The last time a meeting like this happened was in 2021 when CIA Director Burns flew to Moscow to warn Russia to not invade Ukraine. Russia told him that they had no plans to invade Ukraine. This was obviously an outright lie and Burns knew it in the moment because the U.S. already knew Russia’s plans because they had backdoored the Kremlin and had human intelligence sources in Putin’s inner circle. A similar meeting happened in Turkey in the fall of 2022 when Director Burns explicitly warned his Russian counterpart of the grave consequences that would follow if Russia deployed a tactical or low-yield nuclear weapon. His Russian counterpart didn’t deny that they were planning on using a nuclear weapon but rather responded with a “very defiant attitude” and “hubris and arrogance”. A similar phone call happened that fall between General Lloyd Austin and his Russian counterpart in which Austin warned that the use of a nuclear weapon in Ukraine would “remove all the restraints that we have been operating under in Ukraine”. His Russian counterpart snapped back at him saying "I don't take kindly to being threatened," to which Secretary Austin famously responded with: "Mr. Minister, I am the leader of the most powerful military in the history of the world. I don't make threats."

The result of this meeting was Russia reportedly denying to Ratcliffe that they have any plans to attack NATO. The Polish Deputy Prime Minister wrote this today in response: “Apparently, Putin’s spooks told the CIA Director he would not provoke NATO. Putin had told President Biden’s CIA Director that he would not invade Ukraine. We should accelerate defense preparations.”

We don’t really know much about the substance of Ratcliffe’s meeting beyond this warning so we can’t 100% know what’s going on but we can see how governments are reacting and use that to deduce what’s going on. The first thing Ratcliffe did upon coming home was go straight to the White House to meet with General Caine, Hegseth, and Trump. One-way messages don’t require a level of coordination like this. Secondly, President Trump who is terrible at keeping secrets responded to questions about the meeting saying that it was totally routine and “not suspicious or weird”. The CIA director visiting Moscow is so routine that the last time it happened was five years ago.

Moving on to European nations, the Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk warned that Russia is planning a provocation in the coming months. He said today that intelligence indicates Moscow is actively and very seriously preparing for a further escalation of tensions, both regarding the war in Ukraine and across the broader region. He also warned that provocations or limited aggressive actions by Russia against NATO members (particularly along the eastern flank and the Baltic region) cannot be ruled out. We can also see the Polish response beyond his words - they placed 28 brand new tanks on their border with Russia.

Over the past year or so, Russian provocations of NATO have continued to grow with no response from the alliance. If a provocation doesn’t elicit a response, then it wasn’t provocative enough, signaling that the provocateur can go further. This is the kind of trap that NATO has caught itself in. They didn’t respond when Russia started flying drones into Poland and Romania two to three years ago, so when do they respond? Yesterday, Russia sank a civilian ship in Romania’s Exclusive Economic Zone… Shouldn't that elicit a response? It appears there won’t be one. Russia intentionally fired a cruise missile at Poland recently, but there was also no response. Russia has cut undersea cables and destroyed pipelines belonging to the alliance but again… no response. This isn’t even taking into consideration the assassination plot against the CEO of Rheinmetall, their plan to place bombs on flights to the United States, or the numerous ammunition plants around Europe that have mysteriously blown up or caught fire. How about the Russian drones found near Leipzig Airport in Germany? NATO has not responded to any of these in any way that matters. When I’ve spoken to people inside the alliance, they compare it to the poking and prodding a little sibling does to an older one and how you must understand that you’re stronger than them and not respond rashly.

The alliance now faces a deterrence problem only exacerbated by the Trump administration trying to carry out a dismantling of the alliance and the US wasting all of its anti-air interceptors protecting the Gulf states from Iran. A new report from the Associated Press says that the Patriot missile interceptor stockpile in Europe is now “beyond critical” due to the Iran war. One US official told the Associated Press that in the event of a Russian ballistic missile assault on, for example, a military headquarters or power plant, NATO could be in a similar position to Ukraine and be forced “to take punch after punch in the mouth”. Adding that the American military definitely does not have enough Patriots to stop any possible sustained ballistic missile attack and would have “very limited” capability to defend against a single ballistic missile strike or a stray Russian missile that goes off course.

So enough mumbo jumbo - what should we expect from Putin here and why does he want to embark on what appears to be a suicide mission? Putin believes that the NATO alliance is fractured, and how could he not? Besides Mark Rutte, who is paid to say it’s not, who truly believes that the alliance is stronger than ever? Does anyone have any certainty that if Russia attacked the Baltics the US would uphold its Article 5 obligations?

Share

It is my guess at the current moment, and I should note that we have not seen any troop movements to indicate this yet, that Putin will attempt to take a border town in the Baltics in a very limited invasion. In Putin’s eyes, the alliance will shatter over the infighting that will come from it. Will it? I don’t know but he will test it and whether the US upholds its legal obligations or not - it will be very bloody. Putin’s gamble here is that if NATO crumbles under this test, he can take the Baltics with less resistance than Ukraine. If NATO doesn’t crumble, he’s just pushed out of the border town and the alliance won’t expand the war afterwards. These are gambles you really only take if you’re desperate. He’s in a position at the current moment in Ukraine where the status quo isn’t working and so he needs to escalate or deescalate. If he escalates, he may have to fight a war with NATO but in his experience since 2022, they always back down. If he can make the West believe that he is going to escalate, he could get concessions before actually having to do anything. Don’t expect Putin to deescalate though. Deescalating means bringing home nearly a million young men who have no career prospects in a destroyed economy but have access to firearms and know how to use them… In the biz, we call that “Coup-Aid” - you know, like Kool-Aid but with guns and disposing of political leaders instead of grape.

Perhaps I am buying the fever Putin is stewing and this is all a big plan to create enough uncertainty in the minds of European capitals that they start withholding donations to Ukraine out of worry that they may eventually also be involved in the war.

It’s a very stupid game Putin is playing here.

The Voting Rights Act was designed to ban racial discrimination in voting and protect minorities from practices aimed at diluting their votes and the most important provision in the law was Section 2, which prohibits gerrymandering that undermines the power of minority voters. So for decades, Section 2 has been used to force states, mostly in the south, to redraw congressional maps that diluted minority voting power in one of two ways:

1. Splitting minority voters up so they don’t have a majority in any single district

2. Packing them together so they only have the majority in one district when it should be two or more.

For example, Louisiana was forced to redraw its maps a few years back to include a second majority-Black congressional district because they had initially drawn just one, despite the fact that Black people make up a third of the population. But in its ruling this year on that case, the Supreme Court argued that, by considering race to ensure Black voters were equally represented, Louisiana’s map itself amounted to a racial gerrymander. The court then issued a sweeping ruling that dramatically limited protections that ensure minority voters can actually have their votes count.

So, as a result, GOP-controlled legislatures across the South now have the power to eliminate majority-Black districts that they were previously forced to draw under Section 2 and most of them have taken that opportunity. The Congressional Black Caucus estimates that its ranks could be reduced by as much as one-third due to ongoing redistricting efforts and we are set to see the largest decline in Black representation since the end of Reconstruction. This is often overlooked but immediately following the Civil War for about a decade, many of the South’s federal and state representatives were Black. It’s the implementation of Jim Crow that removes them from office and keeps Black-majority districts in the single digits or at zero for the next 100 years. It’s not until the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965 that Black representation returned in America with Black members making up around 14% of the House, which mirrors the Black demographic in America (13.5%). Northern and Blue states are responding by aggressively drawing their own maps to maximize Democratic seats. In the process, minority-majority districts are frequently unraveled with their voters redistributed to dilute adjacent, rural conservative majorities. While strategically sound for the national party, this crossfire eliminates even more Black representation.

The contemporary objective of Republicans is clear: to suppress the Black vote and dismantle the representation guaranteed to them as citizens. The collective memory of Jim Crow has faded into sanitized images of segregated water fountains, so I think it is worth reviewing the actual mechanics of the Southern Autocracy because a lot of it is basically indistinguishable from what Republicans are trying to do at the moment.

Jim Crow was a character invented in 1828 by a White minstrel who blackened his face with burnt cork, exaggerated a limp he had seen on a Black stable hand in Louisville, and shuffled around stages across the country singing a song called “Jump Jim Crow.” So the point of naming the laws after Jim Crow, a racist caricature, was to make clear to Black people where they stood - to make clear that they are bound by the law, but not protected by it, and to make clear that the White people who wish to do them harm are protected by the law but are not bound by it. The entire legal architecture of the South for the next century is built upon this message.

The second thing to understand is that for about a decade after the Civil War, the American South was the most racially democratic place on earth. Black men were voting in numbers that, in some states, would not be reached again for a hundred years. Hiram Revels filled the Senate seat once held by Mississippi’s last antebellum senator and South Carolina’s state House of Representatives had a Black majority. Sixteen Black men sat in the United States Congress between 1870 and 1877, and six hundred or so served in Southern state legislatures. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments had been ratified in rapid succession, and the federal government, fresh off a war it had won, was, for a brief window, willing to enforce them.

From 1866 to 1872 the federal government waged what was, until the FBI’s anti-Klan work in the 1960s, the most successful counterterrorism campaign in American history against the original Ku Klux Klan. The Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871 (the third of which is literally called the Ku Klux Klan Act) gave the Army and federal marshals the authority to arrest Klansmen, and they used it aggressively. There were thousands of indictments across the south. President Grant was personally committed to this and pushed it through over significant political resistance, and by 1872 the first Klan was effectively destroyed as an organization.

For the first time in the United States’ existence, it was finally living up to its founding creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Then Northern Republicans sold out Black people in the South in 1876, and the same institution that had destroyed the first Klan was now being used to break strikes and police labor, while the second wave of White supremacist terror and the legal architecture of disenfranchisement operated without federal interference. Within ten years, there were no Black congressmen. There would not be another Black senator from the South until 2013. In Mississippi specifically, Black voter registration fell from roughly ninety percent during Reconstruction to under six percent by 1892.

The project ran on two tracks: The first track was the integration of state power with private violence. The Ku Klux Klan, the White League, the Red Shirts, and the Knights of the White Camelia were the social infrastructure of the post-war South, drawing membership from sheriffs and judges and state legislators. They killed Black voters and the White men who organized with them, and they burned churches and schools. They murdered Reconstruction-era politicians in their homes and on courthouse steps, and at Colfax, Louisiana, on Easter Sunday of 1873, they killed somewhere between sixty and a hundred and fifty Black militiamen who had already surrendered. The Wilmington massacre of 1898 (an actual coup d’état against an elected biracial city government) and the Tulsa massacre of 1921 were carried out by armed mobs that overlapped almost entirely with the local political establishment.

The state never needed to commit the violence itself. The state needed only to make sure the violence was never prosecuted, and it may come as a shock but local prosecutors, elected by White people only, would not prosecute White-on-Black violence as a matter of policy. The federal government prosecuted some of this for the few years that the Enforcement Acts gave U.S. attorneys real teeth before the Supreme Court took the teeth out in United States v. Cruikshank, ruling that the Fourteenth Amendment didn’t reach private acts of racial violence, only state ones.

The second track was the law, and the law had to look like it wasn’t doing what it was doing because the Fifteenth Amendment said you couldn’t disenfranchise a man on the basis of his race, so the trick was to disenfranchise him on the basis of something else that happened to track his race exactly. So they got creative. There was the grandfather clause, which excluded you from literacy and property requirements if your grandfather had been eligible to vote before 1867 - that is to say - before the Fifteenth Amendment. Most Black men’s grandfathers had been enslaved. Of the more than 55,000 Black Oklahomans living in the state in 1900, 57 had a grandfather who would have qualified. When the Supreme Court finally struck the clause down in 1915, Oklahoma simply held a special session of the legislature and rewrote the law: anyone already registered as of 1914 was registered for life, and Black voters were given a single twelve-day window in the spring of 1916 to register or be disenfranchised forever. That law stood until 1939.

There was the poll tax, which had to be paid in cash, usually months before an election, and in some states cumulatively, meaning that if you hadn’t paid in 1898 and 1899 and 1900, you owed all three years’ worth to vote in 1901. There was the “good character” requirement, in which the White registrar looked at you and decided whether your “character” was good

Louisiana specifically disqualified anyone living in a common-law marriage or anyone with an “illegitimate” child, both determined at the registrar’s discretion. There was the “understanding clause,” which required you to interpret a passage of the state constitution to the registrar’s satisfaction, with no published standard for what satisfaction was. There was the requirement, in some Louisiana parishes, that you produce two already-registered voters who would personally vouch for you, in a parish where every already-registered voter was White. Black voter registration in Louisiana fell from 130,000 to 1,300 in a matter of four years. Then there were the literacy tests. In Louisiana in 1964, applicants were given thirty questions to answer in ten minutes, and a single wrong answer was failure. One question read, in full: “Spell backwards, forwards.” A registrar could fail you for spelling “backwards” with a comma or for spelling it without a comma.

White men taking the same test, when they were given it at all, had their answers accepted on the loose end of any plausible interpretation. These weren’t tests you could study for and pass, these are what I would call “Kangaroo Court Tests” where the result is already decided based on the color of your skin. When South Carolina’s attorney general appeared before the Supreme Court in 1966 to defend these mechanisms, he read aloud one of the questions his state had asked of would-be voters: “Who was the president of the Constitutional Convention? What kind of suit was he wearing?” In Mississippi and Georgia, Black voters would be asked how many bubbles were in a bar of soap, how many kernels of corn were in a jar, and how many seeds were in a watermelon. And then, after all of this, after the grandfather clauses and the poll taxes and the literacy tests and the registrars, there was the White primary, which made the entire question of registration almost beside the point

The post-Reconstruction South was a one-party region. Whoever won the Democratic primary won November automatically, and the Democratic Party, as a private organization, was free to set its own membership rules. It had one rule, and that was to be White. So a Black man in Alabama or Texas or Georgia who had somehow paid the poll tax and passed the literacy test and convinced the registrar of his good character would arrive at the November polls to vote in an election whose actual outcome had been decided months earlier in a primary he was not allowed to enter. The Supreme Court did not strike this down until 1944, and Texas spent the rest of the decade trying various workarounds before finally giving up.

This is why the decision last month in Louisiana v. Callais is so ridiculous. If you knew nothing about history and looked at Jim Crow laws in a vacuum, you could maybe say they were not racially discriminatory. So for Justice Alito to say that State Legislatures have to explicitly admit that they are discriminating against Black voters in order for a gerrymander to be racially discriminatory is preposterous. It completely ignores the history of the south and actual material reality because whether you’re drowning out Black voters as a partisan or a racist, the effect is still the same.

Jim Crow and the southern autocracy operated inside the formal architecture of American constitutional democracy the entire time. There were elections. There were two parties on the ballot, technically. From the outside, and often from the inside, it looked like a democracy but it was not. It was a sustained authoritarian regime that had figured out how to operate inside the legal shell of a republic. In 2013, the same Supreme Court that had spent half a century enforcing the Voting Rights Act decided to rip it up under the intentionally ignorant belief that it had done its “job.”

Shelby County v. Holder was a 5-4 decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts, and the argument was that the South had changed enough since 1965 that the preclearance regime, with its coverage formula targeting the former Confederacy, was no longer a defensible use of federal power. Preclearance meant that if a state wanted to change who could vote, how they voted, or where they voted, they had to run it past the federal government first. This was instituted because the VRA had to kill the Jim Crow Hydra. The federal courts had spent the previous half-century chopping at one head of a hydra at a time, and every time one form of voting discrimination was identified and prohibited, another sprang up in its place. The effect was immediate. Black voter registration in Mississippi went from about six percent in 1964 to about sixty percent by 1968. Black candidates began winning local offices across the South for the first time since the 1870s.

But John Roberts decided things were different now. Within twenty-four hours of the decision, Texas announced it would implement a voter ID law that had been blocked under preclearance. Within months, North Carolina passed an omnibus voting bill that a federal court later ruled had been written, in the court’s exact words, with “almost surgical precision” to disenfranchise Black voters. In the past ten years, southern states have closed over a thousand polling places, purged millions of voters from the rolls, tightened signature-matching and witness requirements for absentee ballots, and redrawn their districts in ways that, on any reasonable read of the historical record, did exactly what preclearance had been designed to prevent.

They’re bringing back Jim Crow and now they are trying to reconstruct the southern autocracy and the one party state that existed for most of this country’s existence. I know this is not exactly inspiring, but you should also understand how politics works in a one party authoritarian state like the American southern autocracy while you still have time to stop it.

The thing about autocracies operating inside of a constitutional system is that it still holds elections, it still passes budgets, and it still produces idealistic young people who want to do good in the world and find out very quickly what doing good is going to cost them. Life still goes on. Right now, we get to be pretty picky about who we align ourselves with, and who we denounce and exile from our coalition, but if we don’t win in November and in 2028, exercising such a luxury is basically committing suicide because the political math is going to be so radically different. What is a red line today will become a bargaining chip tomorrow if we don’t win.

National opposition parties in one party states have to reshape themselves in order to survive and ultimately become complicit in the oppression they want to stop. The Southern Democratic party was the only party Northern Liberals could operate inside of if they wanted any federal power at all, and it produced hideous compromises. The Northern liberals knew they were hideous, but they made them anyway because there was no other game in town. The alternative was doing nothing. FDR, arguably the most progressive President we’ve ever had, was a Democrat…. And so was Mr. Segregation Strom Thurmond. He was only able to pass the New Deal reforms because of the Southern bloc in the Senate.

All of the New Deal reforms, the GI Bill, Social Security, the right to a union, federal housing, fair labor standards, you name it - all passed thanks to Northern Liberals teaming up with Southern Segregationists to pass it, and guess what, it wasn’t because the Southern Whites suddenly saw the light, it was because the Northerners agreed to exclude Black people from all of the programs. Every program that we consider to be a monument to American liberalism was built on a foundation that excluded Black people, because the people in coalition with the liberals would have rather lived in third world poverty than let a Black man get the same benefits as them. When the NAACP went to FDR and begged him to break the southern filibuster on the anti-lynching bill, he told them that if he pushed the bill through, the Southerners would block every measure he asked Congress to pass, so he simply couldn’t take the risk.

What you get in opposition is the ability to shape policy on things that the ruling party has decided not to police. For FDR and the Northern Liberals that was labor and social reforms. What you don’t get is the ability to contest the ruling order on the things the ruling party has placed off the table and that was Jim Crow. The price of these bargains is always paid for by the people who the ruling order has excluded from the bargain entirely.

If we slide into the version of America I think we are sliding into, an America that is unfortunately very familiar, Democrats are going to face the same math as FDR and the Northern Liberals, and they are going to have to make the same compromises in order to survive. They will have to become an opposition that can’t afford its conscience and will have to learn to ration it.

I think perhaps I should end this hopefully, and tell you that things will sort themselves out because the right thing always seems to eventually win in America. That may be true, but millions lived and died over the course of 200 years and never saw a lick of freedom outside of a few years after the Civil War. As MLK said “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” but do you think someone would have been comforted, sitting in Mississippi in 1910, by the knowledge that their grandchildren would one day vote? The only way out is to fight through it. Progress is never linear, and the only way things get better is if you do something to make things better.

Authors Note: A version of this previously aired on a popular news program earlier this year. I wrote both the video and now the text version of this story.

For the past day I’ve been asking people to name US Senators from the past that A) weren’t also Presidents and B) didn’t serve during your lifetime. For the casual observer, the answer was often zero. For the more politically engaged, Henry Clay and Joseph McCarthy would be named and that’s where it would end. Personally, I can only name four off the top of my head: Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, Joseph McCarthy, and Thaddeus Stevens. Even with these guys, Clay is known for being Speaker of the House and Calhoun is remembered for being Vice President. McCarthy is maybe the only Senator who is remembered for being a Senator and it’s for being a total psychopath. Thaddeus Stevens wasn’t even in the Senate, I just threw him in there to prove that no one remembers Senators! People don’t even remember the Senators the Senate has named buildings after: Dirksen, Russell, and Hart! It’s hard to be remembered for 200 years, especially if you’re a Senator.

In order to be remembered and stand the test of time, you need extreme principled conviction that makes you seem like a time traveler to future generations (Stevens), or you need to be so historically massive that you're woven into every textbook account (Clay), or you need to be a real bastard (Calhoun, McCarthy). Lindsey Graham doesn’t hit any of those. He was influential in this moment, sure, but he wasn’t central to it. He was reactive, adaptive, and moved with the winds. He lacked the kind of intellectual or moral coherence that makes someone a symbol of something larger. Graham's problem was also that he wasn’t even a compelling villain. He wasn’t principled enough in his badness. There is no coherent ideology to remember him against, and he never led anything. McCarthy and Calhoun believed something, and it was monstrous which is why we remember them. Historically speaking, “Senator from South Carolina” is not the kind of person you typically want to be and yet Graham isn’t even in the top five of the most evil Senators to come out of the state.

Now we should acknowledge that historical memory is not meritocratic. People don’t get remembered because they deserve to be or because they did something structurally important. Our memory is contingent on who writes the histories, what narratives dominate, and what becomes politically useful to remember. Right now, Calhoun survives as the intellectual villain of slavery. But what if, two centuries from now, the dominant historical narrative shifts to focus on, say, the failure of Reconstruction and who bears responsibility for that? Then suddenly Stevens becomes more central to popular memory and Calhoun becomes secondary. Or what if the narrative becomes about economic exploitation rather than racial ideology? Then maybe neither of them survives as prominently. The broad historical fact that slavery caused the Civil War will always be true but the personas we attach to it rotate based on what later generations find politically or morally urgent to understand about their own moment.

Now unfortunately for Lindsey Graham, I’m fairly certain there is not a single way you can contort recent history to make him a relevant figure in the story. There’s no story where he’s the protagonist that historians are arguing about. He’s always peripheral. He’s the guy alongside Trump, not the defining figure of Trumpism. He’s present during Iraq, but he’s not the architect of it. He’s in the Senate during the financial crisis, but he’s not shaping the response. Even if future narratives completely reframe what those events mean, Graham’s still just... there.

This has made me wonder why Senators rarely ever get remembered and I think it comes down to the structure of the institution. The Presidency has a built-in main character who gets all the credit and blame for everything that happens during their four to eight years, and we tend to index time against them. The House has the speakership, which is also a main character role. Both the Presidency and the House are typically institutions that build things, although they can also destroy things. Builders and destroyers do frequently get remembered. The Senate is completely different from those though. The Senate is made of 100 equals whose primary tool is the veto. All they can really do is block and no one remembers blockers. Funnily enough, the only Senator who seems to be remembered for being a Senator is remembered for acting… not like a Senator.

Miller confused salience with significance. Graham, like other Republican politicians, was on Fox News constantly playing to an audience of one (Trump). Television fame has the shortest half-life there is. Being present during important things is also not the same as being important and proximity to history isn’t history. Graham spent his career following the Senate’s incentives perfectly and the Senate rewards that with power now and oblivion later. He behaved exactly like a senator. That’s why he’ll be forgotten like one.

I don’t mean that as a hit on Graham either, 99.99% of people don’t get remembered. In every major historical event, most people are just in the background going about their day. That’s most of us.

A lot has happened that should have triggered a crisis of conscience on the political right such as masked men grabbing people off the street, attempts by the government to strip LGBTQ+ Americans of their guns, widespread domestic surveillance of liberals, and the mass pardoning of the January 6th insurrectionists. The liberal response has been to call conservatives hypocrites and blind sheep, and while I don’t inherently disagree with that characterization, I do think it comes from a place of complete misunderstanding.

There is, from the outside looking in, an inherent contradiction in American conservative ideology, and it’s most obvious with their two most popular slogans being “Don’t Tread On Me” and “Back the Blue”. It is true that police are members of our communities and families, but they are also agents of the state. The police enforce the laws and orders of the government, and they are - more than any other part of government - the most likely to tread on you. So how can it be that conservatives can believe both of these and not feel embarrassed by the contradiction? How can conservatives believe in law and order while also supporting a President who is objectively the biggest crook to ever reach the White House?

In short, there is no contradiction to be embarrassed by, because these principles were never symmetric to them. Frank Wilhoit wrote that the backbone of conservatism is that “there must be in-groups the law protects but does not bind, and out-groups the law binds but does not protect”. Why must there be in-groups and out-groups in the conservative view though? Conservatism at its core is about believing in a strict hierarchical society. Corey Robin wrote in The Reactionary Mind that conservatism across two centuries is fundamentally the defense of established hierarchy against threats from below. Rather than a philosophy of liberty or tradition, the right is actually a reactionary movement defending power, privilege, and inequality.

This can be best understood by looking at our own history. The loyalists, the enslavers, and the segregationists in American history were conservatives. The loyalists would have maintained their power and status had the colonists not revolted against the crown. The enslavers and then later the segregationists were defending their power and privilege by continuing the subjugation of an entire race for 200 years. The same political sect that supports ICE grabbing random people off the street, also supported slave catchers. The law bound Black Americans while offering them no protection whatsoever. The law also protected White Americans but did not bind them when they waged violence on Black Americans.

Fundamentally, America’s liberals and conservatives are not born from a dispute in the country’s founding ideology, but they are born from the dispute over whether to even have a revolution. Liberals and their ideology are descended from the Declaration of Independence which lays out an egalitarian universalist vision for the country while also aiming to kill preexisting hierarchies. Its core rests on three revolutionary principles: human equality, unalienable rights, and the consent of the governed. By declaring that “all men are created equal,” it directly abolishes monarchical rule because if everyone is equal then no individual is born with a divine right to rule over others. It also directly takes aim at strict hierarchical societies because if everyone is equal then no one has the right to oppress others. Furthermore, it argues that essential rights - specifically life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness - are granted by a higher power rather than the government, meaning it’s impossible to legally strip them away. Under this framing, the government’s only legitimate purpose is to protect these rights and to ensure that the law binds and protects everyone because it derives its power and legitimacy directly from the people it serves.

America’s conservatives and their ideology are descended from Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha or The Natural Power of Kings from 1680. Filmer says that human society is not a collection of equal individuals bound by a social contract, but a divinely ordained, rigid hierarchy where some are born to rule and others are born to serve. In this framework, the state is an extension of the patriarchal family: the leader holds absolute, unquestionable authority, and subjects owe total obedience. I am not making the claim that your average MAGA voter has read 17th-century political theory, but rather that Filmer’s ideas have mutated into a potent blend of cultural populism and Christian Nationalism. While Donald Trump uses anti-establishment rhetoric to attack a perceived "technocratic and progressive elite" hierarchy, his base supports him because they believe he is tearing down a false hierarchy to restore the natural one: one where white, Christian, traditional family structures sit at the top. Trump is willing to meet their demand to stop elevating the "out-group" above the "in-group." When a conservative demands “Law and Order,” they are not calling for an impartial application of the rule of law to all citizens equally; they are calling for the enforcement of this social hierarchy. The Filmerian philosophy completely resolves the apparent contradiction between “Don’t Tread On Me” and “Back the Blue.” To them, the “Me” in the “Don’t Tread On Me” phrase represents the divinely or naturally ordained in-group - those who, by virtue of their position in the hierarchy, are entitled to total liberty and protection from the state. In this worldview, liberty itself is an asymmetrical concept. To a liberal, liberty is a universal right that must be shared equally to exist. To the hierarchical conservative, liberty is a privilege of status. If everyone possesses it equally, it loses its value.

The “Blue,” conversely, is a specialized arm of hierarchical enforcement tasked with treading heavily on the out-groups who dare to disrupt that hierarchy from below. The police do not exist to enforce abstract, neutral statutes; they exist to maintain the boundary line between the protected rulers and the bound subjects. Therefore, a conservative feels no shame when the state targets marginalized groups, liberals, or immigrants, because the law is performing its proper, asymmetrical function: binding the out-group while offering them no protection. This also explains why Trump’s overt criminality does not alienate his base, but rather reinforces his appeal as the ultimate patriarch. The ruler is completely above human law and answerable only to God or the preservation of the hierarchy itself. To his followers, Trump is not a crook breaking the law; he is an absolute sovereign exercising his natural prerogative to protect the in-group and punish the out-group. He is the modern embodiment of the monarch who is protected but not bound by the rules.

Over the past year, liberals have futilely appealed to the universalist, egalitarian ideals of the Declaration of Independence in hopes that conservatives will see the error of their ways, but they are missing the fundamental reality that their conservative peers are operating on an entirely different, pre-Enlightenment wavelength. American conservatism is a fundamental rejection of the Declaration in favor of natural hierarchy.

John C. Calhoun stood on the Senate floor and called the proposition that all men are created equal “the most dangerous of all political errors.” George Fitzhugh’s Cannibals All! Or, Slaves Without Masters from 1857 did this explicitly, attacking Jeffersonian free-society liberalism while defending slavery as the natural order. He declared that the foundational phrases of the Declaration of Independence were "exceedingly mischievous" and fundamentally false, arguing instead that a healthy society requires the strong to rule over and paternalistically "protect" the weak. In his view, the competitive, egalitarian market of the North was a cruel system of economic cannibalism, whereas the absolute, racial hierarchy of the plantation was a benevolent domestic family structure. This antebellum defense of human bondage is just the American version of Patriarcha. Just as Filmer argued that children are born into natural subjection to their fathers, Fitzhugh and Calhoun argued that certain groups of human beings are born into natural subjection to their masters. If this doesn’t prove that American conservative thought has long maintained a deeply rooted, parallel lineage that consciously repudiates 1776, then I’m not sure what will.

Critics might argue that this thesis ignores the mid-20th-century conservative movement - the era of William F. Buckley and small-government libertarian economics. They will claim that conservatism was, for decades, defined by its opposition to state power, but this is historical amnesia. The conservative-libertarian alliance was always a marriage of convenience. Small-government rhetoric was weaponized primarily when the federal government began using its power to enforce integration and civil rights - in other words, when the federal government began dismantling traditional racial and economic hierarchies. The moment conservatives regained control of the state apparatus under the MAGA banner, the illusion of anti-statism vanished.

The modern conservative defense of authoritarian state action, border crackdowns, and a leader who acts above the law is not a sudden deviation from their principles; it’s the manifestation of them. Conservatives do not share the liberal distress over a collapsing republic because their ultimate loyalty is not to a democratic republic of equals; it is to a hierarchical order where power flows downward from a strong executive to a protected class. When Donald Trump acts as a lawless sovereign, or when institutions of state violence tread heavily on the left, the modern conservative does not see a failure of American values. They see a natural order restored.

The fundamental error of the modern liberal and the Democratic party is the belief that exposure to structural contradiction will trigger a crisis of conscience on the right, but there is no shame in a contradiction that does not exist. By continuing to appeal to a universalist, egalitarian playbook that their peers have consciously and historically repudiated, liberals are becoming the kids in Air Bud who are yelling “Hey, a dog can’t play basketball” while the dog continues to dunk on them. The crisis of American democracy is not that one side is breaking the rules of the republic, but that they are operating on an entirely different lineage of power, one where the law is meant to weaponize privilege, not guarantee equality. Until the left understands that the right is not failing to live up to 1776, but is actively fighting for the hierarchy of 1680 and responds to it appropriately, conservatives will continue to consolidate power.

The scale of what’s at stake is easy to underestimate because most Americans have never had to think about it. As of this writing, the United States has thirty-six treaty allies. Thirty-six countries we are legally obligated to defend if they are attacked. That sounds like an impossible burden until you understand the structure: thirty-one of those thirty-six are bound to each other’s defense as well, through NATO, so the obligation is collective rather than thirty-one separate bilateral commitments. It’s out in the Pacific, with Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Australia, and the Philippines, that our obligations stand alone, though even there an informal lattice of cooperation has been thickening for decades. Take a more expansive view and count the Major Non-NATO Allies and the number rises to around fifty. Count the partners - the cooperative states that either don’t want a formal alliance (India, Mexico), couldn’t get one through the Senate (Azerbaijan), or would drag us into a war if we formalized it (Ukraine, Taiwan) - and you’re at something like a hundred countries that have organized some part of their security around the assumption that the United States means what it says.

Subscribe now

For seventy-five years that network has done extraordinary work. It has helped the world avoid a great-power war, the absence of which is so total that we have stopped noticing it as an achievement. It has locked our adversaries out of the international system we designed for ourselves. It is, by most measures available to a foreign policy, a stunning success, and the people who built it deserve more credit than they get.

And it has never once been honest about what it actually is. We have spent three-quarters of a century describing this network in the language of interests - security, deterrence, the balance of power - because somewhere around the start of the Cold War we decided that talking openly about why we built it was naive. But the network has only ever made sense as the expression of something older and larger than interest, something the country has believed about itself since before it was a country, and that has been embarrassed about believing for most of its history. To understand what the alliance network is for - and therefore what it would mean to rebuild it correctly rather than merely restore it - you have to go back to the document that explained, two hundred and fifty years before any of this, why a free people might owe something to the unfree peoples of the rest of the world.

Rebuilding On First Principles

Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense, in January of 1776, that “the cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.” It is one of the most consequential sentences ever written by an American, and you can hear in it the whole argument that the Declaration of Independence would make formal six months later - that the rights being claimed were not the rights of colonists but the rights of human beings, and that a fight over them in one place was a fight over them everywhere. Common Sense is the most important text in American history, and that sentence is a large part of why.

He follows it, almost immediately, with one of the most underread passages in the American canon. “You who love humanity! You who have the courage to stand against not just tyranny but the tyrants, step forward! Every corner of the old world is overrun with oppression. Freedom has been hunted across the globe. Asia and Africa drove her out long ago. Europe treats her like a stranger, and England has just told her to leave. O! Receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind!” Liberty, in his telling, is a refugee driven off every other continent, unwelcome in the country that claims to have invented her, with nowhere left to go. America is not described as a country that has liberty. America is described as the last place on earth liberty can live, and the act of founding the country is the act of building her a home. Paine was more radical than almost anyone you could stand him beside. He did not merely believe that Americans could help other peoples reach for freedom. He believed the principle of liberty was meaningless if it stopped at a border.

Common Sense radicalized the American public toward revolution in 1776. I read it two hundred and fifty years after it was published, and it radicalized me. What Paine lays out, in that pamphlet, is a set of obligations that the generation of 1776 had no choice but to confront and that I have become convinced, two and a half centuries later, we still have:

1. The first is the obligation to posterity. Paine was writing in January 1776 to a generation of colonists who could plausibly have cut a deal with Parliament, accepted some watered-down version of representation, and avoided war. Their grievances were real but they were also negotiable, and most of the signers of the Declaration had spent the previous decade trying to negotiate them. Paine’s argument was that this entire frame was a moral failure, because the question was not what the colonists could live with but what they were going to leave behind. “As parents,” he wrote, “we can have no joy, knowing that this government is not sufficiently lasting to ensure any thing which we may bequeath to posterity: And by a plain method of argument, as we are running the next generation into debt, we ought to do the work of it, otherwise we use them meanly and pitifully.” The generation alive in 1776 was custodian of possibilities for everyone who would come after, and to settle for accommodation was to bind unborn millions to monarchy. Two hundred and fifty years later, the obligation runs in the same direction, and it runs heavier because we are not being asked to build something, we are being asked to keep something already built. The Americans alive right now are custodians of an international order that took eighty years and three generations of Americans to construct, that has prevented a great-power war for longer than any arrangement in modern history, that integrated former enemies into a community of democracies, that built the institutions through which most of the diplomatic and economic life of the world is conducted, and that could be dismantled in the next three years by people who treat it as a protection racket rather than as an inheritance. The order is not abstract and it is not optional infrastructure. It is the reason the children alive in this country today have not lived through what their great-grandparents lived through, and the reason their children may or may not live through what we have so far been spared. The choice in front of us is not whether to engage with the world but what kind of world to hand our children, and the choice to do nothing is itself a choice about what they inherit. An obligation deferred is an obligation discharged in the wrong direction, paid by the people who did not choose it and who cannot consent to the bill. The colonists in 1776 had to act because their children could not. The Americans in 2026 have to act for the same reason, and the bill arriving on our children’s desks if we fail is not measured in taxes or representation but in the question of whether the world they inherit is one that still contains the possibility of free self-government.
   

2. The second is the obligation to humanity in the present. The asylum passage above is not a metaphor and Paine did not intend it as one. He meant that liberty, having been driven from Asia and Africa and Europe, needed an actual place on the earth where it could exist, and that the American project was the construction of that place. The geographic and demographic facts that made America uniquely positioned in 1776 - distance from European courts, a mixed population without entrenched aristocracy, abundant land, a tradition of dissenting religion - were conditions that created responsibility. The asylum Paine described was built on the labor of people who were themselves not free, and this was not lost on Paine, who called for the abolition of slavery ten months before publishing Common Sense. The US spent the next 90 years deepening rather than abolishing the contradiction, and the next century after that constructing a segregationist regime designed to ensure that the Constitution’s protections did not extend to everyone inside its borders. Any honest invocation of the revolution’s universalism has to reckon with the fact that the country built in its shadow failed the people closest to it, and that Americans who advocate for liberty abroad while refusing to defend it at home are not credible witnesses to either. But the obligation does not dissolve in the contradiction, it only sharpens. The people of China, of Russia, of Iran, of Myanmar, of Saudi Arabia, of Cuba, and of half the countries on earth where the autocrats are winning right now including our own, are living through what Paine’s European contemporaries were living through, and they are looking to the same place for the same reason. They are not looking at us because we have been pure. They are looking because we have, sometimes and partially and with enormous cost paid by the people we failed, made the asylum real enough to be visible from where they stand. The obligation is to make it more real, not to pretend it was ever finished.
   

3. The third is the obligation that flows from possession of the example. To have it in your power to begin the world over again and to decline is a kind of cosmic abdication that falsifies everything you claim to believe. The premises of the American Revolution were universal premises. Natural rights do not stop at the Atlantic and the Pacific. The illegitimacy of hereditary rule and the necessity of human rights are not regional preferences. The proposition that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed either applies to everyone or it applies to no one, and if it applies to no one then the Revolution was a tax revolt pretending to be a revolution. There is also a debt question that the transactional foreign policy crowd never wants to discuss, which is that the American republic does not exist without foreign help that was extended on exactly the universalist premises we are now being told to abandon. France bankrupted itself fighting for our independence. Yorktown was unwinnable without the French navy, the Continental Army was unfundable without French loans, and without the French supplying 90% of the Americans’ weapons, they wouldn’t have had anything to shoot at the British. Lafayette and Kościuszko and Pulaski and von Steuben and a whole class of European radicals crossed the Atlantic to fight for an idea they thought belonged to all of them, not to us. We are, in a strict accounting sense, a nation that exists because foreigners believed our cause was the cause of all mankind and acted on that belief at enormous cost to themselves. To then turn around 250 years later and ask what we get out of defending Estonia is to default on a debt that was extended to us when we were a small, improbable, fragile republic asking for help. The transactional logic, applied honestly, runs the other way. To be American, to claim that identity at all, is to accept a responsibility to liberty that exceeds American borders, because the alternative is to concede that the whole thing was a fraud and that the people who died at Yorktown for a universal proposition were defrauded. I will go a step further than Paine and say that Americans who do not see the US as having a moral responsibility to the oppressed are not Americans. They are a lot of things but American is not one of them. Americans who win their independence and then pull up the ladder have falsified the premises they fought on. And a foreign policy that treats the alliance network as a transactional inconvenience - that asks what’s in it for us in Taiwan and Ukraine - is the foreign policy of a nation that has forgotten what it was founded to do.

The New Foreign Policy

America’s new foreign policy should be radical about liberty. If we take Paine seriously, and I think we have to, then the alliance network we rebuild after Trump cannot be the one we had before him. The one we had before him was a moral project that we kept embarrassed about, a democratic alliance that we kept dressing up in the language of interests because we had decided that talking about liberty was naive. We made room for partners who hated liberty (Pakistan, Saudi Arabia) because they were useful against the Soviets, then because they were useful against terrorism, then because they were useful against China, and the cumulative effect is that the gate had been left open so long that nobody could remember what the gate was for.

Three principles, drawn directly from the obligations above, should govern what we build:

The first is that the alliance network exists to keep the ladder down. Every treaty, every partnership, every basing agreement, every aid package should be evaluated against the question of whether it extends or withdraws the asylum Paine described. Alliances that extend the asylum get strengthened. Alliances that withdraw it get terminated. There is no third category of “complicated but useful” partnership that gets to sit outside the principle, because the existence of that third category is what produced the current mess.

The second is that the bloc has to be democratic or it isn’t the bloc. The new order cannot be jointly administered by free peoples and the regimes they exist as a refuge from. A democratic alliance with Saudi Arabia inside it is not a democratic alliance. A democratic alliance with Erdogan’s Turkey and Netanyahu’s Israel inside it is not a democratic alliance. A democratic alliance with the United States inside it, if the United States ceases to be a democracy, is not a democratic alliance either, and the bloc has to be structured to make that last possibility legible rather than unthinkable.

The third is the discipline that distinguishes this argument from the worst arguments that have been made in its name. The framework I’m laying out supports active solidarity with people seeking liberty under autocracy. It does not support invading countries to bring them democracy. The means matter, and the modern record on this is unambiguous: the things that have actually expanded liberty in the world since 1945 are the propaganda of example, the support of dissident movements that asked for our help, the defensive military assistance to democracies under attack, and the slow strangulation of autocracies through economic and diplomatic isolation. The things that have actually contracted liberty, often catastrophically, include every American attempt to install democracy through invasion. Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Vietnam, Iraq, Libya. The universalist principle has been invoked to justify each of these and the body count is not small. We should be honest that the temptation is built into the principle itself, because even Paine fell into it. After the two revolutions he had inspired, the American and the French, he proposed that France invade his own country of birth, England, to liberate the English from their monarchy on universalist principles. He pressed the plan on Napoleon, who briefly entertained it. He was wrong though, and we know he was wrong because we have watched what happens every time a country with our power has acted on the same logic he was reaching for. By the time he died in 1809, alone and largely forgotten in Manhattan, he had watched the French Revolution he helped inspire collapse into the Terror that nearly killed him, expanded into wars of conquest, and finally into Napoleon’s empire. Revolutionary universalism without procedural discipline produces tyranny faster than it produces liberty.

With those three principles on the table, here is what the rebuilt alliance network should actually look like:

The alliance we have is the alliance we have to start from. Building a new democratic bloc from scratch in 2029 would require a sustained American politics capable of generating consensus on first principles, which is not the politics we have and not the politics we are likely to have for a long time. The argument has to operate within the constraint that we will get one window of bipartisan or near-bipartisan attention on foreign policy after the current administration ends - maybe two years, maybe less, maybe nothing - and that window has to be spent on something that already exists structurally, because the political bandwidth to invent new institutions from nothing is not available. NATO is the only working multilateral defense alliance the democratic world has, the only one with a functioning command structure, a sixty-five-year history of operational integration, an Article 5 commitment that has actually been invoked, and a membership pipeline that has absorbed thirteen new members since the end of the Cold War. We use the structure we have because it is the structure we have, and the proposal is to expand it and to harden it rather than to replace it.

The acronym will become wrong. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization cannot honestly be called North Atlantic when it includes Japan and South Korea and Australia, but who cares. It’s a name. It will forever remain “NATO” because changing the name would require a treaty renegotiation that would never clear the United States Senate or the other 31 governing bodies in the alliance, and so we will let the acronym persist as a historical artifact the way the United Nations persists as a name that no longer describes the wartime coalition it was built to formalize. The thing is what the thing does, not what it is called. What the thing does, in the proposal, is bind every consolidated democracy on earth that has an existing defense relationship with the United States into a single mutual defense pact, governed by a democracy filter that determines both who gets in and who stays in.

The structural argument for expansion is straightforward once you accept that the hub-and-spoke system we have built in the Pacific has been operating as a de facto extension of NATO for decades. Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines, and Thailand are American treaty allies. Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States operate together through AUKUS. The Quad coordinates Indian, Japanese, Australian, and American security policy in everything but treaty form. Five Eyes shares intelligence among five democracies, all but two of which are already in NATO. The democratic security architecture in the Pacific is real, it is dense, and it is structurally identical to what NATO does in Europe. The only difference is that the European version is multilateral and named, and the Pacific version is bilateral and unnamed. Expanding NATO to include the Pacific treaty allies is just formally recognizing an alliance that has functioned informally for half a century.

The deeper argument for the expansion is that NATO was always a democratic alliance pretending to be a security alliance, and that the pretense has done us harm. The 1949 treaty’s preamble explicitly invokes “the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law” as the alliance’s foundation, and Article 2 obligates members to “strengthen their free institutions” and to bring about “a better understanding of the principles upon which these institutions are founded.” Those principles are not security principles. They were written into the founding document with the understanding that the alliance being built was a refuge for self-government in a world where self-government was visibly losing, and that the security function of the alliance was downstream of the political function rather than the other way around. The Cold War embarrassed the alliance into pretending otherwise, because the strategic logic of containment required the inclusion of Portugal under Salazar and Greece under the junta and Turkey under whatever government the generals had installed that decade, and the inclusion of those countries forced the alliance to talk about itself in the language of security rather than the language of democracy. The pretense survived the Cold War because the institutional habits of the security framing survived. We should drop the pretense. The alliance is what the founding documents say it is, and the expansion is the move that brings the practice into alignment with the original principle.

Subscribe now

The democracy filter has to be the operative principle for both expansion and continued membership, and it has to be applied honestly enough that it creates pressure on existing members whose democracies are eroding. The current NATO has Hungary inside it, a country that Freedom House no longer classifies as a full democracy, whose government has dismantled judicial independence, captured media, gerrymandered itself into a permanent parliamentary supermajority, and explicitly aligned with Putin’s Russia on every issue where European democratic consensus has tried to assert itself. Hungary’s trajectory may yet reverse and the mechanism below is built to reward exactly that kind of reversal. The current NATO has Turkey inside it, a country where the elected government has imprisoned more journalists than any other on earth, where the judiciary has been purged of independence since the 2016 coup attempt, and where the president has consolidated executive power in ways that no reasonable observer would describe as compatible with the democratic principles the 1949 preamble invokes. I fully understand that the United States exists on this list alongside both of them as of right now but we don’t have much of a think piece if I kick myself out of the alliance I’m trying to expand. The framework I am proposing has to address these cases, because if the framework cannot handle the cases that already exist, the framework is decorative.

The mechanism is straightforward. The expanded alliance establishes a democracy threshold based on existing international democratic indices: V-Dem, Freedom House, the EIU Democracy Index, used in combination so that no single methodology controls the outcome, and any member whose democratic performance falls below the threshold for three consecutive years enters a suspension process. Suspension means the loss of voting rights in alliance councils, the loss of access to joint procurement and intelligence sharing, and the loss of preferential trade arrangements within the bloc, while preserving the Article 5 mutual defense guarantee. The Article 5 guarantee stays because the alliance does not abandon members to invasion, even members it is disappointed in, and because the threat of losing Article 5 protection would create a perverse incentive for democratically failing governments to align with the autocratic bloc for security. If the democratic performance does not recover within five years of suspension, the member is expelled. The mechanism is slow on purpose, because democratic backsliding is sometimes reversible and the alliance should give it the chance to be reversed, but the mechanism is real and it has teeth. Turkey would, on its current trajectory, enter suspension within the first year of the framework’s adoption, and would likely be expelled within the decade. This is a feature, not a bug. The alliance that cannot expel a member whose government has become what the alliance was built to oppose is a walking zombie.

The harder expansion cases are Ukraine and Taiwan, the two democracies under direct autocratic attack that are not currently members and whose membership would mean immediate Article 5 obligations against nuclear-armed adversaries. The argument against bringing them in is the same in both cases: full membership now means immediate war with Russia or China, which the bloc is not prepared to fight and which the bloc has no interest in fighting if it can be avoided. The argument for bringing them in is also the same: these are the democracies that need the asylum most urgently, that are paying the highest current price for the absence of a real alliance guarantee, and whose abandonment would be the clearest possible signal to every other democracy in the world that the framework is not serious. The cases are difficult but they are not unprecedented. West Germany joined NATO in 1955 while the country was still divided and while Soviet forces were occupying its eastern half, and the alliance absorbed the risk because the alternative of leaving West Germany outside the alliance and effectively conceding it to the Soviet sphere was worse. The mechanism for Ukraine and Taiwan is the same one that worked for West Germany. Full membership, full Article 5 guarantee, with the geographic scope of the guarantee limited to currently controlled territory rather than to territory the member claims. Ukraine joins with the guarantee covering everything west of the current line of contact; the recovery of occupied territory is a Ukrainian war aim that the alliance supports through assistance but does not commit to fighting for. Taiwan joins with the guarantee covering the islands Taipei currently administers; the cross-strait political question remains unresolved but the territory under democratic governance is protected. This is the West German solution, applied to two cases that resemble the original case more closely than most discussions of Ukrainian or Taiwanese membership are willing to admit.

The hardest case is India, because India is the world’s largest democracy and the framework’s universalist logic argues for its inclusion, but India has explicitly preferred strategic autonomy since 1947 and would not accept treaty membership on any terms the alliance could offer. India also fails the democracy filter on current performance. Modi’s government has eroded press freedom, weaponized investigative agencies against political opponents, presided over communal violence the state has been at best complicit in, and the V-Dem index now classifies India as an electoral autocracy rather than a democracy. The honest answer is that India does not currently qualify and would not currently accept, and the framework should not pretend otherwise. The alliance maintains the existing Quad relationship and the existing bilateral defense and intelligence cooperation, treats India as a major partner rather than as a member, and leaves the door open for membership when both conditions change: when India’s democratic trajectory reverses and when India’s strategic calculation shifts. The framework does not force the issue. Indian membership is a long-term goal, not a near-term proposal, and the alliance is not weakened by acknowledging that the world’s largest democracy is not currently the kind of democracy the framework requires.

The obligations of membership are deliberately thick. Mutual defense under Article 5 is the floor, but it cannot be the ceiling, because an alliance that only does mutual defense is an alliance that exists exclusively in response to attack rather than in service of a positive project. The Paine framework requires the alliance to be the institutional form of the liberty asylum, which means the alliance does things in the world rather than only reacting to things done to it. Members commit to four substantive obligations beyond mutual defense. The first is a democratic governance commitment, monitored by the mechanism described above, that conditions continued membership on continued democratic practice. The second is a shared sanctions regime, where designations against autocratic regimes and their elites are coordinated across the bloc rather than implemented unilaterally, so that the bloc’s economic weight is applied in concert rather than dissipated through unilateral action that adversaries route around. The third is a joint industrial policy, principally focused on the energy transition we will address at the close of this argument but extending to semiconductors, biotechnology, advanced computing, and the critical minerals supply chains that determine which bloc controls the next generation of strategic industry. The fourth is a coordinated approach to information warfare and electoral interference, recognizing that the principal vector of autocratic attack against democracies in this decade has been informational rather than military, and that no individual democracy can defend itself against this attack alone.

The thick obligations create a thicker alliance than NATO has historically been, and the thicker alliance does work that the existing international institutions are no longer capable of doing. This is where the parallel institutions argument becomes operationally necessary rather than ideologically attractive. The institutions we built after 1945 like the United Nations, the Bretton Woods system, the WTO and its predecessors were built on the assumption that the world’s major powers would eventually all be democracies or would at least be willing to operate within the procedural norms of democratic international order. That assumption has failed. Russia and China both hold permanent UN Security Council seats with vetoes that they use to protect themselves and their clients from accountability. The WTO appellate body has been broken since 2019 because the United States blocked appointments to it under both Trump administrations, and even when it functioned, China was systematically violating WTO norms in ways the dispute resolution system could not effectively address. The IMF and World Bank have voting structures dominated by their original 1944 members and have not adapted to the autocratic capture of the global financial system through sanctions-evasion networks, cryptocurrency, and the deliberate construction of alternative payment systems by China and Russia. The existing institutions are not entirely useless. They still do work on humanitarian coordination, on technical standards, and on disease surveillance but they cannot do the work the democratic bloc needs them to do, because their membership and their voting structures and their procedural norms have all been compromised by the inclusion of the regimes the work would have to be done against.

The bloc therefore builds parallel institutions where the existing ones have failed. The most urgent of these is a democratic-bloc payment and settlement system that operates independently of SWIFT and the dollar-clearing networks that autocracies have learned to evade. The financial isolation of autocracies is the most powerful non-military lever the bloc has, and the existing system has been so thoroughly worked around - through ruble-yuan settlement arrangements, through cryptocurrency, through informal hawala networks, through Chinese state banks willing to function as sanctions-evasion conduits - that it no longer reliably imposes the costs it was designed to impose. The bloc builds a payment infrastructure it controls, requires bloc-internal trade to settle through it, and excludes autocratic banks and their intermediaries from access. This is technically achievable; the European Central Bank, the Federal Reserve, and the Bank of Japan have the institutional capacity to build it; what has been missing is the political will to recognize that the existing system has been compromised.

The second parallel institution is a democratic-bloc trade and investment court that handles disputes among bloc members and that excludes autocracies entirely. The WTO appellate body has been broken for six years and shows no sign of being repaired, which means that international trade has been operating without functional dispute resolution for the entire period during which the autocratic challenge to the democratic order has been intensifying. The bloc builds its own court, with appointment processes immune to single-state veto, and conducts bloc-internal trade under its jurisdiction. Non-bloc trade continues to operate under whatever residual WTO framework still functions, but the bloc’s preferential trade arrangements - lower tariffs, harmonized regulations, joint procurement access - are conditional on submission to the bloc’s court. This creates a powerful incentive for non-aligned democracies to align, and it creates a coherent commercial framework within the bloc that the autocracies cannot disrupt by capturing the dispute resolution mechanism.

The bloc would also build, on a longer timeline, a development finance institution to compete with China’s Belt and Road, and a coordinated technology standards body to set joint standards on AI, biotechnology, telecommunications, and the strategic industries where standard-setting determines market access. These institutions are second-order priorities. They can be built after the alliance expansion, the democracy filter, the sanctions coordination, and the payment system are in place. The point of naming them now is to establish that the parallel institutional architecture is a real project. The bloc is not building one alternative institution. It is building a substantially complete parallel institutional order that operates alongside the existing one, that does the work the existing one cannot do, and that progressively becomes the institutional center of gravity for democratic statecraft in a world where the universal institutions have been captured.

There will be readers who say that the parallel institutions argument is a retreat from universalism, that the free world I have described is now a smaller and more exclusive thing, and that the framework is building walls rather than extending the ladder. This objection is serious but my response is that the universal institutions stopped serving universalist purposes some time ago, and that pretending otherwise has cost the democratic project enormously. The UN Security Council has not authorized a single use of force against an autocratic regime since the end of the Cold War except where the autocratic regime was so isolated that even China and Russia could not be bothered to protect it. The WTO has been unable to discipline Chinese mercantilism for two decades. The IMF and World Bank have lent to regimes that used the loans to entrench themselves against their own populations. The institutions designed to serve the world’s free peoples have been progressively captured by the world’s unfree governments, and the captured institutions have not served our purposes. Building parallel institutions is not a retreat from universalism. It is the recognition that the existing institutions have failed the universalist project, and that the project requires new vehicles. The asylum is still for everyone who can reach it. The work of making this function, however, has to be done by the people who actually believe in it, and that work cannot be done in institutions where the people who do not believe in it have a veto.

Terminating Our Bad Friendships

The alliance expansion is only half the work. The other half is the termination of the partnerships and alliances that should never have existed in the first place, and the willingness to bear the costs of dismantling them. The democratic bloc cannot mean what it says if half of the partners it currently calls allies are governments the framework was built to oppose. The list of those partnerships is long and most Americans do not think about it carefully, because the partnerships were constructed in a Cold War context that has not existed for thirty-five years and have been maintained through institutional inertia, by which I mean that no one in either party has wanted to pay the political cost of ending them and so they have continued as standing arrangements whose original purposes have lapsed and whose current purposes are mostly the maintenance of the arrangements themselves.

Saudi Arabia is the most obvious one. The relationship has existed since 1945, when Franklin Roosevelt met King Abdulaziz aboard the USS Quincy in the Suez Canal and committed the United States to the security of the Saudi state in exchange for stable access to Saudi oil and Saudi cooperation against a series of rotating adversaries. That deal made sense in 1945, when the alternative was Soviet penetration of the Persian Gulf, and it continued to make sense for forty years on a defensible cost-benefit calculation. It has not made sense for a long time. The Saudi state is a hereditary monarchy that publicly beheads its citizens, that funded the export of Wahhabist ideology around the world for fifty years and is responsible for a significant part of the September 11th attacks, that murdered Jamal Khashoggi inside its own consulate in Istanbul in 2018 on the direct order of its crown prince, that has prosecuted a war in Yemen since 2015 that has killed somewhere between 150,000 and 400,000 people depending on whose count you trust, and that is engaged in active normalization with the Russian government on energy production specifically designed to limit the West’s ability to sanction Russia for the war in Ukraine. Yet the United States doesn’t do a single thing to limit its ability to undermine the free world. The justification for all of this has not been articulated in serious terms in twenty years because the serious version of the justification is that we need their oil and that is not something American presidents have wanted to say out loud, and the unserious version is that they are a partner against Iran. This describes a partnership whose costs exceed any plausible benefit. The relationship must be terminated, the arms sales must stop, the intelligence cooperation must stop, the diplomatic protection must stop. The Saudi state enters the framework as a state we have ordinary diplomatic relations with, the way we have ordinary diplomatic relations with most of the world’s autocracies, and the question of what happens next depends on its behavior after termination.

Egypt is the second case, and this is where the realist objection is the loudest. The American partnership with Egypt has been the foundation of the Camp David framework since 1979, the United States transferred roughly 1.5 billion dollars a year in military aid to Egypt for forty-five years in exchange for the Egyptian state’s commitment to peace with Israel, and the framework has worked in the narrow sense that Egypt and Israel have not gone to war during that period. It has also produced a series of Egyptian governments that have ranged from authoritarian to outright military dictatorship, including the current government of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who came to power through a 2013 military coup against a democratically elected government, who has imprisoned tens of thousands of political prisoners, who has presided over the worst human rights climate in modern Egyptian history, and who has been one of the principal recipients of American military aid throughout. The Camp David framework was a transaction the United States made with the Egyptian people without their consent, in which their continued non-belligerence toward Israel was purchased through the funding of the security state that suppressed them. Our relationship must be terminated. The Egyptian government becomes, after termination, what it has always been beneath the aid relationship: a military dictatorship that has to choose its own posture toward its neighbors without American funding to subsidize the choice. The free world cannot be built on the suppression of one Arab population to secure a peace with another.

The United Arab Emirates is the third case and the cleanest, because the relationship is younger and the dependencies are thinner. The UAE has been a useful counterterrorism partner and a useful basing location and a useful diplomatic intermediary for various American projects in the region, and it is also a hereditary monarchy where political parties are illegal, civil society is captured, dissidents disappear into the security services, and the labor system has been credibly described as modern indentured servitude. That relationship terminates. The Abraham Accords framework, which was built in significant part around the UAE’s normalization with Israel, continues to exist as a diplomatic fact but is no longer subsidized by American security guarantees to the autocratic signatories. The smaller Gulf monarchies like Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, and Oman fall under the same framework with the same logic, calibrated by their individual characteristics but governed by the same principle.

There are roughly two dozen other partnerships and arrangements that fall under the same logic, and I am not going to walk through each of them because the list becomes monotonous and the principle is the operative thing rather than the case-by-case application. Vietnam falls outside the bloc despite its strategic utility as a China-balancer, because Vietnam is a one-party state and the democracy filter does not have a strategic-utility exception; we maintain ordinary diplomatic relations and we trade and we coordinate on China where coordination is mutually useful, but we do not call Vietnam an ally and we do not arm it on the assumption that it shares our values. Thailand has been in and out of military rule for decades and the current arrangement is decorative; the treaty alliance lapses if Thai democracy does not recover to the threshold within the suspension window. Singapore is a wealthy and effective one-party state and the partnership becomes ordinary diplomatic relations. Pakistan is a state we have called a partner for seventy-five years without it ever functioning as one in any honest sense, and the formal designation lapses. Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, the various Central Asian autocracies whose partnerships the United States acquired during the Afghanistan war and never disposed of, all of these lapse. The principle of our new foreign policy is that our new world order does not include the regimes that the asylum exists as a refuge from.

The hardest current member case, harder than Hungary and harder than Turkey, is Israel. Israel is a democracy on most domestic measures: its citizens vote in genuine elections, its courts have until recently been substantively independent, its press has been free, its civil society has been robust, and it is also a state whose government has been engaged for two years in a catastrophic war in Gaza that has killed tens of thousands of civilians, whose continued occupation of the West Bank has lasted nearly six decades and has produced a regime that international human rights organizations including Israeli ones describe as apartheid, and whose current government has spent the last three years attempting a judicial restructuring that would have effectively ended the separation of powers and that brought hundreds of thousands of Israelis into the streets in defense of their own democracy. Israel is, in other words, a democracy under genuine internal threat from its own government, in roughly the same way that Hungary was a democracy under threat in 2010 and that the United States is a democracy under threat now. The framework treats it the way it treats any democracy under threat from its own government. The democratic indices apply and the suspension mechanism applies. The judicial restructuring fight, the targeting of civil society, the legislation designed to shield Netanyahu from prosecution, and the broader pattern of democratic erosion are all considered under the same metrics that apply to Hungary and Turkey. The West Bank occupation is a separate question that the framework cannot fully address because the framework measures democracy within states rather than the conduct of states outside their recognized borders, and I am not going to pretend the framework can answer a question its tools are not designed to answer. What the framework can do is apply consistent criteria to Israel’s domestic democratic performance, and on consistent criteria the current Israeli government is on the same trajectory as the governments that triggered the suspension mechanism in the cases above. The framework applies to Israel the standards it applies to everyone, and the consequences follow from the application of the standards, which is the only honest way to run a framework that claims to be universal.

The costs of all of this are real and I do not want to pretend otherwise. Terminating the Saudi relationship means oil price volatility that will be paid by American consumers and by the populations of every country that imports hydrocarbons. Terminating the Egyptian relationship means the Camp David framework is exposed to whatever the actual durability of Israeli-Egyptian peace turns out to be without the American subsidy holding it together, which may be considerable and may not. Terminating the Gulf relationships means the loss of basing access that the United States military has built operational doctrine around for forty years. Suspending Israel from full alliance privileges means a domestic American political fight that will consume the bandwidth of whatever administration tries to do it. Dropping Vietnam means losing a piece of the anti-China coalition that the framework otherwise wants to build. The costs are not abstract. They are large, they are concentrated, and they will be paid by identifiable constituencies: American oil consumers, American defense contractors, the Israeli-American political coalition, the Egyptian military, and the populations of every country whose security has been subsidized by the arrangements being dismantled. I am not going to argue that the costs are small. They are not small. The argument is that the asylum cannot exist if the foundations it is built on are the suppression of the people the asylum claims to be for, and that an alliance system whose principles are abandoned the moment they become inconvenient is an alliance system that has no principles. America was founded on a contradiction whose costs were paid by people who had no voice in the founding. The contradiction was tolerated for ninety years because the costs of resolving it were considered “too high.” They were considered too high until they weren’t, and the resolution, when it came, was paid for in a war that killed seven hundred fifty thousand people, and the resolution was incomplete and the contradictions persisted in altered forms for another century. The history of the US is the history of contradictions that were tolerated until they could no longer be tolerated. The current contradiction - that the bloc that calls itself the free world is the largest customer and the largest subsidizer of the regimes it claims to oppose - has been tolerated for seventy-five years. The termination of the autocratic partnerships is not the imposition of a new cost on the American project. It is the recognition that the cost has been there all along, and that we have been paying it in the wrong currency.

To Begin The World Over Again

There is one more thing the alliance has to do, and it is the thing without which everything I have just described becomes impossible. The democratic bloc cannot strangle the autocracies it has just dropped if it remains their largest customer. The lever I named earlier as the most powerful non-military instrument the bloc has - the economic and diplomatic isolation of the regimes the framework is built to oppose - is functional only if the bloc can afford to apply it, and the bloc cannot currently afford to apply it because the bloc has spent fifty years arranging its energy supply through the regimes it would now be sanctioning. Every barrel of oil the democratic world buys from Saudi Arabia is a transfer payment to the Saudi state. Every cubic meter of gas Europe imports from Russia is a transfer payment to the Russian state and its war effort. Every dollar of trade through the Iranian sanctions-evasion networks that the Gulf states quietly facilitate is a transfer payment to Iran. The autocracies the bloc is supposed to be isolating are funded, in significant part, by the bloc itself. The contradiction is not subtle, and it has been the unspoken organizing fact of American and European foreign policy for half a century.

The math is staggering when you make yourself look at it. In 2022, the year Russia invaded Ukraine, the European Union sent Russia roughly a billion dollars a day for energy. The sanctions regime imposed in response to the invasion was real and unprecedented in its severity, and the sanctions regime was also smaller than the energy transfer it was being applied against - Europe was sending Russia more money for gas than it was withholding from Russia through asset freezes, secondary sanctions, and the SWIFT exclusions combined. The war in Ukraine has been substantially funded, on the Russian side, by the European democracies that are also funding the Ukrainian defense. The Saudi state’s annual oil revenue runs around 300 billion dollars in a typical year, and the largest single bloc of those revenues comes from democratic purchasers. The cumulative scale of democratic-bloc payments to autocratic petrostates over the last twenty-five years is in the trillions of dollars. The bloc has been the autocratic world’s principal economic patron throughout the entire period during which the autocratic world has been organizing itself into a coherent challenge to the democratic order. We funded the challenge. We are still funding it.

The leverage problem follows directly from the contradiction. The bloc cannot be principled toward autocracies it depends on, because the dependency creates a structural constraint that overrides the principle every time the principle becomes operationally inconvenient. When Saudi Arabia murdered Jamal Khashoggi inside its own consulate in 2018, the American response was a few designations on intermediaries and the continuation of every arms deal, every intelligence relationship, and every diplomatic protection that had existed before the murder. The reason for the constrained response was not that anyone in the American government believed the murder was acceptable. The reason was that the alternative - a serious sanctions response against the Saudi state - would have produced an oil price spike that the administration was not willing to absorb politically. The principle existed. The leverage to apply the principle did not, because the dependency had already given the Saudi state veto power over the American response. The same pattern has played out with Russia for thirty years, with the Gulf states across multiple administrations, with Iran during the periods when European energy companies were operating inside the sanctions regimes their own governments had imposed. The democratic bloc has not been hypocritical because the bloc’s principles were insincere. The bloc has been hypocritical because the bloc’s principles could not survive contact with its energy bills. The discipline I proposed in the transition - the four levers, the explicit ruling out of direct invasion, the affirmative commitment to dissident support and defensive military assistance - depends entirely on the bloc being able to afford the costs of applying those levers, and the bloc cannot afford to apply lever one as long as the bloc is the petrostates’ largest customer. The energy transition is not a parallel project. It is the precondition for the foreign policy.

The project, therefore, is a coordinated democratic energy transition pursued as a foreign policy and an industrial policy at the alliance level, with a defined timeline and accountability mechanisms that match the seriousness of what the transition is meant to accomplish. The bloc pools research, manufacturing capacity, supply chains, and procurement for solar, wind, battery storage, geothermal, grid infrastructure, transmission, and advanced nuclear. The bloc commits to a fifteen-year timeline for the complete elimination of hydrocarbon imports from autocratic suppliers, with intermediate milestones at five and ten years and with binding consequences for members that fall behind. The bloc develops alternative supply chains for the critical minerals - lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese, rare earths - that the next generation of energy infrastructure depends on, because the critical minerals are the petrostate dependency of the 2040s if the bloc does not act now, currently routed in significant part through Chinese refining capacity and through extraction operations in countries whose governance is comparable to the petrostates the bloc is leaving behind. The bloc constructs joint financing instruments to underwrite the buildout, capable of moving capital at the scale the transition requires - trillions of dollars over the fifteen-year window, not the tens of billions that current climate finance has managed. The bloc treats the transition as the largest industrial mobilization the democratic world has undertaken since the Second World War, because it is.

The historical analog that does the most work here is not the Marshall Plan, which is the reflexive American reference for any large international project. The Marshall Plan was reconstruction - it rebuilt what the war had destroyed, on foundations that already existed. The energy transition is closer to the European Coal and Steel Community, the 1951 institution that pooled the coal and steel industries of France and West Germany and four other countries explicitly to make another European war impossible by integrating the industrial bases that had funded the last two. The Coal and Steel Community was a foreign policy project conducted through industrial policy, and its function was to remove the material basis for a particular kind of conflict. The energy transition does the same work for the current conflict. The petrostates funded by democratic energy purchases are the industrial base of the autocratic challenge, and pooling democratic energy production at the bloc level is the equivalent move - it removes the material basis for the conflict by eliminating the dependency that produced it. The Schuman Declaration that founded the Coal and Steel Community said explicitly that the project was meant to make war between France and Germany “not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible.” The energy transition aims at the same thing for the conflict between the democratic bloc and the petrostates: not merely unwise but materially impossible, because the funding stream that has made the conflict possible has been turned off.

The technical capacity for the transition exists. The International Energy Agency’s net-zero scenarios assume something close to this trajectory for the electricity sector of advanced economies, and the engineering is largely solved - what is missing is the political coordination and the industrial buildout, not the underlying technology. Solar generation costs have fallen by roughly 90 percent in the last decade. Battery storage costs have fallen by roughly 85 percent. Wind generation has become cost-competitive with hydrocarbons in essentially every advanced economy market. The transition has been bottlenecked by permitting, by transmission infrastructure, by the political economy of incumbent fossil fuel industries, and by the absence of a coordinating institution at the bloc level - not by the technology. A coordinated bloc-level project removes most of those bottlenecks at once. Permitting can be harmonized across democracies. Transmission can be built as a bloc-level infrastructure project. The political economy of fossil fuel incumbents can be confronted across the bloc rather than within individual member states, where the incumbents have always had local veto power. The institutional gap is what has prevented the transition from happening at the speed the engineering would allow. The alliance fills the institutional gap.

The hardest political question inside the transition is nuclear power. The democratic bloc cannot complete the transition on the fifteen-year timeline I have described without advanced nuclear in the energy mix. The numbers do not work otherwise. Solar and wind are dispatchable in the aggregate but intermittent at any given location and any given hour, and the storage capacity required to bridge the intermittency at the scale of bloc-level energy demand is not yet built and would itself require critical mineral supply chains that are not yet built. Advanced nuclear - the next generation of reactor designs, smaller and safer and more rapidly deployable than the 1970s designs that shaped the political consciousness around nuclear in the democratic world - fills the gap. The political economy is difficult because the progressive coalition that supports climate action in the United States and Europe has historically been the same coalition that opposes nuclear, and the framework I am proposing requires that coalition to revisit its position on the grounds that the foreign policy case for nuclear is now substantial enough to override the historical objections. The politics of this are not easy but a democratic energy transition that excludes advanced nuclear on ideological grounds is not actually a transition that can succeed on the timeline the foreign policy requires, and the framework has to be honest about what it requires.

The framework converges on the energy transition from every direction. The obligation to posterity is discharged, in significant part, by ending the funding stream that is warming the planet our children will inherit. The obligation to humanity in the present is discharged by eliminating the leverage that has prevented us from acting on behalf of the people living under the petrostates we have been subsidizing - the populations whose freedom we have effectively traded for stable fuel prices. The obligation that flows from possession of the example is discharged by demonstrating, materially, that a democratic bloc can do the thing the petrostates have spent fifty years insisting was impossible, which is to power its civilization without funding its adversaries. The energy transition is not a fourth obligation. It is the means by which the first three are made operationally real. The asylum that cannot power itself is the asylum that has to make peace with the regimes it was supposed to be a refuge from. The bloc that cannot afford its own principles is not a bloc, it is a customer. The Paine framework, taken seriously, demands that the asylum become materially independent of the persecutors it was built in opposition to, because a refuge that runs on the persecutors’ fuel is not a refuge that anyone should be looking to.

There will be readers who reach this point and say that the framework I have described is impossibly ambitious, that the political coalition required to enact it does not exist, that the institutional capacity required to coordinate it is beyond what the democratic bloc has historically been capable of, and that the costs of the transition will be borne disproportionately by populations and constituencies whose consent the framework cannot count on. That’s valid but the answer is that the framework I have described is roughly as ambitious as the post-1945 reconstruction was, and that the post-1945 reconstruction was successfully accomplished by a democratic coalition that was no less divided, no less institutionally constrained, and no less burdened by competing obligations than the coalition we have now. The post-1945 generation built NATO, the Marshall Plan, the Bretton Woods system, the United Nations, the European integration project, the integration of former enemies into a democratic community, and the institutional architecture that has structured the international order for eighty years, and they did all of it in roughly fifteen years, starting from a world that had just been physically destroyed. The argument that the bloc cannot do something on a fifteen-year timeline today, when the destruction has not yet happened and the bloc still possesses the institutional and material resources to act, is an argument against ambition itself. Paine wrote that we have it in our power to begin the world over again. The post-1945 generation believed him and acted accordingly. The framework I have described is the equivalent claim for our generation, and the equivalent obligation.

What We Were Founded To Be

I want to come back, in closing, to the version of you who is reading this. You have stayed with the essay for whatever it is - an hour, more - because some part of the argument has landed, and the experience of being landed on by Paine across two and a half centuries is the experience of recognizing something you already knew but had not been able to say. The framework in this essay is not original to me. It belongs to Paine, and through him to the European radicals who crossed the Atlantic to fight a war that was not theirs, and through them to every dissident and refugee and political prisoner who has looked at the United States across two hundred and fifty years and seen, however imperfectly and however inconsistently and however much was paid for by people who never agreed to the bill, a refuge for the idea that people can govern themselves. This framework belongs to them. I am writing it down because somebody has to, and because the moment in which it can still be enacted is not infinite.

The essay does not have practical advice for you at the end. There are essays that end with what you should do, and they are useful essays, and this is not one of them. The work the essay is asking of you is not the work of voting or writing letters or supporting the right candidates, although you should do all of those things and you do not need me to tell you so. The work is the conversion of belief. The colonists who read Common Sense in January 1776 did not, in most cases, immediately do anything different on the day they finished reading it. What changed was what they understood themselves to be obligated to. The actions came later, after the understanding had settled, and the actions could come because the understanding had settled. The essay is asking you to settle into the understanding. Everything else is downstream.

Paine wrote that we have it in our power to begin the world over again. He was speaking to a generation of colonists, but the sentence was not addressed to a date. It was addressed to anyone who would later find themselves in a moment where the asylum was at risk and the obligation was clear and the power was still available to those who would claim it.

One generation of Americans took that obligation more seriously than we can quite imagine taking anything. As Union soldiers marched into the war that would end American slavery, they sang a hymn that set their own deaths against the highest sacrifice their civilization knew: As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free. The line is not shy! It places the soldier who dies to free another man alongside Christ on the cross, and it does so without apology, because they believed that extending freedom to the unfree was the holiest work a human being could do. In modern performances of the Battle Hymn of The Republic, the lyrics are often changed to: As He died to make men holy, let us live to make men free. That one word change, from die to live, is the best illustration of how thoroughly we have forgotten what we were founded to be. Maybe modern America is too cool to believe deeply in a great cause, but I am not. The sun has not shined on a cause of greater worth in hundreds of years.

Subscribe now

This year’s iteration of a dual Mother’s Day-Ben Birthday is unique from the other four iterations because this time my Mom is dead, like literally, like graveyard dead. And while that sucks, there are some benefits, like saving money on gifts, and the attention from your family is not diluted anymore. In fact, one could argue that if you like being the center of attention, your birthday falling on Mother’s Day the year she died is a great way of cultivating a great deal of attention from family and friends. Former Mayor Rahm Emanuel said “never let a crisis go to waste”; similarly, as America’s Mayor, I’m telling you to never let a dead mom go to waste, especially if you’re young. Never again in your life will you be able to cultivate such sympathy, and that’s why you should subscribe to my newsletter. My mom didn’t die on the cross of cancer for you to read this and not subscribe… especially on the first Mother’s Day that falls on my birthday? Have some empathy.

Subscribe now

Gallows humor and facetiousness aside, it has been five months since my Mom passed away at age 52. My mom had been living with stage 4 metastatic breast cancer since 2020, and she had kind of always been dying since then. There is a particular shape your life takes when your mother has been “always dying” for five years: you call more often than other sons, but you’ll always look back and think you should have called more. You take trips while she can still travel. You start preemptively grieving, and you find that grief, like rent, is something you can pay for years and still not own anything at the end of it. Thanks to President Biden’s Cancer Moonshot, my mom lived for another five years after her diagnosis. Five years sounds abstract until you think about what fits inside it: long enough for your grandkids to remember you, a high school or college graduation, five more Christmases. New drugs were developed thanks to the research surge, and they froze the cancer in its place and prevented it from spreading. While it’s not a cure, we only get one life, and the ability to extend that life is game changing. The research surge was killed in its reauthorization fight, and what survived was gutted after the 2024 election. My mom was already too far along by then, but the next son’s mother won’t get her five years. He can send her death notice to the Republican Party and thank them for the privilege.

It’s hard to describe the sadness that comes with the death of your mom, but a feeling I’ve been feeling increasingly is loneliness. I used to talk to my Mom every day because who else can you call and bother when you’re bored? She got the traffic reports, my grocery store complaints, the running commentary on whatever was going on in the news, the “is it normal that my knee does this,” the “what do I do with leftover chicken,” the gossip about people she had never met and would never meet but whose dramas and feuds she could have testified about under oath. The calls were almost never about anything, and that was the point. The category of conversation that has no purpose other than to be had with your mother is, it turns out, a real category, and when she dies it doesn’t migrate to anyone else. It just stops existing.

As she went on hospice, we slowly talked less and less as the drugs made it harder and harder for her to focus on the conversation and speak. The calls got shorter. Then the calls got quieter. Then the calls became me talking and her breathing, and then me talking and her humming a little to let me know she was there, and then me talking to a phone someone else was holding up to her ear. So when she had passed, I guess I had kind of grown accustomed to not talking to her. As the months have passed, though, there’s been a deeper loneliness growing, because if not your mom, who else can you call and bother when you’re bored? Family members, friends, significant others, coworkers, and neighbors all try to fill the void, but no one is ever going to love you and tolerate you as much as your Mom will. No one is ever as excited to hear from you as your mom is, and no conversation will ever be as unjudgmental or untransactional as a conversation with your mom (ideally).

I have found myself growing sadder and sadder as the months go on as I think about her. There’s a saying that “one day the thought of your loved one will bring a smile to your face before it brings a tear to your eye”, and it has always felt true, but it almost feels like it’s working in reverse. Maybe I was just being brave for those around me, or maybe I was in shock in the days that followed, but I did smile when I thought about my Mom, and now it brings a tear to my eye. It almost feels like a deep black hole has opened in my chest and my whole being is being pulled into it. The hours have passed like seconds while the days have been longer than months. Just when I think I’ve finally gotten over it, I pass a field of sunflowers (her favorite flower) or I hear REO Speedwagon (her favorite band), and suddenly she’s there. I find myself looking up at the sky some nights wondering if I’m not going to be ok after all.

Not to understate it, but losing a parent is the strangest thing that has ever happened to me. When your parent dies, it’s like your whole world shatters, and it feels like time stops and nothing matters. Yet the world moves on. People just go on with their lives, and you think, “How can this be? Don’t you know that my Mom just died?” It’s just that, though: it’s MY Mom, it’s not yours. The world cannot be expected to stop for the death of a woman it didn’t know, and there is something in that fact that is both unbearable and, if you sit with it long enough, oddly clarifying. For the past few years, I have been mulling this thought in my head: “If I don’t end up in a history book, then this life was all for nothing.” My Mom’s death, I think, has brought deeper clarity and dispelled such notions, because she won’t be in a history book, yet her memory is the greatest blessing I have. The world did not stop for her, and the world will not stop for me. We don’t need to be immortal great men of history to shape the lives of those around us, which is something that was probably very obvious to everyone else a long time ago.

There’s so much I want to tell my Mom about; there’s so much I wish she could see. I wish she could see the life I’m creating in Georgia. I look at restaurants and think, “my Mom would have loved this place.” There’s a Mexican spot in Buckhead with a patio and loud Spanish music that she would have loved. I see movies and think, “my Mom would have loved this,” and the worst part is sometimes I’m wrong; sometimes I imagine her loving something she would have actually hated, and that mistake feels like its own small loss. The mother in my head is drifting from the mother in the urn. I hear gossip and rumors and think, “My Mom and I would have been beating the hell out of this dead horse.” I’ve met people down here that I desperately want her to meet, and I’m making meals that I would die to have her taste.

I have been looking at photos of my Mom when she was younger, and while I see my Mom, I also see a woman who had a life before me. She was loved by people I’ll never meet, she had experiences I’ll never know about, and she did things that shaped her in ways I’ll never learn of. There is a photo from sometime in the 90s from when she played softball at Benedictine University. She is twenty-something, beautiful with long curly hair in her softball uniform, and she doesn’t have a care in the world, and I find myself looking at her wondering what the rest of her summer was like. I find myself thinking about everything she gave up for me that she never named, and not in the sentimental way you typically see described, but in a smaller, truer way: a version of an afternoon, a dream she let go, the idea of a perfect evening, a job she didn’t apply for, a friendship she let drift because of my brother and me. Sons are often told what their mothers gave them, but we are rarely taught to notice what they quietly gave up.

The last words my Mom said to me were when I was getting in my car to move to Georgia three days before she passed. I stood over her bed at 4am as she slept, and I didn’t know what to say. I said, “Thanks for everything,” which in hindsight is a pretty ridiculous thing to say to the woman who has given you everything, but who is ever ready to say their last words to a loved one? My Mom snapped awake and sat up. She had been moving very little and speaking very little, and the little she said was usually very incoherent. When I hugged her goodbye, I could feel her spine and all the bones in her back. The woman who once seemed like she was made of iron was now fragile beyond my belief. She said, “Thank you for coming. I love you,” and as we parted ways and she drifted back into sleep and incoherence, she said, “Don’t forget to register your car.” She was always looking out for me, even at the very end. I used to hate when she’d remind me of something, but I’d do anything to be reminded or nagged about anything from her one more time.

The only recording I have of my Mom’s voice, taken from my voicemail inbox.

At my Mom’s funeral, I met easily over a hundred people, and they all knew everything about me. They knew the schools I went to, the jobs I had, the videos I made, and ridiculous childhood stories about me. A woman I had never seen before in my life held my hand and told me she had been praying for my move to Georgia for months. A man I had vaguely recognized asked me about my work with NATO, while another said that they had listened to my podcast and thought I explained things really well. I learned at her funeral that I had been, without my knowledge or permission, the protagonist of a long-running serial novel narrated to hundreds of people for nearly three decades, and that the central thesis of that novel was that I was magnificent. My Mom was my biggest fan. She told everyone about me and how proud she was of me. She believed in me, so I should believe in me. She would say to me, “You’re going to be ok, you know what’s best for you,” and she was always right. All there is left for me to do is to be the person she raised me to be. I hope this grief never leaves me.

I know we’re not supposed to refer to ourselves as an empire. After all, empires become empires because the leader starts calling themselves the Emperor and I don’t need to give the President new ideas, but the use of empire here I think really helps drive forward my point to people who aren’t total nerds more than phrases like “Rules Based International Order” or “American Hegemony” would. To be clear, we do run an empire and it’s being destroyed by people who don’t see what they are destroying.

Henry Kissinger would always gripe that the United States doesn’t really know what its interests are, because it’s always operated from idealistic principles rather than hard national interest calculations. So instead America tends to confuse its interests with its values. This mindset, and disgust with the idea of pursuing our own interests, is a regular part of how Americans think. If a war isn’t transparently good vs evil like World War Two, the public says the war is clearly for oil (even if the US didn’t actually get any oil from the war (Iraq), even if the invaded nation doesn’t have any oil (Afghanistan)) and it is viewed as a black mark on our image and our character as a nation.

Our revolution was 250 years ago, which in American time might as well be forever ago, but its ideologies, guilts, and motivations are all still deeply embedded in us and how we think of the world. The founding principle of our revolution is that America was founded in explicit rejection of the Old World’s power politics. So all of the king and queen shenanigans, the armies, the dynastic rivalries, the endless European wars over territory and succession are supposed to be behind us because we escaped all of that. We are a new kind of country, built on ideas and consent rather than conquest and force. This mindset produces a certain guilt about having and wielding power, and this forces us to reframe our actions as moral crusades that are for the greater good. Obviously the US has not always lived up to its founding ideals, but no country in the history of the world has laid out such universalist ideals for itself to live up to and actively hates itself when it fails.

A core conflict at the heart of American beliefs is that we can’t quite decide if we are a beacon or if we’re crusaders. Like most countries founded via revolution, we believe our revolution is perpetual and to a certain extent it is. We call it “perfecting our union” but the civil war to end slavery, and then the expansion of equal citizenship under the law to both women and Black Americans is in effect a continuation of our revolution that declared “all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” We believe that our revolution is the natural state of things and that ultimately all people will strive for this kind of life for themselves, and that it is our moral duty to help them achieve that. That belief lines us up as a beacon and as crusaders when ultimately these two things are typically mutually exclusive. Either the people overthrow their oppressor themselves because of the role model we are or we overthrow their dictator ourselves to liberate the people. It is fundamentally a contradiction, but it does make us fundamentally different from the old European empires. America was born as a colony that rebelled against empire and has always denied being one, whereas Britain and France openly acknowledged they were empires and were proud of it. The British and French were relatively comfortable saying certain peoples were inferior and needed guidance from superior ones (The White Man’s Burden). Americans in their empire era would never say such a thing because the entire project is built around universalist principles such as all men are created equal, freedom is a universal human desire, democracy is the natural state of mankind. This is more egalitarian, but it’s pretty aggressive in practice. If freedom is universal, then any society that doesn’t look like America is either oppressed or in error which - given that we believe what we believe - always justifies intervention. In our defense, however, I am unaware of any dictatorship that is free, open, and not inherently oppressive so perhaps our view isn’t wrong.

These two mentalities: the belief that we are above using our power to benefit ourselves and that we have a moral obligation to spread our revolution forced American leaders to create a global "empire" that doesn't see the US occupying populations, colonizing nations, annexing territories, demanding tribute, annexing land, or declaring other cultures inferior by state doctrine.

If you’re the global hegemon of the world, you have to enforce your will on the world in order to get the benefits of being the hegemon. There are two ways of doing this, one is obviously by force. You show up with guns and ships and you say “do what I say or I’ll kill you” and it works but it costs a lot! You have to be willing to kill a lot of people for explicit self-interest & you have to be willing to let a lot of your own people be killed in the process. Americans in general are not willing to do this. Even if you rebut Iraq: The Sequel as an example of them being ok with this, you have to consider that only 4,492 Americans died in Iraq (let their memory be a blessing) and that the US didn’t gain oil, or even major oil assets or concessions directly from the invasion.

So if you’re not willing to do Empire the old fashioned way, then you need to invent a new way and that is the second way of doing this: the rules based international order. It’s an optimistic vision for the world, it’s a world governed by rules and morality, and a genuine desire for the end of war. It’s a noble righteous cause but it is one that fundamentally benefits the US. We universalized our values, institutionalized them in international law, and then enforce that law. This is actually the mechanism that lets America keep the contradicting beacon posture ("we're just upholding universal norms") while exercising crusader power ("and we will enforce those norms"). The genius of it is that these are no longer in contradiction. The rules do the crusading, and America merely upholds them.

This arrangement has benefited the United States enormously and has not necessarily disadvantaged everyone else. That last part is what makes the system durable. Subordinate states chose to join it, which is genuinely unprecedented in the history of empires. But it has also produced a strange domestic confusion: a growing number of Americans, feeling left behind by a global economy they don’t feel they designed or consented to, have come to believe that the United States is being taken advantage of, and that we are the world’s reluctant benefactors, footing the bill for everyone else’s security and prosperity. This gets the situation almost exactly backwards and it’s a testament to how well we managed to frame our infrastructure.

Our order seeks - perhaps naively - to eliminate war, not out of the goodness of America's heart, but because no war means stability, and when you are the dominant economic power, stability is the condition in which you thrive. When you're already on top, the status quo is maximally favorable to you by definition. War, at its structural core, is a mechanism for redistribution. It is how rising powers have historically forced revisions to arrangements they found unfavorable. If you're already at the top, you don't need redistribution: you need enforcement of existing arrangements. Peace is the state in which your accumulated advantages compound; war is the state in which they get put up for renegotiation. And even if you win the war, you've still spent blood and treasure that your rivals haven't, and you've revealed that the system requires force to hold together, which is precisely what a rules-based order is supposed to make unnecessary. Every war the hegemon fights is, in some sense, an advertisement for the failure of the system it built.

The economic logic runs just as deep as the military one. When you're the world's dominant producer, you need the world as your customer, and customers require stability. And you have to build stability, and building it requires architecture. After 1945, the US built that architecture of empire: Bretton Woods, NATO, the IMF, the World Bank, GATT which became the WTO.

These early institutions were critical to stability because they dismantled the European empires, or at least the ones that remained. Colonies were walled gardens where one nation monopolized all of its resources, and everyone else was out of luck or had to pay imperial rents. This created a world of “haves” and “have nots” where existing powers got more powerful and rising powers were locked out. Germany and Japan in the 1930s both explicitly framed their aggression as a response to being locked out. They were “have-not” rising powers surrounded by Anglo-French-Dutch walled gardens, and their solution was to build their own by force. You can disagree with the justification while recognizing the structural diagnosis is accurate: a world carved into exclusive imperial zones produces wars, because the only way for a rising power to get resources and markets is to take someone else’s garden. In fact, this was the conclusion the American State Department reached in the 1940s: The proximate cause of the war was Hitler, but the structural cause was the imperial preference system and the autarkic blocs it produced. Unhampered trade dovetailed with peace; high tariffs, trade barriers, and unfair economic competition, with war.

Pillar One: Money

The first pillar of this empire is money. Money isn’t everything but having it is. At Bretton Woods in 1944, the US set up a system where the dollar was pegged to gold at $35 an ounce and every other currency in the allied world was pegged to the dollar. This made the dollar the reference point for all global commerce, and it made the United States the lender of last resort for the entire non-Soviet world. The IMF and World Bank, both headquartered in Washington and both with US veto power baked into their voting structures, were designed to recycle dollars back into economies that were running short. A country in trouble couldn’t just print its way out! It had to come to Washington, accept conditions, and structurally reorganize itself along lines the US found acceptable. This is called “conditionality” in polite economic literature. In plainer English, it means that every financial crisis in the developing world since 1945 has been an opportunity for the US to rewrite another country’s domestic economic policy. Argentina alone has been restructured by the IMF more than twenty times.

By the late 1960s the system was straining. The US was running deficits to pay for Vietnam and the Great Society, foreign central banks were accumulating dollars faster than the US could back them with gold, and in 1971 Nixon did what no one thought would work: he closed the gold window and let the dollar float. This was supposed to be the end. French economists wrote triumphant obituaries. Instead, something remarkable happened: the world kept using the dollar anyway. Then in 1974, Kissinger (him again) cut a deal with the Saudis where they’d price oil exclusively in dollars, recycle their oil surpluses into US Treasuries, and in exchange we’d guarantee their regime’s security and sell them advanced weapons. Every other OPEC country followed. Now every country on earth that wanted to buy oil needed dollars, and Saudi oil revenue flowed directly back into financing American government debt. The circle closed. We had invented a system where foreign resource wealth paid for American deficits.

This is what economists call the “exorbitant privilege,” a phrase coined by French finance minister Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in the 1960s, who correctly saw what was happening and couldn’t do anything about it. The privilege has several layers. First, seigniorage: the US earns interest on dollars held abroad, effectively taxing the rest of the world for the service of providing them with money. Second, deficit financing: when we owe other countries money, we owe it in a currency we control, and we can pay it back by creating more of it. Third, and most importantly, safe asset monopoly: US Treasuries are the global benchmark for a risk-free asset, which means that in any crisis, money doesn’t flee from America, it flees to America. 2008 was a crisis that originated in American subprime mortgages, and the world’s response was to buy more American debt. Try to get your head around how bizarre that is. It would be like a house catching fire and the neighbors rushing inside to buy the furniture.

There’s a structural catch here though that’s worth naming, because it’s going to matter later. Economists call it the Triffin dilemma. To supply the world with enough dollars to run global trade, the United States has to run persistent trade deficits because we have to import more than we export so that dollars flow outward into the global system. But persistent trade deficits eventually undermine confidence in the currency issuing them. The reserve currency issuer is structurally required to do the thing that will eventually destroy its reserve currency status. For decades, Americans on both left and right have looked at the trade deficit and called it a sign of weakness or of being “ripped off.” It is neither. It is the price of admission to running the empire. The dollars we send abroad come back as demand for Treasuries, which finance our government at rates no other country on earth could get. The deficit is the tribute system. Complaining about it is like a landlord complaining that tenants keep handing him rent checks.

The final piece is the sanctions architecture. Nearly every dollar transaction anywhere on earth, regardless of where the parties are located, eventually clears through the US financial system. If a Chinese bank sells dollars to an Iranian company, that transaction touches a US correspondent bank, which means US law applies, which means the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control can turn it off. This sounds abstract until you realize it’s how we’ve economically strangled Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and North Korea. When we kicked major Russian banks off the SWIFT messaging system in 2022, we were using a piece of infrastructure most Americans have never heard of to punish a nuclear-armed power. It is arguably the most powerful non-military weapon ever constructed, and we built it out of clearinghouses and regulatory forms. If this sounds like a scam, that’s because from a certain angle, it is. It’s just a scam everyone agreed to because the alternative was worse. And the alternative was worse because of the second pillar.

Pillar Two: Security

The second pillar is security, and it’s the pillar most Americans misunderstand the most. NATO is nominally a mutual defense pact against the Soviets, but that was always only half the point. The other half, in the words of NATO’s first Secretary General Lord Ismay, was to “keep the Soviets out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” An armed, independent Germany has options. A Germany underneath the American security umbrella buys American weapons, defers to American strategic priorities, and spends the money it would have spent on tanks on BMWs and social programs instead. Germany’s post-war economic miracle is not separable from the fact that Americans were doing its security thinking for it. Germany’s reliance on the US for security effectively binds it to side with us on matters that matter, because doing otherwise carries an implicit cost.

This arrangement scales. The US maintains roughly 750 military bases in more than 80 countries, while no other nation on earth has more than about thirty foreign bases, and most have zero. This is not a garrison system in the Roman sense because we’re not occupying conquered territory. We’re embedded in the territory of formal allies who invite us, host us, and often pay for the privilege. Japan pays roughly $2 billion a year in host-nation support to keep about 55,000 American troops on its soil. South Korea does something similar. The Gulf states have effectively been subsidizing Fifth Fleet operations for decades. These countries are not paying us because we threatened them. They’re paying because the alternative of building their own independent deterrent, their own blue-water navy, and their own intelligence apparatus would cost them vastly more and deliver vastly less. Ultimately if you are middle to low power, welcoming US troops to your country is the best way to secure your borders because you can assemble your military’s capabilities around them rather than having to reinvent the wheel. This is actually what makes NATO so effective. A country like North Macedonia doesn’t have the means, capability, or need to have high-level military capabilities that the US military has, so they instead focus on things like mountain warfare and the US benefits because they can send their troops to train with these experts.

The nuclear piece is where this gets especially elegant. The US extends what’s called “extended deterrence” to treaty allies: the promise that an attack on Seoul or Tokyo or Berlin will be treated as an attack on Los Angeles. This is, if you think about it for ten seconds, a completely insane commitment and not to borrow from JD Vance - “a nuclear suicide pact”. I think this arrangement is taken too literally by domestic opponents of it. I don’t think the US would actually trade Tokyo for LA, and I don’t think any of our last four Presidents would. I wonder if the Chinese and Russians suspect we wouldn’t trade either. What I do know though is that the commitment creates just enough gray area that it has prevented the Russians and Chinese from using a nuclear weapon on our allies, and just enough gray that it has kept Germany, Japan, South Korea, and half a dozen other technologically capable countries from building their own nuclear weapons. Japan could build a nuclear arsenal in roughly six months if it decided to and South Korea probably faster. They don’t because the American umbrella makes it unnecessary, and the American umbrella makes it unnecessary because we’re willing to make promises no other country would make. In exchange, we get to shape what their foreign policies look like. When we tell Seoul how to talk to Pyongyang, Seoul listens. When we tell Tokyo how to handle Taiwan, Tokyo listens. Extended deterrence is the most expensive bribe ever constructed and also the most profitable.

The most frequently cited example of US security assurances is that we keep the sea lanes open. This is true but it’s always struck me as an odd example because it implies at some level that prior to 1945, there were just pirates running amok or that nations were locking down their waters and charging a toll. That happened of course but that is more of a 400 years ago problem than a 76 years ago problem. (As we speak the Strait of Hormuz is currently closed). Roughly 80 percent of global trade moves by sea, and every major shipping lane on earth: the Strait of Hormuz, the Strait of Malacca, the Bab-el-Mandeb, the Suez approaches, the Panama Canal is either patrolled by the US Navy or patrolled by allies whose naval doctrines we shaped. This is a public good in the economist’s sense: everyone benefits from it, and no single country could be charged for its use. But the country providing it is not providing it out of charity. A global shipping system dependent on American naval protection is a global economy that cannot decouple from American strategic priorities without immediate consequences. When the Houthis attacked Red Sea shipping in 2024, they forced every major shipping line to effectively call the US Navy for help because there is no one else to call. The US then had to go over there and bomb them, and did it work? No. If they tried harder, could it have worked? Maybe but if they’re unwilling to deploy troops, there’s not much they can really do about it.

The intelligence architecture is the last layer, and the most closely held. Then there’s Five Eyes, an alliance among the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand that shares signals intelligence at a depth no other alliance in history has attempted. Beyond Five Eyes there are tiered sharing arrangements with NATO, Japan, South Korea, and Israel that give the US effectively real-time visibility into most of the planet’s electronic communications. This is a really smart deal on our end because we have these great capabilities but having partners that can focus in on individual matters as specialists makes us all the wiser.

Pillar Three: Trade

The third pillar is trade, and it’s where the empire disguises itself most successfully as something boring. GATT in 1947, reformulated as the WTO in 1995, set up a system where trade disputes get resolved at panels of lawyers in Geneva instead of with tariffs and gunboats. Countries that joined got most-favored-nation access to the biggest consumer market on earth. In exchange, they accepted rules we largely wrote, dispute mechanisms we largely controlled, and a set of obligations that reshaped their domestic economies along lines Washington found agreeable.

The dispute settlement body is worth understanding because it’s the engine of the whole system. When Country A thinks Country B is violating trade rules, it brings a case; a panel of trade lawyers hears it; they issue a binding ruling; if the loser doesn’t comply, the winner is authorized to retaliate with tariffs. This sounds neutral. It is not. The rules being enforced were written during the 1940s through the 1990s by American and American-aligned trade negotiators, and they reflect an American theory of what a market economy should look like. They protect intellectual property, the TRIPS agreement extended American-style patent law to the world, which is why a Pfizer drug can cost nearly the same in Lagos as in Louisville even though Nigerian per-capita income is a fraction of Kentuckys. They discipline state-owned enterprises. They constrain industrial policy. They are, in short, American domestic economic preferences exported as international law.

The investment regime layered on top is even more aggressive. Bilateral investment treaties, of which the US has signed more than forty, and the investor-state dispute settlement mechanism known as ISDS let American corporations sue foreign governments directly in international arbitration panels when those governments pass laws that hurt corporate profits. Ecuador has been sued by Chevron. Germany has faced arbitration over its decision to phase out nuclear power. This is a legal architecture where private American capital has standing to sue sovereign states, and the enforcement mechanism sits in Washington and New York. No previous empire has had anything quite like it.

Capital mobility is the quiet twin of trade liberalization. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the US used the IMF, bilateral pressure, and the informal Washington Consensus to push countries to dismantle their capital controls and let money flow freely across their borders. The stated reason was efficiency. The actual downstream effect was that American financial firms became the intermediaries for global capital flows, and American financial markets became the default destination for global savings. When a Malaysian exporter earns dollars, those dollars overwhelmingly end up parked in American financial instruments. When a Norwegian sovereign wealth fund invests its oil surplus, it does so primarily through American asset managers. Global savings flow through Wall Street the way global trade flows through the Navy.

And finally, brain drain, which doesn’t appear in any treaty but is arguably the most valuable single benefit the empire provides. If you are a brilliant twenty-two-year-old in Lagos or Mumbai or Seoul or São Paulo, the empire is where you go to make it. American universities collect the top of the global talent distribution; American companies collect the ones who stay after graduation; American citizenship collects the ones who stay for thirty years. A majority of America’s most valuable tech companies were co-founded by immigrants or their children. The brain drain is a tribute system that pays in human capital rather than currency, and because it operates through individual choice rather than state policy, no country’s domestic politics lets them push back against it effectively.

We are now dismantling this system

For as long as I can recall, the ongoing debate in geopolitical circles has always been “how long can America remain the hegemon” with a very loud minority (although they’re growing) suggesting that America is no longer the hegemon. I don’t know what the future holds, but what I do know and what you know now from having read this is that this system is super deep and it perhaps impossible for another nation to throw the US off its throne without assistance. However, America dismantling it’s own system because the people in charge don’t know it works is very possible and is actually happening right in front of our eyes.

Trump and his subordinates fundamentally misread every layer of the system I just described. He sees the trade deficit and thinks we’re being ripped off, when the trade deficit is actually the tribute system. He sees NATO and thinks we’re subsidizing Europe’s defense, when our security guarantees are how we keep European foreign policy aligned with ours. He sees foreign aid and thinks we’re being suckers, when foreign aid is one of the cheapest forms of soft power ever invented. He sees the dollar’s reserve status as a courtesy other countries grudgingly extend to us, when it’s the closest thing to a magic money machine ever constructed. Every benefit of empire, he reads as a cost. Every cost (which were really investments), he interprets as evidence we’re being scammed. This is the idiocracy half of the equation.

The spite half is just as important. When countries that benefit from our system decline to act in ways that flatter Trump personally, his response is to punish them: Canada for not capitulating fast enough, Brazil for prosecuting his ally Bolsonaro, Denmark for not selling Greenland, Mexico for being Mexico, basically. The targets are not adversaries trying to undermine our order. They are allies and partners who built that order with us. And so the precision instruments that the empire developed to coerce adversaries: sanctions, tariff threats, and trade penalties are now being aimed at the system’s own subordinate states. This is how you make all of your subordinates wonder if they should be subordinates.

Dismantling Money

The financial weapon I described is built on a paradox: it works because it almost never has to be used. Sanctions are credible because the dollar is universal and the dollar is universal because the United States is trustworthy. The United States is trustworthy because we don’t use the financial weapon arbitrarily, but if you pull on any thread and the whole sweater unravels.

On April 2, 2025, which the administration branded “Liberation Day,” Trump declared a national emergency over the trade deficit and used the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), the same statute we built to sanction Iran and North Korea to impose a 10 percent baseline tariff on every country on earth, plus higher “reciprocal” rates on 57 specific trading partners. IEEPA had never before been used to impose tariffs in its 48-year history. The administration was, in effect, repurposing the sanctions architecture as a general trade weapon, and aiming it primarily at allies. The Supreme Court eventually ruled, in February 2026, that IEEPA does not in fact authorize the president to impose tariffs, which the administration responded to by invoking Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 to slap a 10 percent across-the-board surcharge on imports anyway. The legal authority has changed but the policy hasn’t.

The bond market’s response to Liberation Day is worth dwelling on, because it’s the moment the system started to crack visibly. After the announcement, US equities, the dollar, and US Treasuries all sold off simultaneously. This is supposed to be impossible. The whole logic of the exorbitant privilege is that in a crisis, money flees to the United States, not from it. When 2008 happened, foreigners bought more Treasuries. When COVID happened, foreigners bought more Treasuries. When Trump announced his tariffs, foreigners sold Treasuries. The financial press called it “bond vigilantism,” which is a polite way of saying that for the first time in living memory, global capital looked at America and concluded that the safe trade was to get out of American debt. Trump paused the higher reciprocal tariffs three days later because the market vetoed him in real time, which is a nice illustration of the privilege still functioning but also an illustration of what it looks like when the privilege starts to wobble.

The bigger problem is what the tariffs reveal about how Trump understands the trade deficit. Remember that the deficit is structurally required. We send dollars out, they come back as Treasury demand, and that demand finances our government at rates no other country could dream of. The deficit is the system and Trump treats it as a flaw. He has spent his entire political career insisting that countries running trade surpluses with the US are “ripping us off,” which is roughly equivalent to a casino owner complaining that gamblers keep handing him chips. Eliminating the trade deficit, if it actually worked, would also eliminate the mechanism by which the rest of the world finances American consumption and government spending. There is no version of this that ends well. Either the tariffs fail to close the deficit, in which case they’re just a regressive tax on American consumers (the Tax Foundation puts it at roughly $1,500 per household in 2026), or they succeed, in which case we’ve cut off the pipeline of capital that funds the empire.

The most revealing application of the tariff weapon, though, is Brazil. In July 2025, Trump imposed a 50 percent tariff on Brazilian exports explicitly tied to Brazil’s prosecution of former president Jair Bolsonaro. Brazil and the US have roughly balanced trade and Brazil is not a trade adversary. The tariff was straightforwardly an attempt to coerce a foreign government into changing its domestic legal proceedings against a politician Trump personally likes. This is the sort of thing the United States used to accuse the Russians and Chinese of doing. It is also the sort of thing that makes every other government on earth wonder whether their access to the American market is contingent on never doing anything that displeases the American president personally. Trump, as he did in New York City, is running a protection racket.

And the predictable response to all of this is happening. BRICS, which I’d previously regarded as more of a bull session than an institution, met in Rio in July 2025 and produced a 31-page communiqué that is a charter for an alternative financial order: expanded use of local currencies, strengthened development bank, calls for a new reserve currency. India is still skeptical of the common currency idea and probably will remain so, but the direction is clear. Every country that watches Brazil get hit with 50 percent tariffs over its judicial system, or watches the IEEPA get invoked against Canada, draws the same conclusion: the dollar is no longer politically neutral, and prudence requires building hedges. Steve Bannon, of all people, told Politico last summer that Trump is enraged by the dedollarization push. That’s great but he’s the one driving that push.

Dismantling Security

The security pillar is the one where the dismantling has been most visible and also most uneven, because the administration keeps oscillating between blowing it up and trying to claim credit for fixing it.

Starting with allies. In the first month of the second term, Trump imposed 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico (both are allies and both are signatories of a trade agreement Trump himself negotiated in his first term) citing fentanyl trafficking as the IEEPA emergency, which was a transparent fiction since Canada accounts for a fraction of a percent of fentanyl entering the US. He simultaneously and repeatedly suggested that Canada should become the 51st state, called Justin Trudeau “Governor Trudeau,” and described the Canadian border as “an artificially drawn line.” (That’s most borders!) He refused to rule out the use of military force against Greenland and sent his vice president there to deliver, with no apparent self-awareness, a 19th century–style speech about how Denmark was failing to administer the territory properly. He threatened to retake the Panama Canal. In January 2026 the rhetoric on Greenland escalated to threats of 25 percent tariffs on Europe over the issue, prompting France to lobby for retaliation and Denmark to actually deploy additional troops to the island.

The casualness of all this has become normalized and it obscures how genuinely strange it is. The United States is openly threatening to annex the territory of treaty allies. The last time the US seriously contemplated this, James K. Polk was president and the Mexican-American War was the result. The casual extortionate framing of “nice country you’ve got there, would be a shame if something happened to it” is the language of a 19th century empire that hasn’t yet figured out it’s the 21st century. It is precisely the posture our entire postwar system was designed to avoid being seen taking. The genius of the rules-based order was that subordinate states could plausibly tell their domestic publics they were partners rather than vassals. When you publicly threaten to annex them, you give that game away. Mark Carney won the Canadian election explicitly on the message that Canada is not the 51st state, and 90 percent of Canadians now tell pollsters they oppose annexation, with the more striking finding being that 82 percent would rather become a British dominion again than join the United States. A country with whom we share the longest undefended border in the world, whose troops died alongside ours in Afghanistan, has been pushed to the point where rejoining the British Empire polls better than us.

On Ukraine, the picture is more confused, but the trajectory is the same. The administration paused military aid in July 2025 during a Defense Department capability review, then resumed it days later, then folded the funding mechanism into a NATO-financed program where European allies pay for American weapons sent to Ukraine. The November 2025 28-point peace plan, which the administration presented as a fait accompli, required Ukraine to cede territory in Donetsk that Russia had failed to seize militarily, ruled out NATO membership, capped the Ukrainian military at 600,000 personnel, and accepted a frozen front in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. Kyiv and most of Europe denounced it as a capitulation. The administration eventually walked some of it back, including by adding language modeled on Article 5 (an attack across the armistice line would be treated as a threat to “the peace and security of the transatlantic community”) and the framework that has emerged from subsequent negotiations is less catastrophic than the opening bid. But the opening bid told everyone everything they needed to know which that the United States, faced with a war of conquest in Europe waged by a nuclear-armed dictatorship, opened negotiations by offering the dictator most of what he asked for.

NATO itself survived 2025, technically. The Hague summit in June produced a communiqué that reaffirmed Article 5, named Russia as a long-term threat, and got European allies to commit to spending 5 percent of GDP on defense and defense-related expenditures by 2035. This is, in fairness, something every previous American president had been unable to extract. Obama complained about European free-riding; Biden complained about it; neither got 5 percent but Trump did. So the surface story is that the alliance is stronger; however, how much of that 5 percent was the Donald versus the massive war next door?

The deeper story is that the alliance now has to plan for the possibility of operating without us. Pentagon force-posture reviews have suggested the possibility of major drawdowns of US forces in Europe. The administration has signaled that it wants to prioritize the Indo-Pacific and the Western Hemisphere. We’ve been pivoting to Asia since I was in high school, but the Western Hemisphere bit is absolutely pants on head crazy. What pressing business do we have to attend to in the Western Hemisphere, exactly? European leaders, including Macron and Merz, have begun openly discussing European strategic autonomy, which used to be a French hobbyhorse and is now mainstream. Germany is rearming on a scale not seen since the 1930s. Poland is on track to field the largest land army in Europe. The whole Lord-Ismay logic of NATO was “keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” We are now arranging for the Americans to be partly out and the Germans to come back up. A rearmed continental Germany is not an outcome the United States should view with equanimity, and the people who built our system would be horrified to learn we’d talked ourselves into one. I don’t intend to imply that Germany will reconquer it’s neighbors again. It has changed but a strong Germany doesn’t need the United States.

The most underappreciated security cost is happening at the nuclear umbrella’s edge. South Korea has had open public debate about whether to develop its own nuclear weapons. Polling there now consistently shows majority support for an independent deterrent. Japanese politicians have begun saying out loud what was previously unsayable: that Japan should consider its options. Both countries can build nuclear weapons quickly if they decide to, and the only thing keeping them from doing it is faith in the American extended deterrent. That faith is strained when the United States is publicly debating whether it wants to be in alliances at all, and is openly threatening allies with annexation and tariffs. If Seoul or Tokyo go nuclear in the next decade, the proximate trigger will be North Korea or China and the underlying cause will be that we made our promises feel conditional. Nonproliferation has been one of the great quiet successes of American hegemony. We are putting it at risk for nothing.

Dismantling Trade and Soft Power

The trade pillar is where the dismantling has been most thorough and least photogenic, which means it has gotten less attention than it deserves.

Start with USAID. On Trump’s first day in office, he froze foreign aid. Within six weeks, the State Department had cancelled roughly 5,800 USAID contracts and 4,100 State Department grants, somewhere between 83 and 90 percent of the agency’s programs, depending on how you count. The headquarters was shuttered, with staff given fifteen-minute slots to collect their belongings. By July 1, 2025, the agency was formally absorbed into State, and fewer than 6 percent of its original employees made the transition. An organization built up over six decades, which had functionally served as one of the cheapest and most effective soft-power instruments any empire has ever fielded, was demolished in roughly five months.

The human cost has been catastrophic. Researchers estimate that aid cutoffs have already caused somewhere on the order of 750,000 excess deaths globally. The State Department disputes this figure, but disputes it without offering a competing number. There has been a 361 percent increase in cholera deaths in eastern Congo. PEPFAR programs in Uganda and Tanzania have run out of HIV medication. Famine response in Sudan has collapsed. The administration has belatedly launched a replacement, the America First Global Health Strategy, with $11 billion in commitments over five years to selected African partners, a fraction of what was lost, structured around bilateral deals rather than multilateral programs, and not codified in legislation, which means a successor administration can dismantle it as casually as Trump dismantled USAID.

This isn’t just a humanitarian story, although it is that. It’s a story about the destruction of a capability that money cannot easily rebuild. USAID’s value to the empire was never primarily measured in lives saved, although it saved a great many. Its value was that it was the American presence in places where we had no military bases and no embassies that mattered like clinics in rural Africa, agricultural extension programs in Central America, election monitors in Eastern Europe, and women’s literacy initiatives in South Asia. It was the part of America that showed up when nobody else did. Also we live in a globalized world, and so proactively treating diseases in Africa or Asia does make us safer. Whatever you think of the politics of soft power, the cost-benefit ratio was extraordinary: at less than one percent of the federal budget, USAID bought more goodwill than the entire Defense Department combined. Atul Gawande, who ran its global health portfolio under Biden, observed that you cannot rebuild a sixty-year network in a few years, and he is correct. Even if a future administration wanted to reconstitute it, the institutional knowledge has been scattered, the country relationships have lapsed, the local partner organizations have folded. China is moving into the vacuum, which is not a metaphor; Beijing has announced expansions of its own development financing in roughly the same regions USAID has retreated from.

The WTO, meanwhile, has been on life support since Trump’s first term, when the administration blocked appointments to the appellate body and effectively killed the dispute settlement mechanism. The second term has finished the job. The Liberation Day tariffs are flatly inconsistent with WTO rules; the 50 percent Brazil tariff is flatly inconsistent with WTO rules; the steel and aluminum Section 232 tariffs are flatly inconsistent with WTO rules. The institution still exists as a building in Geneva, but its core function has been abrogated by the country that wrote its founding documents. Other countries are not bothering to keep up the fiction either. The European Union has built its own anti-coercion instrument, China has accelerated its own bilateral trade architecture, and smaller countries are signing agreements with whichever big power is nearest. The Most Favored Nation principle, which was the legal heart of the postwar trading system, is functionally dead.

The brain drain has gone into reverse, which I find genuinely shocking and which historians will spend a long time analyzing. The combination of visa crackdowns, hostility toward foreign students, public threats against universities, ICE raids, and general signals that the United States no longer welcomes outsiders has produced something nobody alive has seen before: top global talent choosing not to come here, and existing talent choosing to leave. Chinese researchers in American labs are returning home. Indian graduate students are taking offers in Toronto and Berlin. European scientists who would have come for postdocs are going to Singapore and Sydney. Canadian universities are advertising directly to American faculty. This is not a trend that will reverse on its own. The brain drain was the empire’s most lucrative tribute system, and we’re paying it back with interest, in real time. A 22 year old engineer in Lagos in 2026 is not assuming, the way a 22 year old engineer in Lagos in 2006 would have, that the American future is the global future. They are looking at us and looking at other options and they are quietly hedging.

What Comes After

The thing Trump and his administration cannot see, or refuse to see, is that the American empire was never the formal Defense Department or the formal State Department or the formal Treasury Department. The empire was the trust. It was the eighty years of accumulated reputation that allowed allies to take security risks on our word, that allowed foreign central banks to park their reserves in our bonds, that allowed the smartest students in Mumbai to get on a plane to Boston without considering alternatives. That trust is the asset that doesn’t appear in the balance sheet, and it is being spent down at a pace that the people doing the spending appear not to register.

Trust is recoverable in principle. In practice, allies who have spent two years planning for a world without reliable American backing do not simply forget those plans. The defense industries that Europe is building, the rare earths supply chains that Japan and Korea are pursuing, the trade agreements that everyone is signing without us, they will all continue. Once the EU has built credible defense autonomy, it will not voluntarily re-dismantle it because a future American president promises to be nicer. Once Saudi Arabia has gotten comfortable settling oil trades in yuan, it will not return to dollar-only invoicing because that infrastructure remains a useful hedge regardless of who occupies the White House. The dismantling is creating facts on the ground that will outlast the administration that created them.

There is a darker possibility, which is that the system was always going to face stress because it was always built on a contradiction: the Triffin dilemma I mentioned earlier and the populist backlash to that contradiction was always going to come. On this reading, Trump is not the cause but the symptom. Eventually some American politician was going to look at the trade deficit and decide that the manufacturing job losses in Ohio and the rents on global savings accruing to Manhattan were too politically combustible to coexist forever. There’s something to this. The story of the rust belt is a real story; the deindustrialization of the American interior is not a media invention. The empire I described was built on a bargain that delivered cheap goods, low interest rates, and global stability in exchange for accepting that some American workers would lose their factory jobs to Mexico and China and never get them back. That bargain was sustainable as long as the people losing jobs believed they had been compensated by something. By 2016, a critical mass of them no longer believed that.

So you can read this as Trump destroying the empire out of idiocracy and spite, which I do, or you can read it as Trump being elected because the empire failed to deliver for enough of its own citizens for long enough that they wanted somebody to take a wrecking ball to it. Both can be true. The empire being structurally favorable to America does not mean it was felt as favorable by every American, and the gap between aggregate national benefit and median household experience is the gap that put Trump in office twice. The serious question, which I do not have a serious answer to, is whether the system can be reformed to close that gap or whether it has to be destroyed and replaced with something worse.

What I am confident of is that the people doing the destroying do not have a replacement in mind. There is no coherent alternative architecture being constructed, no successor institutions, no theory of how American interests get protected once the dollar isn’t universal and the alliances aren’t reliable and the soft power apparatus is gone. There is just the wrecking ball, and the assumption that whatever emerges from the rubble will be better because we will be more sovereign or more independent or more masculine or whatever the operative word is in any given week. This is not a strategy and the bill for it will be paid, with interest, by Americans who currently have no idea that an empire is what was keeping the lights on.