trade agreement, the USMCA was originally negotiated and signed by Trump himself during his first term. It replaced the much-reviled North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which Trump called “the worst trade deal in history” and a “job-killing failure” responsible for the loss of American industrial capacity. Although the USMCA was negotiated under the first Trump administration and touted as a major achievement (the president called it “the largest, fairest, most balanced, and modern trade agreement ever achieved”), Trump has since been relatively ambivalent on the value of the deal, noting, for example, that the U.S. still runs a major trade deficit with Canada and Mexico. “It was sort of a good deal, but it was a great deal for one reason,” Trump told reporters in June. “It gave the right to terminate.” That right to terminate (or rather, to not renew) is what the president is exercising now, as he feels the agreement has not done all he had hoped it would. The economic trends that the USMCA was supposed to arrest—growing trade deficits with Mexico and Canada and American deindustrialization—have continued. Indeed, since the USMCA came into force in 2020, the U.S. trade deficit with its North American partners has exploded. In the past six years the U.S.–Mexico trade deficit for goods has almost doubled, going from $111 billion in 2020 to $197 billion in 2025. The U.S.–Canada trade deficit for goods grew from $14 billion to $48 billion over the same time period, an increase of nearly 250 percent. American manufacturing is not much healthier for the change, either. While the U.S. manufacturing industry has grown in dollar terms since 2020, the sector has declined in proportion to the rest of the economy. When USMCA entered into force, manufacturing contributed just over 10 percent of the total U.S. GDP. Today, it represents only 9.4 percent. That decline is particularly painful as the U.S. attempts to keep pace with China’s massive manufacturing sector, an effort that looks more doomed with each passing year. The USMCA also failed to bring any revival in manufacturing employment: There are fewer Americans working in manufacturing today than in January 2020. The lackluster results delivered by the USMCA are hardly surprising. The agreement, though touted as a repudiation of NAFTA, was essentially the same framework with a few modifications and a new coat of paint. It maintained essentially intact the North American free-trade zone, NAFTA’s signal accomplishment, but tightened rules of origin for automotives and automotive parts, strengthened labor standards, and beefed up the enforcement mechanisms for violations of the agreement. It also, of course, added the sunset clause that ends the agreement unless it is renewed by 2036. The U.S. will continue to negotiate with Mexico and Canada over the terms of the USMCA during its remaining decade, however. The Trump administration is pushing to strengthen the automotive rules of origin even further, among other changes. But drawing up a replacement framework does not seem to be on the president’s agenda, at least for now. Materially altering the USMCA framework will be difficult. North American trade is deeply integrated, and is becoming more so as the U.S. seeks to decouple supply chains from China. Much of that manufacturing has moved to Mexico, which under President Claudia Sheinbaum has placed steep tariffs on Chinese goods in an attempt to tighten its economic alignment with the U.S. Ending the North American free-trade zone would be a major disruption to the American economy and highly unpopular with U.S. businesses and consumers. It’s also uncertain how effective doing so would be for American reindustrialization. American manufacturing has trouble competing with China’s cheap labor costs; sourcing parts from lower-cost countries like Mexico allows American companies to reduce the price of their products at the cost of shifting some of the supply chain abroad. Cutting off the possibility of cheaper inputs may stem the flow of offshoring but make American goods too expensive for the market, harming manufacturers. Still, the Trump administration already began to move beyond the free-trade framework established by NAFTA and only partially preserved by the USMCA. During Trump’s 2025 “Liberation Day” tariff campaign, Canada and Mexico were not treated like free-trade partners: The administration imposed duties on some Canadian and Mexican goods under border-emergency authorities, though USMCA-qualifying products retained their preferential treatment. These measures marked an important departure from NAFTA’s animating premise: that tariff-free trade among the three countries should be the default. The Trump administration’s position is that access to the U.S. market must be subordinate to American industrial and economic policy priorities. It will continue to push that line in the ongoing USMCA talks this summer. What will replace the USMCA when it expires in 2036 remains an open question, however, and will probably depend heavily on the results of the 2028 presidential election. Trump himself seems inclined to leave it to his successor, and it is not certain how the party will settle on economic policy as he exits the stage. Vice President J.D. Vance, the heir apparent, has been one of the most prominent champions of the second Trump administration’s protectionist policies, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio, likely to be the establishment darling in a primary contest, is a proponent of something closer to the pre-Trump Republican consensus on free trade. Either could move the party in his own direction.  Democrats, on the other hand, have been fiercely critical of the Trump administration’s tariff policy, and are likely to seek a return to the days of NAFTA, a position that meshes well with the party’s increasing suspicion of borders generally. The post Trump Turns Down USMCA Renewal appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics Platner’s Fatal Dependence on Party Elites The left-populist Democrat says ‘the political establishment’ won’t let him win. (Photo by Laura Brett/Getty Images) Much has been written about the socialist shooting star that was Maine Democrat Graham Platner’s Senate candidacy, which raises questions for anti-establishment political figures of all stripes.  Perhaps the biggest question is how Platner could so thoroughly rout his party’s governing class—he received nearly 72 percent of the vote against the state’s sitting governor, who was backed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer yet stopped campaigning long before Election Day due to abysmal polling—while by his own admission remaining utterly dependent on party elites in the general election. How else are we to interpret his comments that he was ending his upstart Senate bid not because the sexual assault allegations against him were true, but because “the political establishment” and “those in power” were going to starve him of campaign funds? “We went toe to toe with one of the most entrenched political systems in the world,” Platner declaimed. “And we won.”  But then? “The brutal political reality is that they are going to take everything away from us,” he said. It is true that the extent to which the Democrats’ official campaign arms planned to disown his candidacy was extreme (though not unique—comparable Republican entities attempted it with embattled, ill-fated Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore in a 2017 special election). Nevertheless, if you are going to attempt to overthrow your party’s donor class, it would seem important to not be wholly reliant on said donors to win in November. This is not simply to dunk on Platner, who by all accounts is both superficially talented and deeply troubled. It is a question populist conservatives are going to have to answer too. If you cannot rely on your party’s corporate wing for campaign cash, who can you count on when push comes to shove? A decade ago, people assumed Donald Trump would self-fund to a far greater degree than he actually did and that he would therefore not need traditional GOP moneymen or special interest groups. While this turned out to not be entirely true, Trump did well enough with small donors and the earned—read: free—media he could obtain as a savvy celebrity to overcome any cash disadvantage he faced against Jeb Bush, Hillary Clinton, or Kamala Harris. (Though by 2024, a sufficient number of the big GOP donors had come around.) Bernie Sanders, the most viable recent model for Platner’s politics, was similarly successful with small donors and raised enough money to be competitive despite constantly inveighing against millionaires and billionaires. Ron Paul pioneered internet money bombs that broke single day fundraising records. That’s a lot of fiat currency! Platner was much more of a creation of progressive political consultants than any of the above examples, who, whatever their flaws, were their own men and knew where their independent bases of support were located. The oyster-everyman brought a certain raw personal charisma, daring, and a resume uncommon among earnest, youngish liberals, while the political strategist Morris Katz and company attempted to fill in the rest. These operatives appear to have run for the tall grass once Platner proved problematic. Outsiders need to be housebroken before they can be let inside. This is where Platner’s personal recklessness and unmistakable character flaws were as decisive as his dependence on others. As the deadline for him to withdraw fast approached, the nature of the accuser (no longer a Republican or anyone who could be easily dismissed as having a political motive), the nature of the accusations (detailed, reasonably well-corroborated allegations of nonconsensual sexual behavior), and the volume of the accusations (how confident could anyone be that there wasn’t more and that Republicans weren’t sitting on the worst of it) all changed. While it would have been prudent to cut bait once given the tattoo clue, there were only so many more warnings Democrats were going to get while an off-ramp was still available.  If Platner was going to maintain his innocence, however implausibly, it was on him to power through the deadline, try to wage a competitive campaign, and watch erstwhile allies slink back into his camp.  Would the dreaded Democratic establishment really have written off the race against Susan Collins, and perhaps the Senate majority, if Platner had been able to make it look at all winnable? Wouldn’t the money have come eventually? James Talarico just raised $30 million in Texas. Few can stomach being a pariah candidate or much of what Trump has at various points endured, especially if victory seems unlikely. The post Platner’s Fatal Dependence on Party Elites appeared first on The American Conservative.

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