August 8, 2026

There’s a new argument making the rounds in foreign policy circles, and it comes with a local connection. Dartmouth government professor Stephen Brooks and his coauthor, Ben Vagle, a Dartmouth graduate now at Stanford, have just published a remarkable essay in Foreign Affairs. They argue that America still has the upper hand over China, even though most people think otherwise.

That reasoning is understandable. Earlier this year, when the Trump administration threatened new tariffs on Chinese goods, Beijing struck back by restricting exports of rare earth minerals, the unfamiliar but essential materials used in everything from smartphones to fighter jets. China controls the overwhelming majority of the world’s supply. The threat worked. Washington backed off.

It’s the kind of moment that makes China look relentless. But Brooks and Vagle, who in their book “Command of Commerce” make the same case at greater length, say that the episode is the exception, not the rule. For China to truly hold economic leverage over another country, they argue, three things have to be true. China needs to control the overwhelming share of some resource or product, there needs to be no good substitutes available and China needs to be able to inflict real pain without hurting itself too badly. Rare earths meet all three conditions. Almost nothing else does.

However, the authors say, these advantages tend to fade once a country actually uses them. Why? When China restricted rare earth exports, it woke everyone up, and companies and governments started scrambling for alternative sources. That takes time, but it’s achievable. The lesson, Brooks and Vagle argue, isn’t to panic. It’s to get ahead of the next chokepoint before China finds it, whether that’s in medicines, batteries or drone parts.

That’s one side of the story. But it’s worth understanding what’s happening inside China, too, because the two stories fit together.

China is, without question, an industrial powerhouse. It manufactures the overwhelming majority of the world’s solar panels, dominates production of electric vehicle batteries and processes most of the world’s rare earths, according to research from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. That’s real strength, and it isn’t going away soon.

But underneath that manufacturing muscle, China’s domestic economy is struggling. Its real estate market, once a massive engine of national wealth, is in shambles, wiping out savings for millions of families. Young people are struggling to find jobs, and prices are falling rather than rising, which sounds nice until you realize it usually means people have stopped spending. Local governments borrowed enormous sums to build infrastructure nobody needed, and now can’t pay it back; banks keep extending new loans just to keep old debts from collapsing, which starves everyday businesses of credit.

Logan Wright, a China analyst at the Rhodium Group, argues that Western observers keep misjudging China because they focus on what its leaders say they want to do, rather than on the shaky financial foundation underneath. He believes China’s debt troubles directly limit how much money Beijing can throw around the world through programs like its Belt and Road infrastructure lending.

But here’s the strange twist. Even though Chinese leaders don’t care for consumers’ pockets, Chinese factories keep producing far more than the country’s own citizens can buy. Hence, all that surplus, solar panels, EVs and cheap manufactured goods gets shipped overseas, often at prices that undercut everyone else. That’s exactly what gives China its outsized influence over global trade. Strangely, China’s domestic weakness is what fuels its international reach.

So, what is China? Is China a titan or a house of cards? Ironically, the honest answer is both, and that’s precisely why it’s worth reading Wright and Brooks and Vagle side by side. Wright shows why China’s power has real limits. Brooks and Vagle show that America’s power has been underestimated.

But there’s a catch worth noting. Xi Jinping doesn’t run for reelection, doesn’t answer to a free press, and can order banks to keep bad debt on life support indefinitely. China can absorb a decade of pain that would sink an elected government. The American strategy Brooks and Vagle describe, persistent, coordinated, built on trust with allies, is exactly the kind of long game democracies struggle to sustain, especially when an administration is busy tariffing and alienating the very allies it needs. If Beijing looks unbothered, this may be the real reason.

I was curious how Brooks squares that with the moment we’re in, so I sent him an email query. If the strategy depends on Washington working steadily with allies, I asked, who’s going to bell the cat, given that this administration seems to have traded diplomacy for tariffs and threats?

Brooks was candid. He wouldn’t guess where the administration is heading, he said, but the point is that it’s in America’s own “selfish” interest to work seriously and consistently with allies to constrain China’s trade practices. Trump isn’t wrong that China’s economic policies are hurting the U.S., he added. Where the president errs, in Brooks’s view, is in believing America can fix the problem alone.

And that explains Xi Jinping’s composure, the fabled Cheshire Cat smile, serene, inscrutable, mischievous. He doesn’t need to make a move to unsettle you. He just needs to keep smiling while democracies argue whether to use the advantages they already have.

Narain Batra is a study leader at the Osher Institute at Dartmouth College. In September, he is scheduled to teach a hybrid seminar: “Journalism: It’s Not Fake News: Restoring Faith in the First Amendment in the Age of AI.” Those interested in the course should contact Lisa King at osher@dartmouth.edu.

https://www.concordmonitor.com/2026/08/08/my-turn-us-china-trade-power-struggle/

ABOUT GOLFING WITH DONALD TRUMP

Dear Narain,

I have finally been able to read your commentary about golfing with Trump. It is a well-written piece, and I am glad you wrote it. I agree with nearly all of the points you make about communicating with those you may oppose or disagree with. Indeed, as a mediator for more than 30 years, I strongly believe in communicating about differences as a way to find common ground, but the normal rules do not apply to Trump, in my view. Trump does not engage in rational discussion or dialogue. His statements and actions, and his large reservoir of tweets and social media posts, coupled with his incurable inability to engage in a serious give-and-take discussion, disqualify him, in my view, from consideration for a golf game.

Yes, walking the fairway with Trump might offer some openings to meaningful discussion, but his record demonstrates unequivocally that he is incapable of any meaningful or serious discussion. He turns any attempt at such communications into opportunities to boast about himself or rail against those who do not support him. He bullies his way through conversations or attempted conversations by constantly interrupting and talking about what is on his mind, usually unrelated to whatever triggered his comments. He has demonstrated too many times to list his unwillingness and, likely, an inner constitutional inability to listen to others and engage with the issues they raise. He is, in a word, not a person capable of being influenced or touched in any way by an attempt at conversation.

The examples you give of other presidents and the benefits or potential benefits that came from their willingness to speak with and meet with their adversaries do not, sadly, apply to Trump. That is not what Trump is about. He goes into meetings totally unprepared and ignores accepted facts and falsifies known facts to come up with his unhinged comments, policies, and directives.

I agree that history provides many examples of diplomacy and discussion working together to achieve an outcome that might otherwise not have been achievable. Trump is not a person who would or could use communications with an adversary to bring about progress on any front. I am speaking not from antipathy toward Trump, though I find him to be a despicable human being, but from an objective analysis of the Trump we have seen in operation. I have read quite a number of books on Trump, including examinations of his early history as a business fraud artist. He was never a business success. He squandered the hundreds of millions of dollars his father gave him and managed to bankrupt six companies. He found “success” only after NBC gave him stardom with The Apprentice, and he parlayed that into a public perception of competence. There has never been any. You must forgive my rant, but this man should be shamed and exposed at every opportunity. He will not change, but perhaps at some point, enough members of the voting public will realize they have been duped to abandon Trump and his acolytes.

Your state in your commentary: “A widespread diffused anxiety that talking to people we oppose is itself a kind of betrayal. But if conversation threatens a person’s convictions, it means that the convictions were never as strong as they felt. Strengthening them requires contact with the alternative, not distance from it.”

I agree with the above statement, but it does not apply to my view of not wasting the time to speak to or meet with Trump, particularly if that would give him an opportunity to use any such meeting to falsely legitimize some action or policy that he has pursued. He is in office because he has mastered the demagogic arts as Hitler and others have done before him. To that extent, he is more than merely a deplorable person; he is truly dangerous, and no one should engage in any conduct with him that he can use to further his deception of the public.

I offer my comments as your friend to better explain my thinking about Trump.

By the way, the Bill Alford you reference in your article is an Amherst ’70 classmate and friend of mine. We lived across the hall from one another during our freshman year. Bill is an exceptional scholar and thinker and a true heavyweight in his field. I am glad you are familiar with him. I only see him now at reunions, but he is a regular, as am I, at our five-year reunion gatherings.

Scott McGee

Norwich, Vermont

August 1, 2026

July 20, 2026

An attorney friend, a sharp legal mind and a lifelong Democrat, asked me recently, mid-round, whether I would play golf with Donald Trump if he invited me. I said yes, enthusiastically. He looked startled. “Why?” I said it would give me a chance to talk with one of the most consequential political figures of our time.

That small exchange captures a large American problem. We have started to treat conversation as a moral hazard. A republic that cannot talk to itself is inadequately positioned to talk to a world that is fracturing before our eyes. I’m not making a case for sleeping with the enemy. I want to give the skeptics their due. They aren’t wrong about everything. Sitting down with an adversary looks like giving them legitimacy, whether or not that’s the intent.

When Trump met Kim Jong Un in Singapore in June 2018, the first-ever meeting between a sitting American president and a North Korean leader, the joint statement committed both sides to work toward denuclearization and a new relationship, but it contained no verification mechanism and no timeline. The Council on Foreign Relations argued that the summit normalized Kim as a legitimate actor on the world stage even as Pyongyang’s weapons programs, human rights record and missile development went largely unaddressed in the communique.

Harvard’s William Alford made a similar argument about Nixon’s 1972 trip to China. The “Nixon goes to China” mythology, he contends, obscures the fact that Nixon spent years stoking the very anti-communist hysteria that made rapprochement so difficult in the first place. In international relations, engagement can be theater, but pictures of handshakes are not policy.

Nonetheless, the historical record also shows what happens when the alternative — silence — is tried instead. For more than two decades, Washington and Beijing exchanged almost no direct communication. When Nixon and Mao Zedong finally sat down in February 1972, the encounter did not resolve the ideological chasm between the two systems. It did something more modest and more useful. It replaced imagined enemies with observed ones. The trip produced the Shanghai Communiqué, opened liaison offices in each capital and lifted the dark cloud the two nations had lived under for a generation.

Reagan and Gorbachev offer an even stranger case, because their most consequential meeting was seemingly a failure. At Reykjavík, Iceland, in October 1986, the two men came close to an agreement to eliminate their entire nuclear arsenals before the talks collapsed over the Strategic Defense Initiative. No treaty was signed. And yet historians now treat Reykjavík as a turning point of the Cold War, the moment two leaders discovered that abolition was more than rhetoric. The breakthrough treaty on intermediate-range missiles followed a year later, built on what the failed summit had revealed about both men’s actual red lines. Two years later, Reagan stood in Berlin and challenged Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.” The wall fell in 1989; the Soviet Union followed it into history two years after that.

Jimmy Carter’s 13 days at Camp David with Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin make the same point in a different key. The two leaders disliked each other so intensely that Carter had to separate them after three days and shuttle between their cabins for the rest of the negotiation. Proximity did not build affection. It created a treaty, the Camp David Accords, that has held, unbroken, about five decades.

And then there is the case that has nothing to do with political summits. Nelson Mandela spent twenty-seven years in prison, much of it under the watch of a young Afrikaner prison guard, Christo Brand. He was told that he’d be guarding the country’s most notorious man. Instead, the two built a friendship that outlasted apartheid itself, continuing until Mandela’s death in 2013. Reconciliation, in Mandela’s hands, started as a daily contact with a jailer before it became a national policy.

If I found myself walking a fairway with Donald Trump, I would ask about his strong short game and his unconventional swing and putting stroke, not out of courtesy but genuine curiosity and admiration. Pivoting to geopolitics would test the diplomatic skills I taught for more than three decades. I would ask what he believes China wants over the next 20 years. Respect, disruption or dominance? What he thinks Iran is actually hunting for. How he defines American strength in a world where no single country sets the terms. These are not partisan questions. They bypass the red-blue ideology. They are about the emerging global geopolitical architecture, not party allegiance.

My attorney friend’s reluctance on the golf course reflected something real. A widespread diffused anxiety that talking to people we oppose is itself a kind of betrayal. But if conversation threatens a person’s convictions, it means that the convictions were never as strong as they felt. Strengthening them requires contact with the alternative, not distance from it.

So yes, if Donald Trump invited me to play golf, I would say yes. Not because I agree with him. Not because I admire him. But because in a plural, dangerous world, the ability to sit across from someone and ask a real question is not a weakness. It is reconnaissance.

And if my attorney friend is reading this, I say: relax. I’m not defecting. I’m just teeing off. You’re still buying the beers after. As you always do.

Narain Batra is a study leader at the Osher Institute at Dartmouth College. He lives in the Upper Valley.

By Jim Wilson

For several years now, like many Americans, I have found myself increasingly discouraged by the toxic polarization that seems to dominate our national life. Every day brings another political insult, another angry accusation, another reminder of how deeply divided we have become. The anger seems endless. The insults grow sharper. Every disagreement becomes a battle. Every issue becomes a test of loyalty. Too often, our political leaders appear to prosper by keeping us anxious, suspicious, and divided, more interested in amplifying our fears than easing them. Cable news and social media thrive on outrage. It is easy to conclude that the bonds holding us together are fraying beyond repair and to believe that the country is coming apart.

And yet, over the past few weeks, three very different events have reminded me that beneath the noise, there is another America—an America that receives far less attention but may be far more representative of who we really are.

The first has been the arrival of World Cup teams from dozens of nations across the globe. In town after town, Americans have welcomed athletes and visitors with enthusiasm, generosity, and curiosity. People of every age, race, background, and political persuasion have gathered to celebrate the games. They have cheered not only for their own teams but for the spirit of international competition itself. Watching crowds mingle, laugh, and share experiences with people from different cultures has been a powerful reminder that openness and hospitality remain deeply rooted American virtues.

For millions of passionate soccer fans from all walks of life, cheering within huge stadiums, in the public squares surrounding the stadiums, and in millions of homes across the three host countries, the nation’s challenges, its political polarization, and its anxieties receded, if only for two hours. It was a truce of sorts: a moment of reconciliation made possible by sport.

Washington Post reporter Leon Krauze was in Mexico City for the opening World Cup game. In an essay The World Cup Offers a Glimpse of Something only Soccer Can Offer he wrote: “…with the tournament now underway, it feels like the world has collectively exhaled. Soccer has once again offered something only soccer can offer: a glimpse of a shared humanity.”

Krauze goes on: “Mexico itself has been transformed. Before the opening whistle, commentators fretted that the country’s various maladies — from poverty to violence and corruption — would mar the festivities. The country’s problems have, of course, not vanished. But the tournament has brought to the surface that other Mexico so often buried beneath the ugly headlines: a Mexico that is colorful, hospitable, generous, and musical — chaotic in the best sense of the word. A Mexican fan helping someone cross a gigantic puddle, Koreans and Mexicans dancing together inside a taqueria, a duck, named Merlin, wearing the team’s national colors — this is the Mexico I’m happy the world can glimpse.”

Equivalent scenes have unfolded across all three host countries. The Scots took over Fenway Park and the streets of Boston — and embraced a police officer who juggled a soccer ball a few times in front of them. The Brazilians painted Times Square yellow days before the French turned it blue. The residents of Lawrence, Kansas, have turned their town green and totally supported the Algerian team with meals, music, and welcoming festivities. The orange tide of the Dutch marched on Arlington, Texas, behind its double-decker bus; the Japanese fans, as they always do, stayed after the final whistle to tidy the stands. What has prevailed is that sense of community — a rebuttal of the divided, isolated world on which authoritarian voices feed and delight.

What struck me was not simply the soccer. It was the atmosphere. In cities from Mexico City to Vancouver and Toronto, from Los Angeles to Atlanta, from Philadelphia to Kansas City, visitors described being greeted warmly by volunteers, restaurant workers, hotel clerks, and ordinary citizens eager to make them feel at home. Outside stadiums draped in colorful flags, families posed for photos with visiting fans, children traded team scarves, and conversations in dozens of languages blended into a cheerful hum.

One television reporter remarked that the crowds looked like “the United Nations having a block party.” At a time when our political discourse often emphasizes who does not belong, these gatherings celebrated the opposite idea—that people from every corner of the world can come together in friendship and mutual respect. I had almost forgotten how much, as a nation, we welcome and enjoy visitors. The contrast between what has become a divisive norm and this welcoming and all-inclusive reality could not be sharper.

The second was the remarkable run of the New York Knicks. Growing up near Boston, I am a Celtics fan. Yet I found myself pulling for this underdog group and for the city that embraced them. Seeing tens of thousands of people pour into the streets of New York, united by nothing more than their affection for a basketball team, was unexpectedly moving. For a few weeks, differences that normally separate people seemed irrelevant. Republicans and Democrats, rich and poor, lifelong New Yorkers and recent arrivals—all were part of a shared experience. The joy was spontaneous, communal, and genuine.

Led by Jalen Brunson, a player whose toughness and humility seemed to embody the spirit of the team, the Knicks captured the imagination of New Yorkers in a way not seen for years. Suddenly, orange and blue jerseys were everywhere. Sports bars overflowed. Subway riders who had never met exchanged knowing smiles. Complete strangers embraced after big victories. These images brought back memories of the strong sense of unity surrounding the 1980 Miracle on Ice; that, too, was a dark time in our national mood.

Television cameras panned across a crowd outside Madison Square Garden. There were young professionals in business attire, construction workers just off their shifts, grandparents, teenagers, immigrants, lifelong New Yorkers, and recent arrivals. They differed in every imaginable way except one: for that moment, they belonged to the same community.

The chants of “Let’s Go Knicks!” echoed through the streets. Car horns became musical instruments. The city was celebrating not simply a basketball team but the joy of sharing an experience with millions of neighbors.

On the steps of City Hall, the mayor presented the key to the city to this team … “Over these past weeks, as the Knicks kept winning, our city has come together as one,” Mamdani said. “Neighbors invited neighbors over. Strangers high-fived one another in the street. Subway conductors sang their announcements and bus drivers danced behind the wheel. So often when this city comes together, it is because we are forced to, by a moment of tragedy or adversity. What a gift it is to be brought together by pure, unfiltered joy. For as long as we live, we will remember this feeling of a city together, a city alive, a city overcome by happiness.”

Sports cannot solve our political problems. But they remind us of something important: human beings long to belong to something larger than themselves. We crave connection. We want reasons to celebrate together. The crowds in New York were not celebrating a political victory over their opponents. They were celebrating one another.

The third event was the opening of the Obama Presidential Center. I recognize that Americans hold differing views about Barack Obama and his presidency. That is entirely appropriate in a democracy. But what struck me was not politics. It was the tone of the occasion.

The speeches by Barack and Michelle Obama reflected themes that once seemed commonplace in American public life: respect, service, citizenship, community, hope, and faith in the future. Whether one agrees with every policy they supported is beside the point. The message was larger than partisan politics. It was a reminder that America is strongest when we see each other not as enemies to be defeated but as fellow citizens engaged in a common experiment. The larger message was about community, participation, and faith in the future. Both Barack and Michelle Obama spoke about service and the responsibilities we owe one another as members of a democratic society. Barack spoke of building a generation of citizens committed to solving problems together. Michelle spoke of hope, opportunity, and the importance of helping young people believe that they matter and that their voices count. Both expressed their abiding faith in democracy, in the people, and the idea that democracy is not something someone else does for us; it is something all of us must do together.

What unites these three events is not sports, politics, or international competition. It is something deeper. Each event revealed an America that exists largely outside our political arguments. It is the America of volunteers, neighbors, coaches, parents, teachers, fans, community leaders, and ordinary citizens. It is an America where people still show kindness to strangers, rally around local causes, welcome visitors, and gather in celebration. And above all, have a strong desire to be connected to each other and to a larger community.

The contrast with the body politic today is striking. Our public discourse often suggests a nation consumed by hatred and retribution and irreconcilable differences. But everyday life tells a more complicated story. Most Americans are not spending their days looking for people to despise. They are raising families, helping neighbors, volunteering at churches and food banks, coaching Little League teams, supporting local charities, and trying to leave their communities better than they found them. America is often kinder than its politics. The America we see on television is frequently a distorted reflection of the America we encounter in our neighborhoods.

None of this means our problems are insignificant. Political polarization is real. Distrust is real. Anger is real. These unifying moments do not stop wars or end political cruelty. They do not make the world more democratic. They do not redeem governments or erase injustice. But they carve out a fragile space in which enemies can remember, however briefly, that they belonged to something larger than their quarrels. We should not minimize the challenges facing our country. But the events of recent weeks provide evidence that points in the opposite direction.

The welcome given to visitors from around the world, the joy of a city united behind its team, the hopeful message of a presidential center dedicated to civic engagement are powerful – and hopefully lasting -reminders that the forces pulling us together remain strong, hopefully greater than the forces pulling us apart.

Beneath the surface, each moment revealed the same truth: The loudest voices are not necessarily the most representative voices. To quote FDR, speaking in the depths of the Great Depression: “A nation is not defined by its loudest arguments that dominate the daily news. It is defined by the character of its people.”

“It ain’t over ‘til it’s over,” but I feel a glimmer of hope.

Jim Wilson taught history and economics for 49 years in Connecticut before retiring to the Upper Valley in 2008. Since then, he has taught numerous Osher classes on current politics and related issues. Jim lives in Strafford, enjoys many outdoor activities, and travels frequently.

June 27, 2026

A statue of Thomas Jefferson greets visitors at the main lobby at the Jefferson Hotel in Richmond, Va., Wednesday, Feb. 17, 2016. Credit: AP Photo/Steve Helber
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From global capitals to the quiet towns, a momentous question hangs in the air: What’s there to love America? When people ask this, they are often looking at the ragged edges of the headlines, the intense political polarization, the economic anxieties, the cultural snarling.

But if we take a long-view historical perspective, we find that the essential genius of the American experiment doesn’t lie in a frictionless existence. It lies in its unique architecture as a self-renewing society. It was years ago that I wrote a book titled “America: A Self-Renewing Society,” where I explored how America relies on open communication and constant internal reinvention to overcome its worst crises. Later, in “The First Freedoms and America’s Culture of Innovation,” I focused on what I call the constitutional foundations of the aspirational society, a society in pursuit of happiness.

Today, I want to explore how these two forces — the First Amendment and the pursuit of happiness — converge to create an irresistible gravitational pull for the world’s most ambitious minds. Why is it that global disruptors, like South African-born Elon Musk, cross oceans to build their futures here? The answer isn’t just about capital or venture markets. It is about a culture uniquely designed to tolerate, and even reward, the transgression of the boundaries of permissible thought.

When Thomas Jefferson captured the beauty and entrepreneurial power of the phrase “the pursuit of happiness” in 1776, he was introducing an active, dynamic element into statecraft. He didn’t promise happiness as a state-sponsored giveaway. He framed it as an open-ended hunt. The pursuit of happiness is, at its core, the foundational right to self-determination, to look at the existing order of things and say, “I can build something better.”

But a grand ambition is utterly meaningless without the energy, the firepower, to sustain it. And that energy is the First Amendment. In “The First Freedoms,” I argued that the marketplace of ideas is not just a civic luxury for journalists and political dissenters, it is the most powerful engine of technological and economic breakthrough. The First Amendment does something extraordinary. It normalizes and legalizes deviation. It protects the right to challenge orthodoxies, to question established authorities, and to think outside the permissible boundaries of traditional societies.

Think about it. In many parts of the world, even in some highly advanced economies, there’s a suffocating social or political cost to being a contrarian. If you challenge the corporate hierarchy in Tokyo, or the political establishment in Beijing, or the regulatory bureaucracy in Brussels, the system pushes back to crush the anomaly. But not in America. Because America’s culture of innovation thrives on the anomaly.

This brings us directly to the phenomenon of Elon Musk. Musk is an immigrant. He left South Africa, spent time in Canada, but knew that his ultimate destination had to be the United States. Why? Musk is an exemplar of an aspirational disruptor who requires an environment of radical intellectual and industrial permissiveness. You cannot build SpaceX in a country where the state completely dictates aerospace development. You cannot build Tesla in an environment that punishes the massive, chaotic financial risks required to completely upend a century-old automotive industry

When Musk speaks passionately about the First Amendment, even when his own interpretation of it sparks intense global debate, he is acknowledging a fundamental truth that his entire empire is built on the freedom to disrupt. He was drawn to America because it is the one place on Earth where a single individual can propose something as absurd as colonizing Mars or rewriting the global financial system via PayPal, and the culture doesn’t lock you away as a madman. In fact, it allows you to become the first trillionaire in the history of the world.

This is the essence of the self-renewing society. America is constantly disrupted from within by its own dreamers, its own immigrant energy and its own iconoclasts. Consider another disruptor, Barack Obama. At the opening of the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, he said that over 40 years ago, he arrived in Chicago in search of an idea and a sense of purpose. As a young man who believed deeply in America and drew inspiration from the Civil Rights Movement, he wanted to be part of something larger than himself. He envisioned an America where everyone has opportunity, everyone is seen and everyone belongs, because that was a country where he felt he had a place, too.

Musk and Obama are two sides of the same coin that proclaims, Congress shall not…

So, as we look at America at 250, what’s there not to love? If you love neatness, if you love absolute predictability or if you love a society that sits quietly in historical inertia, then America will always frustrate you. It is a messy, loud,and frequently unequal place. The gaps between its highest ideals and its daily realities are often painfully wide, as we see today. But if you value the unyielding pursuit of human potential, if you believe that progress only happens when individuals are free to push past the boundaries of permissible thought, then America remains the ultimate aspirational theater of innovation and the pursuit of happiness.

Narain Batra is a study leader at the Osher Institute at Dartmouth College. He lives in the Upper Valley.

June 6, 2026

Indian Army vehicles travel in formation during the annual Republic Day parade on Rajpath in New Delhi, India, Saturday, Jan. 26, 2013. Indians across the country celebrated Republic Day, which commemorates the 1950 adoption of its constitution. Credit: AP Photo/Kevin Frayer

In July 1776, the world experienced a momentous geopolitical upheaval.

In Philadelphia, a group of Enlightenment rebels and bravehearts, fortified with the audacious ideas of Locke and Montesquieu, were calling for a death warrant for “the Royal Brute of Great Britain.” They were giving birth to a “Novus Ordo Seclorum” — a New Order of the Ages. They looked at the future and saw a Republic. And they promised to build it. And they dared to keep it.

In the same span of time, in my 5,000-year-old ancestral home, the majestic land straddling the Himalayas to the Indian Ocean, the Sun of the Great Mughals and the Taj Mahal was not just setting. It was being extinguished. By 1776, the Emperor Shah Alam II was made into a “pensioner” of a private corporation, the East India Company. While America was throwing off the yoke of the British Crown, India was being molded and refitted for the yoke.

Consider the man who linked our two fates: Lord Cornwallis, the British general during the American Revolution, who in 1781 capitulated and surrendered his sword to George Washington at Yorktown. To Americans, he was the face of British defeat. But do you know where the British sent him next to redeem His Majesty’s reputation? India!

The loss of the American colonies would make India the “Jewel in the Crown,” an absolute imperial necessity. As a historian might say, the British Empire acquiesced in the loss of the 13 colonies only because it could consolidate and loot the Indian subcontinent. India’s colonization and America’s independence, in a sense, are historical twins born of a single global convulsion.

For a long time, the view from India toward America was one of envy mixed with inspiration and admiration. But the bridge between two great people wasn’t built by soldiers; it was built by philosophers and visionaries.

In the mid-19th century, Henry David Thoreau experimented with transcendental life at Walden Pond, just a few hours south of where we stand today. He wrote “Civil Disobedience,” a rationale for his refusal to pay taxes to a government supporting slavery and war. A half century later, a young Indian lawyer in South Africa, Mohandas Gandhi, read Thoreau. He didn’t just read him — he operationalized him. He took up the New England transcendentalists’ protest and transformed it into Satyagraha, the moral force that would eventually dismantle the very empire that Cornwallis had built. Many decades later, Martin Luther King Jr. would walk the Gandhi’s walk of non-violence and humanity’s shared dreams.

When India finally stood up to declare its “Tryst with Destiny” at the midnight hour of 1947, Indians looked across the Atlantic. They built their parliamentary system with the heart and soul from the American Bill of Rights.

When the Indian Constitution begins with “We, the People,” it isn’t just a legal preamble. It is a civilizational bond. India and America are two nations built not on ethnicity, or religion, or shared blood, but on a shared text of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” (Sanskrit: Āyuḥ svātantryaṁ sukhānveṣaṇam).

Nowadays, the view in India has shifted from aspiration to the Indian diaspora exploring the new “Silk Road” in America. One of the most successful ethnic groups in the United States, Indian-Americans, from Silicon Valley to elite universities and health care systems, represent the vital talent driving America’s core institutions.

Today, America looks at India for the “iCET”—the Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology. Whether it is jet engines, semiconductor chips or AI ethics, the two nations have realized they are “indispensable partners.” India has the youthful brainpower; America has the ecosystem. Do you see the future? Our interests have finally aligned with our values. We both face a systemic challenge from an authoritarian model that rejects the 1776 vision.

In 1776, America was a radical experiment. In 2026, America is the most prosperous, open, compassionate and innovative civilization in history. India is an ancient civilization, but a young Republic. When an Indian reflects on America at 250, through a looking glass, he sees India as the only other nation on Earth, large enough, crazy enough and diverse enough to attempt the impossible, to govern 1.5 billion free people under the rule of law.

The rule of law gives America deep advantages. The capacity to attract genuine talent from around the world, to allow people to vote with their feet, to build lives and companies and futures here — that’s something no authoritarian state can manufacture. The rule of law, for all its failures, creates conditions for economic dynamism that centrally planned economies consistently fail to match. And sometimes, they collapse, as the Soviet Union did. The rule of law is not for nothing. It cannot be belittled even in the age of Donald Trump.

America is not declining, regardless of Xi Jinping’s admonishment to Trump in Beijing on a recent visit. America has extraordinary assets. Its institutions, its talent, its culture of innovation. These are real, and they are formidable. But America cannot win on autopilot.

The countries, the empires, the powers that have fallen throughout history, they didn’t fall because they lacked strength. They fell because they stopped seeing clearly. Because they confused the present moment with the permanent. Because they ceased to be vigilant. That’s the challenge for America at 250.

Narain Batra is a study leader at the Osher Institute at Dartmouth College. He lives in the Upper Valley.

https://www.concordmonitor.com/2026/06/06/my-turn-india-america-shared-values-rule-law/

29th May 20

Despite the fact that China’s economic power is visible to anyone paying attention, the West continues to underestimate it, assuming Western soft power will preserve the old order. Foreign policy analyst Narain D. Batra argues this a dangerous delusion; one in which American dominance is treated as the natural, permanent order of things. The new geo-economic settlement is clear: China has already built structural dominance in manufacturing, trade, critical minerals, electric vehicles, and artificial intelligence. Great powers do not decline through weakness alone, but through the inability to see the world clearly.

After President Donald Trump’s friendly and deferential visit with China’s Xi Jinping, Matthew Hennessey, a Wall Street Journal editor, wrote a column alerting us about the false “Red Scare.” The argument, stripped to its bones, was this: America is great, China ain’t, and you should stop worrying. Hennessey’s article, confident and sharply written, is a near-perfect specimen of American triumphalist thinking. But when you hold it up against the actual data, it’s deeply misleading.

His argument makes us feel comfortable. Why? Because “America has NVidia. We have Apple, Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Tesla. We have the NBA. We have Sydney Sweeney. We have the B-2 bomber.” We are, in his words, “crushing it.” China, on the other hand? “TikTok. That’s pretty much it.” That’s the full accounting of China’s rise. There’s something almost refreshing about the confidence. Hennessey isn’t hedging. He’s saying, we’re winning, China is not, don’t worry, relax. The problem is, when you actually look at the numbers, the confidence isn’t confidence. It’s a falsetto.

Consider the numbers Hennessey doesn’t mention. Let’s start with manufacturing. Hennessey frames America as the world’s economic engine, and manufacturing is where that engine gets built. But China accounts for 27.7% of all global manufacturing output. That’s nearly five trillion dollars in 2024 alone. It has held the title of world’s largest manufacturer for sixteen consecutive years. China is not rising, not catching up. China has been dominant for a generation.

Now let’s talk about the industry that will define economic and military power for the next fifty years: electric vehicles. In 2024, China produced 70% of every electric vehicle built anywhere in the world. And it produces nearly 80% of all lithium-ion batteries. BYD, a Chinese company, sold 4.3 million vehicles last year. Tesla sold 1.8 million. Six of the world’s ten largest EV manufacturers are Chinese. And here’s the number that I think really cuts through the noise: the cheapest BYD model retails in China for under eight thousand dollars. The cheapest American EV starts at thirty-three thousand six hundred. That gap is not marketing. That’s an industrial capability that took decades to build, and we do not currently have an answer for.

___

Culture follows power.

___

Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford, toured Chinese factories last year and test-drove Chinese EVs. And afterward, he said: “The most humbling thing I’ve ever seen.“ That’s the CEO of Ford. Not a think-tank analyst. Not a politician. The guy who runs one of the most iconic American car companies in history.

And then there’s Elon Musk, the very Elon Musk that some cite as American proof of greatness, who warned that Chinese EV makers would “pretty much demolish” most global competitors without trade barriers.

Most of us don’t think about rare earth minerals, probably the most alarming point in this whole conversation. These are elements that sound obscure until you realize they are physically inside every smartphone, every EV, every wind turbine, every F-35 fighter jet, and every missile guidance system that the United States builds or deploys. There is no modern military without rare earths. There is no clean energy transition without rare earths. There is no semiconductor industry without rare earths. China mines roughly 70% of the global supply. But mining is not even where the real leverage is. China refines approximately 90% of the world’s output.

Think about what that means for a moment. The most powerful military on earth cannot fully build its own most advanced weapons systems without materials that Beijing controls and can cut off. And we know Beijing is willing to use this. In April 2025, after the Trump administration announced tariffs, China restricted exports of seven critical elements. Ford temporarily halted Explorer production within weeks, not because of a trade dispute in the abstract, but because the supply of rare earth magnets dried up.

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In January 2025, a Chinese AI start-up called DeepSeek released a model. It reportedly matched or outperformed leading American AI systems, systems that companies like OpenAI and Anthropic spent billions of dollars developing. DeepSeek was built for approximately six million dollars, using chips that are already subject to U.S. export restrictions.

The market reacted instantly. NVIDIA lost nearly six hundred billion dollars in market capitalization in a single trading day. It was the largest single-day loss for any company in the history of stock markets. The Nasdaq fell 3%. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index dropped 9.2%, its worst day since March 2020.

A Gartner analyst commented that the event “changed global beliefs about frontier-model cost curves and China’s competitiveness.” That’s a Sputnik moment, the moment when you realize the assumptions you’d been operating on were wrong.

Or consider global trade. In the year 2000, thirty-three countries traded more with China than with the United States. But by 2025, China had become the top goods trading partner for most of the world. Every major economy in South America now trades more with Beijing than with Washington.

Wall Street Journal’s Hennessey says the world is “with us.” That “if they could, they would be us.” True, of course, America’s model of open markets and rule of law does remain genuinely attractive to a lot of people in a lot of places. But the trade data tells a different story about who the world is actually doing business with. And doing business with a country is the most honest vote. The world isn’t with us the way some of us think. It’s hedging. It’s diversifying.

___

America is not winning on autopilot.

___

Let’s address the cultural argument, because it’s the one that sounds most compelling on the surface. Hennessey asks, name a Chinese movie star with global appeal. Name a Chinese musician who fills stadiums. Name a Chinese thinker reshaping intellectual discourse.

Right now, in 2026, the honest answer is, of course, it’s America. But cultural dominance doesn’t lead to structural power. It follows it, usually by a generation, sometimes two. America’s cultural dominance after World War II wasn’t just the organic product of freedom and creativity. It was built on top of structural advantages, such as a broken Europe that needed rebuilding, a dollar that became the world’s reserve currency, Hollywood’s market-driven universal appeal, and decades of deliberate policy designed to export American culture as a strategic asset. That foundation took decades to build. The British Empire didn’t start exporting its cultural soft power until after it had already built the empire. Culture follows power.

Hennessey asks us to consider America’s military prowess during the 2003 Iraq war. But then what? The United States spent twenty years in Iraq and Afghanistan. Over two trillion dollars. Nearly seven thousand American military lives. And we ended with the Taliban back in power in Kabul, and Iran more influential across Iraq than it was before the Iraq invasion. Now, after the Middle East devastation, Iran is still standing despite the threat of total annihilation.

Do we have to worry about a potential conflict with a nuclear-armed nation of 1.4 billion people, one that has the world’s largest standing army and has been explicitly building a navy designed to contest American power in the Indo-Pacific, especially if it comes to Taiwan, a bastion of freedom and technology that America enabled? Keep thinking.

America does have real, deep advantages. The capacity to attract talent from around the world, genuine talent, people voting with their feet, building lives and companies and futures here, that’s something no authoritarian state can manufacture. The rule of law, for all its failures, creates conditions for economic dynamism that centrally planned economies consistently fail to match. These are not nothing.

But here’s the distinction we have to keep in mind. There’s a difference between “America has real strengths” and “therefore, don’t worry.” The first is true. The second is dangerous. A nation that wants to stay a global power doesn’t just celebrate its advantages. It protects and builds on them. It asks why the CEO of Ford is flying to Shenzhen to study Chinese cars. It asks why a Chinese start-up just built an AI model for six million dollars that shook the foundations of a six-hundred-billion-dollar American industry in a single day. It asks why China controls the materials inside our own fighter jets.

America is not declining as Xi Jinping admonished Trump in Beijing. America has extraordinary assets. Its institutions, its talent, its culture of innovation. These are real, and they are formidable. But America is not winning on autopilot. And the countries, the empires, the powers that have fallen throughout history, they mostly didn’t fall because they lacked strength. They fell because they stopped seeing clearly. Because they confused the present moment with the permanent. Because they ceased to be vigilant.

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Join the conversation

After President Donald Trump’s friendly and deferential visit with China’s Xi Jinping, Matthew Hennessey, a Wall Street Journal editor, wrote a column alerting us about the false “Red Scare.” The argument, stripped to its bones, was this: America is great, China ain’t, and you should stop worrying. Hennessey’s article, confident and sharply written, is a near-perfect specimen of American triumphalist thinking. But when you hold it up against the actual data, it’s deeply misleading.

His argument makes us feel comfortable. Why? Because America has Nvidia. We have Apple, Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Tesla. We have the NBA. We have Sydney Sweeney. We have the B-2 bomber. We are, in his words, “crushing it.” China, on the other hand? “TikTok. That’s pretty much it.” That’s the full accounting of China’s rise. There’s something almost refreshing about the confidence. Hennessey isn’t hedging. He’s saying, we’re winning, China is not, don’t worry, relax. The problem is, when you actually look at the numbers, the confidence isn’t confidence. It’s a falsetto.

Consider the numbers Hennessey doesn’t mention. Let’s start with manufacturing. Hennessey frames America as the world’s economic engine, and manufacturing is where that engine gets built. But consider China. It accounts for 27.7% of all global manufacturing output. That’s nearly five trillion dollars in 2024 alone. It has held the title of world’s largest manufacturer for sixteen consecutive years. China is not rising, not catching up. China has been dominant for a generation.

Now let’s talk about the industry that will define economic and military power for the next fifty years: electric vehicles. In 2024, China produced 70% of every electric vehicle built anywhere in the world. And it produces nearly 80% of all lithium-ion batteries. BYD, a Chinese company, sold 4.3 million vehicles last year. Tesla sold 1.8 million. Six of the world’s ten largest EV manufacturers are Chinese. And here’s the number that I think really cuts through the noise: the cheapest BYD model retails in China for under eight thousand dollars. The cheapest American EV starts at thirty-three thousand six hundred. That gap is not marketing. That’s an industrial capability that took decades to build, and we do not currently have an answer for.

Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford, toured Chinese factories last year and test-drove Chinese EVs. And afterward, he said: “The most humbling thing I’ve ever seen.” That’s the CEO of Ford. Not a think-tank analyst. Not a politician. The guy who runs one of the most iconic American car companies in history.

And then there’s Elon Musk, the very Elon Musk that some cite as American proof of greatness, who warned that Chinese EV makers would “pretty much demolish” most global competitors without trade barriers.

Most of us don’t think about rare earth minerals, probably the most alarming point in this whole conversation. These are elements that sound obscure until you realize they are physically inside every smartphone, every EV, every wind turbine, every F-35 fighter jet, and every missile guidance system that the United States builds or deploys. There is no modern military without rare earths. There is no clean energy transition without rare earths. There is no semiconductor industry without rare earths. China mines roughly 70% of the global supply. But mining is not even where the real leverage is. China refines approximately 90% of the world’s output.

Think about what that means for a moment. The most powerful military on earth cannot fully build its own most advanced weapons systems without materials that Beijing controls and can cut off. And we know Beijing is willing to use this. In April 2025, after the Trump administration announced tariffs, China restricted exports of seven critical elements. Ford temporarily halted Explorer production within weeks, not because of a trade dispute in the abstract, but because the supply of rare earth magnets dried up.

In January 2025, a Chinese AI startup called DeepSeek released a model. It reportedly matched or outperformed leading American AI systems, systems that companies like OpenAI and Anthropic spent billions of dollars developing. DeepSeek was built for approximately six million dollars, using chips that are already subject to U.S. export restrictions.

The market reacted instantly. Nvidia lost nearly six hundred billion dollars in market capitalization in a single trading day. It was the largest single-day loss for any company in the history of stock markets. The Nasdaq fell 3%. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index dropped 9.2%, its worst day since March 2020.

A Gartner analyst commented that the event “changed global beliefs about frontier-model cost curves and China’s competitiveness.” That’s a Sputnik moment, the moment when you realize the assumptions you’d been operating on were wrong.

Consider global trade. In the year 2000, thirty-three countries traded more with China than with the United States. But by 2025, China had become the top goods trading partner for most of the world. Every major economy in South America now trades more with Beijing than with Washington.

Wall Street Journal Hennessey says the world is “with us.” That “if they could, they would be us.” True, of course, America’s model of open markets and rule of law does remain genuinely attractive to a lot of people in a lot of places. But the trade data tells a different story about who the world is actually doing business with. And doing business with a country is the most honest vote. The world isn’t with us the way some of us think. It’s hedging. It’s diversifying.

Let’s address the cultural argument, because it’s the one that sounds most compelling on the surface. Hennessey asks, name a Chinese movie star with global appeal. Name a Chinese musician who fills stadiums. Name a Chinese thinker reshaping intellectual discourse.

Right now, in 2026, the honest answer is, of course, it’s America. But cultural dominance doesn’t lead structural power. It follows it, usually by a generation, sometimes two. America’s cultural dominance after World War II wasn’t just the organic product of freedom and creativity. It was built on top of structural advantages, such as a broken Europe that needed rebuilding, a dollar that became the world’s reserve currency, Hollywood’s market-driven universal appeal, and decades of deliberate policy designed to export American culture as a strategic asset. That foundation took decades to build. The British Empire didn’t start exporting its cultural soft power until after it had already built the empire. Culture follows power.

Hennessey asks us to consider America’s military prowess during the 2024 Iraq war. But then what? The United States spent twenty years in Iraq and Afghanistan. Over two trillion dollars. Nearly seven thousand American military lives. And we ended with the Taliban back in power in Kabul, and Iran more influential across Iraq than it was before the Iraq invasion. Now, after the Middle East devastation, Iran is still standing despite the threat of total annihilation.

Do we have to worry about a potential conflict with a nuclear-armed nation of 1.4 billion people, one that has the world’s largest standing army and has been explicitly building a navy designed to contest American power in the Indo-Pacific, especially if it comes to Taiwan, a bastion of freedom and technology that America enabled? Keep thinking.

America does have real, deep advantages. The capacity to attract talent from around the world, genuine talent, people voting with their feet, building lives and companies and futures here, that’s something no authoritarian state can manufacture. The rule of law, for all its failures, creates conditions for economic dynamism that centrally planned economies consistently fail to match. These are not nothing.

But here’s the distinction we have to keep in mind. There’s a difference between “America has real strengths” and “therefore, don’t worry.” The first is true. The second is dangerous. A nation that wants to stay a global power doesn’t just celebrate its advantages. It protects and builds on them. It asks why the CEO of Ford is flying to Shenzhen to study Chinese cars. It asks why a Chinese startup just built an AI model in six million dollars that shook the foundations of a six-hundred-billion-dollar American industry in a single day. It asks why China controls the materials inside our own fighter jets.

America is not declining as Xi Jinping admonished Trump in Beijing. America has extraordinary assets. Its institutions, its talent, its culture of innovation. These are real and they are formidable. But America is not winning on autopilot. And the countries, the empires, the powers that have fallen throughout history, they mostly didn’t fall because they lacked strength. They fell because they stopped seeing clearly. Because they confused the present moment with the permanent. Because they ceased to be vigilant.

Sources:

The Future Is American: China doesn’t have what we have.· https://www.wsj.com/opinion/free-expression/the-future-is-american-6c8240d4

China manufacturing output: https://www.safeguardglobal.com/resources/blog/top-10-manufacturing-countries-in-the-world/

China EV & battery dominance: https://www.americansecurityproject.org/charging-ahead/

BYD vs. Tesla sales: https://research.contrary.com/report/chinas-journey-to-ev-dominance

Rare earth mining & refining: https://www.mining-technology.com/analyst-comment/china-dominate-rare-earths/

Rare earths & defense (dysprosium/terbium): https://gqg.com/insights/critical-dependence-on-rare-earth-minerals/

DeepSeek / Nvidia market loss: https://www.nbcnews.com/business/markets/tech-stocks-react-chinas-deepseek-sparks-us-worries-ai-race-rcna189394

China as top global trading partner: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-chinas-global-trade-takeover/

Ford CEO Jim Farley Says China’s Advanced Cars Are ‘Humbling’: https://fordauthority.com/2025/07/ford-ceo-jim-farley-says-chinas-advanced-cars-are-humbling/

In an age of unprecedented access to information, the powerful are still more protected than ever. Not through censorship or conspiracy, but through something quieter and harder to fight: the collective institutional instinct to look away. A labour icon whose crimes were known for decades before a newspaper dared print them. A financier and predator whose name universities scrubbed from their records even as they cashed his cheques. Two stories, one pattern. Host of America Unbound, Narain D. Batra, argues that most institutions remain quiet until it no longer costs them to speak out.

What does it mean to know something, documented, confirmed, and beyond reasonable dispute, and then do nothing with that knowledge? Not out of ignorance. Not for lack of access. But by choice. By institutional instinct. By the quiet, collective decision that some truths are more trouble than they are worth, the trend is toward greater institutional secrecy.

A farmworker saint whose crimes were known for decades before a newspaper published them. A financier and predator whose name had to be scrubbed from campus calendars even as universities cashed his checks. Two stories. Two worlds. One pattern so consistent, so structural, so deeply embedded in how powerful institutions actually operate that we might call it the architecture of forgetting.

These two stories are not parallel failures; they are connected at the root. They are the same failure, operating through different mechanisms, in different precincts of American life. And until we see them that way, we will keep being surprised, every few years, every new scandal, when the pattern repeats.

___

Conspiracies can be exposed and prosecuted. What we see instead is something more mundane and more durable: a shared institutional instinct, operating without coordination, yet producing coordinated silence.

Let’s start with what Cesar Chavez and Jeffrey Epstein had in common. On the surface, almost nothing. One was a Mexican-American labor organizer who lived simply, who fasted, who led marches, who became a symbol of the dispossessed. The other was a financier of uncertain origin and unlimited appetite who cultivated the wealthy and powerful and accumulated influence the way others accumulate art.

But the protection each received from scrutiny was built from identical materials.

They both had supportive constituencies. Chavez had the labor movement, Latino civil rights organizations, the political Left, and an education system that had canonized him. Epstein had the universities that depended on his money, the financiers who depended on his connections, and the academics and politicians whose careers he had touched. Different constituencies, same function: a network of people with something to lose if the protected figure falls.

They both offered something that institutions wanted and could not easily replace. Chavez offered moral authority, the kind that comes from genuine sacrifice and genuine achievement, and that attached itself to every institution that claimed him. Epstein offered money and access, the kind that comes from extreme wealth, and that attached itself to every institution that accepted.

In both cases, the information that would have ended the protection existed, circulated, and was suppressed, not by a single powerful actor, but by the collective reluctance of many individual actors, each making a small decision not to look, not to ask, not to print, not to pursue.

There was no conspiracy. Conspiracies can be exposed and prosecuted. What we see instead is something more mundane and more durable: a shared institutional instinct, operating without coordination, yet producing coordinated silence.

It is worth dwelling on the university for a moment, because it sits at the center of both stories in ways that I don’t think have been fully examined together.

In the Chavez story, universities were not perpetrators; they were amplifiers. They built the curriculum. They assigned the biographies. They named the centers, the scholarships, and the lecture series. They took a complicated, flawed, genuinely courageous man and transformed him, through the apparatus of academic glorification, into something he was not: an uncomplicated hero. Having done that, they created conditions in which any journalist, researcher, or student who wanted to complicate the picture was swimming against a powerful institutional current.

In the Epstein story, universities were perpetrators. MIT didn’t just passively benefit from Epstein’s money; it actively concealed his involvement, deliberately hid his name from records, and physically managed his campus visits to prevent dissenting voices from encountering him. Harvard didn’t just accept donations; it conducted an internal investigation so incomplete that senior faculty member Lawrence Lessig called it “Hamlet without the prince.”

Two different roles, but in both cases the university was the institution that stood between the public and the truth, in one case by constructing a false image, and in the other by hiding a true one. And in both cases, the people most harmed were those the university claims to serve: young people, students, the next generation. The ones who were taught an incomplete history in one case, and in the other, the ones who were trafficked to a man whose name MIT staff typed as two initials in an email because writing it out in full felt like too much of a risk.

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James Madison did not give us the Freedom of Information Act. That came 170 years after him, in 1966. What Madison gave us was the philosophical foundation on which that act rests: the idea that self-government requires informed citizens, and that the government, and by extension the powerful institutions of civil society, does not get to decide what the public deserves to know.

Freedom of information is not merely a legal procedure for requesting documents from federal agencies, though it is that too. It is a statement about the relationship between power and the people over whom it is exercised. It says: you do not get to keep secrets from us. Not if those secrets protect the powerful at the expense of the vulnerable. Not if they allow predators to operate behind the shield of institutional prestige. Not if they teach our children to admire men who did not deserve admiration.

The Freedom of Information Act worked in both of these stories. Documents were released. Court records were unsealed. Congressional investigations produced thousands of pages of evidence. Journalists filed requests, fought for access, and eventually, years later, published.

But here is the hard truth: the legal architecture of transparency is necessary but not sufficient. It can force documents into the light. It cannot force the institutions that receive that light to act on what it reveals. That requires something the law cannot mandate, : will, courage, and accountability that has real teeth.

In the Chavez case, what was missing was journalistic will. The information existed. The story could have been told earlier. The editorial decision, made quietly, without discussion, by the collective instinct of an industry that had built the legend and did not want to examine it, was to wait.

In the Epstein case, what was missing was institutional accountability. The files are open. The emails are public. The donor lists are available. One woman is in prison. The universities have issued reports. And yet the same dynamics, anonymous gifts, powerful donors, institutional prestige available for purchase, are operating today at universities whose names we do not yet know.

___

The question — what does it mean to know something and do nothing with that knowledge? — does not have a legal answer. It has a moral one.

___

We should come back to the people, because in the institutional analysis it would be easy to lose sight of them. There is a woman, Dolores Huerta, who is ninety-five years old. She spent her life being called fearless because she fought for people who had nothing, and she won. For sixty years, she carried a secret that was not hers to carry, because she believed a movement mattered more than what had been done to her. She was wrong. But the press, which has no such excuse, waited just as long.

There are two girls who were twelve and thirteen years old in the 1970s. They are in their sixties now. They waited decades for a story that the adults around them, including the adults in newsrooms, decided was too complicated, too costly, too disruptive to tell.

There are young women whose names are in sealed federal records, who were trafficked to a man whose name MIT staff typed as two initials in an email because the full name felt like too much of a risk. They were trafficked during the years when MIT was calculating how much of a convicted sex offender’s money it could accept before the public would notice.

These are not abstractions. These are the people the architecture of forgetting was built over. These are the people who paid, with their safety, with their silence, with decades of waiting, for the comfort of institutions that chose not to know what they already knew.

What Comes After Knowing

The architecture of forgetting is not dismantled by releasing more documents. It is not dismantled by better FOIA procedures or more aggressive congressional oversight, though those things matter. It is dismantled by the accumulation of individual decisions to refuse to participate in it.

The journalist who decides that the protected narrative is precisely the one that needs examining. The editor who overrules the institutional instinct and assigns the story. The university administrator who looks at the donor’’s name and says no. The researcher who discloses the funding source in a footnote, even when that source is embarrassing. The citizen who refuses to accept hollow accountability.

We are living through a moment when two major American stories are making the same argument simultaneously. The information was there. The access existed. The documents were available. And the downstream accountability, the part that is supposed to follow from transparency, the part Madison assumed would follow, fell short. It fell short in the political system that was supposed to be the ultimate guardian of the public interest.

Eventually, both stories broke through. That matters. The press did the work, finally. The courts released the documents, eventually. The survivors spoke when they were ready, when they felt the world was finally willing to hear them. But “”eventually”” is not good enough. Not for the people who waited.

Madison gave us the tools. The Freedom of Information Act gives us the mechanism. What neither Madison nor any law can give us is the collective will to use them, not selectively, not comfortably, not only when the protected figure belongs to the other side, but consistently, honestly, and without the quiet exemptions we build into the architecture when the truth is inconvenientto people we admire.

The question — what does it mean to know something and do nothing with that knowledge? — does not have a legal answer. It has a moral one. And that answer belongs to each of us, individually, every time we encounter a truth that costs something to tell.

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Narain D. Batra
1st May 2026

There’s a war going on for global technology. America’s leading diplomat just published a battle plan that’s a fortress with no front gate — and an open back door.

Jake Sullivan, fresh off his tenure as National Security Advisor, has taken his talents to Harvard and used the platform to outline his vision for American technological supremacy in a sweeping Foreign Affairs essay. It’s sophisticated. It’s well-argued. And it is, at its core, a strategy built around the assumption that you can win a footrace by building a really impressive starting block.

Meanwhile, two researchers at the Wall Street Journal, Jai Ramaswamy and Matt Perault, looked at the same landscape and arrived at a conclusion that should alarm anyone who read Sullivan’s piece with satisfaction. We are already losing the thing Sullivan is trying to protect.

Sullivan has diagnosed the problem correctly. His prescription is another matter. The “small yard, high fence” doctrine, which means protecting a narrow set of genuinely critical technologies with serious rigor rather than slapping export controls on everything and hoping for the best, is a meaningful upgrade from the scattershot approach that preceded it.

He’s correct that advanced semiconductors, frontier AI models, and certain biotechnologies represent genuine national security leverage. He’s correct that democratic nations should be coordinating standards rather than undercutting each other. He’s correct that the values embedded in technology architectures matter and that surveillance-by-default isn’t a neutral design choice.

But here’s the thing about being correct at the strategic level while losing at the operational level: you still lose. Sullivan’s framework assumes the game is about controlling the best tools. What Ramaswamy and Perault are pointing out, with data that should land like a bucket of cold water, is that the game has already shifted to who owns the foundation on which everything else is built.

Consider the number that should keep you up at night: eighty percent. That’s the share of developers globally now building on Chinese open-source AI models. Alibaba’s Qwen series alone has crossed 700 million downloads, and as of March 2026, it’s approaching a billion, with its single-month download volume in December exceeding the combined total of Meta, DeepSeek, OpenAI, Mistral, and four other major competitors combined. These aren’t downloads by state actors or military programs. They’re downloads by engineers, entrepreneurs, and students in Bangaluru and, Jakarta, and São Paulo who are building the hospitals, the fintech apps, the educational tools, and the infrastructure systems of the next twenty years.

Sullivan is worried about what happens if a bad actor gets access to a frontier model. That’s a real concern. But Ramaswamy and Perault are worried about something larger and slower and far harder to reverse. What happens when the entire developing world’s technological nervous system runs on Chinese code, Chinese defaults, and Chinese assumptions about what data gets collected and what speech gets flagged? That’s not a security breach. That’s a civilizational lock-in.

The language analogy nobody is using plainly enough is this. When the British Empire spread across the globe, it didn’t just export goods — it exported English. A century later, English is the default language of science, aviation, finance, and diplomacy not because it’s the most elegant language but because it was everywhere first.

AI is becoming a language in exactly the same functional sense. The models that developers build on shape how they think about what’s possible, what’s safe, what’s worth measuring, and what’s worth ignoring. When you build on a Chinese model trained with Chinese priorities, you are, whether you intend to or not, inheriting a set of assumptions that were not designed with your interests in mind. Sullivan wants to make sure America speaks the best dialect. Ramaswamy and Perault are pointing out that if we keep treating open-source AI as a threat to be contained, America won’t be speaking anything. It’ll be translating.

What neither piece quite says out loud is that the U.S. government spent two years in an essentially defensive crouch on open-source AI. We compared it to nuclear proliferation. We floated licensing regimes. We treated the release of capable models as an inherently suspicious act requiring justification. China, in the same two years, treated it as a growth strategy. That asymmetry, one side viewing a technology as a liability to be managed, the other viewing it as an asset to be distributed, is not a policy disagreement. It is a catastrophic misreading of the competitive environment. If you believe, as Sullivan does, that technology is fundamentally a lever of state power, then the lesson of the last two years is that China pulled the lever while we were still debating whether touching it was responsible.

So, what does actually winning look like? Sullivan wants America to hold the high ground. Fine. But high ground in the 21st century is not a mountain you defend — it’s an operating system you distribute.

The U.S. government should not merely permit open-source AI development. It should be funding, promoting, and strategically deploying it as a form of soft power infrastructure, the same way we once thought about the Marshall Plan, the Peace Corps, or USAID. Give the developers in Nairobi and Seoul and Bogotá something better to build on. Make American open-source AI the default, not because we mandated it, but because it’s faster, more transparent, and doesn’t come with a back door to Beijing.

Sullivan is right that we need standards and coordination. But you don’t set global standards by locking your best work in a vault and calling it protected. You set them by making your approach so widespread and so useful that everyone else is effectively playing on your field.

There’s something fitting about America’s grand strategy for technological competition being authored from the most exclusive institution in the country. Harvard is, after all, the original small yard, high fence enterprise, built on the premise that restriction creates value, that scarcity confers prestige, that not everyone deserves access. That model built a great university. It will not build a great technological future. The developers writing the next generation of applications are not waiting for a white paper from Cambridge. They are on GitHub right now, and they are building with whatever is most useful.

The only way America remains an AI superpower is to keep its code open and its fences low enough to let the talent in. That’s not a bumper sticker. It’s the entire lesson of the last five years, written in 700 million downloads that went somewhere else. The alternative is well-documented. It looks like a beautifully argued essay in Foreign Affairs — the echo chamber where yesterday’s decisions get dressed up as tomorrow’s strategy, passed around among people who already agree with each other, and mistaken for leadership.

April 23, 2026

One Tuesday morning, the President of the United States posted on Truth Social, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

Soon after, my thoughts flashed back to one of the world’s most celebrated Persian poets, Omar Khayyam, and his most famous poetic lines from the “Rubaiyat”:

“A Book of Verses underneath the Bough, / A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou / Beside me singing in the Wilderness— / Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!”

Only a beautiful civilization could have uttered these beautiful words.

But then I read Trump’s words again, slowly. Not “the regime will fall.” Not “the military will be destroyed.” Not even “the infrastructure will be degraded.” A whole civilization. Never to be brought back again.

The civilization in question is Persian, one of the oldest and most consequential in human history. The people who gave the world algebra, poetry, architecture and philosophy going back more than 2,500 years.

Trump spelled out a specific plan. Every bridge in Iran would be “decimated,” every power plant “out of business, burning, exploding, and never to be used again.” This is not a metaphor, not a negotiating ploy, not the exasperated hyperbole of a frustrated commander-in-chief. This was a detailed public statement to destroy the civilian infrastructure upon which tens of millions of people depend to survive, including their heat, their water treatment, their hospitals and their food supply chains. And their children!

When pressed on whether targeting every bridge and power plant would constitute war crimes, Trump rejected the premise, arguing that Iran’s leaders were “animals” who needed to be stopped. The dehumanization — “animals,” “crazy bastards,” a civilization unworthy of continuity — is not incidental to the threat. History has a word for the deliberate destruction of a civilization based on the premise that its people are less than human. What’s that word?

Recalling the horrific word, Amy Spitalnick, the CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, said, “Make no mistake: the president’s threats are deeply reprehensible to us as Jews and as Americans, and must be condemned by all leaders — regardless of their stance on the war with Iran. We know what it means when leaders call for communities and populations to be wiped out.”

The U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres warned that “there is no military objective that justifies the wholesale destruction of a society’s infrastructure or the deliberate infliction of suffering on civilian populations.”

Legal experts affirm it too. Sen. Elissa Slotkin, a former CIA analyst, warned that targeting civilians on a mass scale “would be a clear violation of the law of armed conflict as laid out in the Geneva Conventions, as well as the Pentagon’s Law of War Manual.”

A group of Senate Democrats, including Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said it loud and clear, “Intentionally destroying the power, water or basic infrastructure upon which tens of millions of civilians depend to punish the very civilians who suffer at the hands of the Iranian regime would constitute a war crime, a betrayal of the values this nation was founded on and a moral failure.”

Even Marjorie Taylor Greene, once perhaps Trump’s most devoted congressional ally, condemned the post “evil and madness” and called for the invocation of the 25th Amendment.

The question that haunts most of us today is not who we have been — a beacon and champion of liberty across the globe — but who we are becoming and where the Pied Piper of Make America Great Again is taking us.

With unambiguous moral clarity, Pope Leo XIV called it the “delusion of omnipotence.” The first American-born Pope in history looked at what his own country’s president had written and called it “truly unacceptable,” adding that attacks on civilian infrastructure are “a sign of the hatred, the division, the destruction the human being is capable of.” He urged Americans and people of good will everywhere to contact their political leaders and demand they choose peace.

Pope Leo XIV is not naive about geopolitics or indifferent to Iranian aggression and the tyranny of the mullahs against the Iranian people. He called it unacceptable because some lines, once crossed even in language, alter the moral architecture of the world. When the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth tells more than 93 million people that their civilization will die tonight, he is not just threatening Iran. He is telling every person on the planet what America will decide whose human life is worth.

Pope Leo XIV’s warning regarding the “delusion of omnipotence” has shifted from a prophetic whisper to a screaming reality. American and Iranian diplomats descended upon Islamabad, fueled by the toxic certainty of their own supremacy, convinced that total victory was an inevitability. Instead, they departed empty-handed, bounded only by a fragile ceasefire and a suffocating blockade.

The illusion of control has shattered, leaving behind a chilling clarity: there are no masters in this conflict, only victims. They now face the terrifying realization that the next spark won’t just ignite a city — it will consume the globe.

Narain Batra is a study leader at the Osher Institute at Dartmouth College. He lives in the Upper Valley.

Phil Mickelson hits onto the fourth green during a golf match against Tiger Woods at Shadow Creek golf course, Friday, Nov. 23, 2018, in Las Vegas. Credit: John Locher/AP

April 6, 2026

The long winter is finally loosening its grip on the Upper Valley. We rejoice in the coming of another mellifluous season of maple syrup. And let’s not forget the notoriety of our mud season, a harbinger of spring self-renewal.

Out at the Lake Morey Country Club, the greenskeepers are taking the flags out of storage, treading down the frost heaves and unwittingly preparing the stage for my own annual humbling golf season.

I can’t wait.

I play with the Hanover Old Boys, a group of nine with roots at the old Hanover Country Club. Lawyers. Doctors. Educators. Businessmen. The group is a self-governing Yankee democracy, ardently overseen by Jim, a Yale man whom we refer to, with complete affection, as Jim the Grim. Jim keeps order. Jim keeps score. Jim has never, to my knowledge, duffed a tee shot in his life. Some find this deeply suspicious.

Every one of them plays better than I do. I want to be clear, however. I am not a beginner. I have been playing for years. The gap between what I know and what I execute is, however, roughly the width of the Connecticut River even on a good day.

Not long ago, I used to hit the “golfer’s dream” by shooting my age. Last year, I was four strokes off that pace. In most areas of life, a four-shot regression wouldn’t prompt a visit to a therapist. In golf, however, it prompts the purchase of a new club.

Consider hole 12 at the Lake Morey Golf, the most challenging hole on the course that has humbled every Hanover Old Boy at one time or another, though they are far too dignified to say so. Few of us make par on 12. The lawyer has tried. The doctor has tried. The businessman has tried. The soccer coach has tried. Jim the Grim has tried, though his expression never changes, so it is difficult to tell. I have tried so many times that I have developed a personal relationship with its craggy elevation. The hole does not judge me — I just look up at the panoramic views of the Echo Mountain.

After the round, we repair to the clubhouse. This is, if I’m honest, the best part. The bonhomie that follows 18 holes of shared joy is a particular Upper Valley pleasure: drinks, silly jokes and warm argument, the replaying of shots that were better in memory than in fact.

In the off-season, November through mid-April, when the course sleeps under the Upper Valley winter, the group does not hibernate. They become a think tank, spending the winter in robust debate about global affairs and the American condition, pivoting from Russia-Ukraine, the Middle East, MAGA polarization to Silicon Valley tech billionaires.

Which brings me, in my golf desperation, to AI.

Dartmouth President Sian Beilock recently wrote about how AI is transforming education, how we learn, how knowledge travels and how human potential gets unlocked. Which has prompted one urgent question: Can AI fix my short game?

I read “Choke” by Beilock, what to do when you crack under pressure. I have tried all. Equipment. Positive thinking. Swing thoughts. Pre-shot routines. I am not too embarrassed, at this stage of my golfing life, to try AI. It beats Gary Kasparov at chess. It passed the bar exam. It writes poetry and diagnoses illness and is, I am told, very good at short game simulation.

Surely AI can get a duffer like me to shoot below my age.

I consulted a leading AI system. I described my game with full transparency — the four-shot regression in one year, the 12-hole challenge, the supremacy of the Hanover Old Boys. I asked for help. It responded with some sensible tips about tempo, weight transfer and the importance of keeping my head still. Don’t choke. I had heard all this before.

But I am not giving up on technology. I have been reading about a self-driving golf cart that navigates the course autonomously, tracks the shot data and offers real-time club recommendations. In other words, my own AI caddy can watch every swing and analyze every disaster on every hole with the cool detachment of a humanoid that cannot feel embarrassment on my behalf.

Imagine its calm, pleasant voice: “Based on your last 97 attempts at this hole, I recommend laying up.” I imagine myself ignoring it completely and going for the green anyway. Some things AI cannot fix. The stubbornness of a hopeful duffer is one of them.

But here is what keeps me coming back every April. The score isn’t really the point. The point is 18 holes with the group — the lawyer, the coach, the doctor, the businessman, Jim the Grim in his element, all of them insufferably competent and entirely good company. The scorecard is just the Joker: there will be another day.

The flags are back in the cups at the club. It has a new director, Chris Daly, a most accomplished golf professional.

The Hanover Old Boys are warming up. Jim the Grim will be the first to be there, with expression jolly, game immaculate. I have, somewhere on the horizon, an AI caddy who will tell me which club to choose and where to lay up.

This year: I’ll hit the score below my age. AI said so. Stop laughing.

Narain Batra is a study leader at the Osher Institute at Dartmouth College. He lives in the Upper Valley.

Let me begin with a night that shook two nations.

March 22, 2026. LaGuardia Airport, New York City. A regional jet, Air Canada Flight, carries 72 passengers and four crew members from Montreal. A routine flight. The kind that happens hundreds of times every day across this country, so familiar we barely think about it anymore.

The plane touches down on Runway 4. It is moving at the ground speed of about 95-105 miles per hour. The cockpit crew, two young Canadian pilots who had dedicated their lives to carrying strangers safely through the sky, are completing what should be the most ordinary part of their journey.

And then, a fire truck crosses the runway. In seconds — not minutes, seconds — both pilots are dead. A flight attendant is hurled from the aircraft, still strapped to her seat. Dozens of passengers are rushed to hospitals. And a nation asks, once again, the question it has asked too many times before.

How did this happen? The investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board began picking through the wreckage. And what they found was not one failure. There were many.

The fire truck had no transponder, no signal to tell the control tower exactly where it was on the airfield. The airport’s automated warning system, designed precisely to prevent this kind of collision, went silent because too many vehicles were clustered together near the runway, confusing the radar. A radio call from the fire truck was drowned out by another transmission. Two controllers were managing the midnight shift alone, juggling multiple roles, in what investigators described as a high workload environment. And the captain, sensing danger, took control of the aircraft just two seconds after touchdown. He had six seconds before impact.

Think about that. Nine seconds to see, to react, to try to steer 84,000 pounds of aircraft away from disaster. It was not enough. Now, hold that image in your mind. Because it is the key to everything I want to say today. We have been flying commercially for nearly a century. We have built aircraft of breathtaking sophistication. We have constructed airports that manage thousands of movements every single day. Aviation is, statistically, the safest form of long-distance travel ever devised. And yet. Different airports. Different decades. Different faces. The same devastating pattern — human fatigue, miscommunication, systems that failed at the worst possible moment, warnings that arrived too late.

So, I ask a simple question. A question that seems almost naive until you sit with it long enough.

If artificial intelligence is going to do all of our jobs, and that is what we are told, why can’t it take over our aviation and make it absolutely safe? The answer is both more hopeful and more humbling than you might expect.

We are already building predictive AI systems that do not merely react to danger, but foresee it. Predictive maintenance technology today quietly monitors engine vibrations, pressure readings, and temperature patterns, flagging components drifting toward failure before any human eye would notice.

Weather modeling AI can forecast turbulence with an accuracy that would have seemed miraculous to pilots of a generation ago. In medicine, algorithms already detect cardiac events before a patient feels the first symptom. The instinct to see danger before it arrives, that is no longer science fiction. It is science in progress.

Applied comprehensively to aviation, the possibilities are extraordinary. Imagine a system watching every vehicle on every airfield in real time, with or without a transponder. A system that cannot be fatigued. That cannot be distracted. That does not miss a radio call because another transmission stepped on it. A system that would have seen that fire truck moving toward Runway 4, calculated the collision in milliseconds, and simply said: STOP. That system might have saved two lives on the night of March 22, 2026.

Now, let me also tell you what artificial intelligence cannot do at present.

The great mathematician Henri Poincaré gave us chaos theory, the discovery that in complex systems, the tiniest unmeasured variable can produce wildly different outcomes. It is called the butterfly effect. Even the most powerful intelligence ever conceived cannot predict a genuinely chaotic system beyond a certain point.

And then there is the matter of the truly unknown. AI learns from patterns it has seen before. The catastrophic accidents that haunt aviation history were each, in their time, unprecedented combinations of failures. A machine trained on the past remains, in part, blind to the genuinely novel and unique. So complete safety, that seductive phrase, remains beyond reach. Not because our engineers lack brilliance. But because reality itself does not offer such guarantees.

But here is what matters most. Most aviation accidents are not mysterious acts of an indifferent universe. They are recognizable. They are preventable. They are patterns that a sufficiently intelligent system could catch, flag, and interrupt. Without predictive AI, tomorrow will simply be yesterday with a different date. The same vulnerabilities, dressed in newer uniforms. The same grief, delivered to different families. We owe the next generation of travelers more than that.

Now let’s go somewhere more difficult. Because if predictive AI can save lives in the sky, can it save lives on the battlefield?

Right now, the United States and Israel are engaged in a military conflict with Iran. And for the first time in history, artificial intelligence is not just supporting that war, it is, in meaningful ways, helping to fight it.

The Pentagon’s AI targeting system, known as Maven Smart System, is processing battlefield intelligence at a speed and scale no human analyst could match. Sifting through satellite images, surveillance data, communications intercepts. Identifying targets. Recommending strikes. Compressing what used to take days of analysis into hours. Into minutes. That’s how Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Iranian Supreme Leader, and many other Iranian top leaders have been killed.

Craig Jones, a lecturer at Newcastle University on war and conflict, put it this way. He said the AI machine is making recommendations for what to target that’s actually much quicker, in some ways, than the speed of thought.

Faster than the speed of thought! On the very first day of the conflict, a strike hit a girls’ elementary school in southern Iran. One hundred and sixty-eight people killed. Most of them schoolchildren. A preliminary investigation found the strike likely resulted from outdated intelligence.

I think of those children. And I think of the fire truck on Runway 4. And I see the same terrifying truth in both. Technology moves faster than wisdom.

Here is the difference: In aviation, artificial intelligence has one goal. Protect every life. There is no enemy. There is no politics. There are no competing moral claims. The objective is unambiguous: prevent the crash, bring everyone home safely.

War is the opposite of that.

In war, AI is asked not how to save everyone. Rather, whose life to protect, and whose life doesn’t matter. No algorithm can answer that moral question. No AI power resolves the ancient, agonizing tension between military necessity and human dignity.

And here is what is truly frightening. AI in warfare does not merely assist violence. It distances us from it. It turns human beings, fathers, mothers, schoolgirls in southern Iran, into data points on a targeting screen. Historian Eric Hobsbawm noted that this impersonal distance in war, this removal of the actor from the visceral consequences of their actions, has historically made mass violence not harder, but easier. A pilot dropping bombs from altitude does not see the faces below. An algorithm recommending a strike sees only a coordinate.

Some will argue that AI soldiers and AI targeting actually reduce civilian casualties compared to the fog and fury of human combat. That precision, by definition, means less indiscriminate destruction. That removing human fear, rage, and fatigue from the battlefield produces more restrained outcomes. Perhaps that argument has merit in certain circumstances.

But consider the other side of that coin. If war becomes cleaner for the side that wages it, if there are no body bags coming home, no grieving mothers on the evening news, no political cost, doesn’t war then become easier to start? Doesn’t the very efficiency of AI warfare lower the threshold at which leaders decide to press the button?

That question has no easy answer. But it is the question our generation must wrestle with — before the technology makes the choice for us.

We stand at a remarkable and precarious moment in human history. The same intelligence — artificial intelligence — that could prevent the next LaGuardia, that could see the fire truck before the pilots can, that could save two young Canadians from dying in the dark on a New York runway — that same intelligence is simultaneously being used to select targets in a war that has already killed schoolchildren.

The technology is neutral. It has no conscience. It does not choose its masters.

What it does — magnificently, terrifyingly — is amplify. It amplifies the intentions of those who wield it. Used with wisdom, transparency, and genuine commitment to human life, it could make our skies dramatically safer, our hospitals more effective, our cities better managed.

Used without accountability, without international law, without the insistence that a human being, a moral agent, remains responsible for every life-or-death decision, it could make war faster, more lethal, and more disturbingly easy to wage.

I have traveled a great deal in my life. I have sat in the back of an aircraft crossing oceans, trusting as we all do, that the systems around me, human and mechanical, are holding. That somewhere in a tower, someone is watching. That the pilots up front have the skill and the technology to bring us home.

That trust is not blind. It is earned, flight by flight, year by year, by an industry that treats every accident as a lesson and every near-miss as a warning.

What I want, what I believe we all want, is for that same spirit to govern every application of artificial intelligence. Not the spirit of speed and dominance and competitive advantage. But the spirit of responsibility. Of foresight. Of the ancient physician’s oath: First, do no harm.

Because without that spirit guiding AI, our tomorrows, in the air, and on the ground, and on the battlefield, will be nothing more than our yesterdays, with a higher body count and a faster trigger.

March 24, 2026

People walk between buildings on the campus of Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., last December. Credit: Steven Senne / AP

What good is the right to know?

Most of us did not know that March 16 was the Freedom of Information Day, but Sky Barsch of VTDigger was quick to point out in her email that FOIA, the public right to know, has been indispensable to their accountability reporting.

Nor do most people know that the FOI Day falls on the birthday of James Madison, the man who drafted the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights, and believed, with a conviction bordering on self-righteousness, that a self-governing people cannot be kept in the dark by the government they created. He would have found current events deeply troubling.

The Freedom of Information Act, signed into law in 1966, was Madison’s promise kept, albeit imperfectly. It established a legal right to compel federal agencies to open their files. Journalists use it. Lawyers use it. Activists use it. Over the decades, it produced revelations that were startling in scope. For example, hidden safety failures at nuclear plants, the Pentagon’s own internal reckoning with the Afghanistan war and federal data exposing patterns of police misconduct.

Without FOIA, such stories won’t get told. Without these stories, nothing changes.

So far, the system has been working. We celebrate it every March 16, hold high a few journalists, present them with some awards and affirm the principle. Good, but here is where we need to press a little harder, because I think we owe Madison more than a tribute.

Consider what freedom of information has actually opened up the last few years. We know things now that would have seemed impossible to know a generation ago. Thousands of pages of sealed court documents have been released. Flight logs. Depositions. Financial records. Names, powerful names, familiar names, attached to one of the most documented cases of predatory abuse and institutional protection in modern American history. The information is out there. It has been reported, analyzed, indexed and archived.

And then what? One conviction. A woman who served as a procurer and enabler sits in prison comfortably, protected. The network she served, the men who flew, who visited, who knew and said nothing, who wrote checks and attended dinners and had their photographs taken, they are, with rare exception, still in place. Still endowed. Still honored.

This is where the story gets close to home. Not just Wall Street and Washington. Academia. Our great research universities, the institutions entrusted with training the next generation of journalists, lawyers, scientists and policymakers, accepted money from this world. Some did it knowingly — the 2008 conviction left no room for ignorance. Some let buildings be named. Some created centers. Some invited access, and access bought legitimacy, and legitimacy was exactly what was being purchased.

The research produced may be real. The science may be sound. That is precisely what makes it hard. We want to believe that knowledge exists independently of how it’s funded, that truth is truth regardless of who wrote the check. And in a narrow sense, that’s correct. But institutions don’t just produce knowledge. They produce legitimacy. They confer status. They signal, every time they accept a donation and attach a name to a hall, that this person belongs in the community of serious, respectable people. That signal was being bought. That is not a minor footnote.

What should be done about it? That question has not been seriously asked, let alone answered. A few institutions faced public pressure and issued statements. Some money was quietly redirected. Some names remain on buildings today, right now, as you read this. The logic of institutional self-preservation is powerful and persistent. It waits for the news cycle to move on. It usually doesn’t have to wait long.

Which brings us back to Madison, and to what the Freedom of Information Day is really asking us to reckon with. The law worked. The documents were released. The information is available to anyone with an internet connection and an hour to spare. The problem is not access. The problem is what we do, or don’t do, once we have it. The Freedom of Information Act was built on the assumption that citizens, given the facts, would demand accountability. That prosecutors would prosecute. That boards would act. That the institutions, exposed, would reform.

That assumption has been stress-tested in recent years, and the results are not encouraging. Information, it turns out, is necessary but not sufficient. It requires something more — will, courage and institutions willing to hold other institutions to account. But these things are in shorter supply than documents.

Madison believed that an informed citizenry was the foundation of democracy. He wasn’t naive about human nature — no one who designed a system of checks and balances was naive — but he believed that sunlight, relentlessly applied, would eventually do its work.

On this Freedom of Information Day, the documents are open. The names are known. The money has been traced. The question Madison couldn’t answer for us is whether knowing is enough.

Narain Batra is a study leader at the Osher Institute at Dartmouth College. He lives in the Upper Valley.

India, America, and the Shaping of the Modern World (HyFlex: In-person)

Spring (4-8 hours)

Date: 4/6/2026-4/27/2026

Time: 9:30 AM-11:30 AM EDT on Monday

FOR REGISTRATION, CONTACT:
Lisa King
Director, Osher at Dartmouth

Lisa.L.King@dartmouth.edu

osher@dartmouth.edu

Course Description
On the morning of 15 August 1947, when Jawaharlal Nehru, the heir to Mahatma Gandhi, the Buddha, and the European Enlightenment, raised the Indian Tricolor flag on the ramparts of the Red Fort, the seventeenth-century palace of Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, India was born again—free to experiment with freedom. Since Independence, the country has gradually evolved from Nehru’s democratic socialism to Narendra Modi’s democratic, entrepreneurial, and digital India, addressing its internal contradictions by playing the game of democracy, and in the process, becoming the fourth-largest global economy. And with the spacecraft Chandrayaan exploring the Moon and beyond, a space nation with a billion dreams is on the rise.

By the end of this four-day seminar, participants will have gained a comprehensive understanding of the history of modern India and its evolution into a global technological powerhouse, working in partnership with the West, nonetheless, maintaining its strategic autonomy. Moreover, during the course, participants will have brief glimpses of India’s culture, dance, music, and architecture.

This course will combine lecture with class discussion.

Special Notes

• This is a four-session course (8 hours total).
  Readings will be available online.
  Optional Book:

  • India in a New Key: Nehru to Modi - Narain Batra (ISBN-13: 978-9355203281)

After his speech at the Concord City Auditorium, Pete Buttigieg greets Chris Masure, who referred to him as “President Pete,” on Saturday, Feb. 21, 2026. Credit: CHARLOTTE MATHERLY / MonitorIs Pete Buttigieg a beautiful angel beating his luminous wings in the void, or is he a hard rock pragmatist who could go to the White House?

Is Pete Buttigieg a beautiful angel beating his luminous wings in the void, or is he a hard rock pragmatist who could go to the White House?

He came to New Hampshire last week asking a deceptively simple but profoundly significant question: “A day will come, sooner or later, when Donald Trump no longer dominates American politics,” he said to his audience at the Concord City Auditorium. “I’m asking you to picture that day to ask all of us a very challenging question: Then what? Then what? What are we going to do?”

What comes after Donald Trump? Not just after the man, but after a decade in which American politics has been wrapped around his blustering persona, his perpetual grievances, his grand gesticulations and theatrics and his thirst for global dominance. Americans never asked this question before. Presidents come, and then they leave with halos of grandeur, massive presidential libraries, well-paid memoirs, and sumptuously paid speeches.

For a region like New England that cherishes civility and civic life, town‑meeting democracy, and a certain practical Yankee moderation, Buttigieg’s visit to Dartmouth and Concord offered a revealing test of his emerging post‑Trump pitch, and whether that pitch could become a tidal wave to carry him to the White House.

In Concord public spaces and on the Dartmouth campus, Buttigieg, a former cabinet secretary and Rhodes Scholar, tried to play a double role. On the one hand, he presented himself as a calm, humorous, rational explainer of the American condition, reflecting on “Law and Democracy: The United States at 250,” in the age of Donald Trump. On the other, he appeared simply a 2028 prospect, one of several Democrats tip-toeing to make the early trek to New Hampshire, hustling for campus talks, party events and photo‑ops for a soft launch for the next presidential cycle.

As he hopped around the state, Buttigieg’s reaction to the imaginary “What after Trump?” was strikingly a matter-of-fact, bread-and-butter response. He talked less about constitutional collapse and more about the basics of ordinary life — people having food in the fridge, a safe commute and a stable roof over their heads. “Our job is to deliver something as citizens and voters to make sure that our government and our country are going to bring us something better — not just better than today, but better than before,” he told the audience.

He linked Trump‑era tariffs, chaotic immigration policy, and attacks on public education to highlight how life has become harder and less predictable. At the same time, he insisted that simply restoring the pre‑Trump status quo — putting Humpty Dumpty back together again — won’t be enough. “We need a much better vision than to simply find all the pieces of what this administration smashed to bits and tape them back together and serve up something resembling the old normal,” Buttigieg said.

However, the overall impression of Buttigieg’s visit was not so much transformative or visionary but rather that of managerial competence in the sense that a more liberal version of the existing order could be made functional again. Whether this is good enough for the “What after Trump” era is the real question, because the conditions that brought Trump to power — regional economic decline and job evaporation, Hillbilly Elegy cultural grievances, diffused economic insecurity, institutional distrust — remain. Any post‑Trump politics that do not confront the problem structurally and fundamentally will be fragile.

As Brookings expert Daniel S. Hamilton commented, “The new age of disruption is about more than one man, even a U.S. president. Trump’s contribution has been to make the United States government more problem than solution. He is better at tearing down than building up. But we should be clear-eyed that these challenges will continue after he is gone.”

Buttigieg and other hopeful Democrats who follow him to New Hampshire for testing the waters for the presidential primary need to step out of their comfort zone of incremental restoration of the Republic. They need to rebuild state capacity, strengthen guardrails on executive power and elections, and demonstrate the government’s ability to solve concrete problems in people’s lives, especially those related to economic insecurity and inequality.

Democrats should frame democratic decline in comparative, long‑term terms and build cross‑partisan coalitions to protect institutions, whoever is in power. That means combining institutional reform with civic mobilization by investing in local organizing, civic education, and community groups so that “after Trump” becomes an ongoing project of democratic and economic renewal and reconstruction, not a return to a fragile status quo.

It seems the U.S. Supreme Court has shown the way. By reasserting Congress’s tariff authority, the 9-3 decision constrains unilateral disruption, anchoring post‑Trump reconstruction in institutional checks-and-balances and predictable economic governance. The whole world is waiting.

Narain Batra is scheduled to teach, in April, a 4-session weekly seminar, “India, America, and the Shaping of the Modern World,” in-class and Zoom, at The Osher Institute at Dartmouth. He lives in the Upper Valley.

https://www.concordmonitor.com/2026/03/04/my-turn-pete-buttigieg-post-trump-vision/

India has been criticised by Donald Trump and Western leaders for refusing to fall into line, from buying Russian oil to resisting pressure to choose sides between Washington and Beijing. But what looks like defiance may be foresight: Narain D. Batra argues that India’s commitment to strategic autonomy, maintaining relations across rival powers while safeguarding its own interests, is not an anomaly but a blueprint for a world moving beyond rigid blocs. As Western states quietly recalibrate their own China policies, India’s much-maligned independence begins to look less like exceptionalism and more like an early response to an emerging multipolar order.

2nd February 2026

Early December last year, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi welcomed President Vladimir Putin to New Delhi with visible warmth and embrace, the reaction in Washington and European capitals was immediate and resentful. The symbolism, many argued, spoke for itself. At a moment when the West sought to isolate Russia economically and diplomatically, India appeared to be doing the opposite. The announcement that the two governments would ensure “uninterrupted” Russian energy supplies only hardened that judgment.

What the West interpreted as defiance was, from New Delhi’s perspective, continuity. India did not alter its Russia policy in response to the Ukraine war. It simply reaffirmed a position that has been consistent for more than three decades, one rooted in strategic autonomy, an avatar of Jawaharlal Nehru’s non-alignment, diversification of partnerships, and resistance to binary choice. The failure lies not in India’s conduct, but in the West’s assumption that a crisis in Europe should automatically reorder strategic conduct in India. This assumption is neither historically grounded nor analytically sound. India’s engagement with Russia long predates Vladimir Putin and Narendra Modi. It survived the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War, and the rise of U.S. unipolarity. In the 1990s, when many expected India to pivot decisively toward Washington, New Delhi instead pursued a dual-track strategy, deepening ties with the United States while preserving its relationship with Moscow. That approach was not hedging born of uncertainty. It was a deliberate effort to avoid dependence on any single great power.

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India is not a treaty ally of the United States. It has never sought to be one.

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Strategic autonomy, in the Indian context, is not a new rhetorical posture. It is a doctrine that evolved from India’s prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s non-alignment policy that developed during the Cold War. Today, as India’s minister of external affairs Subrahmanyam Jaishankar has argued in The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World (2020), strategic autonomy reflects the structural realities of India’s geopolitical and security environment, not ideological nostalgia. Those realities have only sharpened in recent years. India faces an unresolved and increasingly militarized border dispute with China, its principal long-term strategic challenger. Since 2020, the Line of Actual Control has witnessed continued deployments, infrastructure buildup, and lethal clashes. No responsible Indian government can afford to weaken its deterrence posture during such a confrontation. Russia remains vital to that position, supplying military systems that cannot be replaced overnight without operational risks. It might seem like constraint, but it is also a choice that enhances India’s options.

The West’s misinterpretation of the Modi–Putin meeting also reflects a tendency to personalize organizational and geopolitical policy. Modi is depicted as unusually accommodating toward Russia. This argument doesn’t stand historical scrutiny. India’s Russia policy has been remarkably stable across governments led by the Congress Party and the Bharatiya Janata Party alike. Modi nonetheless made it more flexible and adaptable. In recent years, U.S. foreign policy discourse has increasingly equated partnership with alignment, expecting partners not merely to share interests, but to adopt common strategies and moral framework. This expectation may be realistic within formal alliances such as NATO. It is misplaced when applied to non-allied powers operating under distinct security imperatives.

SUGGESTED VIEWING The Indian Century With Rana Mitter, Kate Sullivan de Estrada, Alpa Shah, S. Y. Quraishi

India is not a treaty ally of the United States. It has never sought to be one. The U.S.–India partnership has advanced precisely because it accommodated this reality rather than denying it. Attempts to impose alliance-like expectations on India now risk unraveling that progress.

The deeper flaw, however, lies in the strategic enclosure of the Ukraine war itself.

For Europe, the conflict is existential. It unfolds near NATO’s borders, invokes historical ordeal, and straightforwardly implicates continental security. For the United States, under President Trump, the war is consequential, no doubt, but secondary to the long-term challenge posed by China. For India, Ukraine War is seriously disturbing, nonetheless, geographically a distant conflict whose primary relevance lies in its impact on the balance of power in Eurasia.

India’s calculus revolves around geopolitical outcomes. Chief among those outcomes is the accelerating alignment between Russia and China. Since 2022, Moscow’s economic, technological, and diplomatic dependence on Beijing has deepened dramatically. China is now Russia’s largest trading partner, its major energy customer, and its primary gateway to sanctioned goods and financial arrangements.

From New Delhi’s perspective, this trend is destabilizing. A Russia fully absorbed into China’s strategic orbit would strengthen Beijing’s hand across Asia, including along India’s contested borders. Preventing that outcome, any which way, is a reasonable Indian interest.

It is also a primary American interest as many scholars have argued. Henry Kissinger warned repeatedly that the gravest danger to U.S. interests would be the consolidation of China and Russia into a single strategic bloc. In On China, he argued that U.S. diplomacy should aim, wherever possible, to prevent such alignment. That warning is now being realized in reverse. Western policy is doing what the Kissinger diplomacy sought to avoid.

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The fundamental mistake in much Western commentary is to treat pluralism as a lack of commitment rather than as a strategy of resilience.

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India’s renewed strategic engagement with Russia does not reverse this trend. But it complicates it. By providing Moscow with economic alternatives to China, albeit limited, India helps preserve a degree of Russian autonomy. That autonomy may be narrow at present, but it is not meaningless. The Modi–Putin meeting, then, should not be read as a diplomatic equivocation. It should be understood as a signal of continuity. India will pursue its interests as it defines them, not as others prescribe them. The real question is not why India refuses to isolate Russia. It is why the West assumed it ever would. If Washington wishes to build durable partnerships in a multiplex-multipolar world, it must learn to distinguish between disagreement and betrayal. India has not abandoned the West. It has merely reminded the West of a reality it prefers to ignore that India’s autonomy is not antagonism.

Emerging Realities

The debate over India’s engagement with Russia ultimately exposes a deeper fault line in the West strategy, the tension between a NATO-centric worldview inherited from the Cold War and a pluralistic reality shaped by multipolar power distribution. The United States no doubt remains by far the world’s most powerful state, as eminent political scientists William Wohlforth and Stephen Brooks have discussed in Foreign Affairs, but it no longer operates in a system where alignment is a binary choice, or compliance is assured. Power today is diffused, interests are overlapping, and strategic behavior is increasingly situational. India is not an outlier in this world. For much of the postwar period, American strategy relied on a relatively clear hierarchy of relationships. Allies aligned closely, adversaries opposed, and nonaligned states occupied the margins and struggled for relevance. That architecture is collapsing. Rising powers today seek influence without entanglement, partnership without subordination, and autonomy without isolation. They hedge not because they lack conviction, but because they face multiple, simultaneous risks. India’s foreign policy reflects this reality with unusual clarity.

New Delhi’s engagement with Russia, its deepening partnership with the United States, its competition with China, and its participation in institutions ranging from the Quad to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization are often portrayed as contradictions. In fact, they are expressions of a single logic, how to maximize strategic options in an uncertain environment.

This logic unsettles Washington because it resists categorization. It does not fit neatly into alliance theory or containment doctrine. Yet it may be better suited to the world the United States now confronts, where it must maintain its primacy to assure that the rule-based global order is sustained. As India’s Jaishankar explains, “To the uninitiated or the anachronistic, the pursuit of apparently contradictory approaches may seem baffling. How does one reconcile a Howdy Modi gathering [the Houston rally where Modi campaigned for Trump in 2019] with a Mamallapuram [named after the small town where Modi met with Xi Jinping also in 2019] or a Vladivostok Summit? Or the RIC (Russia-India-China) with JAI (Japan-America-India)? Or the Quad and the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization)? An Iran with the Saudis, or Israel with Palestine? The answer is in the willingness to look beyond dogma and enter the real world of convergences. Think of it as calculus, not just as arithmetic.”

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India’s choices should be judged by whether they weaken or strengthen the balance of power vis-à-vis China, not by whether they align with Western moral narratives in every instance.

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The fundamental mistake in much Western commentary is to treat pluralism as a lack of commitment rather than as a strategy of resilience. India’s refusal to sever ties with Russia does not negate its convergence with the United States on China, technology governance, maritime security, or supply chain resilience. Nor does its engagement with Moscow imply indifference to Ukraine’s sovereignty. It reflects an effort to compartmentalize issues rather than collapse them into a single axis of alignment. This compartmentalization is not unique to India. Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, and Indonesia pursue similar strategies, calibrating relationships across competing powers. What distinguishes India is not the strategy itself, but its scale and significance. As the world’s most populous country, the fourth major economy growing 7-8 percent annually, and a pivotal Indian Ocean power, India’s choices shape the international system rather than merely responding to it. For the United States, the implication is clear but uncomfortable that its influence will increasingly depend on accommodation rather than enforcement.

Demanding alignment on every issue creates risks, shrinking the coalition Washington needs most today. Accepting divergence on some issues, while consolidating convergence on others, may preserve strategic balance. This is not a call for relativism. It is a call for prioritization. The prioritization, from an American perspective, aims at China. Every major U.S. strategy document identifies China as the greatest challenge of the 21st century. That challenge cannot be met without capable partners across Asia. India is the most consequential of those partners.

India’s engagement with Russia contributes to the very outcome Washington seeks, preventing the consolidation of a Eurasian bloc dominated by Beijing. By preserving alternative channels for Moscow, India checkmates China’s effort to transform Russia into a junior partner. India’s choices should be judged by whether they weaken or strengthen the balance of power vis-à-vis China, not by whether they align with Western moral narratives in every instance. Seen through this perspective, India’s Russia policy is not an aberration. It is an adaptation. India will remain strategically autonomous, regionally focused, and globally engaged.

Narain D. Batra
Contributor

The Institute of Art and Ideas (IAI) is a British philosophy organisation. It runs the HowTheLightGetsIn philosophy and music festival.

https://iai.tv

In mid-January, presidential historian Richard Norton Smith, during his visit to the Rockefeller Center, offered a simple but profound conservative standard for the office of the president. He said that the best presidents “combine moral imagination, humility, humor, and sharp political instincts with an ambition rooted in service, not ego. The weakest are those who can’t see beyond their own time or faction—leaders who want the office more than they know what to do with it, and who never grow as the presidency itself evolves.”

By that standard, what we’re witnessing is a presidency that has explicitly rejected moral imagination in favor of what it sees as brutal efficiency. In fact, on the night of 5 January, when Stephen Miller, a top White House Adviser, sat across from CNN’s Jake Tapper, we saw the burial of the moral standard that historian Smith had talked about at the Dartmouth Dialogue.

Tapper, known for his fearless reporting, reached for the usual journalistic tools, including references to the UN Charter, appeals to international law, and the principle of national sovereignty. Miller didn’t just deflect the questions; rather, he demolished the platform. With the amoral detachment of a man who knows he holds the MAGA high ground, Miller asserted that the era of leading from behind is over. In its place, he saw the imperative for a raw, unapologetic revival of Theodore Roosevelt’s “Big Stick,” rebranded as the Donroe-Monroe Doctrine.

The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 was a defensive-aggressive position, a “keep out” notice to European carpetbaggers. But the Donroe Doctrine is bold and belligerent. It proclaims that the Western Hemisphere—let’s not forget Greenland—is no longer just an American sphere of influence. It’s an extension of American security. The 3 January scooping out of the Venezuelan leader, Nicolas Maduro, from his palace wasn’t a law enforcement action. It was a message loud and clear that in 2026, the only rule that carries weight is the one backed by hypersonic missiles and choppers at night.

We’re witnessing the birth of new Superpower Imperialism in full display. For decades, we lived under the delusion that “Soft Power,” trade deals, cultural exchanges, foreign aid, and human rights treaties were the fundamental international currency, a global system where every nation, big and small, had a voice. That hope died in Caracas. The Trump administration looked at the global chessboard and decided that if China is going to militarize the South China Sea and Russia is going to treat Eurasia as a private estate, America should start acting like a global landlord rather than pretending it’s only a global sheriff.

The aphorism, “might is right,” attributed to the ancient Greek historian Thucydides, is based on the conviction that “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” It speaks of Trump’s world. It’s efficient. It’s decisive. It cuts through the red tape jungle of the United Nations like a chainsaw through timber. But as Miller’s brutal defense of the Venezuelan operation made clear, it’s also a geopolitical philosophy that wrecks the very concept of a global community.

The seductive appeal of this “Hard Power” pivot is obvious, especially for the American people who are tired of the endless stalemates in Ukraine and Gaza, tired of the slow-moving gears of diplomacy, and hungry for quick solutions. Removing a dictator in 48 hours feels like “America First.” Looking past the immediate thrill of a successful military operation, we need to ask what happens to the world when the guardrails are gone.

When we embrace the “might is right” doctrine, we lose the moral and legal standing when other powers mimic us. If the U.S. can intervene in Venezuela because of “national security interests,” how do hold back Beijing when it proclaims that the Philippines or Taiwan is its “national security interest” that justifies a similar action?
This isn’t just about Venezuela; it’s about the return of Leviathan grand-scale anarchy. If we continue down this path, we are heading toward a world carved into spheres of influence where your rights as a human being or a sovereign nation depend solely on which hegemon’s shadow you happen to live under. It is a world where trade becomes tariff-based hostage-taking and diplomacy becomes “Greenland or 10% tariff” kind of ultimatums.

The “Donroe Doctrine” might be winning the headlines today, and Stephen Miller might win the shouting match on cable news, but history is rarely kind to empires that trade their values for brutal dominance. What we need today is to reestablish a rules-based global order that recognizes we’re in a multipolar world that needs guardrails to prevent a global free-for-all. Without a shared set of rules, the world is just a dungeon where everyone is holding a dagger.

January 13 2026

On a Saturday ride with the Upper Valley Cycling Club, John Barnett and Mark Breene, both of Sunapee, Lance Putnam, of Sharon, Elizabeth Melville and Arthur Melville, also of Sunapee, climb a hill in West Windsor on Aug. 17.
Credit: Valley News photographs — Jennifer Hauck

In 2026, the Upper Valley, a most extraordinary economic and cultural heartbeat of the vast twin-state region, is currently at a turning point where outstanding institutional growth is colliding with a bucolic infrastructure that’s pushing against its limits and raising the question of affordability.

The colossal footprint of Dartmouth Health remains the region’s major economic driver. By August 2026, the final phases of the Patient Pavilion at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center are scheduled for completion, adding new inpatient beds and specialized units, according to Tom Manion, DHMC’s chief operating officer. Nevertheless, its expansion is reaching a critical threshold, and the Upper Valley paradox is in full view. DHMC is slow in building affordable housing for the staff despite its efforts.

Dartmouth College is doing its own part in mitigating the housing crunch through its project Sugarwood Circle in West Lebanon, a $15.2 million development specifically for Dartmouth employees, slated for initial occupancy in January 2026, “as part of President Sian Leah Beilock’s commitment to add 1,000 beds for faculty, staff, and students in the next 10 years.” Keeping affordability expectations in mind, perhaps, the “Company Town” model would become a primary survival strategy for major employers in the Upper Valley. Consider this: as of late 2025, the median home price in Grafton County surged 12.4% year-over-year, almost triple the statewide average, according to the Fiscal Policy Institute.

This year is turning out to be the year of an easy regulatory environment to stimulate growth. Lawmakers in Concord as well as Montpelier are facing a rebellion from business leaders who argue that 1970s-era regulations are strangling growth. The Vermont Chamber’s 2026 Legislative Priorities emphasize “workforce and housing alignment” and the need for regulatory predictability. “Affordability pressures, demographic decline, and rising operating costs are converging just as our state needs more workers, more housing, and greater predictability to sustain economic growth,” the report says.

New Hampshire business leaders are pushing for a “comprehensive review” of agency rules to streamline permitting for energy and housing. For the Upper Valley folks, 2026 will raise questions about zoning laws, whether they can generate new housing opportunities with environmental preservation. The question is no longer if the region must change, but how fast it can adapt its legal framework to keep pace with its economic potential.

The most disquieting question of 2026 is the “Property Tax Shock.” As towns upgrade infrastructure to support growth, sooner or later, the bill will arrive. Vermont homeowners are facing a projected average 12% education property tax increase in 2026, driven by rising school costs. For the average homeowner in the Upper Valley, for example, the rising home valuations are no longer a “wealth gain,” they are a liability. When the property tax bill jumps while the local school district is still forced to cut staff, the “Upper Valley Advantage” starts to feel like a cruel joke.

In 2026, the Upper Valley’s labor crisis has been worsened by federal policy. Mass deportations and intensified ICE raids, such as the recent high-profile actions against farmworkers in the Champlain Valley and Upper Valley dairy farms, have created a “chilling effect” that extends far beyond the undocumented community. Dairy farmers in the region, who are largely ineligible for the H-2A seasonal visa program, are facing serious threats. According to the Business & Human Rights Centre, many workers are now afraid to leave the farms to get basic necessities. The loss of even a few key milkers can force a multi-generation family farm to close down.

In New Hampshire, the landscape shifted drastically on Jan. 1 as new anti-sanctuary laws took full effect. Communities like Lebanon and Hanover have been forced to amend their ordinances to allow police cooperation with ICE or face state penalties of “up to 25% of the funding it receives from the state.” With deaths now outnumbering births in the region, growth is almost entirely predicated on migration. International migrants fill a disproportionate share of essential roles in health care, manufacturing and domestic services, according to USA Facts.

The Upper Valley in 2026 is a microcosm of the modern American dilemma: high-tech and high-demand, but low-inventory (housing and labor) and high-anxiety. It’s a region with a “We Are Hiring” sign permanently affixed to its front door, finally realizing it cannot sustain its global-class institutions if it continues to squeeze the workers and residents who make them run.

Narain Batra is a professor, historian, journalist and author whose work spans freedom, Artificial Intelligence, media and geopolitics. As host of the “America Unbound” podcast, he explores American power, technology and culture. He lives in the Upper Valley.

https://www.concordmonitor.com/2026/01/13/my-turn-upper-valley-economic-growth-challenges/