Politics Development, the American Way Is this regulatory agency leading the charge on Trump’s Golden Age? Consensus is in short supply in modern America, to hear the political scientists tell it: polarization along geographic, educational, class, and sexual lines; media fragmentation; the collapse of civil society. Everyone is suspicious, lonely, and cooped in small, strange ideological silos. We still call it the United States, but you say the first word with a bit of a gulp. Strangely, though, there has been a sort of convergence on one of the great public left–right, blue–red battlegrounds of the last century: political economy. Both major parties seem to agree that something has gone terribly wrong, and that the something has to do with our ability to build things. From Infrastructure Week to the CHIPS Act, both Rs and Ds have blundered into the arena to try to prod the American industrial base back to life. The reasons for this vary depending on the flavor of person you’re talking to—or, in the case of the politicos, the flavor of audience they’re talking to: restoring manufacturing jobs, national security, vague patriotic aspirationalism. A recurring idea is that, in the absence of hardheaded political decision-making, our economy has become basically frivolous, a phantasm of app development and healthcare services. Let’s accept that critique, and say that something needs to be done about American industry. Of course, like begetting a child or cooking a steak, industrialization can be achieved in more pleasant ways or less. In bare numerical terms, one of the most successful industrialization campaigns of the last century: Stalin’s. Soviet industrial production increased by (give or take) 50 percent under the first Five-Year Plan. In the long run, though, the Soviet system didn’t work terribly well in ways that do not need to be dissected for readers of The American Conservative. It also killed and brutalized millions of people along the way. The specter of the planned economy is viewed with suspicion for good reasons. There are intermediates between the glorious science of Marxism–Leninism and the aimless proliferation of social media platforms. In states that are not classically communist or ideally libertarian, what does a development regime look like? This question can be cut up into a number of constituent questions, the foremost of which is, How does development happen? And, almost equal with it, What do you want the government to do? The second question can be used to answer the first. Broadly speaking, the government can do three things: It can tax, it can subsidize, and it can regulate. Crudely put, the much-touted Asian model uses these tools aggressively to choose winners and losers. The state works closely with large firms—the zaibatsu in Japan, the chaebol in South Korea, the massive state-supported concerns in China—to achieve strategic economic goals. In these systems, development happens because the state orders it. Eyeing China’s conspicuous successes, some commentators, even on the right, have hinted that the U.S. would do well to imitate its approach. This is for a variety of reasons unappealing to many, probably most, Americans, not least because of the implicit or explicit limits on economic freedom such an approach demands. Historically, the U.S. has had a different model of development: free markets fostered and protected by the state. Given the opportunity to build the goods the national interest demands, market actors will rise to the occasion. If there is a disjunction between the national interest and the American industrial engine, it is because something has gone wrong in the way the state is fostering and protecting those markets. What is President Donald Trump’s developmental model? What will his second administration do—and what is it already doing—with the toolkit of tax, subsidy, and regulation? The first of these has grabbed the lion’s share of headlines in the first six months of Trump 47; the administration has shown an unparalleled willingness to throw its weight around with taxation in the form of an aggressive tariff policy. The end goal is to give American firms a competitive edge by hook or by crook, whether by renegotiated trade agreements or by simple protection. (Whether this will work remains to be seen.) Subsidies are a tougher nut: Congress still holds the power of the purse, and the American fisc is in sorry condition after 40 years of Republican tax cuts and Democratic spending. A January executive order charging the Treasury to investigate the establishment of a sovereign wealth fund for domestic investment may bear fruit, but in these early days we don’t know when or how much. Are these efforts tilting more towards the Asian model or more towards the old American model? It is hard to say at this inchoate stage. That leaves regulation, which Congress has largely abdicated to the agencies of the executive branch. And it is here, in bland office buildings in Northwest Washington, DC and amid the technical weeds of federal rulemaking, that a coherent model—a coherent and American model—championed by the administration is coming into view. A policymaker coming up with a development model in 2025 has significant disadvantages compared to his predecessors in prior generations. Technical advances have rendered every human endeavor far more complicated; farming, steelmaking, drilling for oil, driving, paying the electric bill, napping your child, checking the weather, and donating to your church’s collection are now mediated by computer chips and satellites. In particular, the defining characteristic of the modern world is the supremacy of telecommunications in every sphere. The Federal Communications Commission was formed in 1934  for the purpose of regulating interstate and foreign commerce in communication by wire and radio so as to make available, so far as possible to all the people of the United States a rapid, efficient, Nation-wide, and world-wide wire and radio communication service with adequate facilities at reasonable charges, for the purpose of the national defense, for the purpose of promoting safety of life and property through the use of wire and radio communication, and for the purpose of securing a more effective execution of this policy by centralizing authority heretofore granted by law to several agencies and by granting additional authority with respect to interstate and foreign commerce in wire and radio communication. From its founding until 1982, the FCC’s foremost task was overseeing the Bell System, the national telecommunications monopoly. The Bell monopoly was a unique American solution to telecom provision—in contrast to European or Asian models—that fit into the constellation of similar mid-century companies that built the American Century. “The great corporate labs at RCA, IBM, GE, and the Bell System formed half of a public-private partnership, in which the government paid for basic research, but private capital took the risk of commercialization,” as David Goldman wrote in these pages in September. “This was an alternative to what every other advanced country did during that period, which was nationalize the phone system, or build it out from the ground up as a state monopoly,” commented FCC Commissioner Nathan Simington. “I think it could be argued that nothing succeeds like success, and, while the Bell System certainly is not without its flaws, it’s also true that Americans enjoy generally better and cheaper wire-line services than in most European countries.”  Simington noted other advantages too, beyond pricing. “Plus we have that whole Bell Labs thing, which gave us transistors, lasers, communications, satellites, cell phones, all that good stuff. So it’s hard to look back at that Heroic Age of the FCC and say—you know, whatever constitutional questions we might have—40 years in the rear view mirror, that it wasn’t successful.” In 1983, the Bell monopoly was broken up in the tide of deregulation, particularly under the pressure of new wireless technologies.  Dale Hatfield, a telecommunications specialist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, was heavily involved in writing the 1982 complaint about AT&T’s efforts to stifle competition from new wireless services, like those provided by the now-defunct MCI. For six decades, Hatfield has been at the heart of the FCC’s technical work; he served as the commission’s chief technologist and chief of the Office of Engineering and Technology, and still sits on the FCC’s Technology Advisory Council and on the Commerce Department’s Spectrum Management Advisory Committee. “My career in radio communications goes back to when I was 15 years old, and I became a radio ham and was absolutely fascinated with it,” said Hatfield. “And from there, eventually, my interest was so strong that it led me into the spectrum world that I am now. So I’ve been involved in almost all the major spectrum matters since 1963.” Ironically, Hatfield and his colleagues’ success against the Bell System deprived the FCC of its single biggest job. “The role of the FCC as an economic regulatory agency has, I think, been in question since 1982, and we’ve struggled to match institutional continuity with the proliferation of communications media that have flourished in the age of the post-breakup phone system, but then also in the early internet age, and now with the bewildering variety of communications and telecommunications media that we’ve got,” said Simington. The commission’s explicit brief, which has been substantially unchanged since 1934, is as broad as ever—broader, even, in the age of networking. It just may no longer be the best organ for handling everything in that brief. “I’m not calling for the dissolution of the FCC—the Wall Street Journal is, I’m not—but it’s worth asking the question, at minimum, if the FCC is going to continue in its present form,” said Simington. “I know that Congress shows no sign of changing the Communications Act in any fundamental way. If the FCC is going to continue in its present form, how can [it] change to be more efficient?” Here, one of the fundamental questions facing the federal government and, most acutely, this administration comes to the surface: What is the proper role of the administrative state? Here is the China temptation: picking champions and explicitly directing industry. Here also is the question of what exactly an administrative agency is supposed to be—an independent, technocratic organ beholden primarily to the Article I branch or an efflorescence of the executive from which its authority flows? The Trump 47 FCC’s outlook is perhaps unsurprising. “When we talk about priorities of a Trump 47 FCC, we’re talking about priorities of the administration, as much as the actual regulatory agenda of the FCC itself,” said Simington. “So my question, looking at the FCC, is really to what extent are our policies consistent with, as opposed to pushing back against, the president’s policies in this area. We have to ask the question because our independence is no longer what it used to be. And we have to ask the question because the executive branch should speak with a sole voice, and that’s with the voice of the duly elected president, the only member among us who has true democratic legitimacy. A robust vision of political leadership guiding the agencies means they may have less power in themselves; it may, however, also free them to pursue actual policy more nimbly. The political portion of the body does policy, and the administrative portion again administers the policy. “So, in other words, when people say, Well, what are your priorities? I say, well, let’s step back and look at what the administration’s priorities are. What did the president tell the secretary of defense? Shipbuilding, shipbuilding, shipbuilding. Okay. Do I have a role in that? Well, let’s look at the major shipbuilding powers in the world right now, which are China, South Korea, and Japan.” Simington cited a battery of facts about the role of 5G communications technology in foreign industry generally and in facilitating the manufacture of ships particularly, by way of contrast to the U.S., where 5G development has been primarily consumer-facing. “And so, with all that said, my question is: What does 5G industrialization look like in the United States? And to what degree are we just path dependent on a path that doesn’t lead there?” Simington said. “So this in turn requires, I guess, analysis that’s a little broader than a typical FCC analysis. Normally we would look at industry, make sure that there’s no obvious regulatory thumb on the scale that serves to pick winners, and then say, ‘Well, you know, we’re technology neutral, we’re technology independent, we’re technology agnostic. We’re going to let them fight it out in the marketplace to the degree that they’re within a particular regulatory category.’” And here is where the rubber meets the road: encouraging the pursuit of policy priorities without telling telecoms what to do. Are the regulations, as they exist, actually preventing the genius of the market from applying itself to the administration’s desired goal? “I find myself asking, increasingly, what does it look like to ensure that, if American industry wishes to execute a pivot towards greater [business-to-business] and industrial use of 5G, there’s a regulatory framework available for it to do that?” said Simington. “That is, have we implicitly locked the United States into a consumer-facing posture in a way that forecloses alternative uses?” So the rise of wireless technologies like those that eventually developed into 5G—that is to say, technologies that use the radio spectrum—helped to bring down the FCC’s most significant ward, but it has also provided one of the preeminent and unambiguous spheres for the commission’s work in the years since.  “Radio spectrum is a limited resource, and like any resource that’s scarce, it has to be divided up among competing uses. And of course, today, we’re seeing a terrific explosion in different uses, ranging from your cell phone to government radars to your crib monitors,” Hatfield said. “It just is a tremendous number of devices using the spectrum, and somebody has to develop the rules. Who gets to transmit, who doesn’t, all of those sorts of things. And that’s where we are today—trying to sort out the highest value uses for the radio spectrum.”  The allocation of spectrum privileges is where the philosophy of development comes to the fore—what ways of using a limited resource best support the national interest? How many substantive conditions does the regulator want to place on the use of the spectrum? “There are four different ways that you can make the decision, and these are relevant today,” explained Hatfield. Those methods are the beauty contest, where different interests present the FCC with the case for why their use for spectrum space is the best; first-come, first-serve licensing, where the first interest to use a bit of spectrum gets to claim it; lotteries; and what Hatfield calls “market-oriented approaches to deciding,” which is to say, auctions. On a crowded, 100-year-old common like the radio spectrum, concerns can arise from unexpected places. The FCC periodically reviews its regulations; the latest round was announced in March by a public notice with the provocative title “In Re: Delete, Delete, Delete.” The introduction to the notice read: Through a series of Executive Orders, President Trump has called on administrative agencies to unleash prosperity through deregulation and ensure that they are efficiently delivering great results for the American people.  By this Public Notice, the Federal Communications Commission (Commission or FCC) is taking action to promote the policies outlined by President Trump in those Executive Orders. Specifically, we are seeking public input on identifying FCC rules for the purpose of alleviating unnecessary regulatory burdens. We seek comment on deregulatory initiatives that would facilitate and encourage American firms’ investment in modernizing their networks, developing infrastructure, and offering innovative and advanced capabilities. The announcement, combined with the renewed interest in restoring the commission’s power to auction off spectrum space, was greeted by a flurry of angst in a group you might not expect: amateur radio operators, or hams. Title 97 of the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations defines amateur radio thus: “A radiocommunication service for the purpose of self-training, intercommunication, and technical investigations carried out by licensed individuals interested in radio technique solely with a personal aim and without pecuniary interest.” In layman’s terms, the amateur service is a sandbox for private individuals’ experimentation with and technical development of radio-spectrum technologies, from homebrew networking to building international communications relays. Bruce Perens, a founder of the Open Source movement and an avid amateur radio operator, emphasizes that this is the fundamental value proposition for the amateur service. “Amateur radio is the only system where you can change the network of a wide area, network something that is a city or even international,” said Perens. “You could not do that on the phone system, for example. So this is where a lot of people learn the wireless technology and electronics.” The list of famous hams vindicates the point; it includes the Nobel-winning physicist Joseph Taylor, the inventor of the walkie-talkie Al Gross, and the Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak. (As mentioned above, Dale Hatfield’s long career also began on the amateur bands.) During a period in which American industrial ambitions are heavily checked by the absence of a trained technical pool, such a space is invaluable. “That’s why Silicon Valley, for example, was started by radio hams, and that [still] goes on,” Perens noted. “If you look in the high-tech companies, they’re just a lot of people with these letters and numbers [i.e. amateur radio callsigns] after their name. And so we have to understand that this has a tremendous value as far as STEM education.” The opening of the “In re: Delete, Delete, Delete” docket occasioned Perens with significant concerns. “The problem I have with ‘Delete, Delete, Delete,’ is it comes from the assumption that regulation is bad. And in the case of FCC, regulation is not bad,” said Perens. “But we do need some changes to regulation, and they are mostly technical, and they are things that the average person would not understand or care about. For example, we want to be regulated by the bandwidth of our signal rather than the mode of our signal.”  Perens noted other examples of past regulation removal that were salutary—particularly the abolition of the Morse code proficiency requirement for hams, a move for which he was a leading advocate—but emphasized that spectrum regulation as a whole encourages the useful application of technologies, rather than stifles it. “There’s some point in deleting some regulations, but if we deleted everything, we’d be back to the Citizens Band radio with just nuttiness on every channel,” he said, referring to the anarchic radio service for unlicensed recreational users. Perens was also skeptical of the prospect of spectrum auctions, which many hams fear will reduce the bands on which they may operate. “I don’t think that spectrum auction is a good way to [allocate use], because spectrum auction automatically says monopoly use of spectrum, whereas the alternative is shared use of spectrum with licenses and spectrum management,” he said. “And I think that shared use of spectrum is very important, because the United States is not homogeneous. When these guys are buying spectrum at auction, they are buying spectrum to deploy in a metropolitan area, and they will probably never use that spectrum anywhere else, and it is available for other users if it is correctly managed, but if it is auctioned off, it’s not.” Perens fears that ham interests and amateur radio’s value proposition have been poorly represented, and the consequences could spell the end of the amateur service. “I think that the worst thing that could happen would be, you know, ham radio can be looked at as the the native people of radio spectrum, okay? And and then one day, someone comes in to cut down our forest. That’s the worst thing that could happen,” he said. “And, on the other side, we could have [the American Radio Relay League’s] comment heeded, which would make some small improvements, which are important, or no one could listen at all. … [Those] are the good outcomes. The bad outcome here is that the natives get sent somewhere else and someone takes over the forest.” (The ARRL, the preeminent amateur radio organization in America, did not respond to request for comment.) Simington disagreed. “I’m not sure that the amateur radio community could have done much more than it did, considering that the FCC culture has shifted away from engineering somewhat and more towards economic regulation,” he said. “So if your general background is economic regulation, and you would be just as happy at the FTC as the FCC, then maybe ham radio doesn’t seem like a particularly special category to you, maybe more like an appendix or a historical curiosity. But I think that’s the wrong attitude. The FCC should reclaim its engineering heritage and its credibility in field enforcement.” Non-enforcement of the correct use of spectrum space, a classic bugbear for hams, turns regulation into something that incentivizes bad behavior rather than guiding good behavior. “To the degree that we’re not enforcing that… it becomes a case where regulation chases out the legitimate users, where we put so many obstacles in the way, it’s doing things that people will just go into the many, many convenient, unregulated ways of doing those things and say, catch me if you can,” said Simington. Hatfield echoed concerns about enforcement, noting that it affects the entire common, not just amateurs. “The cyber attacks up the protocol stack … that gets a lot of attention. That’s occurring up at the application layers, where things are going in the network and the physical layer. Stuff that we’re talking about that happens down in the radio spectrum, that jamming and stuff, has just not gotten the attention that, in my opinion, it deserves. But it’s a tough problem,” he said, adding that enforcement prioritization is itself difficult. “Here again, you’ve got an allocation problem of money: Where does it go?” Concerns about the efficient use of spectrum space also weigh heavily on the FCC. “That’s exactly the kind of thing that I think leads to the argument for having a regulatory agency with significant field enforcement and activity review powers; that otherwise we do see spectrum licenses being potentially opened to questions of this type,” said Simington. “As to how serious those questions are, though, I guess I would say that, in an age where we’ve generally required as much rural buildout as possible, specifically in wireless mobility, and where there have been explicit rural buildout conditions on major transactions such as the Sprint–T-Mobile transaction—then in that case, it’s hard to argue that the wireless mobility industry should be building less capacity and offering fewer services outside of major metros.” Balancing difficult-to-value but clearly important interests like the amateur service against economic interests is the classic difficulty of managing a common. “It’s very difficult to get the solutions that satisfy everyone, which is precisely why we have a public process with notice and comment rulemaking for this kind of thing,” said Simington. “There are probably going to be people’s oxes gored by this, and even injustice is done, but, but on the whole, I think the FCC record on this is pretty strong.” When you google news stories about the FCC, you see endless headlines about Chairman Brendan Carr’s high-profile jousting with media outlets over bias in news coverage, and understandably so. These brawls are flashy and certainly generate many clicks; nor are questions of soft censorship by any means insignificant. But the focus on this side of the FCC’s work seems to miss the underlying program or philosophy that emerges from the commission’s approach to the more technical issues, which seems to be nothing less than a defense of a particular vision of the American way of life. What was implicit in Simington’s discussion of spectrum regulation and allocation became explicit when he spoke about the commission’s work fostering cybersecurity risk markets—markets that, he believes, will prompt more effective and innovative cybersecurity practices than checklists and mandates. “The idea behind the Cyber Trust Mark [program] is essentially that we’re going to leverage the insurance sector and private litigation to engage in price discovery on what the real drivers of cybersecurity are,” Simington said. “In other words, I’d like to surface the question, what the fully loaded cost of ownership, including security overhang, is for a device, so that we’re not price discriminating solely on a sticker price basis.” This is the heart of the matter. “We say that we believe in capitalism. You know, that doesn’t just mean corporatism. It means that some companies are going to make the wrong bets and fail, and some are going to fail to assess risk and fail. We’re going to continue to create space for startups by allowing them to compete,” Simington continued. “On this basis, it would mean that the ability to quantify the drivers of risk within your organization and … within your wireless equipment manufacturer will suddenly have economic value, not just be a drag on hitting your sales numbers. And to the degree that we’re rewarding risk professionals for risk discovery in this area, I think we get to a rapid surfacing of superior cybersecurity practices.” The commissioner contrasted this with a more top-down, rules-based approach: “If we don’t like it, then we should just give up and say, what we’re actually doing is red, white, and blue communism. I’m not a big fan of that, you know? I think that our free society only works if you believe in it.” Hatfield echoed this sentiment. “The evidence strongly points to the fact that the United States has benefited greatly by using marketplace forces in how we determine spectrum management,” he said. “In Europe, they may use more of a command-and-control type system, and I think one of the reasons we’ve benefited is we’ve been much more open to competition. I think it’s very clear that our system is working pretty darn well when you compare it with other systems. Here again, there’s advantages and disadvantages, but it’s working pretty well.” “I think very often what we’re really doing is we’re identifying places where price discovery was stifled before. And, you know, we have to, we have to believe that our capital allocation mechanisms are valuable,” said Simington. “I mean, the United States has more allocatable capital … than any country in the world. We have something like a third of the allocatable capital in the world. That’s an amazing feature of our system. It’s a proof that our system is the best for generating wealth and therefore human flourishing. And, you know, it’s very easy for this to get lost at a time of political upheaval, but this administration has deep commitment to this idea.” Regulation that conserves and expands free and fair markets that support the national interest—call that development, American style. The post Development, the American Way appeared first on The American Conservative.

Infrastructure Is This 26-year-old America’s Nuclear Prometheus? Isaiah Taylor, founder of Valar Atomics, sits down with The American Conservative to talk about the promise of nuclear energy under Trump 2.0. Nuclear energy is either a dirty phrase or a holy grail, depending on whom you ask. For the energy startup Valar Atomics and its founder, Isaiah Taylor, it’s the latter. Valar announced in March, one month after raising a $19 million seed round, that it was partnering with the Philippines’ Nuclear Research Institute to develop nuclear energy for the Pacific nation. Then, in April, Valar joined multiple states and reactor companies in a lawsuit against America’s Nuclear Regulatory Commission, alleging that the agency’s rules are too onerous to allow for small-scale testing and innovation. In May, following President Donald Trump’s executive order to reform nuclear-reactor testing, Taylor announced that Valar will partner with the state of Utah to build a pilot advanced reactor at the San Rafael Energy Research Center by Independence Day next year. The American Conservative caught up with 26-year-old Taylor in a phone interview to hear about Valar’s whirlwind past few months. What is the elevator pitch for Valar Atomics? Valar Atomics is focused on making the world’s energy with nuclear power. We do that by making a small modular reactor. It’s a very safe, very simple reactor design, and we essentially make a small version of it, and then we make many of them…. We do this in something we call a gigasite. A gigasite is essentially a large-scale site where we create hundreds of the same reactor over and over. That allows us to achieve economies of scale and get our reactors very cheap. Then we create tons of power, and we use that power for data centers and heavy industry and metal refining and all the sorts of things that are going to help reindustrialize. I know that Valar just inked this deal with the Philippines’ research institute. What’s going on there? What’s the upshot?  The Philippines is a really key ally of the United States. They’re counter-positioned against China, and are becoming extremely critical to our defense posture in that region. They have a big power issue. They don’t have enough local energy resources. Their natural gas is running out, their oil’s running out. They don’t have solar, they don’t have wind, and they really, really need nuclear. So a couple years ago they reached out to the United States and said, “Hey, we’d really like to be able to make nuclear reactors here from U.S. companies.” And it looks like Valar Atomics is gearing up to build the first one with this agreement that we signed. Are you guys working on a demonstrator reactor right now? What’s your timeline or your hope for getting something from demonstration to powering these industrial sites?  There are a couple levels of demonstration. We’ve just completed what’s called Ward Zero. Ward Zero is a non-nuclear prototype reactor. So, essentially, we build a nuclear reactor. But instead of putting nuclear fuel in it, we put heaters in it…. And we use those heaters to mimic the nuclear fuel, and it allows us to test the thermal properties of the reactor, test all the mechanical systems and make sure everything’s working well. Then we move to the actual nuclear reactor in the Philippines, that’s called Ward One. Ward One is named after Ward Schaap, my great-grandfather who was a nuclear physicist on the Manhattan Project. Then we go from Ward One, which is a very small demonstrator reactor, to our full commercial model, which we’ll make right after that. So there’s essentially a series of prototypes that allow us to demonstrate capability and increase our capability leading up to these full-scale sites.  You guys are probably glad to be working with an ally of the U.S. But what’s it been like working with the U.S. regulatory state? Is that something you’ve approached yet?  The short answer is that the nuclear environment in the U.S. died in 1979. 1979 was Three Mile Island. This was a nuclear incident that had no deaths and had no measurable effect on the environment or health of the public around the plant, and yet it completely shuttered the nuclear industry in the U.S. Unfortunately, a lot of that was absorbed into the regulator. So the regulator added extremely stringent rules. We added a lot of requirements that make it take forever and cost a ton of money to go through simple reactor prototypes. Our conviction is that you need to go through reactor prototypes in order to develop a technology… I think we have a real window here where we could fix that environment. Can you imagine Valar under a second Democratic administration? Were you white-knuckling it through the election? Was that on your mind?  Yeah, we were absolutely white-knuckling it through the election, no doubt. During [the] Biden era, we were working with the State Department and with some other people and [were] able to work with the bureaucracy that was there, but the perspective of actually being able to bring it back to the United States was just completely off the radar. To Biden’s credit, he did start to push for nuclear in the last couple years of his administration. He did sign the ADVANCE Act [a bill intended to accelerate nuclear technological progress], which was a bipartisan act in Congress, but I’d class all these things as sort of trying to arrange the deck chairs on the Titanic, right? There needs to be a complete overhaul of the regulatory environment in the United States in order for nuclear to work. That was just not something that the prior administration had the stomach for. So we’re really grateful to be working with the Trump administration. This whole concept of the politicization of energy—it’s been going on for decades. I saw the headline recently that the EPA Museum left the first Trump admin out. Anything having to do with the environment or regulations, it’s just become so political. Some things are just so clearly products of the left, and some things are so clearly products of the right. Can you just talk about why you think energy should be post-political? The most obvious thing that you should do for your country is to make energy cheaper. If the two political parties are essentially two different theses on how to best serve the nation, then both sides should be able to agree that we should have more energy and it should be cheaper, because that affects absolutely everything about American life. But unfortunately, that’s not been the case. Instead, the focus on the left has been not how to make cheaper energy and more abundant energy, but how to offset carbon emissions. But the ironic thing is that if you look at the climate impact of the United States versus a country like China or any of our geopolitical rivals, our impact on the environment is already so much lower. We’re just chasing diminishing marginal returns while making everything more expensive for ourselves and making it impossible to build anything.  I think that there was a lot of irrationality in that policy for a long time. On the left, there was this religiosity of greenwashing everything and trying to promote these policies that make it impossible to build. I think that probably a lot of that was actually, if you trace the money all the way back, you’ll find that some of these funds came from places that actually don’t want us to succeed. That’s sometimes the only way to explain the total irrationality. It shouldn’t have to take two-and-a-half, three years to do an environmental assessment to build something. You should be able to do an environmental assessment in months, not years. That’s how it is everywhere else in the world where you’re actually able to build stuff. So this shouldn’t be political. It’s only political to the extent that the left doesn’t want to build things anymore. And I think that’s a mistake.  On your Valar journey, have you had any strange bedfellows? Maybe people who are from the green energy world or left the green energy world who’ve told you, “Hey, we’re interested in what you’re doing?” Absolutely. The whole nuclear space is a very interesting mix of the freedom-loving, patriotic right and the wanting-to-move-away-from-carbon left. You have people from both sides, and I think we can all come together on that, because nuclear is the cheapest energy and it does happen to be carbon-neutral. So there are people who just know that energy should be 10 times cheaper and nuclear is the only way to get there. And there are people who want energy without carbon, and nuclear is also the way to get there. When people hear about your gigasites, do they ever compare you to Henry Ford and the Model T? What do you think is a good historical analogue for what Valar’s trying to do? I would say that Model T is an interesting comparison, but SpaceX might be a little bit better. SpaceX took sort of a quasi-governmental industry, rockets, even though they were made by ULA, which was technically a private company. They were defense contractors who sort of make things on the government dime for the government’s purposes. Elon took that, and he essentially privatized rocketry, and he was able to streamline it and manufacture it and make rockets land themselves. Valar’s trying to do a very similar thing for nuclear. The nuclear industry has been, somewhat, a public-private partnership over the last 50 years, which I think has driven a lot of irrationality into it, unfortunately. And we are a fully privatized company that’s looking to design, produce, manufacture, and operate its own reactors, and I think that’s gonna drive costs down an enormous amount.  You talked about Three Mile Island. When people hear nuclear, they think about accidents. They bring up Chernobyl; they bring up Fukushima. So how do you think about safety and accident prevention and all of those kinds of things? What kind of conversations have you been having with your team? The three major nuclear incidents that have happened so far have all pertained to what’s called water reactors. So water reactors use water in the core for a combination of cooling and moderation. Chernobyl used graphite and water. Three Mile Island and Fukushima were just water. These were both large-scale, high–power density designs that are very, very efficient. They sort of came from the U.S. Navy’s form of building reactors. All of commercial nuclear today is downstream of reactors that went into the submarines in the U.S. Navy. Water reactors are really important for naval vessels because they’re very power dense. What that means is they’re small and they make a ton of power. But being very small and making a lot of power is also sort of naturally unsafe. So if you have a ton of energy in a very small diameter, or let’s say an enormous amount of energy in a big diameter, you are sort of working against physics, or physics is working against you, in terms of safety. We do the exact opposite. We operate a very, very low-power density within an architecture that doesn’t use water at all. What that means is that we don’t have any massive pressure spikes in the system because there’s no steam generation and there’s no decomposition of water into hydrogen. A lot of the nuclear accidents in the past have had to do with hydrogen explosions from water overheating. We basically just avoid those problems altogether. Our reactors are passively safe designs operated in extremely low-power density, so that if anything does go wrong, the heat that’s produced by the core does not have to be actively removed. We don’t rely on human operators or active engineering systems to remove heat from the system. It’s just passively removed based on principles of physics. So, there are ways that you can design around these problems, and we have, and I would say one of the reasons that this hasn’t been pursued in the past is just that it’s been hard to test and iterate in nuclear. We just sort of had a design that was decided on in the ’60s, and we haven’t really been able to innovate too much since then. So Valar is really stepping out and being able to do that.  You’re part of a very innovative crowd of tech-minded entrepreneurs known as the “Gundo bros.” How are you guys spurring each other on even while working on totally different technologies? Can you talk a little bit about that environment and say what somebody who’s never heard of El Segundo should know? El Segundo is the best place in America to build things today. It’s a small suburb of Los Angeles, but it really feels like its own place. It’s gated on four sides. So on one side we have the beautiful Pacific Ocean. On another side we have the Chevron El Segundo Refinery. Then we have the 405 highway. And then, on the fourth side, we have the Los Angeles International Airport. So it’s a bit of a walled garden of a building. What we have there is really just a bunch of extremely motivated entrepreneurs who love America and love building real things in the physical world. We want to build planes and cars and trains and nuclear reactors. We want to modify the weather and make it do what we want and take dominion of the earth and defend America from her enemies. It’s a really cracked group of people who are extremely motivated and we encourage each other, we support each other all the time. You talked about taking dominion of the earth. I always want to ask people about their underlying philosophy. And I think I can guess a little bit, but it’d be better to get it in your own words. What affects your philosophy? Is it your faith? Is it being a parent? Is it all of the above?  My philosophy of technology is basically this: So God created a good and abundant world, that’s number one, right? Men fell and they created pain, toil, etc. Christ came back and redeemed man. Now we’re in this slow period of lifting the curse, right? I’m a post-millennial, I believe that the world actually gets better and better until Christ returns and death is slowly pushed back and the fall is slowly pushed back. The final enemy to be defeated will be death, and that’s when Jesus returns. But until then, we’re slowly lifting the effects of the curse, and you could see that starting in 0 AD. The effects of the curse have slowly been lifted from the world.  Technology has a ton to do with that. A lot of the lift is actually technological, and that makes it a lot of fun to build because really what we’re doing is we’re sort of anti-cursing the world through technology. We’re making it easier to live on Earth. We’re making it better to live on Earth. That touches a lot of things you wouldn’t necessarily expect. It doesn’t just mean making goods cheaper. It might mean making nature protected, or it might mean making an area more fruitful with water. It might mean changing how we get a certain type of energy because it has a better effect on the environment. So it’s a very exciting place to be building. That’s what drives me every day.  You came of age slightly after the Great Recession, when everything felt flat and nothing felt exciting. It sounds like you want to leave your kids a very different world. Can you elaborate on that a little bit?  America was sort of stagnating everywhere except Silicon Valley for the last 20, 30, maybe even 40 years, essentially since the 1970s. We, through trade policy and through environmental policy, essentially made it impossible to build things in the real world, and especially—I think this is what people miss—it’s not that it was impossible for large companies to build things in America, but it was very much impossible for young people with a little bit of capital and a lot of passion to get started and build something. If you have to fill out an Environmental Impact Statement for two years just to do a small project, you don’t do it.  Instead, kids learn to program computers and they move to Silicon Valley, or they just sort of do their run-of-the-mill, 9-to-5 desk job. But America has always been a nation of innovators. The entire world around us was invented by Americans for the most part. That sounds like an exaggeration. It’s really not.  Think about the things that make up the modern world. We have cars. Cars were invented by Americans. We have airplanes—invented by Americans. We have iPhones invented by Americans, using the Internet invented by Americans. So almost everything in the modern world you’ll trace back to the innovation of America. Unfortunately, we just completely deleted that over the last 40 years. The way that we did it is through making it hard for young, motivated people to build things at a small scale and then scale them up. And so that’s what I’m excited about that we’re unlocking right now. I think that this administration is a big part of it, but there’s a groundswell that’s sort of inevitable anyway. I think the groundswell is coming from the fact that my generation is fed up. We’re looking into the past, and we’re seeing that we used to build great things and, and we’re saying, “Hey, we’re gonna do that again.” People are so mean to Gen Z! I think Gen Z’s pretty cool. I totally agree. I’m very, very bullish on Gen Z actually. I think that we’re going to fix the state of affairs… all by ourselves if we have to. The post Is This 26-year-old America’s Nuclear Prometheus? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics What’s Next for Europe? Scenes from three cities on a continent on the brink. Munich in winter is mildly depressing, unlike the traditionally sunny postcards replete with lagerbier and dirndl. The airport is pretty far from the Bayerischer Hof, the venue for the 61st Munich Security Conference and, as history will record, the formal acceptance of the emergence of multipolarity and a declared shift in the grand strategy of the globe’s preponderant great power.  A few days earlier, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth declared that the U.S. would look to shift the burden of conventional deterrence on to the Europeans and that the days of unlimited NATO expansion, for all practical purposes, are over. Within the next two weeks, European leaders in the largest gathering of national security elites were lectured by the American vice president about how their institutions increasingly resemble those of the Soviet Union. Immediately after, the Ukrainian president, in his top crusading form, bizarrely tried to rally continental Europe against America by calling for a European army to drive out foreign invaders from the continent, and arguing that the U.S. be replaced by Ukraine in an European alliance.  The U.S. then held a separate meeting with Russia on deconfliction and arranged to turn Ukraine into a modern version of the Belgian Congo—the Ukrainians will hand over their minerals to the U.S. in lieu of the U.S. allowing them to seek a security guarantee from Europe. Germany held an election, and the new leader, Friedrich Merz, advocated for a tripartite nuclear arrangement with the UK and France, echoing calls for a European army and, among some over-excitable social media accounts, an eventual European empire. Not only was talk of imperialism coming back—the article itself was coming back, at such a rapid and disorienting pace that it almost felt as if the Earth’s magnetic poles shifted overnight.  The Uber driver from my hotel to MSC was a woman of advanced age and neurotic habits, whose opening salvo of English reminded me of Ilka Grüning’s Mrs. Leuchtag in Casablanca. We passed a Frauenkirche surrounded by niqab-wearing Balkan women, who crossed the road in large groups purposefully ignoring the green lights. I asked her by Google Translate what she thought of Alice Weidel and the rising fortunes of the Alternativ für Deutschland. After a few minutes of miscomprehension, she explained to me how her country is barely recognizable, and that she and her husband have worked for over forty years and have nothing much to show from the state. Upon further probing, she mentioned that while the Turkish diaspora still somehow work and are mostly “europeanized,” the Albanians, Romanians, and Ukrainians are hogging all the benefits, and that as a strong protest she is planning to vote—for CSU. AfD, for all its growth, has plateaued. Untamed Germany remains politically divided as ever, and the majority of right-wingers are reticent about voting in arch-Prussians who are opposed to NATO and arguably see the U.S. as occupiers.  The front of the Bayerischer Hof, surrounded by bemused young policemen and women, brought from all over Germany for the Munich Security Conference, also for some reason had a makeshift memorial with a gallery of Michael Jackson postcards. This is quintessential German conservatism stuck in the halcyon late 1980s, suffused by the Reagan glow and the Scorpions’ “Send Me an Angel.” All except one. If Germany had the late 1980s level of troops—12 divisions of the German army to start with—we wouldn’t even be having the conversation about a transatlantic rift. For all the tough talk, both Americans and Germans know, instinctively, that it is not France or the United Kingdom, but Germany that has the transatlantic special relationship. Berlin is the real prize of American hegemonic aspirations. If the U.S. has a willing partner in Mitteleuropa, European politics will continue to be equal in power but subservient in stature to American trade and security. Germany is that country: instinctively pro-American, unlike the British, without the Euro-hegemonic aspirations of the French. They are also not as tribal and imprudent as the other formerly Soviet states.  Most of NATO is not in any way a force multiplier for the U.S. America doesn’t really need Belgium or Lithuania; in fact, the more the countries in an alliance or an institution, the less the relative influence of the hegemon due to the sheer number of cooks in the democratic kitchen. By contrast, with a skilled workforce and intact manufacturing base, Germany is the competent engine of Europe. Germany is also the country least able to understand the changes that started in the U.S. since 2016. The Germans, of all Europeans, are the ones most baffled at the sudden noises coming out of the U.S., even when their foreign policy interests and mercantile instincts are aligned to Trump far more than to Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton.  Nowhere was this dynamic more visible than in the reaction of Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech at the conference. Hegseth had several days before uttered the most consequential policy sentence to come out of the new Washington leadership. In a speech to the Ukraine Defense Contact Group in Brussels, Hegseth said that not only that Ukraine was not welcome in NATO, possibly ever, but that Europe would have to bear the security burden of a post-armistice Ukraine, as the U.S. will not commit troops in any form. Then he argued for a key policy shift that everyone has been dreading: a desire to shift the burden of “conventional deterrence” to Europe. It didn’t help that within a day or two an Islamist migrant ran over a group of pedestrians in Germany.  Grim-visaged men in uniforms from the Middle East and a columnist for the Atlantic who lives in Europe were loitering in the central hall in anticipation of the VP’s speech. “Consider the side in that fight that censored dissidents, that closed churches, that cancelled elections. Were they the good guys? Certainly not”, Vance said, “to many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, it looks more and more like old entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation….” Stunned silence ensued: Caliban was enraged at seeing his face in the mirror.  For two decades, the Europeans have played a tactically smart game. Alliance literature provides ample historical evidence that alliances are almost never purely based on ethnicity, race, ideology or religion. Communism didn’t keep the peace between various communist countries or groups. Islamists kill more Muslims than others. Cardinal Richelieu famously sided with the Protestants against a Catholic power. The entire European history is one of alignments and backstabs based purely on geography and asymmetry of interest. NATO itself in its formative years had a particular Catholic dictatorship, a nation ruled exclusively by military juntas, and a power oscillating between democratic Islamism and military dictatorship; at various times and places—Suez, Cyprus, Falklands—it saw conflicting actions between its member states.  And yet, after the Cold War, the European powers internalized and propagated the idea that NATO has always been an alliance of shared values; geography had nothing to do with it. The intention was to free-ride under the American security umbrella while pretending to be morally better. But for American preponderance in the European balance of power, only a few European states are both economically necessary and strategically valuable.  “For years we’ve been told that everything we fund and support is in the name of our shared democratic values. Everything from our Ukraine policy to digital censorship is billed as a defence of democracy,” said Vance. “But when we see European courts cancelling elections and senior officials threatening to cancel others, we ought to ask whether we’re holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard.” It sounded no different to some European ears used to American hectoring. Vance’s Munich speech “sounded very much like the same American nation-building as ever, just running with a new ideological software,” a British columnist said, requesting anonymity, “Americans just don’t understand Europeans at all.”  That is true. But given that America will not allow a Europe dominated by a single flag or army, and influence the states that truly matter to Washington, ideology or regime type be damned, the only perceivable benefit from the Vance speech was to provoke and gauge a reaction from the Europeans to see who truly cares about continuous American engagement. And they didn’t disappoint.  “Many leaders have talked about a Europe that needs its own military—an Army of Europe. I believe that the time has come. The Armed Forces of Europe must be created.” The president of Ukraine was feted at the central hall as he weirdly tried to rally Europe against the United States. The speech was bold and contradictory to the point of being absurd, a small state at war demanding protection while vilifying and threatening the hegemonic protector. “A few days ago, President Trump told me about his conversation with Putin. Not once did he mention that America needs Europe at that table, that says a lot,” he continued. “Ukraine will never accept deals made behind our backs without our involvement. And the same rule should apply to all of Europe. No decisions about Ukraine without Ukraine. No decisions about Europe without Europe.”  After demanding NATO protection, he implied that Donald Trump is tactically sided with the Russians, and demanded a European hegemony, “a common European foreign policy and (the) level of European cooperation”, to push back Washington. Within hours former Belgian Prime Minister and European Empire dreamer Guy Verhofstadt advocated for a European army, and Polish PM Donald Tusk said that Europe should be a military power in its own right.  “The possibilities of an integrated European army in the sense you lay out is zero. To me, it is a mirage, and a symbol rather than a policy goal,” Anna Sauerbrey, journalist for Die Zeit, told me. “It does not exist, firstly, for practical and political reasons. Who would be in charge? Not even the most European minded states would give up this core element of their sovereignty…. The military cultures of the 27 countries are very different, formed through centuries of unique national history. Germany’s army, for example, is a parliamentary army. It’s parliament who decides whether it is deployed. In France, a presidential democracy, it’s the president.” One estimate made by the Belgian financial analyst Herman Matthijs suggested that in such a scenario, to offset Americans, Belgium alone would have to shell out around ten billion euros more for defense, much higher than the 2 percent NATO stipulation that they are currently supposed to spend. But trivial matters such as the defense budget or GDP didn’t dampen the online social media enthusiasm for a potential “European Army” and a federalized Europe. The EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said, “The free world needs a new leader.” The former Dutch Defence Minister Kajsa Ollongren urged pivoting to a continent-wide war economy. One terminally online Dutch social media influencer and self-declared Erasmus student tweeted, echoing the sentiment of many others, “Build and buy European! American equipment is crap.”  Buda, my second stop after Munich, is classical compared to the more modern, Anglo-American Pest. I had lunch at the lovely New York Cafe, and walked up the stairs to the stunning statue of St. Stephen next to the Matthias Church, where an elderly gentleman was playing “Tyomnaya noch’” (“Dark is the night”) on an accordion—a Soviet classic written during the Battle of Kursk in 1943, where Zhukov’s “general offensive in the south” routed the German 9th Army, thus permanently destroying the tank supremacy of the Nazis and altering the course of the war in Europe—highlighting the ambivalent relationship between Budapest and Europe at a time when the Ukrainian expeditionary diversion force was being routed by Russia in Kursk.  Hungary has been the only country opposed to a continuation of the war in Ukraine from the start of the conflict, and for that Viktor Orban has paid an enormous political price. In this, Orban is unlike Giorgia Meloni, who kept her social conservative credentials intact while sidelining the Eurosceptic opponents to her right by being on the side of the Euro-American establishment on the question of Ukraine. Hungary is also unlike Poland, a country that regardless of their governance is principally guided by a monomaniacal historic animosity towards any rapprochement with the main Slavic power to her east. Orban attempted to position Hungary as a “true neutral,” a middle power at heart of Mitteleuropa, equidistant from all major power centers. This realism is historical. It was a Hungarian from Transylvania named Urban (or, in the Hungarian spelling, Orban) who went to the Byzantines to sell what was then the most advanced artillery technology in the globe. Refused by the complacent Byzantines, Urban displayed a quintessential principle of amoral and irreligious realism by proceeding to sell his weaponry to Mehmed the Conqueror.  The Hungarians and Ottomans remained on-and-off friends for the next hundred and half or so years under both John Hunyadi and Matthias Corvinus, alternating between crusading warfare and rapprochements. Hungarians, along with the Italians, were the chief educators of the rapidly Europeanizing Ottoman elite. Ottoman court cosmopolitanism and society somehow mirrored that of Hungary and Italy, wherein the working class remained homogenous and reactionary, and the elite incorporated a somewhat race-neutral meritocracy similar to that of the Roman and the British imperial systems. That continued, as A.J.P. Taylor wrote, “The middle class, the lesser nobility, existed only in Hungary; and in Hungary the intellectuals, even if Slovak or Rumanian by origin, could become ‘Magyar’ like the gentry.” Lajos Kossuth, the hero of the Hungarian revolution whose bust is still in the U.S. Capitol, was ethnically a Slovak Lutheran.  Viktor Orban, who is a continuation of that political tradition, is facing the biggest challenge of his career. “We’re caught in the crossfire between major geopolitical players: NATO has been expanding eastwards, and Russia has become less and less comfortable with that. The Russians made two demands: that Ukraine declare its neutrality, and that NATO would not admit Ukraine,” Orban said in 2022 at the start of the conflict. “These security guarantees weren’t given to the Russians, so they decided to take them by force of arms.”  The assessment is not qualitatively dissimilar to that of John Mearsheimer, George Kennan, or Donald Trump. Within a week of Vance’s Munich speech, Orban repeated the sentiment. “Europe will be destroyed, including the Hungarian economy, and this must be stopped.” Hungary also recently became the first EU member to lose out on over $1 billion in funds due to violations of EU standards, and the EU sidestepped a Hungarian veto to unblock around $800 billion funds for Ukraine. The Ukrainian government has repeatedly tried to formally and informally push the Europeans to ditch Hungary and accept Ukraine in its stead.  Ukraine, in its characteristic style of caustic diplomacy, said that Slovakia and Hungary “shouldn’t be afraid,” that Hungary is spreading “disinformation,” and that Hungary should ensure that Russia is “kept out of Europe”, whatever that means. The intensely anti-American Volt Europa party has suggested that Hungary be stripped of her voting rights in the European Parliament. The Hungarian government in turn scolded Ukraine for failing to seek peace and for how Ukrainians have treated their large Hungarian minority population, including conscripting some of them for war.  Parts of the Fidesz elite are worried in private that Orban is isolated in Europe, and without a concerted effort from the Americans to support him against Brussels, increasingly a rival to Washington, his situation might be even more precarious. The continuity of the Fidesz project after Orban is also in question: There’s no decided bench or a charismatic heir apparent. Finally, true neutrality came at a cost, especially at a time when the world is increasingly imperial in all but name. “Forgive me, for this is the first time we are hearing similar sentiments out of an American administration on Ukraine, and we cannot seem to trust if this will be sustained or is temporary depending on who is in power in Washington,” a Hungarian state researcher told me on condition of anonymity.  With a growing economy hungry for American investment, Hungary is counting on a trade deal with the U.S. and a potential trade route between India, Italy, and the United States to balance the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative. Budapest is also interested in building a domestic military–industrial complex. If the Ukrainians and the Turks can have a growing and successful domestic drone manufacturing base, then Hungary, with a high number of STEM students and a monthly minimum wage of around $700, is ideally placed to be the drone manufacturing hub in Europe. It can serve as a pivot point for a new American approach to the European Union and Russia, if any start-up investor is looking to cut labor costs as well as dig into the growing EU domestic military research funding.  Yet any European or American investment in the Hungarian military industrial complex would be stillborn as long as Hungary seems to be economically close to China. If Fidesz’s natural allies are realist Republicans in Washington, perhaps the only way to alienate them would be to cozy up to their greatest rival returning to power in the East.  An impossibly polite Albanian-Italian student of health economics at an university in Rome, who wants to eventually move to the U.S., drove me to the Trevi Fountain. My final stop before returning to the U.S. was the Eternal City, the home of the European empire nonpareil. Giorgia Meloni, almost alone among the Europeans, is attempting to be the bridging power between the two sides of the ocean. Of all the major Western powers, Italy is often wrongly seen as the sickest economy. But it is the only economy which is truly internally resilient, and a power with a functional defense industrial aerospace and AI sector. Both Britain and the United States pride themselves on their capitalism, but Rome is the true city of small businesses, where one can find a healthy restaurant and cafe in every street corner and a table-served cup of coffee costs under $2. This guaranteed their economic survival and recovery at a faster pace post-Covid, when many small businesses in the U.S. were either shuttered or gobbled up by mega-chains during and after the shutdown and the riots of 2020.  To Anglo-American sensibilities, Meloni provides a strange template of successful right-realist diplomacy with a civilizational twist, a classic middle power hedging, so protean that it often fails to satisfy any side—but always survives. Meloni was the first leader to visit the White House after Trump won to promote trade deals. Within two weeks of the Vance speech in Munich, she was the first one to shut down the talks about sending European peacekeepers to Ukraine, all the while arguing for giving Kiev “NATO-lite” security guarantees. The geopolitical analyst Alice Carrazza commented, “Rome supports enhanced European military cooperation, but only as a complement to NATO, not as an alternative. It will remain aligned with Washington due to shared strategic interests—particularly in Africa, where security is a fundamental priority. If the European Union turns inward, Italy will look beyond.”  Meloni has positioned herself opposite Matteo Salvini and Silvio Berlusconi’s russophilia, thereby earning her a mediation credential between a panicked liberal European establishment and the rising right-realists in America. Trying to navigate that impossible position, she said that while any peace deal in Ukraine requires a security guarantee (open to interpretation), a rift between Europe and America will be fatal for Europe, resulting in war returning to the continent. After the Franco-British proposal for a “coalition of the willing” to put troops in Ukraine, Italy immediately declined; Meloni said that Italy was not interested in sending troops to police Ukraine. The current defense minister, Guido Crosetto, a former Christian Democrat who is now in the Meloni camp, said that Europe cannot have its own army, but only interoperability within the European pillar of NATO: “A single European recruitment center starting tomorrow with soldiers ready in 20 years? A European officer’s school with trained officers in five years?” Nothing else is doable. The night before leaving Europe, I met Federico Petroni, an America-watcher and the editor of Limes, over a plate of amatriciana. “A European army independent from or built as an antagonist to the United States is a dream that Italy cannot afford to have. Italy’s existential interest is to secure freedom of navigation in the maritime chokepoints connecting its economy to world markets,” Petroni said. “This can be done only in partnership with the U.S. Navy. Betting against the thalassocracy has been done only once in the past—it ended in catastrophe.”  It can give you whiplash to see the two Romes, and consequently the two Europes: nuns praying in the place where St Peter’s bones are buried for the health of the current overseer and absolute monarch, and then walking across to the other side of Tiber, in front of the Colosseum, where Caesar’s statue timelessly, silently mocks technocracy. Ultimately both Europe and America are at crossroads because they are unable to define through which lens they should see their civilization and alliance.  Every large republic or empire throughout history has been credal in nature in some form or the other; that remains the only natural way to achieve permanent political legitimacy, unity, and endurance, just as every revolutionary force in history has been puritanical and divisive in the long term. Small republics can afford to be more homogenous and not credal, but they are then prone to external influence or often outright conquest. This contradiction was evident in both the United States and countries in a potential United Europe in the first quarter of 2025.  The European Union faces structural challenges. A continent historically never united without force of arms or conquest, it corporately desires to be an empire vicariously through America. It is unable to implement any order without American power and generosity, while often sanctimoniously lecturing America about morality, even when those values appear to be increasingly frayed, open to interpretation, and unenforceable. There is no Caesar, Charlamagne, Napoleon, or Hitler waiting in the wings. No individual country in Europe is capable of achieving martial hegemony over the entire continent, unlike America in 1945 and again in 1989.  The European Union is an artificial construct, and European peace is purely a second-order side-effect of American hegemony. American reactionaries fail to understand that the dormant divisions within Europe are constitutional, not simply intra-racial but intra-ethnic. An appeal to a pan-European identity is practically impossible; it conjures back centuries-old ethnic divisions, while simultaneously eliminating the claims of millions who are currently within European boundaries but who fall in the gray zones of those various ethnic divisions. Social conservatism couldn’t unify Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, and Slovaks—not since Russia invaded Ukraine. An appeal to geography faces another problem for an entity whose existence is predicated upon the tendency towards constant territorial expansion and recombination. Consider the Polish and French outreach to Turkey at the cost of relations with Greece and Armenia as a reaction to Russian revanchism. This brings back older Catholic-Islamic political alignments against a concentrated Orthodox power, an elite alignment explicable only through the lens of geography and not ideology, especially as Europeans are facing a simmering Islamic insurgency within.  Culture affects politics. Absent a unifying creed or applicable force, Europe’s elites have not forged a pan-European identity, but they have managed to dissolve most local bonds, as well as the relative power and competitiveness of the individual states. Germany cannot have 12 divisions in its army as it had in 1989 simply because the majority of the German Gen Zers would rather be conquered than go defend their country or their potential empire. America naturally doesn’t face any imminent European hegemony. “A consolidated European state would be a competitor of the United States, but the chance of a consolidated European state is extremely remote for the policy-relevant future, so policy doesn’t need to worry about it much”, Justin Logan, Director of Research at Cato Institute, told me as I returned to the Washington, DC.  But dark clouds gather in the horizon. Part of the risk is internal. Donald Trump won the 2024 election when an era-defining multiethnic coalition rallied to the cause of a renewed American century. That coalition itself risks now fraying due to a combination of a surge of unabashed ethnic toxicity in social media against constituent parts of the coalition and hideous public spats between tech-libertarians and paleoconservatives on economic questions, leading to organizational incompetence and occasional chaos. There is no realism or restraint here, much less any unifying optimistic narrative or exemplary conduct for the rest of the world to emulate.  On foreign policy, the implications are stark. Trump’s personal instinct to avoid conflicts in the Middle East and Europe, as well as his ideas of integrating Panama and Greenland more tightly into the American sphere of influence, are laudable. But stands in contrast with a very revolutionary and evangelical cultural stance of his administration when it comes to Europe and Canada. A golden rule of foreign policy realism dictates that any revolutionary state invites a balancing coalition. “Power begs to be balanced,” as Kenneth Waltz wrote.  While Europeans might be structurally divided about forming an actual empire, European and Canadian establishment elites are not. And they are fuming on the sidelines waiting for an opportunity to retaliate. His previous Munich appearance consolidated Vance’s position as the rational thinker and heir apparent of the realist right. This time, Vance was viewed as a combination of Napoleon and Robespierre among elite European circles—attempting to export rather than exemplify a revolution, French-style rather than American-style. While the European Union does not pose any military challenge to the American homeland, Europeans are perfectly capable of throwing their weight behind rival powers to permanently wreck American trade and dollar supremacy, even at great cost to themselves. And while Americans overall prefer Trump’s fair trade posture, there is no evidence that Americans prefer living under actual autarky. Pursuing it would turn MAGA radioactive for generations. Finally, European conservatives, who are both ideologically aligned and geographically important, are unable to gauge whether the Trump administration would back them if they reject a potential EU empire or they would be casually ditched on a whim—or, worse, due to change of government in the United States, to suffer the wrath when the other transatlantic side is in power. Strategic uncertainty in foreign policy isn’t good for obvious reasons. And no one from the current administration has made any effort either to academically contemplate the reemerging intra-European fault lines or to make the necessary diplomatic outreach to the aligned forces. A consolidated EU, even as a trade superpower, is a civilizational danger to American prosperity and predominance. A divided Europe isn’t.  Americans hate to be hated, and therefore they institutionalized peace in the European continent instead of practicing a more workable balance of power. The result has been European free-riding and American overstretch. A better lesson for the new right in America is not replacing neoliberalism and neoconservatism with another type of evangelizing about a different set of values. Caesar in Gaul remains a pretty good template to follow. The key is to be focused, partially retrench, allowing the natural European divisions to fester; only aligning with those few who are geographically and materially important. Alliances based on values, kinship, religion or ideology are a recipe for disaster.  “Divide et impera, the reprobated axiom of tyranny, is under certain (some) qualifications, the only policy, by which a republic can be administered on just principles,” James Madison wrote about governing a large republic. It is a sound principle of foreign policy as well. Some rhetorical restraint won’t harm either.  The post What’s Next for Europe? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Culture How to Build a Society Observations from 14 Days in Singapore. The air is surprisingly clean in Singapore, a futuristic city nestled amid the dense jungle at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula. Chickens roam freely, and monkeys can be spotted along the paths leading downtown, where towering steel skyscrapers stretch toward the sky. Bikes are scattered across the city, left unattended and without locks. There isn’t a single police officer in sight. The atmosphere is sweet and serene; most people dress neatly, seemingly out of a simple, mutual respect for one another. Massive trees rise unexpectedly from the ground. English, Malay, and Arabic street names dot the landscape. Above it all, green canopies—so many green canopies—blend with the gleaming steel architecture that rises above the Singapore Strait. The lush, vibrant nature of Singapore is no accident. Lee Kuan Yew, the man who crafted the city-state into what it is today, made sure the Southeast Asian nation wouldn’t simply become a concrete jungle for well-heeled capitalists, but a livable, breathable space whose wealth was not only measured by the strength of its currency. “I have always believed that a blighted urban jungle of concrete destroys the human spirit. We need the greenery of nature to lift up our spirits,” Lee wrote in his memoir From Third World to First. “After independence, I searched for some dramatic way to distinguish ourselves from the other Third World countries. I settled for a clean and green Singapore.”  Speaking to Parliament in 1968, Lee, who acted as the city’s first chief gardener, laid out his vision for a green ecosystem within the nation as it rapidly urbanized and industrialized from huts to skyscrapers after Singapore was expelled from Malaysia in 1965. “An elected government cannot have certain sections of the city clean and green and leave the rest to fester,” Lee told lawmakers. As a result of Lee’s efforts, the island nation boasts four nature reserves and more than 300 parks in a space smaller than metropolitan New York.  When Western analysts categorize Singapore, it is usually through the lens of industry and discipline. For as much as Lee enjoyed the natural beauty of his island nation, it was with a cane that he bent its people’s will and shaped Singapore into the business behemoth it is today. Though its people are not immune to the inflationary cycle that has recently stricken the West, their salaries are competitive, their schools are among the most prestigious in the world, and their streets are safer than almost any others. There are BMWs and Benzes and Porsches around every corner, the lap of a luxury that is rare even among the richest of Western societies. Lee’s dream of a new city for his people and for Asia succeeded, with little thanks to the democratic ideals of the American experiment. Writing in the Washington Post following Lee’s death in March of 2015, Richard Cohen argued that Lee’s legacy said as much about Singapore as it did our downwardly-mobile society stateside. Remarking on the many tributes Lee received from his Western counterparts, Cohen wrote, “We appear to be suffering from an acute case of authoritarian envy.” Singapore is not an authoritarian society by decree. The People’s Action Party, headed by Lee for more than 50 years, has repeatedly won majorities in election after election, including as recently as 2020, when PAP won 83 of 95 Parliamentary seats. Lee was determined to steer his nation clear of the mismanagement that has plagued other Asian cities, which have struggled to modernize their infrastructure, from roads to schools, over the last century. The differences, for example, between Singapore and Johor Bahru, a similar-sized Malaysian city on the causeway across the Straits of Johor that connects it to Singapore, are vast and numerous. The citizens of Johor Bahru, living only a bridge away from mainland Singapore, suffer from poor wages, poor literacy, and expensive transport. The threat of violence is present in JB, too, a concern that didn’t cross my mind once during the two weeks I spent crisscrossing Singapore in early February.  From the moment I exit the plane at Changi Airport, one of the largest transportation hubs in all of Asia, Singapore and its people aim to impress. Named the best airport in the world on 12 different occasions by Skytrax, Changi is a microcosm of everything I will experience in Singapore over the next 14 days. Besides the airport’s luxurious shopping malls, its healthy grocery stores, and air-conditioned rainforest, the hurly-burly of air travel itself is reduced to a mere exchange of pleasantries. I breeze through biometric security checks and into the nation within 15 minutes of landing.  At no point will the stark contrast between Asia’s first-world infrastructure and my American perception of it be more apparent than at this airport. Sleek, streamlined technology efficiently moves hundreds of thousands of passengers through the concourse each day in a seamless experience. Leaving Dulles, on the other hand, was a chaotic mess; the return was even worse. Uninterested, overwhelmed boomers sluggishly checked passports at Immigration Services, while tetchy TSA agents used what felt like outdated scanning devices between bites of greasy fast food. In Singapore, everything runs like clockwork. The subways and roads are pristine, and the people are dressed for success. In the mornings, men and women of all ages are out jogging and stretching. By evening, markets are buzzing with food and young professionals; then many of them are back to jogging. It’s a culture defined by relentless, unwavering productivity. In all of Southeast Asia, Singapore stands out like a vibrant rose in a garden of withered flowers. The women wear their hair in beautifully woven buns, and everyone sports Bluetooth headphones. The Blue Line MRT, heading toward Suntec City in the heart of the Downtown Core, is so packed that it’s hard to breathe. Surrounded by busy professionals and foreigners, I can’t help but long for my spacious, open home on the American plains. The vestiges of the British Empire are unmistakable in the downtown area: the gothic St. Andrews Cathedral, the Norman Foster–designed Supreme Court, the palatial Raffles Hotel, which once hosted the likes of Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad. Though Singapore concretely feels like a city of the new, it has retained the masterpiece watermarks of the old within the fortress of big business. Singapore dominated the top end of the inaugural Fortune Southeast Asia 500, released in 2024. Eighty-five companies from the island nation, in sectors as diverse as banking, commodities, oil, and infrastructure, were featured on the list. Half of its wealthiest 10 companies are based in Singapore. This, as much as the thickets of lush greenery and the well-behaved and well-housed populace, is the legacy of Lee, who maneuvered his tiny nation into one of the most competitive capitalist societies in the whole world.  Lee’s project of rapid Westernization made his city-state a marvel of the Orient—so much so that following the departure of Chairman Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, Chinese Communist Party officials embraced elements of Lee’s capitalist vision and the two nations came to an earnest and mutual respect. Lee visited Beijing many times during his stewardship; when he died in 2015, the Chinese foreign ministry released a statement that championed Lee as “a uniquely influential statesman in Asia and a strategist embodying oriental values and international vision.”  True to those words, it’s impossible to overlook the internationalist scope of Singaporean culture during my two-week jaunt on the Other Side of the World. Buddhists, Muslims, Christians, Taoists, and Hindus live in blended harmony in this place. Mere blocks from St. Andrew’s Cathedral beats the heart of the Muslim community—Haji Lane and its ornate Sultan Mosque in the district of Kampong Glam. The striking religious landmark, built in 1826, is one of 72 mosques in the region. More than half a million residents who call Singapore home identify as Muslim.  Buddhism is the largest religious demographic in the nation, with more than one out of every 3 Singaporeans identifying themselves as such, although the sight of monks in orange robes is less common here than in neighboring countries such as Thailand and Laos. Catholics and other Christians account for about 20 percent of the Singaporean population, due in equal parts to British colonialism and Lee’s promotion of the adoption of English as a primary language for all of Singapore’s citizens to learn. The prominence of English, from its presence on signs and atop infrastructure to the locals who speak it well without hesitation, makes visiting or living in Singapore relatively easy in comparison to other Southeast Asian countries.  Though Lee recognized the important role English played in westernizing Singapore, in 1966 he mandated that all citizens learn their “mother tongue,” a language associated with their own unique cultural heritage. Lee created the Prime Minister’s Book Prize, which pushed students to learn the language of the West while retaining rich linguistic traditions of the Orient. “If we were monolingual in our mother tongues, we would not make a living,” Lee later reflected in his memoir. “Becoming monolingual in English would have been a setback. We would have lost our cultural identity, that quiet confidence about ourselves and our place in the world.” On one of my first nights in the city, my sister and her husband take me to a hawker center; an open-air, cafeteria-style zone with nearly a hundred different, cart-sized eateries. Wontons, prata, satay, popiah, fish soup—all of Asia’s most delectable desires are on display at fair prices. I must have gained five pounds at the Little India hawker center alone. These centers are a dizzying delight for foodies.  As with all of Singapore, there are strict rules that are enforced here, not by policemen with batons, but by the heavy expectations of a high-trust society. Although a few day staff man the trash bins at the hawker centers, patrons are expected to clean their own tables and bus their plates. Not to do so is a matter of shame and, to my American astonishment, I don’t see a single scrap of food or misplaced dish on the tables in any of the more than 15 hawker centers I dine at during my stay.  But it’s not just respect for one another that keeps the citizens of Singapore on their best behavior. It’s also the threat of real, actual punishment. In eulogies of Lee, the Singaporean’s preference for the cane is often cited as part of his paternalistic stewardship. When American teenager Michael Fay, a student at the Singapore American School, was found guilty of vandalism in 1994, he was flogged four times despite appeals. “Can we govern if we let him off and not cane him?” Lee responded when the punishment was questioned abroad. “We’ll have to close shop. That’s my view. I am an old-style Singaporean who believes that to govern you must have a certain moral authority. If we do not cane him because he is an American, I believe we’ll lose our moral authority and our right to govern.”  Though intellectuals often view Lee’s form of punishment as archaic and out of step with the modernization efforts of the city-state, a Los Angeles Times poll conducted at the time of the caning revealed that 49 percent of Americans supported the punishment, despite protests from then-President Bill Clinton. Additionally, 36 percent of respondents expressed support for introducing similar caning measures in the U.S. for teen vandals. One of Lee’s most famous quotes—“Whoever governs Singapore must have that iron in him, or give it up”—encapsulates his determination to govern as necessary, regardless of Western liberal values. He famously stated: “This is not a game of cards! This is your life and mine! I’ve spent a whole lifetime building this, and as long as I’m in charge, nobody is going to knock it down.” Fay’s caning served not only as a lesson in Singapore’s resilience to international protests, but also as a message to its people—that their commitment to the national project would not be undermined by the double standards of liberal critics abroad. Since independence, Singapore has been an all-or-nothing endeavor, with Lee and his people fully invested in its success. This mindset helps explain the ubiquitous surveillance in the city-state: There are over 100,000 CCTV cameras, or 18 per 1,000 people, making it the third-most surveilled city in the world. (Besides Singapore, Chinese cities dominate the list.) In Singapore, the feeling that you are being watched is ever-present, from the moment you enter the country at Changi Airport to the time of your departure. In grocery stores, on the subways, outside restaurants, and in hotel lobbies, there is always a camera judging your movements and actions. Depending on your vantage point, Singapore is the modern expression of a dystopian security state. Especially from a Western perspective, immediate concerns about privacy and freedom arise in response to such extensive monitoring. The very ethos of America and our people is a natural desire to be free of state surveillance, and many of our greatest slogans and people have embodied that streak of independence.  Proponents of the “watched city” concept argue that heavy surveillance, combined with strict punishments for drug traffickers and violent offenders, has contributed to the creation of a “perfect society.” I can’t deny that during my time in Singapore, I felt safer than I’ve ever felt in any major city. I’ve been to Rome, Lisbon, Paris, Dublin, Bangkok, New York City, Los Angeles, Tucson, Dallas, and Detroit, and I can tell you firsthand that each of these cities has areas marked by blight and criminal activity that even the most seasoned travelers need to navigate carefully. But not Singapore. A big part of this safety is due to the city-state’s zero tolerance for theft, harassment, drug use, and violence. Strict punishments play a significant role in deterring criminal behavior. For example, an Indian national who stole less than $1,000 worth of perfume at Changi Airport this year is now facing up to seven years in prison. And yes, they still hang people in Singapore. Since resuming the death penalty after a brief hiatus during the Covid pandemic, Singapore has executed 25 people—most for drug trafficking—despite condemnation from international critics. Yet the threat of punishment alone isn’t what earns Singapore its reputation as the “safest city in the world.” The social cohesion fostered by Lee Kuan Yew’s vision of a genuinely integrated society, built on values of productivity, ingenuity, and fairness, has contributed to a nation where poverty is low, schools are world-class, healthcare is accessible, unemployment is minimal, and the standard of living is among the highest globally. Another key factor that keeps the streets of Singapore free from petty criminals and homeless vagrants is its planned housing, a central theme to Lee’s vision for the country. More than half of the 6 million people who call Singapore home live in high-rise apartments built by the government that defy American preconceptions of what government-built housing looks like. Through subsidized housing, Lee provided homes for nearly 75 percent of the population who previously lived in tin-walled huts.  The apartments, known as HDB flats, come with a 99-year lease and the knowledge that someday the properties will be returned to the Singaporean government, which built more than 50,000 of them during an expansion period beginning in the late 1940s. The average flat is about 750 square feet with three bedrooms in a condo-like setting. On the ground floor is often a large, open-air deck where residents can mingle and children can play. In 1964, Lee introduced his Home Ownership for the People Scheme, which sought to house every single Singaporean in a bid to shore up potential tensions in a country of immigrants. “My primary preoccupation was to give every citizen a stake in the country and its future,” reads a placard in Lee’s writing at a hawker center near Farrer Park in the Kallang residential zone. “I wanted a home-owning society.”  Blending a deeply different nation of immigrants took more than providing subsidized housing for all—it took making them live together. In 1989, the Singaporean government mandated racial quotas that required Malays, Chinese, and Indians to live among each other in the same residential zones, essentially outlawing the formation of racial districts. Speaking of the decision in 2015, President Tharman Shanmugaratnam argued that “the natural workings of society” would have led to “mistrust, discomfort, bigotry and what we see in abundance in many countries in the world today.” “Once people live together, they are not just walking the corridors together everyday, taking the same elevator up and down,” Shanmugaratnam said. “Their kids go to the same kindergarten, their kids go to the same primary school. The most intrusive social policy in Singapore has turned out to be the most important.” Walking through the streets of Singapore, it is clear that the project has been a success. Christian symbols are visible everywhere, as Muslim men stream into the mosques for morning prayers. Just a metro stop away in Little India, hundreds of Hindu devotees gather at the Sri Veeramakaliamman Temple on a Wednesday afternoon. Throughout my stay, I never once feel tension rising between the city’s diverse communities. This multicultural harmony is not merely a stroke of luck, but a conscious effort rooted in the pursuit of peace, embodied in Singapore’s National Pledge: “We, the citizens of Singapore, pledge ourselves as one united people, regardless of race, language or religion, to build a democratic society based on justice and equality so as to achieve happiness, prosperity and progress for our nation.” The words are often recited by Singaporeans at public events and in schools. On my final day in the Orient, I catch the blue line train to the downtown area. A staff member stands on the platform holding a sign that reads, “No eating/drinking in train or station.” Whether it’s the cameras, the threat of punishment, or simply mutual respect, I never witness a single crumb of food or bottle of liquid on any of the hundreds of trains I take during my stay. People stand shoulder to shoulder, quietly. There are no boomboxes blaring, no teenagers performing acrobatics for spare change as you might see in the rundown cars of the Bronx or Columbia Heights. No one is speaking loudly on the phone. There are no angry stares, no strange smells, and no frantic individuals shouting in the corners of the car. There are clear expectations here, and the people rise to meet them. It’s certainly not easy. I can see that. It takes a specific kind of person, committed to a particular way of life, to make it work. But when it does, it truly works. The trade-offs—limited privacy and restricted freedoms—have contributed to the creation of a society unlike any other in the world. At its worst, Singapore represents something that America often struggles to achieve: a society that is safe, clean, quiet, and undeniably boring. “Boring” is the last word I’d use to describe my homeland. The big, creative, rambunctious energy of the West and especially America cannot be overlooked here among the quiet streets and tempered people. I miss our Red, White, and Blue every moment I am away, warts and all. America has a pace and intensity that is unmirrored the world over which makes its blights all the more worth suffering. As I consider what makes a great society, what elevates a people—their great dreams and collective aspirations—I can’t help but marvel at our own chaotic blend.  When I arrive in downtown Singapore, young people are relaxing on palatial garden bluffs. Everyone here wears shoes—not Birkenstocks, huaraches, or sandals, but leather derbies, brown oxfords, and black Park Avenues. In their footwear lies a revealing truth about Singaporeans: They’re all business. There’s a refined elegance at work here, one that extends even to the luminous quality of the nation’s impeccably designed banknotes. The undeniable success of Singapore, from the general health and wealth of its people, to its stature as a hotbed for finance and tech in the 21st century, cannot be overstated. In less than half a century, Lee transformed a third-world slum into a thriving business paradise admired around the globe. While the United States and its Western allies struggle with the cultural and economic stagnation of the 21st century, new models of governance, inspired by Singapore’s bold and unforgiving approach, may be necessary to forge a path forward. Lee understood that the road ahead wouldn’t be easy, and that both the sacrifices of the people and his own leadership would not always be celebrated. Yet he pressed on. How do you build a society? With an iron fist. Speaking from his deathbed in 2015, Lee summarized a life’s work: “At the end of the day, what have I got? A successful Singapore. What have I given up? My life.” The post How to Build a Society appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics A Naval Mirage  Who’s afraid of China’s navy? Credit: Krzysztof Pazdalski/Shutterstock War drums are beating along both the Potomac and the Yangtze. The U.S. Navy is puffing the dragon every way it can, warning that the Chinese navy is now larger than our own. It now has three aircraft carriers with at least one more building. China’s shipbuilding capacity dwarfs America’s. Chinese naval squadrons appear regularly on all the world’s seas, including the Mediterranean and the Baltic. The U.S. Navy’s claims of a vast naval threat from China almost take us back to early 1942, when Americans waited anxiously for reports of whether Japanese armies were landing on Hawaii and the West Coast.  Beijing for its part is stoking the fire. It claims it faces deadly threats from the first island chain, the islands closest to the Chinese mainland including Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines. It claims a “Nine-dash Line” through the South China Sea that is neither historically nor legally supportable and is a military joke, mirroring the lines Japan drew through water in its strategy in the Second World War.  Water is quite good at ignoring lines on maps. China is building lots of warships that look nice in photos and on port calls. But does China have a navy? Or is the People’s Liberation Army Navy just a collection of ships?  The difference between the two is profound. A collection of ships can impress in peacetime. But if war comes, those ships continue to act as individual ships or perhaps small squadrons. They cannot do what a real navy does, namely make all its war ships, aircraft, submarines, supply ships, and dockyards work together to create a single, harmonious whole that can be focused on a decisive strategic objective.  The 17th century diarist and naval administrator Samuel Pepys is best known for writing the longest description of flatulence in the English language. But his real fame comes from the fact that he found the Royal Navy a collection of ships and left it a real navy, one that would rule the waves for another three centuries. Who is China’s Pepys?  Making the PLAN a real navy faces another shoal. The Chinese navy is dividėd into three fleets, the northern, central, and southern. They seldom train together. Can’t China fix that? Probably not, because the reason for the three well-separated fleets is political. The Chinese navy has in the past played important roles in supporting rebellions. The Chinese Communist Party does not want it to do so again. The idea is that, with three fleets, if one rebels, the other two can suppress it. So uniting them for training or even in war runs a political risk in a country where Red is more important than Expert.  China also has a maritime vulnerability that her navy, if it is one, is unable to cover. That is dependence on long-range ocean shipping for both imports, including fuel and food, and her exports, without which her economy would crash. The U.S. Navy can stop both with a distant blockade, so distant that the Chinese navy cannot get at the blockaders.  This is what Britain did to Germany in the First World War. Germany anticipated a British blockade, but expected it to be in German coastal waters where torpedo boats and submarines could pick off the blockaders.  Instead, Britain applied a distant blockade the German navy could not reach. The result was that Germany starved. A distant blockade would also enable the U.S. to defeat China without firing a shot, something important when confronting a nuclear power. If China were to blockade or invade Taiwan, we would just institute a distant blockade and wait. At some point China would have to negotiate, and we would hold the better hand.  If the U.S. Navy’s carefully cultivated alarm over the rise of the PLAN is a naval mirage, geography still dictates that we remain the world’s dominant naval power. Τ0 that end, the U.S. Navy has serious internal problems that both the Trump administration and Congress should make haste to address. Like our other services, the Navy’s system for procuring new ships and aircraft is so badly broken it cannot produce a good product. We’ve gone from the debacle that is the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), where design failures have led to new ships being retired, to the disaster of the Constellation-class frigates, where we were supposed to buy a proven, Italian design but have gone to a ship that is 85 percent new and, given production problems, may never touch seawater.  At the same time, the Navy wants more ships, but cannot man the ships it has. Its dockyards are full of vessels still under repair that were supposed to be back in service years ago and its senior officer corps has gone from iron men in wooden ships to wooden men (and women) in iron ships.  The biggest threat the U.S. Navy faces is its own internal dysfunction.  The post A Naval Mirage  appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs China’s New Push for Latin America The Chinese are changing their gambit in the United States’ backyard; America can and must adjust. On May 14, China scored a major coup in its effort to increase Chinese influence in Latin America. President Gustavo Petro of Colombia signed a joint cooperation plan with the Chinese, formally adding the key Latin American country to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Colombia is the first country to join the BRI since Jordan signed onto the project in December of 2023, and its accession is a sharp pivot in Colombian foreign policy, which has traditionally been strongly aligned with the U.S. The agreement came after Petro travelled to Beijing to attend the fourth ministerial meeting of the China-CELAC Forum, an organization created by China in 2015 as part of their efforts to integrate Latin America into the Chinese economy and sphere of influence. As part of this year’s China-CELAC Forum, Xi Jinping announced that China would be distributing $9.2 billion in yuan-denominated financing to participants in the forum. After a decline in Chinese investment in the region that began in the late 2010s, China has been making a distinct push to reassert its influence in Latin America, as it hopes to seize on potential conflicts with the United States caused by the new Trump administration. The imposition of tariffs, in particular, will disrupt U.S. economic integration with Latin American markets, a rupture China is eager to take advantage of. The deal with Colombia was one manifestation of such tensions: Early in President Donald Trump’s second term, Petro attempted to reject a repatriation flight of Colombian deportees from the U.S., arguing that their human rights and dignity as Colombian citizens were being violated. Trump responded with overwhelming force, suspending visa issuance for Colombians and threatening massive tariffs on the country if it refused to accept the flight. Confronted with such a debilitating response, Petro had to back down—but he did not forget the humiliation. Colombia’s move to join the BRI is a sharp break in the country’s normally pro-American foreign policy, but far from an anomaly in Latin America. In fact, nearly all of Colombia’s neighbors joined the pact years ago—Panama in 2017, Venezuela in 2018, Ecuador and Peru in 2019. Altogether, 22 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean are members of the BRI, including every country in South America except Brazil and Panama (and France). The benefits of Chinese partnership with Latin American countries are significant. Geopolitically, increased Chinese influence and market integration reduces Latin America’s reliance on the U.S., making the option particularly attractive for countries with an adversarial relationship to the U.S. like Nicaragua and Venezuela. Another major attraction is the offer of substantial Chinese financing on easy (if not necessarily generous) terms for infrastructure and energy projects. Many Latin American countries are still infrastructure-poor, making the offer of ports, railways, and dams particularly appealing. For China, expanding markets in Latin America fits naturally into its economic and geopolitical strategy. Major construction projects provide a convenient place to offload its massive surpluses of concrete and steel production, while Latin American markets, which principally produce raw materials for export, slot easily into its own manufacturing-oriented economy, which has a massive demand for raw materials and energy to convert into cheap goods for abroad. The result has been a massive expansion of Chinese trade with the region, reaching well over $500 billion in 2024. Much of the trade has been fueled by Chinese investment: Chinese mines in Bolivia extract lithium, zinc, and other metals from the earth, and Chinese railways in Chile transport them to the coast, where they are shipped to Asia from Chinese ports in Peru. In return, Latin American countries (like everywhere else in the world) purchase affordable Chinese manufactured goods by the bucketload. But China’s expansion in Latin America has not been without costs. Massive energy and infrastructure projects are vulnerable to a number of high-profile problems. Take the Coca Codo Sinclair Dam in Ecuador. The massive, $3.4 billion hydroelectric project was intended to be the centerpiece of Ecuador’s power grid. At full capacity, the dam was designed to provide a quarter of the country’s electricity. Instead, the project has been marred by continual scandal—shoddy construction has led to extensive cracking in the pipe system, poor planning has created massive erosion problems around the dam, and corruption charges have been filed against Chinese corporate sponsors and Ecuadorian government officials. Billions of dollars have been expended on a dam that functions at less than 50 percent capacity. Rather than serving as its most important power source, the project has contributed to the rolling blackouts that have plagued Ecuador and may be at risk of complete failure in the coming years. Failures like Coca Codo are of little help for their host countries, which are left saddled with large debt burdens for faulty projects. To meet its debt obligations, Ecuador has had to sell vast amounts of its domestic oil production to China at steep discounts. But these projects are also a gamble for the Chinese government, which runs the risk of sinking vast quantities of funds into projects that make no or even negative returns. The failure of high-profile projects, and the risks of default on China’s generous credit, have become major stressors on the country’s efforts to expand its economy and influence overseas, including in Latin America. In order to address the risks of big-budget, high-profile projects and questionable loans, China has since the mid-2010s begun retooling its foreign aid strategy, including in Latin America. The massive infrastructure projects accompanied by buckets of easy credit are now mostly a thing of the past. According to AidData’s November 2023 report on Chinese development finance, the percentage of Chinese lending commitments dedicated to infrastructure projects “fell from 65% in 2014, to 50% in 2017, 49% in 2018, and 31% in 2021.”  Instead of large, high-profile projects like Coca Codo, China today spreads its investment out across many more, much smaller projects. This is one of the major reasons China has begun focusing on the installation of green energy like wind and solar; these projects can be done on a much smaller scale than railroads and hydroelectric dams. Chinese investment in manufacturing and technology has also increased as China’s domestic manufacturing sector has grown; these investments are especially useful for China’s international influence, as host countries benefit from Chinese manufacturing expertise to increase their own industrial production. But the system also benefits Chinese manufacturers, as China has rolled up the manufacturing value chain and domestic labor has become more costly. Likewise, China has significantly scaled down lending from its traditional credit apparatuses, the Chinese Export-Import Bank and China Development Bank, and replaced it with loans from other Chinese banks and with syndicated loans in collaborative arrangements, including many with Western banks and development organizations. These loans, distributed across more but smaller projects, are less risky and more likely to provide a return to fuel further expansion of China’s international development arm. Much of the rest of China’s credit apparatus has, in turn, been devoted to emergency lending: extending funds to countries in debt distress, especially countries that already carry heavy loads of Chinese debt. In this way, China is essentially acting to backstop its own investments by shoring up the balance sheets of its debtors and preventing defaults on its loans. This new Belt and Road strategy, less flashy in form but more sustainable, is what China will be offering Latin America as it seeks to exploit the potential frictions caused by the United States’ newly vigorous engagement with Latin America. The Trump administration’s renewed interest in the region has had some successes over the Chinese, as with Panama’s decision to withdraw from the BRI in February after Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned the country that the U.S. would take action if it did not feel certain that the Panama Canal was free of potentially hostile Chinese influence. But American intervention will inevitably be distasteful to many countries, who would prefer their politics to remain free from the influence of the superpower to the north. While for Latin American countries the allure of turning to China is strong, the U.S. has cards of its own to play in response. Latin American leaders are not ignorant of the potential pitfalls of Chinese investment in their countries. A survey of regional political leaders found that they preferred working with the U.S. to working with China for every category of international development except energy and infrastructure. Chinese projects are far more likely to face allegations of corruption and environmental damage than projects backed by Western nations. Historically, China’s reputation for easy credit and its historical willingness to finance the kind of public works projects prioritized by developing countries has been its major selling point. But with China’s new development model, easy credit and giant infrastructure projects will be more difficult to come by. While the U.S. does not have the massive carrot of China’s international development finance program to dangle in front of countries as an enticement, its private sector remains the largest source of foreign direct investment in Latin America, and the American system of government has a much better reputation than the Chinese Communist Party. As the U.S. reasserts itself in Latin America and confronts China’s foreign influence machine, it will have to learn how to leverage its attractions, as well as the threats of tariffs and other coercive measures, in order to build a sphere of influence in the Western hemisphere conducive to its continued security and prosperity. The post China’s New Push for Latin America appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics Most Favored Nation Drug Pricing Will Flop, but What Wouldn’t? Pursuing the worthy goal of reforming drug pricing requires a more radical change to the pharmaceutical industry. On May 12, President Trump took a big swing at cutting drug prices, issuing an executive order requiring Most Favored Nation (MFN) pricing, resetting U.S. drug prices based on the lowest price that a drug company charges overseas. The order is aimed primarily at wealthier European countries, which use national drug purchasing rules to force drug companies to charge much less there than in the U.S. Currently, as a share of GDP, total U.S. drug spending is about twice as high as in European companies. This is Trump’s second try at establishing MFN pricing. Late in his first term, then–Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar issued a rule requiring Medicare to use MFN to buy certain high-priced drugs. Time expired on Trump’s term before it could go into effect. Biden repealed it, replacing it with a new law empowering Medicare to negotiate prices directly with drugmakers. Trump’s latest order ups the bidding, rejuvenating MFN and seeking to impose it in private insurance, not just Medicare. The order’s terms gave all pharma companies 30 days to cut prices voluntarily, which none will do. After that, HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. and Medicare chief Mehmet Oz are authorized to launch an as yet unspecified rule-making process to impose lower pricing.  What happens next is anyone’s guess. The prospects of executive rulemaking surviving a court challenge is very low, perhaps zero, but those practicalities are less important to Trump right now. Here, as on other issues, the president is staking out a maximalist position from which to work backwards as practicalities require. Pushing MFN in the private sector is an interesting gambit, positioning Trump closer to Bernie Sanders than his own party. Already Republicans like Senate Leader John Thune and Wyoming’s Senator John Barrasso have expressed concerns about government-mandated prices, replaying pharma CEOs’ argument that, in the extreme, a massive cut to U.S. companies’ revenues will kneecap new drug R&D. Trump’s case for MFN is straightforward. In paying more for drugs, Americans unfairly subsidize drug R&D from which free-riding overseas consumers benefit, especially in other industrialized, wealthy countries. Opponents concede that U.S. prices are higher but argue that MFN rules are easily circumvented. European health authorities might agree on paper to higher prices, but will then require significant discounts or rebates which, under most countries’ confidentiality laws, could be kept hidden. Ironically, this is exactly what happens in the U.S. Drug companies publish high list prices (for reasons discussed below) only to enter into confidential agreements providing large discounts or rebates.  Even if an MFN rule or law dictating private pricing survives court challenges, opponents argue, drugmakers could just stop selling products that have a high U.S. price in the European markets with the lowest prices, thereby excluding that price from the MFN calculation. Alternatively, drugmakers could spin off high-value drugs into offshore entities, absolving themselves from actually selling the drug in Europe while retaining an economic interest and effective control over how their intellectual property is used.  So is this just Trumpian performance art, directionally savvy but practically impossible? No. It is of a piece with his broader strategy to reduce trade deficits, increase burden-sharing by European and Asian allies, and shore up domestic manufacturing. The MFN order has to be seen in tandem with tariff policies and a previously ordered Commerce Department investigation into the vulnerability of U.S. drug supplies from foreign countries, especially China. Evidence for this appeared in the U.S.-UK trade agreement published a week before the MFN order. One section offers lower tariffs for UK-made drugs if the British reduce barriers to U.S. pharma companies operating in Britain, and hints at an Anglo-American alliance to produce key drug ingredients. Neither China nor India, the other top supplier of critical drug chemical inputs, is named, but the intention is clear.  Trump’s advisors figure that the U.S. has the upper hand on drug pricing. EU drug exports are the largest positive contributor to the bloc’s global trade balance. Pharma and biotech are big contributors to the UK, Danish, German, French, and Swiss economies. Still, it will be a very tall order to get the Europeans’ nationalized health systems to pay much more for drugs. They face significant budgetary constraints resulting from stagnant growth, shrinking and aging populations, and already-strained health systems. No UK prime minister, for example, will agree to pay more for U.S. drugs while having to cut National Health Service funding. Recognizing the barriers to practical implementation, Wall Street and pharma leaders took Trump’s MFN order in stride, consoling themselves that practical effects might be years away, and that executive action to impose private market prices are unlikely to withstand judicial challenge. Nevertheless, their equanimity will quickly smash headlong into two forces that are shaking up the drug business and pricing: China’s fast-growing biotech capacity and exponential demand for anti-obesity GLP-1 drugs.  Until recently, China had been following the same path in drug manufacturing as in mobile phones and autos. First they established a dominant position (along with India) in making low-price, low-margin generic drugs and key drug ingredients. Then, they moved up the value chain. U.S. vulnerability to drug supply interruptions became painfully clear in 2022 to 2023, as failures at a couple of Chinese and Indian factories led to a year-long shortage in a few life-saving cancer drugs. The U.S. has slowly been building manufacturing capacity, but making chemical precursors for drugs in the U.S. will remain economically unviable. The Commerce Department report on supply chain issues will refocus attention on this and China’s role. Meanwhile, the Chinese government has conducted a full-court press to build its own biotech industry, funding startups and academic institutes, pushing firms to use AI to accelerate drug design, and recruiting American-trained Chinese scientists to return home. China’s failure to produce an effective COVID vaccine was embarrassing, but, as in other industries, the Chinese bounced back, learning from their mistakes and doubling down on high-value cancer and gene-editing therapies. In a Trumpian world view, China’s growing capabilities only increases the urgency to get wealthy nations to pay more for American drugs and compete with Chinese R&D. European and Asian countries with large pharma industries see it differently, as yet another reason why MFN pricing is a fool’s errand. Why pay more for American drugs, they wonder if equally effective and cheaper ones will soon be available from China? Wouldn’t it be better to reach a deal with China to supply drugs to their market and try to minimize China’s ability to undercut their exports to the rest of the world? The second, and potentially larger game-changer, domestically and globally, is the incredible potential for GLP-1 drugs to treat multiple chronic conditions—not only obesity, rampant in many industrialized and developing countries, but also heart, liver, and kidney disease. The drugs may even counteract addiction and forestall dementia or Parkinson’s Disease. The potential value is immense, taking one shot or pill to address multiple conditions, but realizing great outcomes requires much more than a prescription and a friendly wave from the pharmacist. Recipients need dietary and behavioral coaching for metabolic issues, along with continual nutritional monitoring, and over time, dosing adjustments. Channeling Trump, let’s talk about America first. U.S. drug pricing is wholly incapable of valuing drugs like GLP-1s that have multi-system benefits, and require long-term use to realize cumulative benefits. Drugs are priced for short-term needs based on transaction volumes, not future results. Breakthrough drugs like GLP-1s, similar to new gene-editing treatments that have decades-long efficacy after a single treatment, require a total rethink.  So what does this have to do with MFN?  Changing how high-value drugs are priced in the U.S. will actually do much more, much faster, than MFN-style brinkmanship to equalize how these drugs are priced in wealthier countries, in Europe and globally. To see how, we have to take a step back and look at how U.S. drug prices are set today. This starts with a surprising truth. Despite heated rhetoric in Washington DC about drug pricing, the vast majority of prescription drugs that Americans take are cheap. That seems laughable based on experiences with insulin price spikes and drug co-pays, but it is true. Ninety percent of prescriptions are written for generic drugs, accounting for just 18 percent of total drug spending. Most of the fighting about outrageous drug prices concerns the other 10 percent of prescriptions, accounting for 82 percent of spending. This group largely includes drugs to treat advanced chronic disease (like GLP-1s), autoimmune conditions like multiple sclerosis and lupus, and cancer.  For decades, the core bargain in U.S. drug pricing involves a tradeoff between today’s insurers and consumers and our future selves. Pharma companies get about 10–15 years when a new drug is approved to charge as much as the market will bear, subject to the drug’s incremental value versus competitors. After the patent expires, drugs can be made as generics and become much cheaper. Those 90 percent of generic drugs prescribed today were once much more expensive. We are the beneficiaries of decades-old R&D investments.   This bargain breaks down in the face of chronic disease and a health insurance system designed to solve short-term, acute issues. Insurers like to spend as little as possible now, pouring the bulk of health dollars into treating the most advanced conditions. Incrementally ratcheting up treatments as symptoms worsen seems rational, but it is at odds with the way chronic disease works. Blunting symptoms does not equal stopping disease. As we age, metabolic conditions spread, disrupting multiple bodily systems, reinforced by unhealthy food and pollutants. What starts as obesity eventually includes cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Once a person enters multimorbidity, defined as three or more chronic conditions, the need for newer, more expensive drugs skyrockets, along with greater cancer and dementia risk. Current approaches to drug pricing encourage incrementalism. Start with a generic drug, then ratchet up treatment intensity as the situation builds. Generic drugs have value. Statins cut the risk of a premature heart attack or stroke, which is great, but with the underlying disease progressing, many people go on to develop expensive heart, lung, or kidney failures. It is only then that doctors and insurers say, “Aha, time for the best and latest drug!” Until GLP-1s came along, there was no drug therapy that could be deployed reliably and at scale to halt and prevent disease, except weight loss surgery, which insurers actively discouraged.  As a result, the lion’s share of rising drug spending since 2000 has been driven by increasing multimorbidity. Americans now enter multimorbidity younger, spending more of their lives taking more expensive drugs. Since 2000, the share of Americans entering Medicare with multimorbidity has jumped 66 percent, from about one-in-four to just under one-in-two. It was no surprise that once Medicare began negotiating prices directly with drugmakers, the first 10 drugs targeted included seven for advanced chronic disease, two for autoimmune conditions, and one for a progressive blood cancer.  This brings us to the two strangest aspects of current drugs. The first is that no one knows what drug companies actually get paid. Whenever a politician starts talking about drug prices, what they mean is the list price set by the drugmaker, which is far from the actual net price that they are paid. List prices are generally 25 percent to 50 percent above the net price, sometimes more.  Why is this? One well-meaning distortion is that Medicaid is required by law to get a 23.1 percent discount on most branded drugs’ list prices. That means drug companies automatically mark up list prices by an equivalent amount. Then drug makers enter into convoluted negotiations with insurers to set the net price. This horse-trading is generally not done drug by drug. Instead, drug makers may accept a lower price on a highly-prescribed drug to get others that they make bumped up ahead of their competitors. Whatever they lose on the first drug they recoup on the others.  In sum, no one really knows the net price for all drugs after rebates across insurers. If nothing else, empowering Medicare to negotiate drug pricing means we now know the net price that the largest single drug buyer pays, but we are still in the dark about the price paid by everyone else. That has to change.  Drug companies should be required to disclose the net price for each drug they sell, including in the disclosure transparency into how much net prices vary across insurers. Interestingly, Trump proposed doing this in his first term for all Medicare drug purchases, only to back down because under the upside down world of health care, using lower, net prices would have actually increased Medicare drug premiums, which would have provoked a political firestorm. Conveniently since then, Congress (and Biden) has released some of the pressure by capping total Medicare drug premiums and out-of-pocket costs. Any premium increases that might result would be more than offset by curbing the profitability of health care entities that profit on the difference between list and net prices.   The second problem is that drug prices are a single number that is paid in full when a prescription is filled, or a shot is given. This made sense 40 years ago when most drugs treated one or two symptoms and were taken as daily pills. As we have seen, drugs like GLP-1s are different. While they have to be taken consistently, most of their benefits accumulate over time. Most of the value for a person with obesity or diabetes does not happen on the day they weigh 20 percent less or achieve a healthy blood sugar levels, it happens over time to the extent they can maintain better health, forestalling multimorbidity and that exponential curve at the end as long as possible. Likewise, a lot of drugs can be taken much less frequently. Some, including for Hepatitis-C, some cancers, and gene therapies may be given just once, resulting in years or a lifetime of protection. Paying by the shot is crazy, as is paying a single price for drugs like GLP-1s when their real value accrues over time.  So we must abandon prescription-based pricing for GLP-1s, replacing it with an outcomes-based pricing that pays drug companies some when a drug is given but more over time, with future amounts tied to recipients’ health outcomes. This increases access by allowing much lower upfront prices, critical to achieve equity and reduce future health liability as quickly as possible. With more access, drug companies will recoup some of that lost revenue, with a lower price but higher volume. Thereafter, the original creator of a drug can earn payments associated with recipients’ improved health, even after the drug has gone generic.  Critically, outcomes-based pricing will force drugmakers to care—a lot—about how well their products’ recipients are doing. Are they getting consistent clinical care, dosing advice, and effective dietary and behavioral counseling? GLP-1 makers may say this is a concern for them, but frontline clinical reality has little effect on their long-term profitability. For them, it is a race to amass prescription volume before patents expire or they can introduce a newer version, effectively rolling patent protections forward. Disclosure of net prices and outcomes-based pricing for GLP-1s could transform the debate over price equity and free-riding on American R&D. The U.S. will have leverage to force European countries to disclose net prices in their own markets, providing clarity about real price differences. With this data, the U.S. could require drug companies to pay a portion of U.S. revenues into a national R&D fund with amounts paid tied to net price differentials. Either local drugmakers will pressure national authorities to raise local prices, thereby reducing free-riding, or R&D funding contributions will help underwrite cutting-edge science in the U.S.  Likewise, outcomes-based pricing will force foreign GLP-1 manufacturers to lower upfront prices to hold or gain U.S. market share. It will also limit Chinese (or other) cancer and gene editing drugmakers’ ability to use high U.S. prices, under current approaches, to undercut American products in other export markets. All drug manufacturers will have to realize the value of their drugs over time to the extent that they demonstrate lasting efficacy.  In sum, it’s possible to lower U.S. prices while forcing other wealthy nations to equalize pricing and to improve how all breakthrough drugs are priced—just not with MFN pricing. It’s the right goal, but the wrong way.  The post Most Favored Nation Drug Pricing Will Flop, but What Wouldn’t? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics The DEI-Fueled Collapse of a Virginia Magnet School TJ’s story throws stark light on the problems with building admissions policies around racial “equity.” Credit: John M. Chase/Shutterstock The results are in for at least one school: After four years of DEI-driven, functionally race-based admissions, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, known as TJ, in Alexandria, Virginia, has seen its national ranking fall to 14th place and its number of National Merit Scholar semifinalists cut nearly in half. And according to the Virginia Attorney General, as of May 2025 it is in violation of the Virginia Human Rights Act and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for discriminating against Asian American students in the admissions process at the school. TJ is also under federal investigation. It is steadfastly sticking to its radical admissions policy despite the negative effects. Given T.J.’s role as a STEM feeder school into the Ivies and Big Tech, this is more than another culture war battle. It affects national security. Until four years ago the only way into TJ was via a rigorous entrance exam. Then in 2020, following the death of George Floyd, TJ officials became concerned about their negligible number of black and Hispanic students and changed admissions standards. The test was gone, replaced by a “holistic review” to include more “students who are economically disadvantaged [who now make up over 11 percent of the student body] English language learners, special education students, or students who are currently attending underrepresented middle schools.” Without the entrance test, the black student population grew to seven percent from one percent of the class, while the number of Asian American students fell from 73 to 54 percent, the lowest share in years. A group of mostly Asian American parents objected to the new plan and started the Coalition for TJ. The coalition filed a lawsuit with the help of the libertarian Pacific Legal Foundation. Instead of seeing weighting of experience factors as a way to level the playing field for underrepresented groups, they saw racism. The experience factors were just a work-around for straight up race-based decisions. In 2022, a federal judge found the school board engaged in impermissible “racial balancing” when it overhauled admissions. In May 2023, however, the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled in favor of the new admissions process, finding TJ had not discriminated against Asian American students in its admissions policies. The appellate court found that there was not sufficient evidence the changes were adopted with discriminatory intent. The court said that the school had a legitimate interest in “expanding the array of student backgrounds.” Too bad for the Asians, America’s on-and-off minority; there are only so many seats available at TJ. The court found TJ’s essay-based admission policy was not a proxy for race-based decisions. TJ was thus able to make racially-motivated decisions without appearing legally to make racially-motivated decisions. Because of this twist of logic, Supreme Court decisions in key affirmative action cases, Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina, did not apply. The Supreme Court then declined certiorari—it would not hear the case—in Coalition for T.J. v. Fairfax County School Board. The conservative Court’s denial left in place the ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals affirming the discriminatory policy. The declination is in contrast to the Court’s earlier rejection of affirmative action, Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. Harvard, and of race as a primary admissions factor. TJ was free, for all intents and purposes, to discriminate in its admissions process. One factor TJ would rely on was an applicant’s public middle school zip code, a good indicator of race in a divided Fairfax County. Zip code was to become one proxy for race, a work-around to Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. Harvard, which supposedly outlawed race alone as a primary admissions factor. Schools like TJ may use race as an admissions criterion so long as it is not the only basis for a decision, with the implied so long as the goal is diversity (supposedly good on its face) and not whitewashing (naughty.) It is this policy the Supreme Court refused to review. “The holding,” Associate Justice Samuel Alito added in his dissent, “effectively licenses official actors to discriminate against any racial group [Asians, in the instance of TJ] with impunity as long as that group continues to perform at a higher rate than other groups.” That is all history because enough time has passed that we now know the results of this legal tomfoolery. Once the top-ranked public high school in the nation, T.J. fell to 14th place in the 2024 U.S. News rankings. According to the U.S. News Best High School Rankings Methodology, academic performance constitutes at least 50 percent of a school’s overall ranking. This includes standardized test scores and participation and success rates in advanced courses like IB and AP, contributing to two categories that hold significant weight in determining a school’s ranking: college readiness and state assessment proficiency. Also, the school, which once boasted 157 National Merit Scholar semifinalists in 2020, saw that down to 81 for the 2025 scholarship competition. (The school says the data may also reflect educational disruptions during the Covid pandemic.) “The decline is the inevitable consequence of elevating ‘equity’ over excellence,” wrote Mark Spooner on his blog, Fairfax Schools Monitor. “In 2020, then-Superintendent Scott Braband announced the School Board’s determination that DEI would no longer be ‘a thing’; it would henceforth be ‘the thing’ in the Fairfax County public school system. T.J. was the obvious first target for this ‘social justice’ initiative because more than 70 percent of its students, admitted under rigorous academic criteria, were Asian Americans. The racial imbalance was deemed unacceptable.” Spooner went on to write,  We are more than three years into the T.J. experiment, but the Fairfax County School Board hasn’t yet addressed its successes and failures. Whether an objective analysis will ever be conducted is questionable, for the program was adopted primarily for ideological reasons, and the Board may be reluctant to subject its ideological assumptions to scrutiny. The elimination of entrance exams and other academic criteria forced T.J. to introduce remedial math courses for academically unprepared students. How many students needed to be enrolled in these programs? And did the programs succeed in rapidly bringing students up to speed so they would thereafter thrive at T.J.? We don’t know, but there are disturbing clues. Information has emerged that the drop-out rate at T.J. has spiked, particularly among some minority groups. If this is true, it suggests that the softened admissions standards may have hurt the very students who were intended as beneficiaries. Though it appeared to have been settled by the Supreme Court’s non-intervention, the Virginia attorney general’s recent move may reopen the issue. According to the AG, Asian American students received 56 fewer offers of admission immediately following the shift in policies, after consistently making up more than 65 percent of admitted students. He said the school was already a “minority majority high school,” but the board “determined it was the wrong minorities. The board abandoned a race-neutral, merit-based system that previously was in place, and they adopted a policy structure specifically designed to reduce the number of Asian American students.”  The attorney general referred the matter to the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Justice for further enforcement under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act as a next step. The Trump administration has threatened to withhold money from schools and colleges over DEI efforts that amount to discrimination, and has opened an investigation into TJ’s admissions policy. It seems that even as the influence of DEI wanes across the country, some schools just haven’t learned. Based on the test scores, perhaps neither have their students. The post The DEI-Fueled Collapse of a Virginia Magnet School appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs To Make a Deal with Iran, Abandon Maximalist Demands A nuclear agreement would avert war but requires flexibility. Credit: poliorketes/Shutterstock President Donald Trump wants a deal with Iran and is uniquely positioned to obtain one. He has proven his ability to change stances while maintaining domestic support and, on various Middle East issues, appears to have given negotiators a long leash, empowering them to push for agreements that seemingly deviate from Trump’s own rhetoric. He will need to show such flexibility again if he wants to finalize a deal with Iran. Trump wrote on social media that the United States would not allow Iran to enrich uranium, contradicting the proposal reportedly put forward by his lead negotiator, Steve Witkoff. If the United States maintains maximalist demands for zero enrichment, talks are doomed to fail, making both an Iranian bomb and a U.S.-Iran war more likely. An acceptable deal is within reach, however, but only if Washington adopts a pragmatic approach focused on constraining Iranian enrichment and abandons the unrealistic goal of eliminating it entirely. The Enrichment Standoff While negotiations gained some momentum early on, the two sides’ red lines on enrichment have emerged as a major sticking point. Witkoff initially suggested Washington might tolerate low-level enrichment, but both he and Secretary of State Marco Rubio now publicly insist that Washington will not accept any enrichment and that Tehran’s nuclear facilities must be fully dismantled. However, Axios reported that the recent U.S. proposal to Iran would allow “limited low-level uranium enrichment on Iranian soil” and would establish a regional nuclear consortium. This would be a significant shift that could help break the impasse. Shortly after, however, Trump wrote on Truth Social that any agreement “WILL NOT ALLOW ANY ENRICHMENT OF URANIUM!” Subsequent reports suggest that Iran would be allowed to enrich uranium at low levels in the “opening years of the proposed arrangement” but would be required to end domestic enrichment once the consortium began operations. Iranian officials, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have said Tehran will reject the proposal precisely because of these zero-enrichment demands.  Many in Washington will accept nothing less than Iranian capitulation to maximalist U.S. demands. In May, more than 200 Republican lawmakers signed a letter insisting on the full dismantlement of Iran’s nuclear program. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) called the reported proposal allowing low-level enrichment a “side deal that lets Iran get away with everything.” Demands for zero enrichment and dismantlement are a poison pill for any deal. Iran has steadfastly rejected such terms for decades, and understandably so; its right to domestic enrichment is enshrined in the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi recently reaffirmed this stance, saying a deal “ensuring that Iran will not have nuclear weapons … is within reach,” but that Iranian enrichment “will continue with or without a deal.” This position represents a broad consensus in Iran, uniting reformists and hardliners alike. It is essential that unreasonable, maximalist demands are not allowed to collapse negotiations. Without an agreement, the United States and Iran could quickly find themselves on a path to war. The Iranian nuclear program is more advanced than ever, with Tehran nearly doubling its stockpile of near weapons-grade, 60-percent-enriched uranium since February. Meanwhile, the October deadline for European parties to the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) to “snap back” sanctions lifted under the deal is fast approaching, and they are likely to do so if no deal is reached by then. If that happens, Iranian officials have vowed to leave the NPT, which would significantly weaken monitoring of Iran’s nuclear program, close the door to diplomacy, and raise the risk of preventive action. Failure to reach a deal would hand ammunition to those in the administration, Congress, and Israel pushing for strikes. Indeed, Trump has warned that Tehran must “move quickly,” or “something bad’s going to happen.”  A Path Forward Conventional wisdom in Washington holds that if Tehran rejects complete denuclearization, the only alternative is military action. Trump himself has said that Washington has two choices for handling Iran’s nuclear sites: “blow them up nicely or blow them up viciously.” However, military force cannot permanently dismantle Iran’s nuclear program and would likely motivate Tehran to finally go for the bomb. Moreover, an attack on Iran’s nuclear sites would almost certainly trigger a broader war that would be massively expensive in both American lives and dollars. Washington does not need to choose between unrealistic demands and a costly war. A third path—a more limited but still sufficient agreement—is still on the table. Iran, weakened by sanctions and setbacks in the region, is eager for an agreement—as long as Washington abandons the zero-enrichment poison pill.  An endorsement by Trump, the dominant force in his party, would be enough to move forward a reasonable deal. While Iran hawks would condemn any agreement with Tehran, the public would likely reward him. Polls show that a majority of Americans oppose military action against Iran and support a diplomatic agreement, even if it allows limited enrichment. The president has already demonstrated a willingness to pivot from maximalist positions in the Middle East and elsewhere, and has not been punished by voters. Trump ended strikes against the Houthis, quickly reversing policy with little domestic pushback. Trump also surprised many by ending sanctions against Syria, embracing Syria’s new leader, and almost overnight resetting relations with the country.  Furthermore, Trump has positioned Witkoff in a way that makes a deal far more achievable. Rather than engaging in major multilateral talks in search of a comprehensive deal like the JCPOA, Trump has given Witkoff the leeway to act as his emissary to understand the Iranian position and obtain an agreement, which could then be the foundation for future deals that could include additional parties. This approach has upset the Europeans, but it is the best method for securing a quick deal that avoids conflict between the U.S. and Iran.  The contours of a workable agreement are clear. Crucially, a deal need not forbid Iranian enrichment for it to successfully prevent Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons. What matters is robust monitoring, the disposal of Iran’s highly enriched uranium, and strict limits on enrichment levels—conditions Iranian officials have repeatedly stated they would accept. Tehran has also signaled openness to a U.S.-proposed regional enrichment consortium, so long as enrichment takes place on Iranian soil. This is not the maximalist “Libyan model,” but it is enough to significantly extend Iran’s breakout time, contain the most dangerous aspects of its program, and defuse the crisis.  Maximalist demands threaten to scuttle negotiations and put the United States and Iran on a path toward war. But if Trump chooses pragmatism, he has a real opportunity to resolve the Iranian nuclear issue. Such an agreement could be a first, crucial step toward the regional grand bargain that Trump desires. At the very least, the United States would have one less crisis to worry about.   The post To Make a Deal with Iran, Abandon Maximalist Demands appeared first on The American Conservative.

If a child has a disability that requires a wheelchair in the United States, we generally assume they'll be able to get one. If a family can't afford a wheelchair, we know there are programs and resources that can help fill that need, so the idea that a child wouldn't be able to go to school at all because of a physical disability doesn't really cross our minds. That is the reality in many parts of the world, however. In developing nations with limited resources, kids with mobility issues often languish at home, unable to participate in or contribute to many aspects of community life. Especially in rural areas that are far from large medical centers and services, kids with disabilities can slip through the cracks and lose the opportunity to get an education. Malawi Wheels Country Coordinator Gelson Mtinga poses with three new wheelchairs.Courtesy of Malawi WheelsBehavioral therapist Danielle Kama encountered that reality while volunteering on international service trips during college at San Diego State University. After her first service trip took her to Tanzania, she returned every other year, helping to build schools or teach English. After college, she became a Christian and started doing mission work as well, which eventually led her to Malawi.Malawi is a small, majority Christian country in East Africa, landlocked between Tanzania, Mozambique, and Zambia. Approximately the size of Pennsylvania in area, it's also one of the poorest nations on Earth, with the majority of its population living in rural areas and doing cash crop and subsistence farming. Approximately 70% of Malawians live in poverty by international standards. It was in Malawi that Danielle met Justin, an eight-year-old living with mobility differences. Danielle was helping with a children's program when she noticed Justin sitting on the ground while playing with his friends. Justin may not be able to walk, but he loves to play soccer.Courtesy of Malawi Wheels"He had the biggest smile on his face, just like beaming from ear to ear," Danielle tells Upworthy. "And all the kids were around him, also smiling. They just kind of ran off to the next cool thing, and then I noticed him start to crawl, with his arms dragging his knees. He couldn't walk, but he kept smiling while trailing all the way behind these other kids trying to keep up.""I don't even remember thinking, 'That's so sad'," she adds. "It was just really beautiful to see his joy despite the mobility difference." Danielle visited with Justin's family to find out what kind of needs they had. She found out that Justin's father carried him to school, two miles each way, so he was able to attend. But most kids in Justin's circumstances aren't that fortunate. In fact, according to the 2018 Population and Housing Census, approximately 11.6% of Malawians aged five and older have at least one type of disability. With only 14 prosthetists and orthotists, 200 physiotherapists and assistants, and 15 orthopedic surgeons serving the entire country, Malawi has a limited number of professionals to address mobility and disability issues. "It kind of became my mission to see if it was possible to get [Justin] a wheelchair to at least make that easier for him and his family getting him to school," she says. "And I found quickly that there's not a lot of options or organizations in Malawi for making or donating wheelchairs." Justin in his chair with his brother and a friend.Courtesy of Malawi WheelsDanielle managed to track down a chair for Justin, but knowing the need was greater than just one child, she became determined to find a way to get more wheelchairs made locally. She met an "amazingly clever and funny" Malawian named Richard, who was a wheelchair engineer. After he trained three welders in his craft, Danielle hired them to start a wheelchair-making operation, now known as Malawi Wheels. "So that was in December of 2021," Danielle shares. "And then in February, just two months later, [Richard] died of a heart attack. Terrible, terrible. But I truly believe God allowed his knowledge and passion for making wheelchairs for kids to be transferred to our team before his death. And I know that it was really meaningful for his wife to have that legacy live on through now Malawi Wheels." The Malawi Wheels team, left to right: Samuel George (wheelchair engineer) Esther Anthony (office manager), Emmanuel Fred (wheelchair engineer), Stevie Wilson (fieldwork manager), Gelson Mtinga (country director) , Oscar Tamatha (wheelchair engineer) Courtesy of Malawi WheelsWhat started with Justin and Richard has now become a team of six men and women, all local Malawians, who identify children with mobility needs, build wheelchairs for them, and deliver them. Danielle says that so far about 200 kids have gotten wheelchairs from Malawi Wheels, which are all made and repaired locally."We believe that local needs should have local solutions," she explains. "All of our materials to make wheelchairs are purchased in Malawi so that we can 1) repair them in Malawi and 2) we can give back to Malawian-owned businesses and of course the local economy. So all of our team is local Malawians, our supplies are purchased in Malawi, and our wheelchairs are built and delivered in Malawi." Miracle and his community the day he got his wheelchairCourtesy of Malawi WheelsDanielle says there are advantages to staying local and not being part of a large international organization. There are non-profits that give millions of wheelchairs away on a global scale, which Danielle praises, but she says there can be issues with not being able to repair or find replacement parts for wheelchairs shipped in from other places. Additionally, as kids outgrow their chairs, they may not have anyone to contact to get a larger one because the chair was just dropped off for them. Malawi Wheels wheelchairs are custom made for each child so they are safe and their individual needs are catered to. Oscar puts finishing touches on a wheelchair (left), Rose with her mom after getting into her Malawi Wheels chair for the first time (right)Courtesy of Malawi Wheels "We really like being small right now," Danielle says, "because we're able to carry those 200 children and really hold them and see their story. Our desire is not just to give a wheelchair, give a handout, and then leave. We want to see their progress, repair wheelchairs, make updates, sustainably support the family for the future with some of our programs like parent support groups, which focus on more of the financial, spiritual help for the parent, and then our small business programs, which focus on empowering families financially so that they can support their children long term."This holistic approach to service is purposeful. The support groups where parents of kids with disabilities gather to pray for one another and provide mutual support also receive physical therapy educational training to better help their children with their needs. "We transport licensed physiotherapists to the groups to focus on parent training for exercises so that they can take those exercises home and then continue them daily with their children," Danielle shares. "And the main purpose for a lot of these groups is to try to defeat some of that isolation and discrimination that these parents experience." Parent groups provide emotional and spiritual support as well as physical therapy education for parents of kids with disabilities.Courtesy of Malawi WheelsIt's not uncommon in Malawi for a child born with special needs to be seen as cursed or as a punishment from God for a family or individual. It's also a common and accepted practice for a father to leave the family if a child is born with or develops a disability, so there's a lot of stigma and discrimination that follows these kids. "That leaves, of course, a lot of single mothers caring for their children alone and a lot of lonely mothers and families," says Danielle. "So our goal has been to start new communities for those parents and caregivers that share that common bond so that they can lean on one another, because there are common struggles and common joys that come with having a child with special needs that can then bring them together and help them feel not so alone. So yeah, we kind of get that emotional spiritual care but then also that physical care because we have the physical therapy embedded within the groups as well." See on Instagram Malawi Wheels also provides business support to help the families become more self-sufficient financially. "We recognize that a lot of the time, special needs does mean special expenses like medical equipment, monthly medicines, hospital care, so one solution we've found that can be be helpful is coming alongside those families to assist them in starting their own business so that with the profits they can better support their child long term. Again, not just giving a handout that's not going to help them in the long run, but sustainably supporting them. So, when a family is interested in starting a business, we start with a one-on-one small business training for them, we help them make a business plan and then we supply a grant or a no-interest loan, and then we support them through the building process and check in bimonthly for updates. And we found that this can be a huge help for families."Businesses are often small grocery businesses, selling various items like tomatoes, cooking oil, eggs, etc. Some families also start cooked food businesses like a French fry stand—known as chips in Malawi—or selling small donuts called mandazis.Danielle says their research over the last couple of years has indicated that no-interest business loans tend to be much more effective than grants. Having the responsibility and accountability of paying the money back, even without any interest, seems to be more empowering to recipients than being given a grant, leading to greater success. Continuous learning helps the organization hone their programs to have the most impact. See on Instagram It really all comes down to ministering to people's needs holistically, says Danielle, with the mission being for "people to come away with an understanding of Christianity that reflects God's love for his people, especially regardless of ability, regardless of looks, regardless of religion. Because we believe that God created everyone, that everyone bears his image, that he loves everyone, that he really wants healing for his people, mind, body, and soul. So that's why we focus on that holistic model of helping. Of course, we want to provide spiritually, but we're also there to help with physical needs because that's what Jesus did. He didn't just offer prayer. He offered physical healing and provided for physical needs. So I think that collision of faith and works is really important." Danielle and her son with the Malawi Wheels team.Courtesy of Malawi WheelsAs for Justin, he's been thriving with his increased mobility."After receiving a chair, we've seen Justin become so social in his community," Danielle says. "Every time our team visits the village he's from, they always pass him on the road and see him at the soccer fields or with his friends. He's always out, every time I go to Kabekere where he's from, he is always along the road somewhere."Additionally, the physical therapy Justin has received through the parent support group has helped him gain enough strength and balance to be able to use a walking frame for short distances. He's also become a soccer coach for his team of friends. "I've seen him play soccer, too—adaptively, of course—but he'll sit on the floor and swing his legs to kick it to his friends," says Danielle. "So just seeing that now he's even a soccer coach and how involved he's been in his community since being able to have that mobility and independence is so cool."Mobility truly is a gift that empowers and opens up a world of possibilities. Learn more about the Malawi Wheels mission and see how you can support their efforts here.