Once a KGB, always a KGB

Happy September, everyone!

As summer reaches its psychological end, even as extreme temperatures continue to bake Middle Tennessee, perhaps you may have, through no fault of your own, missed some of the critical stories occurring around the world. In that case, it would be my pleasure to inform you. After all, with two major wars with no end in sight raging in the heart of Eurasia, there is never a shortage of news to discuss.

The war in Iran, six months on

It’s hard to believe we have endured six long months since The United States and Israel launched devastating strikes on the Islamic Republic of Iran, deemed Operation Epic Fury, that assassinated Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and unleashed desperate, destructive Iranian retaliation across the Middle East. The goal of the attacks, as President Donald Trump clearly addressed during a speech announcing Khamenei’s demise, was to ensure that “Americans will never have to face a radical, bloodthirsty terrorist regime armed with nuclear weapons” ever again. Furthermore, Trump explicitly issued a call for “all Iranian patriots who yearn for freedom to seize this moment, to be brave, be bold, be heroic, and take back your country.”

In other words, Operation Epic Fury was designed to accomplish the two words that send the chills down the spines of those Americans with memories of Afghanistan and Iraq: regime change.

Now, six months later, Iran’s regime has indeed changed— for the worse. Tehran’s brutal domestic crackdown has only escalated. Venomous threats, once largely dismissed as theatrical balderdash for domestic hard-line consumption, now target countries as far away as Bulgaria. Commercial shipping in the Middle East, once protected by Iranian caution toward overwhelming U.S. naval superiority, has fallen prey to the predatory paranoia of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Tehran’s old doctrine of balancing revolutionary upheaval with strategic patience, as well as balancing more moderate and hard-line domestic factions, has been shattered ever since the IRGC seized complete control of the pariah nation under wartime conditions. And worst of all, at least for the United States: our munitions are running out. No doubt Beijing and Moscow are pleased.

In other words, Operation Epic Fury, while launched with the best of intentions against a truly evil regime, has turned into an epic quagmire for the United States.

Recently, following the successful naval operation to destroy Iranian mines in the now world-famous Strait of Hormuz, the rats of the IRGC (sorry, I cannot label such vile war criminals as human) swept into action to reinstall them, necessitating yet more bombing and a nagging fear inside of this author that we may be staring down the cold inevitability of a long-haul war. While I, along with everyone reading this article and nearly everyone else around the world, would like this war to end not today but yesterday, the maniacally anti-Western dogma of the IRGC makes any kind of settlement, let alone a major concession on the nuclear program, vanishingly unlikely. While perhaps one can claim that such an ideology made war inevitable between the United States and Iran, we are most certainly stuck in a potential forever war against a dangerously cunning adversary.

Ratcliffe journeys to Moscow

For decades, the relationship (or rather, lack of one) and high-stakes rivalry between the American and Russian intelligence apparatuses was legendary, inspiring the Jack Ryan series by Tom Clancy as both sides played the game of espionage and deep psychological operations aimed at dismantling the foundations of each other’s global empires. As the Committee for State Security, known around the world as the KGB, was dismantled along with the Soviet Union, these Russian intelligence operatives, including a rather ordinary midlevel bureaucrat based in East Germany, were cast adrift in a world that no longer needed them. During the early years of the Russian Federation, these so-called Chekists were reduced to the inglorious task of performing the dirty work of competing oligarchs within Russia’s borders or occasionally pulling off high-profile stunts such as the gruesome and widely publicized 2006 assassination of Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko in London with a fatal dose of polonium.

Now, with Russia experiencing a deep diplomatic freeze with both the United States and Europe since the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Chekists, who now comprise the core of President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, have pushed their operations into overdrive. Altogether, this dynamic has bombarded Europe with a new kind of violence far more audacious than mere computer hacking of American politicians. In the last three years, Europe has suffered shopping malls set ablaze in Lithuania and Poland, electronic GPS jamming in the Baltic Sea region, and most recently an attempted drone attack on a cargo shipment at Germany’s Leipzig Airport targeting military equipment bound for Ukraine. All of these incidents, and more, are not only designed to halt the weapons pipeline to Kyiv, but also to frighten Westerners about the risk of World War 3 lest we keep poking the bear.

It is in this context that CIA Director John Ratclfife embarked on an unannounced visit to Moscow on August 25. Of course, the intrigue as to why Ratcliffe made this journey, the first of a CIA director in nearly five years, has provoked a flurry of cold war-style speculation. Trump, consumed by Iran and domestic politics, largely brushed off the visit as “semi-routine,” insisting he merely hopes “to see the war with Ukraine end.” Others have speculated that Ukraine or Europe was not a point of discussion at all, and Ratcliffe merely warned Russian intelligence chiefs Alexander Bortnikov and Sergei Naryshkin, two of Putin’s most loyal Chekists, to halt intelligence sharing with Iran— an unlikely outcome considering Moscow’s bloody alliance with Tehran. The most common explanation, however, remains that Ratcliffe was in Moscow to warn against any sudden or drastic measures targeting NATO countries, especially the vulnerable Baltic States.

As someone who has visited the Baltic States multiple times and walked right up to the Russian border, I know for a fact that such assurances will be most welcome there.

Conclusion

There is a major reason why neither the conflict in Ukraine, nor the conflict in the Middle East appear to be reaching a conclusion anytime soon, despite the high costs for all sides. Both the Iranian and Russian regimes operate on a principle that the world order is a vehicle for so-called Anglo-Saxon (meaning American) hegemony that desperately seeks to destroy them. Thus, these regimes’ incentive for compromise is essentially nonexistent while their incentive for maximized disruption is vast. It’s not like mediators like Pakistan, Qatar, Turkey, and even Donald Trump haven’t tried to induce Vladimir Putin or the IRGC to see reason, but for these seasoned jihadists and Chekists, carrots are trap, and the only language that matters is force.

Toronto may look nice, but this facade is hiding a deeper rot

In the American psyche, there are some nations and cultures that still can capture our imagination, and then there are those who do not. China, Great Britain, Italy, Russia and Japan, for example, all possess a legacy of centuries or even millennia of great empires, profound literature, distinct languages, and indigenous cultures inseparable from their core nationhood. Britain, in particular, maintains a special standing in our collective mind as the mother country, the nation from which our own language, traditions and political system all descend. However, our neighbor to the north, Canada, despite sharing a 5,525-mile border, the longest in the world, and sharing a mother country in Great Britain, belongs distinctly in the latter category. And recently, Canada’s weaknesses have burst into the American news cycle in a most ugly manner.

Last week, just as it appeared that a trade agreement between the United States and Canada was imminent, the Canadian government abruptly and shockingly walked away from the negotiations, unleashing a trade war certain to rattle both economies. In a statement defending the escalation, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, the successor to the ludicrously unqualified nepo baby Justin Trudeau, claimed his government walked away from “a bad deal” that “asked too much, and offered too little” and “compromises Canada’s sovereignty and… key industries.” In short, at least according to Canada’s prime minister, the United States, under the Trump administration is nothing less than a big bully mercilessly devouring a weaker nation out of pure spite and malice. And Canadian citizens, who were already pressuring Carney to kill any trade agreement with Washington, are in lockstep with the government. In fact, according to one survey by the Angus Reid Institute, 76% of Canadians believed the prime minister made the correct decision to walk away.

I am not here to discuss the finer details of international trade—that matter is for lawyers and economists to decipher. Neither am I associated with any of the Detroit automakers whose business model has long relied on frictionless transit across the Ambassador Bridge linking the two North American nations. Furthermore, I do not wish for any Canadian, let alone any American, to lose their jobs over a trade war whose main culprit appears to be Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick—a trade war I sincerely wish had been averted. My biggest concern with Canada is not the trade balance, but what appears to be the nation’s slow-burning self-destruction.

And it all comes down to Canada’s origin story, or rather, lack of it.

The first devolution of power from Britain to the territory now known as Canada occurred in 1867, when the provinces of Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick formed Canadian Confederation, a self-governing colony still fully integrated into the British Empire. Over the subsequent decades, provinces such as Manitoba and British Columbia also joined this dominion, with the final piece, Newfoundland, not incorporated until 1949. In fact, before 1931 and the passage of the Statute of Westminster in London, Canada was entirely a British overseas territory, not a sovereign nation in any form. Unlike the United States or essentially every other country around the globe, there was no seminal, heroic event where Canada earned its right to exist as a nation. Instead, Canadian ‘independence’ was merely the outcome of a series of parliamentary procedures. No wonder so few Americans know this history, because there is simply nothing interesting to discuss.

By and large, for a century after the original confederation, Canadian identity, despite the Francophone minority in Quebec, was entirely an offshoot of British imperial identity, albeit with a distinctly Scottish flair. This identity, I believe, is best exemplified by this scene in the 1968 World War II film The Devil’s Brigade, where the Canadian units make their dramatic entrance wearing distinctly British uniforms and accompanied by a marching band with bagpipes blowing a powerful rendition of Scotland the Brave.

Today, such pageantry is a thing of the past. In the words of our friend Justin Trudeau, delivered to The New York Times shortly after his first electoral victory in 2015, Canada has become the world’s “first post-national state” where there is “no core identity” and “no mainstream.” Instead, Trudeau continues, Canada is a nation of “shared values– openness, respect, compassion, willingness to work hard, to be there for each other, to search for equality and justice.” Worse, with the trade war in full swing, Canadian identity is gravitating ever closer to one in direct opposition to the United States.

Sounds lovely, doesn’t it?

Essentially, Trudeau’s philosophy is a rejection of any notion of Canada as a nation who can be proud of its history and its distinctly Canadian identity, Canada is instead merely a political entity controlling a vast geographic zone, where anyone and anything from anywhere can be considered Canadian so long as one practices respect, compassion, or whatever Kumbaya Trudeau decides to pull out of his rear at any given moment. This dreadful policy, introduced by Justin’s father Pierre Trudeau as prime minister in 1971, is known as Multiculturalism, is an explicit rejection of the famed American Melting Pot model. In America, no matter where in the world our ancestors came from, everyone is required to abide by the values of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. This philosophy is best exemplified by Theodore Roosevelt’s 1915 speech regarding “hyphenated Americans” and warning that “The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else.”

Such clear parameters of what it means to be Canadian are unfortunately absent north of the border.

Unlike the United States, where the Continental Army fought a brutal, eight-year war of independence, or Europe, where modern national identities are the manifestation of a primordial past, Canada’s corresponding identity is entirely void of such robust foundations. Today, the identity of Canada’s past has been entirely erased by Canada’s political elite. While I feel no ill will towards the Canadian people, the same cannot be said for Canada’s leaders, especially Justin Trudeau. Unfortunately, Canada is a dying nation, and it is the utmost responsibility of the United States to ensure that such national seppuku stays north of the border.

Perhaps the only thing hotter than the Northern Hemisphere’s sweltering summer of 2026, complete with a Europe literally on fire and a triple-digit heat advisory last weekend that stretched Middle Tennessee’s air conditioners to their outer limits, may be President Donald Trump’s temper at traditional American allies who defy his wishes. While Seoul, as well as the American foreign policy mainstream, has long been annoyed by the unholy alliance of Trump and North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un who deem the so-called Freedom Shield biannual military exercises between the longtime allies provocative instead of stabilizing, the latest ally to meet the president’s ire is one who, at least until this year, few Americans knew existed.

Introducing the Sultanate of Oman.

Ruled since 2020 by Sultan Haitham bin Tariq Al Said, Oman sits on the eastern tip of the Arabian Peninsula on the shores of the Arabian Sea. Like almost every nation in the region, the sultanate’s economy overwhelmingly relies on the export of oil and natural gas to countries such as China, India, and South Korea. However, unlike its wealthy Arab counterparts, Oman has two massive advantages— both through the sheer luck of geography. First, it is the only one of the six Gulf Cooperation Council states, plus multi-million barrel-per-day producer Iraq, whose maritime trade route are entirely free regarding the Islamic Republic of Iran’s death grip of the now globally known Strait of Hormuz. In practice, this means Omani energy exports have been spared— and continue to function normally, much to the jealous chagrin of Oman’s neighbors. Second, Oman is Iran’s direct geographic counterpart directly across the strategic maritime chokepoint.

I must apologize for a little dive into Middle Eastern history, but as anyone reading this blog ought to know, one can never properly grasp the current political situation without a basic historical context. After all, my favorite quotation in human history is George Santayana’s “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Anyway, since the expulsion of the Portuguese from the Arabian coast in 1650, the Musandam Peninsula, Hormuz’ southern shore, has been under the control of tribes loyal to the Al Said dynasty. This lineage has remained in power since 1749, albeit between 1798 and 1951 as a client state of Great Britain who, in exchange for dynastic security, guaranteed the safety of Britain’s Middle Eastern trade routes.

The Musandam Peninsula itself, however, remains a geographic oddity. Since the local ash-Shihuh tribe, which have made its home there for centuries have been loyal to Oman’s Al-Saids rather than to the seven noble families who cobbled together the United Arab Emirates in 1971, the peninsula remains to this day an Omani exclave surrounded by Emirati land borders. For decades, the shores of the strategic peninsula were dotted with sleepy fishing villages, somehow never erupting despite the dark shadow of the expansionist regime known as the Islamic Republic of Iran barely 20 miles across the Strait of Hormuz. In my frank opinion, such vulnerable geography badly undercuts Muscat’s self-aggrandized reputation as a benevolent Switzerland of the Middle East. Together, the two nations are the co-gatekeepers of the strait. And for nearly six months, one of them has slammed that gate shut.

For several weeks now, both Iran and Oman have engaged in sensitive, high-stakes negotiations over a long-term governance arrangement regarding the Strait of Hormuz. Just when it appeared that a diplomatic breakthrough was imminent, Iran’s Supreme National Security Council barked out a litany of sweeping, unilateral demands, including a complete U.S. military withdrawal and immediate, unconditional sanctions relief, and even reparations. If enacted, such concessions would represent a historic capitulation by the United States and its Gulf Arab allies to an adversary who wants to rule the Persian Gulf through blackmail and brute force. For a rogue state who has behaved with reckless violence and impunity, no self-respecting nation would ever cave to such extortion. Recent further menacing from Tehran, shall we say, does not help.

But there remain further roadblocks, not in Muscat but in Washington. According to a report released Tuesday by The Associated Press, President Trump, who has recently offered some colorful comments claiming the strait as sovereign American territory, was angered by what many administration officials resent as double dealing by the Sultanate, especially proposals for Oman to collect “voluntary service fees” for ships crossing the waterway. Such frustration spilled over into a threat, delivered to Fox News correspondent Trey Yingst to “bomb the s*** out of” Oman if the Sultanate “gets in the way” of Washington’s economic blockade against the Islamic republic. A vulgar threat, yes, but a threat provoked by legitimate frustrations regarding Iran’s refusal to compromise and Oman’s role in enabling its rogue neighbor. When pressed on the matter on Monday in the Oval Office, the president again refused to rule out a military campaign.

While it is most difficult for me to imagine Pentagon planners drawing up an operation to attack Omani targets, considering Muscat’s long-running security relationship with Washington, Trump’s frustration exposes what I believe is a fundamental miscalculation of Omani foreign policy. While publicly boasting the label Switzerland of the Middle East, never mind that Switzerland actually has rational neighbors, Omani diplomacy has amounted to little more than crude chicanery that plays Washington and Tehran against each other while amassing all the profits. This strategy works handsomely in peacetime, but when the guns of war are unleashed, such double dealing always goes down in flames. And it isn’t just Washington who is furious with Oman’s trickery, but Iran as well.

So that is the lesson of the week. You can always attempt to reel in the benefits of superpower hostility, but in the end, you will get burned. And the Sultanate of Oman may just learn this lesson the hard way.

Of all the many injustices and outrages that occur in our world, there are few, if any, that frustrate me more than revisionist history. As a writer dedicated to informing my readers of the most accurate information I can access, I consider the world of misinformation and rumors to be my most formidable enemy. I may have even called you out personally if I spot such misinformation. For a man who prefers to avoid confrontation and not hurt anyone’s feelings, such a step is most, shall we say, audacious. Even worse than a TikTok algorithm run amok, however, are the effects of decades of a top-down smear campaign against a now-deceased American president whose accomplishments, after years of mockery, are finally receiving the praise and recognition they deserve.

Fifty-two years ago this month, Richard Milhous Nixon, America’s 37^th president, resigned in disgrace after a two-year saga in which Republican political operatives (operating without Nixon’s foreknowledge or approval) staged a now-infamous break-in of the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the sprawling Watergate Hotel complex in Washington, D.C. to uncover dirt on potential opponents for Nixon’s 1972 reelection campaign. Nixon’s fatal mistake, ordering the FBI to halt its investigation of such criminal misconduct, caught on tape only six days after the break-in, was a blatant obstruction of justice. Once the “smoking gun” tape was released to the public, Richard Nixon lost all political support, even from other Republicans. As he was drowning in deep depression, heavy alcoholism, and self-medication, Nixon had little alternative but to vacate the office he had spent decades working to achieve.

In an era when there were only three major news networks, Nixon had no alternative media space where he could defend himself beyond press conferences that were immediately dismissed by the Washington press corps as deceitful. However, as the many failed attempts by current president Donald Trump’s enemies to derail his political career, including three assassination attempts, have made evident, the media landscape of 2026 is not the same network that defeated Richard Nixon in 1974. Yes, there is ample misinformation and outright junk out in the grand ecosystem of cyberspace. But there also exists a space for redeeming historical figures wronged in their lifetime.

Let me introduce to you all the viral phenomenon known as Nixonmaxxing.

In social media slang, maxxing, according to Merriam-Webster, “describes the practice of optimizing a specific aspect of one’s life, often to an extreme degree.” While most maxxing trends are not worth our time here, Nixonmaxxing is exactly the clever mix of Generation Z social media habits fused with Richard Nixon’s insights about American society and international affairs our nation and world need.

Back in 2018, Jim Byron, the president of the Nixon Foundation based in the 37^th president’s home state of California, began to seek out ideas to make the one-time villain of Watergate not only relevant, but cool. In one video posted on the foundation’s Instagram account in May, Nixon waves to adoring crowds and shakes the hands of his supporters young and old set to a modern-day rap soundtrack. In another video, the fictional character Don Draper from the AMC series Mad Men calls Nixon the “Abe Lincoln of California,” set to yet another rap track, this time by R&B superstar Drake. In the second video, Draper favorably juxtaposes Nixon’s humble background as the second of five sons (two of whom died young) to two hardworking parents on a California citrus farm and his naval service with John F. Kennedy’s privileged East Coast upbringing as his justification for voting for Nixon in the 1960 presidential election.

The trend has even received a shoutout from Vice President JD Vance, who, while speaking at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in Nixon’s birthplace of Yorba Linda, California, went so far as to call himself an admirer of the 37^th president, claiming that Watergate would have been a “12-hour news story” today and also compared Nixon to Donald Trump as victims of a “deep state” devoted to their political and personal ruin. Whatever one’s opinion on Donald Trump and the so-called “deep state,” there is no doubt to me that whatever Richard Nixon’s flaws, the press, along with the entire Georgetown Cocktail Circuit, (as the Washington elite bubble was known during Nixon’s era) was devoted to ruining a man whose only crime was speaking to the interests of the silent majority against the radicalism slowly seeping into elite media discourse.

Today, more than 50 years later, the world Nixon so feared has come home to roost.

In his later years, Richard Nixon labored to remove the shame of Watergate from his legacy by returning to the public eye as a sage of foreign affairs. Since his administration successfully extracted the United States from Vietnam while simultaneously beginning the process of normalizing the bilateral relationship with the People’s Republic of China, Nixon’s insights, otherwise scorned by the same DC cocktail establishment, could not simply be ignored. Only one month before his passing from a massive stroke in 1994, Nixon mailed a letter to President Bill Clinton warning that the relationship between Russia and Ukraine was “highly explosive,” and if allowed to explode, “will make Bosnia look like a PTA garden party.” Nearly 30 years before the outbreak of the deadliest European conflict since 1945, Nixon, who visited Russia four times after his presidency, was more aware than anyone of the bitterness in Russian society regarding their nation’s 1991 collapse.

Perhaps the most prophetic of all were Nixon’s comments on Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the fallen Shah of Iran. Pahlavi, like Nixon, was a man thoroughly scorned during the 1970s due to his crackdowns on civil liberties and massive oil wealth, and much of the Western intelligentsia celebrated his 1979 downfall just as enthusiastically as they celebrated Nixon’s. Of course, little did any of these righteous liberals know that the regime that emerged after 1979 would make the shah’s repression look like community service. And Richard Nixon, who attended Pahlavi’s funeral in 1980 when the rest of the world turned the cold shoulder to a monarch who legitimately attempted to modernize and improve his nation, was, again, vindicated. In 1980, Nixon bluntly told journalist Barbara Walters that if the United States did not stand up for its friends like the shah, “we’re not going to have friends” and that the choice in Iran “was not between the shah and somebody better, but between the shah and somebody infinitely worse.”

Again, Richard Nixon had utterly obliterated the quixotic and doomed moral crusades of the Georgetown Cocktail Circuit.

Yes, we all know that Richard Nixon made one crucial mistake, a mistake for which he paid dearly. Still, he was a man who worked hard to pull himself from poverty all the way to the White House, achieved diplomatic success in Beijing and Paris, and offered an ungrateful public his prophetic intuition of foreign affairs as well as the danger of domestic radicalism. And that is why we ought to relegate Nixon’s mistake to the historical margins. While it may take a few 21^st-century algorithms and the clunky phrase Nixonmaxxing to fulfill the task of informing our young people about the cruel realities of the world, it is fine by me that this historical injustice is finally being redressed.

When I was little boy, all those years ago in New Mexico, I was one of those children who decided to, rather than play sports or video games, memorize the chronology of every single American President, from George Washington to, at the time, George W. Bush. One of my favorites I came across was William Howard Taft, the 27^th officeholder (though only the 26^th man) to assume the presidency. My admiration for Taft had little to do with the merits and accomplishments of the Ohio-born lawyer, judge, territorial governor, cabinet secretary, president, and eventually Chief Justice of the United States. No, it was entirely because this little boy was amused by Taft’s, shall we say, robust frame. One of my favorite children’s books happened to be entitled President Taft is Stuck in the Bath. The more one learns more about the life of our 27^th President, the more one realizes that William Howard Taft was far more than just obese. He was a legal genius whose vision still shapes our courts today.

Peaking at a corpulent 354 pounds, William Howard Taft was by far the heaviest among all the American Presidents. His daily food intake clocked in at a astonishing 8,000 calories, including two 12-ounce steaks (one for breakfast and another for dinner), three buttermilk waffles drenched in maple syrup for breakfast, a hearty lunch comprising four mutton chops topped with potatoes, jelly, and a mountain of whipped cream, and the heaviest meal of all, dinner, where Taft gorged on salads, roast turkey, salmon, and more potatoes on top of his second 12-ounce steak. Such culinary excess eventually caught up with him, as Taft suffered from a parade of unpleasant ailments, including sleep apnea, severe bowel irregularity, and even trouble breathing. His frame was also, unsurprisingly, viciously mocked by the press. These struggles pushed the 27^th president into a lifelong hamster wheel cycling between these aforementioned binges and exhausting crash diets.

Unlike his muscular and energetic predecessor Theodore Roosevelt, Taft’s preferred exercise was a round of golf. After being introduced to the game in the summer of 1894 in Canada, Taft became hooked, teeing up at the Chevy Chase Club in Maryland five days a week when residing in Washington. While Roosevelt criticized Taft’s habit, nothing could stop Taft from exercising his lifelong passion, not even his weight (this was after all, an era before golf carts). Even during the 1908 election, when Taft’s “aristocratic” habit was a political liability, Taft wrote,

Preceding the late election campaign there were many of my sympathizers and supporters who depreciated its becoming known that I was addicted to golf, as evidence of aristocratic tendencies and a desire to play a rich man’s game. You know and I know that there is nothing that furnishes a greater test of character and self-restraint, nothing which puts one on an equality with one’s fellows or, I may say, puts one lower than one’s fellows than the game of golf.

Amen, William.

However, the true legacy of William Howard Taft is not his physique. It is the man’s accomplishments, both inside, but more so outside the White House. Born in Cincinnati in 1857, father was Alphonso Taft, the patriarch of the Ohio political dynasty who served each as Secretary of War, Attorney General, Ambassador to Austria-Hungary, and finally Ambassador to Russia. However, unlike his father, the young William, disgusted by the brazen corruption of the Gilded Age, wanted absolutely nothing to do with politics and instead found his calling in the practice of law, at which he excelled. After graduating second in his class from Yale University in 1878, Taft returned to Cincinnati and established himself almost immediately as a prominent member of city’s legal establishment. However, by Taft’s 30^th birthday, it was clear that he was destined for judicial benches far weightier than those in Cincinnati.

What followed was nothing less than a rocket ship to the legal and political stratosphere. In 1890, President Benjamin Harrison appointed Taft as the United States Solicitor General at age 32, the youngest individual before or since to be the chief counsel of the executive branch arguing before the Supreme Court of the United States. For this author who turns 32 in October and who found his niche only a few years ago, such a promotion is, by anyone’s account, nothing short of astounding. Two years later, Taft joined the bench of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, where he served for eight years on the bench while specializing in labor and antitrust cases. While balancing the workload of the federal judiciary, Taft still managed to find time to lecture for two hours a week at the University of Cincinnati Law School. Becoming President of the United States was still not in Taft’s plans.

By 1900, the United States was an expanding colonial power. One of these new colonies happened to be the Philippines, an Asian acquisition from the Spanish-American War. However, the Filipino population did not take kindly to their new rulers, and Washington needed a way out of a costly counterinsurgency. In 1901, Taft arrived in Manila with the mission to pacify the restless Filipinos. As a legal expert devoted to building a legal framework for a population with no concept of the rule of law, William Howard Taft was the perfect man for the job. In the place of ruthless crackdowns, institutionalized segregation, or forced assimilation, Taft made the wise decision to treat the Filipinos humanely. After his appointment as governor, Taft implemented land reform, distributing farmland to peasants, while institutionalizing strong legal and education systems Taft hoped would eventually allow the Philippines to achieve full independence. As a result, within 50 years, the Philippines became a fully sovereign state.

In 1904, Taft returned to the United States to become Theodore Roosevelt’s Secretary of War, and it quickly became clear that Taft was being groomed as Roosevelt’s preferred successor. Thus, Taft, a distinguished judge who did not dream of a political career, was on the fast track towards the highest office in the land. And on November 3, 1908, the American public gave the judge from Cincinnati their stamp of approval to become the 27^th President of the United States. Unfortunately for Taft, the job did not sit well with him. Having yo-yoed his weight for years, the stress of the presidency pushed him into those dreadful culinary habits discussed above, a lifestyle that proved disastrous for his health. Taft’s overeating unleashed a vicious cycle where his weight gain produced ever more physical agony, thus escalating Taft’s already elevated mental stress and further fueling his massive appetite just to cope with it all. By the last full year of his term in 1912, the man was absolutely miserable, with golf as his only relief from the pain.

To William Howard Taft’s credit, and Theodore Roosevelt’s chagrin, Taft broke up more monopolies (75 investigations) than his fabled Trust Buster” predecessor, as, unlike Roosevelt, Taft was philosophically committed to upholding the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 clause-by-clause. While his predecessor was content to manage and work with “good trusts” whose existence served the public interests while dismantling “bad trusts” abusing consumers, Taft made no such exception. He was a man of the law first and foremost and thus unwilling to tolerate any corporation whose practices clearly violated it. By 1911, when Taft’s administration launched another investigation against the US Steel corporation, the gloves came off between the two men, spawning one of the most legendary feuds in American political history, with sharp insults flying in both directions. While Roosevelt insulted Taft as a fathead and stupid, deeply wounding Taft, the 27^th president rebutted by accusing Roosevelt of being a demagogue and a dangerous egotist.

For Taft, insults targeting his weight crossed the line and wounded a deeply kind and warmhearted man known for both his booming belly laugh and sensitive nature.

The pair’s ugly vendetta ultimately led to Roosevelt’s “Bull Moose” defection from the Republican party and their mutual defeat 1912 presidential election, and Taft, freed from the job he so hated, was finally free to pursue his passion for the rest of his life: the law. So unhealthy and miserable was the 27^th president, that another term likely would have killed him. For the next eight years, the now former president returned to his alma mater of Yale and taught constitutional law, where his warmhearted nature made him beloved by both students and faculty, earning him the nickname Big Bill. However, this name may have been a misnomer, for it was at Yale where Taft finally committed himself to exercising through daily walks and losing weight, dropping down to the relatively slim frame of 244 pounds and publishing continued critiques of what he believed were executive abuses of power by the Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson Administrations. In Taft’s own words, “it seems to me as if I were young again and had shed some of the flesh that evidences advancement in years.”

After years of physical and emotional suffering, William Howard Taft was finally happy and healthy.

It was after 1921 when Taft finally was offered his opportunity to shine. Even into the 1920s, the Supreme Court of the United States was a mess. In that era, any case, no matter how frivolous or constitutionally irrelevant, had the right be heard by the highest court in the land. In practice, this meant that even a minor dispute between two men from Taft’s old home of Cincinnati with zero constitutional relevance held the same status with the most complex constitutional questions, ensuring the court would be overworked with frivolous cases and leave the most critical cases in limbo for years. It was President Warren G. Harding (not a great guy, by the way) who offered, upon the death of Chief Justice Edward D. White, Taft the opportunity to succeed him. After nearly half a century of honing his legal expertise, interrupted by four years in the White House he hated, Taft was now offered the job he had always cherished.

Today, Taft is known as “the Father of the Modern Supreme Court,” and for good reason. Under the Chief Justice’s own guidance, Congress in 1925 passed the Judges Act, a law that not only eliminated direct appeals from lower district courts but also, critically, gave the Supreme Court discretion over its own docket of cases, ensuring the most critical constitutional questions could not only be heard but properly scrutinized. The system Taft designed survives to this day. So in love with his new job was Chief Justice Taft that he even went so far as to write “I don’t remember that I ever was President.” After Taft died in 1930, it was clear to everyone at the time that his legacy would be firmly judicial, not presidential.

In conclusion, let us reflect on William Howard Taft not as the obese man who allegedly (the incident never occurred) needed help just to climb out of his bathtub, but the legal scholar whose brilliant mind not only was a tremendous asset in his lifetime, but has lived on more than a century later in the fundamental structure of American federal courts. Such a reflection would most certainly please the Chief Justice from Cincinnati, likely as he enjoys his heavenly round of golf.

It was a lovely two months. Not since May 13 have I published a single entry relating to the conflict in the Middle East. Thanks to three weeks in Europe, a very special anniversary, and a brief window where it seemed that a peaceful Middle Eastern order could be at hand, I was offered a blissful reprieve from all bad news hailing from the region that has never ceased to give me and other geopolitically-minded researchers headaches. Just a couple weeks ago, traffic was up in the Strait of Hormuz and 47-year archenemies the United States and Iran met directly on the shores of Switzerland’s picturesque Lake Lucerne. The radical, hardline Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) then had other ideas.

Beyond the escalating tit-for-tat in the Persian Gulf, one must ask, was this war, perpetuated by Iranian hard-liners currently resisting a reasonable peace agreement inevitable, or was it avoidable? If one looks at two critical moments, I begin to lean more towards the former.

Back in 2015, you probably remember the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), an arrangement signed between the Obama Administration, in concert with other global powers, and the Islamic Republic of Iran to almost completely dismantle the latter’s uranium enrichment program that had long been a constant source of regional instability. Because the United States and Israel have long maintained an unwritten doctrine that Iran successfully weaponizing radioactive material into a deliverable nuclear bomb is such a dangerous outcome that pre-emptive military action would become mandatory, Washington at the time opted to seek out a diplomatic solution lest this terrible binary ever be reached. The core provisions of the agreement would be the end of multilateral sanctions against the Islamic Republic in exchange for Tehran allowing inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) to supervise the de-enrichment process and never, ever, develop a nuclear weapon.

While the JCPOA was noble, and Tehran continued to comply for quite some time, hard-liners on both sides fiercely attacked the agreement. For the most militant anti-Western Iranian factions, such as the IRGC, the deal was a treacherous capitulation to the Great Satan that would dismantle Iran’s defenses. Likewise hostile to the nuclear agreement were hawks in the Republican Party including, to no one’s surprise, our friend Senator Lindsey Graham, who called the JCPOA a “disaster” and a “death sentence for Israel” and dismissed the IAEA inspection regime as a “complete joke.” However, the JCPOA’s executioner was none other than first-term Donald Trump, who lamented, “The Iran deal is a terrible deal. We paid $150 billion. We gave $1.8 billion in cash. That’s actual cash, barrels of cash. It’s insane. It’s ridiculous.” While technically the cash payout was the outcome of an unrelated legal dispute, the optics of the arrangement proved catastrophic for the JCPOA.

Less than three years and one presidential signature later, the Iran Nuclear Deal was dead, and with it the first critical safeguard to prevent war.

In the years that followed, Iran, again snarled by sanctions and with nothing to lose, resumed its uranium enrichment as further diplomacy to resurrect a nuclear agreement went nowhere and the regime’s misconduct grew ever more brazen. However, the second critical moment is what I believe made this current nightmare in the Persian Gulf inevitable. On October 7, 2023, 50 years to the day after the Arab invasion of Israel that sparked the Yom Kippur War, Palestinian terrorists from Hamas, a key proxy militia of Iran, unleashed a devastating and horrific ground offensive deep into Israeli territory that slaughtered hundreds of Israeli civilians and unleashed a conflict that obliterated the Hamas-mismanaged Gaza Strip. This atrocity fundamentally and permanently altered and radicalized Israeli strategic doctrine. While once Jerusalem could believe its enemies could be deterred by self-preservation instinct, Hamas’ miscalculation proved that Iran’s notorious Axis of Resistance meant exactly what they said.

Now, instead of merely deterring threats, Israel will act, despite the widespread condemnation of the international community, to preemptively dismantle threats before they materialize, even if a threat is not deemed imminent. In practice, this doctrine ensures Israel is locked in a forever war against adversaries who will never renounce their ambition to destroy Israeli statehood. Likewise, if any Axis front is attacked, all are bound to retaliate, pulling Israel deeper into the vortex of a multi-front war. The next two-and-a-half years after the 2023 Hamas attack were a series of close calls, managed escalations, and Israeli provocations that even aggravated their closest allies in Washington. Yet somehow, the United States and Iran managed to skirt by with only 28 hostile exchanges due to Tehran’s then-aversion to all-out war with an adversary everyone at the time expected would prevail.

Not anymore.

With the Trump Administration now formally notifying Congress of a resumption of hostilities with Iran, few, if any, expect the conflict, initially expected to only last days, to end anytime soon. The Iranian Revolutionary Guards, dangerous men who thrive on conflict and whose bloody grip on power in Tehran would be seriously imperiled by a permanent peace agreement, have nothing to lose in their determination to humiliate the United States into withdrawing from the region— an outcome that would ensure the vassalization of the entire region under their command. Even if Trump wants out, these bloodthirsty barbarians simply cannot allow it.

Returning to my original question, I would describe the Middle East over the past several years, at least since the October 7 attacks but most likely stretching even further back to the collapse of the nuclear agreement in 2018, as existing in the presence of the theatrical notion of Chekhov’s Gun: an object, which may appear irrelevant, that’s bound to detonate at some point. In this instance, the gun was the ever-present specter of all-out war between the United States and Iran. Even though neither side wanted one, mutual red lines (especially relating to the nuclear program) and autonomous allies like Israel and Hamas made the situation downright combustible. Just because the trigger happened to be an infamous meeting in the White House Situation Room where Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu provided dubious intelligence of Tehran’s alleged vulnerability doesn’t mean there were not dozens if not hundreds of triggers that could have sparked the gun to go off.

And detonate, the Middle East did.

Air Force veteran. United States Senator. Foreign policy hawk. King of the Sunday morning talk shows. Fierce defender of President Donald Trump. One can assign many labels to the recently and shockingly deceased South Carolinian Lindsey Graham, but discreet was certainly not one of them. Following his initial election as a US Senator in 2002, Graham established himself as one of the most visible, and most opinionated, individuals in the chamber on the north side of the United States Capitol. Then suddenly, on Saturday evening, shortly after returning from one of his many journeys overseas, Lindsey Graham was found in his Washington home unresponsive and in cardiac arrest and was declared deceased at 10:23 PM.

Here is a look back at the life and legacy of South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham.

Born and raised in the Upstate of South Carolina, not far from this author’s alma mater of Furman University, Lindsey Graham joined the Reserve Officer Training Corps at the University of South Carolina in 1973 and devoted his early life to serving his country and the study of law, earning his Juris Doctor from the same institution in 1981. In the mid-1980s, Graham, with his distinct and unmistakable Southern drawl, served as a JAG attorney stationed in Frankfurt, in what was then West Germany, eventually being promoted to the role of chief United States Air Force prosecutor in Europe. In 1989, Graham left active duty to join the South Carolina Air National Guard, and even as his political career began to blossom, remained in the US Air Force Reserves until 2015.

Following a brief stint in the South Carolina House of Representatives, Lindsey Graham was elected to the US House of Representatives as part of the Republican Revolution of 1994. In the House, Graham’s sharp-tongued Southern drawl arrived in America’s living room as one of the most resolute advocates of the impeachment of President Bill Clinton in 1998. Despite his lifelong bachelorhood and rumors of closeted homosexuality, Lindsey Graham voted for both the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 and then as a United States Senator the Federal Marriage Amendment in 2006. Despite his fiercely conservative posture on almost everything else, Graham’s first two senate terms saw multiple bipartisan efforts, fiercely opposed by the Republican Party base, to pass comprehensive immigration reform.

However, it was foreign policy that will forever define Senator Lindsey Graham’s legacy.

Graham’s closest friends and allies in the United States Senate were Arizona Republican John McCain and Connecticut Democrat Joe Lieberman, two men who regularly acted as thorns in the sides of their respective party leaderships. Together, the three men were known as the Three Amigos, distinguished by their absolute devotion to the creed that only American hard power can make the world a safer place against dangerous adversaries like Iran, Russia, and Islamist terrorism, and anything less would be a Munich-style appeasement. In practice, this belief ensured Lindsey Graham never met a military intervention he didn’t like. In Iraq, when the George W. Bush Administration made plans to deploy a surge of troops in 2007, it was the Three Amigos who whipped support in Congress even as public opposition to the war mounted. In Syria, Graham advocated a close alliance with Kurdish forces as our greatest ally against the barbarians of Islamic State.

Despite a brief stumble last year following the calamitous Oval Office meltdown between Presidents Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky, Lindsey Graham was a long-time supporter of Ukraine and perhaps Capitol Hill’s sharpest critic of Vladimir Putin’s regime. In fact, Ukraine happened to be Graham’s final overseas destination, where he met with the newly emboldened Zelensky and warned Moscow, “I have never been more optimistic than I am today that we have the formula to end this war (and) help Ukraine be more lethal. Let those supporting Russia to know there’s going to be a price to be paid... and to try to find an off-ramp — not to humiliate Putin, but to end this war so… Ukraine will thrive.” Indeed, Graham may have been the critical link who helped bridge the chasm between the two presidents who famously came to blows not even 18 months ago.

Senator Graham’s consistently hawkish stance, a principle from which he never wavered throughout his entire career, certainly had its dark side. Despite deep skepticism not only with US allies but also within the Trump Administration, there is no denying that Lindsey Graham was one of the principal architects of Trump’s fateful, and according to most of Washington, catastrophic decision to launch a full-throttle military attack on the Islamic Republic of Iran. As not only one of Israel’s strongest supporters on Capitol Hill but also a close ally to the exiled Iranian opposition, Graham had long urged multiple presidents to finally solve America’s 47-year Iran crisis and destroy the religious nazis once and for all. After multiple meetings with Benjamin Netanyahu and outbreaks of violence across the Middle East, Graham’s intervention has stuck the United States in another forever war with an adversary who despises compromise.

Whatever one thought of Lindsey Graham, there is no denying that despite his short, 5’7” frame (this author once met the man back in 2022), he was a larger-than-life public figure not only in Washington, but worldwide. Regularly fraternizing with heads of state and other movers and shakers across the globe, Lindsey Graham was a Washington legend whose absence in the corridors of power and the Sunday morning political talk shows will be profound. As the last of the Three Amigos, perhaps Lindsey Graham’s sudden passing will be viewed years from now as the definitive end of America’s era of military interventionism.

Well, all good things must come to an end.

Last Monday evening at Seattle’s Lumen Field, the US men’s national soccer team succumbed to a 4-1 demolition by Belgium’s Red Devils and have exited the 2026 World Cup. Tragically, all those American Outlaw renditions of John Denver’s sweet-and-simple yet legendary 1971 melody “Country Roads” have now fallen silent. However, victorious in the Round of 16 against our hockey-loving, yet only silver medal-winning neighbors to the north were defeated by the Kingdom of Morocco’s Atlas Lions, the national team named for a species of feline carnivore now extinct in the wild and whose only remaining specimens live in the Temara Zoo in the Moroccan capital of Rabat.

So, you may be asking, why am I going on about Morocco here? The answer comes down to an undiscovered, but still groundbreaking, footnote in America’s 250-year history.

On December 20, 1777, Sultan Mohammed III, eager to expand trade to boost his regime’s coffers, opened Moroccan ports to about a dozen Christian nations with whom his kingdom had no diplomatic relations. One of the nations mentioned by the Sultan’s declaration was none other than the infant republic in North America fighting for its survival without any foreign assistance, as France was to only join our side two months later. Including a totally unrecognized entity on par with established European states like Austria, Prussia, and Naples was certainly a bold move. But Mohammed was a bold man.

You see, 18^th century Bourbon France, like Britain, was an unabashedly imperialist power whose only restraint on not feasting upon a technologically and culturally “inferior” nation in its backyard like Morocco was the ongoing war with Britain fought across multiple global fronts. France had attempted an invasion of Morocco as recently as 1765, so it was natural that Benjamin Franklin, representing a nation in desperate need of French help, ignored the Sultan’s letter. Ghosted for nearly seven years by the now victorious and recognized United States and suffering an economic downturn, Mohammed III put all his chips down by seizing an American merchant vessel, the Betsey, and holding the crew for ransom in the port of Tangier.

Sultan Mohammed III was not a man who swallowed an insult.

Too weak to rescue the hostages by force, the US government under the failed Articles of Confederation agreed to pay the Sultan a humiliating $30,000 ransom to release the detained seamen 9 months later, a complete rip-off long before North Korea and Iran began making similar demands and begin negotiations on the framework of a bilateral relationship— lest any hostage incidents occur again. The man chosen for the task of opening North African markets the United States was Thomas Barclay, the American consul in Paris. With the helpful encouragement of the Spanish government, Barclay’s mission concluded successfully in the Summer of 1786 with the signing of blandly titled Treaty of Amity and Friendship, more commonly known today as the Treaty of Marrakech.

The Treaty of Marrakech, in force for 240 years, is now the oldest uninterrupted bilateral agreement with a foreign state in American history. Not bad for a small and then-impoverished country in North Africa, eh?

Since 1786, relations between the two countries have blossomed. In 1867, the United States was a party to the Cape Spartel Lighthouse Treaty, which also included nations like Britain and Spain, that guaranteed the Strait of Gibraltar’s neutrality and free commercial passage. Perhaps the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps should take note, but that’s just my idea… In World War II, Morocco became the critical hub for the US military to push the Third Reich out of North Africa before their ultimate defeat in 1945.

Today, the United States Armed Forces has led its largest Africa-centric military exercises in Morocco, exercises awesomely named African Lion, since 2005 in a coalition with more than 40 other countries. While bilateral trade is a modest $7.4 billion, Morocco has positioned itself on the forefront of modern warfare by opening the first ever drone training hub on the African continent. The security relationship between the United States and one of our oldest allies remains rock solid, so long as the current Makhzen political order remains in place in Rabat. Mohammed III’s direct descendant, Mohammed VI, while a prickly and arrogant man who, according to our Hungarian guide, refused to let a woman walk in front of him, is at least an ally of some sort (see note).

If there’s any team left in this World Cup for whom you should cheer for, my money is on the Atlas Lions of the Kingdom of Morocco.

Note: Shortly after I finished this essay, the Atlas Lions were defeated 2-0 by Kylian Mbappe and a stacked French national team. While Morocco’s World Cup journey may be over, Moroccans abroad aren’t going away quietly. In fact, last night’s disgraceful conduct by the Moroccan diaspora across Europe is a tell-tale sign that the ever prickly Mohammed VI, just like Nicolas Maduro and former Mexican President AMLO, ensures that his subjects who do emigrate are anything but the best and brightest the kingdom has to offer. While the Moroccan monarch may be an ally to the United States, for Europe, it is an entirely different story…

Author’s Note: the following article has also been published on Breitbart News, as a part of their “Celebrating American Greatness” series in honor of America 250. Back in April, I visited Mr. Polk’s home in Columbia, Tennessee, and knew he was exactly the man whom I should honor for this year’s celebration. While you may or may not agree with everything Breitbart writes, I hope you all appreciate that I am tremendously honored to have finally been published in a national news outlet. I would like to thank everyone at Breitbart News, as well as Dinesh D’Souza, for this wonderful opportunity. I hope this will be the start of a new chapter in my life. My article can be found on this link.

Kind Regards to all my readers,

Samuel Waitt

1.2 million square miles.

This was the amount of territory that was incorporated by the United States under the Administration of James. K Polk, the 11th President of the United States, between 1845 and 1849. This amounts to more than one-third of the entire territory of the continental 48 states of America.

When we hear the phrases coast to coast or sea to shining sea, we must recognize that during the first half of the 19^th century, such geographic parameters were merely a dream for men like James K. Polk and the Jacksonian Democrats who supported him. Yet he’s the one who got it done.

Many Americans, including future president Abraham Lincoln, were adamantly opposed to this notion. However, the lawyer from Columbia, Tennessee stood firm to his vision and accomplished in one four-year term more than many presidents have in two. Here is why we should all, for our nation’s glorious 250^th birthday, celebrate the legacy of James K. Polk.

Born in North Carolina in 1795, James Knox Polk and his family journeyed across the Appalachians to the frontier of Maury County, Tennessee when James, the eldest of ten children, was 11. James’ childhood was difficult, as his frail health, compounded by chronic, severe abdominal pain meant he could not perform any of the manual labor vital to surviving the hardships of frontier life.

At age 17, Polk was subjected to a radical, experimental surgery by Dr Ephraim McDowell in Kentucky where he was operated upon while upside down to remove the urinary bladder stones that were the cause of his chronic pain. Throughout the excruciating operation, the sickly teenager was only offered brandy to dull the pain. The surgery was ultimately a success, the abdominal pain melted away, and James K. Polk was ready to embark on his career.

After achieving a law degree from the University of North Carolina in 1818, Polk quickly became enthralled by Andrew Jackson and “Old Hickory’s” style of politics and jumped into the political arena himself. In 1823, Polk was elected to the Tennessee House of Representatives, and within two years, he was already in Washington as a member of US House of Representatives.

During this period, Polk married Sarah Childress, a society hostess who complemented James’ shy, bookish nature and eventually became one of the most influential first ladies of the 19^th century. The couple had no children, as James’ bladder surgery had likely caused him lifelong infertility.

In Washington, James K Polk’s close friendship with President Jackson was rewarded by his ascension to the house speakership in 1835. After serving two years as Governor of Tennessee from 1839 to 1841, James K. Polk’s greatest achievements were yet to come.

During Polk’s era, America was driven by the concept of Manifest Destiny, the belief that the young nation whose population was clustered near the Atlantic coast but sovereign over a vast and sparsely inhabited territory, was divinely ordained to spread its republican and capitalistic values by acquiring the entire North American continent. The problem was, however, that multiple native tribes, European powers, and finally the new republic of Mexico stood in the way.

In July 1845, magazine editor John O’Sullivan published an essay coining the phrase Manifest Destiny in his Pro-Democratic Party Periodical United States Magazine and Democratic Review. In this essay, alluding to the thousands of American settlers who had flooded into Texas, a recently annexed territory still claimed by Mexico, O’Sullivan declared, “Texas is now ours… and the sweep of our eagle’s wing already includes within its circuit the wide extent of her fair and fertile land.”

With acquisition of land from the Atlantic to Pacific coasts, O’Sullivan argued the United States could thrive economically and earn its rightful place as a world power.

Today, the concept of manifest destiny is controversial among historians, but James K. Polk, a Jacksonian Democrat himself, was an eager devotee of O’Sullivan’s grand vision of an America stretching from coast to coast. Critical to his victory at the 1844 Democratic Convention and subsequent general election was his bold campaign slogan “54-40 or fight.” The slogan was a reference to another territorial dispute, this time with Great Britain: Oregon and the latitude of the territory’s northern boundary with then Russian-controlled Alaska. By successfully neutralizing his critics who feared that such daring expansionism would eventuate ruinous wars with both Mexico and Britain, James K Polk, won the hearts and minds of the American people and achieved his lifelong dream of the American presidency.

During his inaugural address in March of 1845, Polk was full steam ahead:

As our boundaries have been enlarged and our agricultural population has been spread over a large surface, our federative system has acquired additional strength and security. It may well be doubted whether it would not be in greater danger of overthrow if our present population were confined to the comparatively narrow limits of the original thirteen States than it is now that they are sparsely settled over a more expanded territory. It is confidently believed that our system may be safely extended to the utmost bounds of our territorial limits, and that as it shall be extended the bonds of our Union, so far from being weakened, will become stronger.

In opposition to the Democratic Party at the time were not Republicans, but the Whigs, led by the charismatic and sharp-tongued Kentucky politician Henry Clay. The Whigs were strongly pro-legislative supremacy, pro-tariff, divided over slavery (a split which led to the party’s collapse in the 1850s), and opposed to the territorial expansion of the United States.

Clay, whom Polk had defeated in 1844, had warned that Polk and the Democrats’ platform was “seriously charged with an inordinate spirit of territorial aggrandizement” and would cause “the further propagation of slavery” in the United States. Polk, on the other hand, had promised lower tariffs as well as the fulfillment of Manifest Destiny through the annexation of both Oregon from Britain and California from Mexico.

The battle lines were drawn.

In November, President Polk dispatched congressman Democratic congressman John Slidell of Louisiana to Mexico City to negotiate with the Mexican government the purchase of New Mexico and California. The Mexican Government under President Jose Joaquin de Herrera balked, and Polk subsequently ordered the occupation by general and future president Zachary Taylor of disputed territory along the Rio Grande River.

This provocative yet shrewd move by the president set a trap the Mexicans fell right into when they attacked Taylor’s troops near what is now Bluetown, Texas on April 25, 1846. After Polk thundered that the Mexicans had “shed American blood on American soil,” Congress overwhelmingly approved a declaration of war on Mexico on May 13.

Meanwhile, as all national resources were directed to the war with the neighbor to the south, Polk was in desperate need of a solution to a long-festering dispute in the north. Like Texas, Oregon was a popular destination for American settlers who journeyed the Oregon Trail destined for the boundless opportunities of this largely unknown land. Meanwhile, Britain had limited resources to fight for a backwater territory far from its more critical interests in India and Africa.

Thus, the Oregon dispute was resolved without a war as both sides agreed to extend the already established 49^th parallel boundary westwards to the Pacific by signing the Oregon Treaty in June 1846. While Jams K. Polk was forced to renege on “54-40 or fight,” he had already accomplished one of his core campaign promises, all without a drop of bloodshed.

The Mexican American War had its domestic critics. One of these critics was a young Whig congressman from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln gave a speech in 1848 denouncing the war as “unnecessary and unconstitutional” and warned of the accession of new slave states to the union.

None of this opposition slowed down Taylor’s army, who captured Monterey in September and defeated a threefold numerically superior Mexican Army led by General Antonio Lopez De Santa Anna at the Battle of Buena Vista in February 1847. This victory was a sensation at home, inspiring a new wave of patriotism unparalleled since the war of 1812.

However, when Taylor hesitated to launch a deeper offensive, President Polk ordered General Winfield Scott to mount an even more daring invasion of the Mexican heartland from the port of Veracruz. Following victory after victory, battles that included almost every major future Civil War general, Scott’s Army entered Mexico City on September 14, 1847, and the war was over.

In the end, both the United States and Mexico signed the Treaty of Guadelupe Hidalgo. Mexico was allowed to keep its sovereignty as a state while ceding more than half its territory, 525,000 square miles to the United States, including all of Alta California and Nuevo Mexico. In just three short years, James K. Polk had achieved every single one of his campaign promises and nearly doubled the size of the country.

Under Polk’s administration, the United States annexed the entirety of what became the states of Texas, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, California, Nevada, and Utah, almost all of New Mexico and Arizona, as well as parts of Colorado, Oklahoma, Kansas, Montana, and Wyoming— more than 1.2 million square miles. Without James K. Polk, Americans would have never been able to speak the phrases Coast to Coast and From Sea to Shining Sea.

While Polk left Washington in 1849 completely exhausted and tragically passed away only 3 months later from cholera, the 11^th President of the United States’ legacy is indisputable. The humble lawyer from frontier Tennessee had elevated the status of his young nation from an insecure coastal state to a continental power who could rival the great powers of Europe.

So today, let us remember this hero of American history, a man who faced relentless and vicious opposition from the Whigs yet was determined to carry out his vision he knew would produce a stronger and more prosperous union. If we just set aside the politically correct narratives that Polk’s accomplishments somehow didn’t count because he was a southern slaveholder, James K. Polk deserves the highest status in the Pantheon of American statesmen. That he has often been left out is an act of criminal malpractice by the American education system.

If you ever stop by Nashville, where I live, you must pay tribute to James K. Polk at his and his wife Sarah’s graves on the grounds of the Tennessee State Capitol.

The Second Day of July 1776 will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by Solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be Solemnized with Pomp and Parade with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.

Such were the words of John Adams, discovered in one of the nearly 1,200 letters exchanged between the future 2^nd President of the United States and his wife Abigail predicting how the previous day’s vote by the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia to break off all ties with the almighty British Empire would be honored for centuries to come. Adams, the abrasive yet morally upright Boston lawyer demonstrated a tremendous, almost clairvoyant foresight regarding how Americans, two centuries after his death, would commemorate this historic moment. Except for one thing.

Instead of July 2^nd, somehow, we got stuck with July 4^th. What the heck happened?

Let me explain. The answer as to why boils down to one of the driest processes in human existence: parliamentary procedure. Unless you were a debater in school, earned a law degree, or have been elected to public office, odds are you have probably never encountered parliamentary procedure. According to Cornell University, parliamentary procedure “refers to the procedures for debate and general conduct of business of the Assemblies during meetings and other operations.” The purpose of such measures is to ensure an orderly and expeditious process to adopt decisions on the principle of majority rule without entirely marginalizing the minority.

As 25 of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence were lawyers, Virginia delegate Richard Henry Lee’s mere resolution dissolving the relationship between the 13 Colonies and Great Britain, passed on July 2, 1776, was insufficient. For the next two days, the congress debated amendments to the formal document drafted by a five-man committee, a committee that included Adams and his lifelong political rival and primary author of the declaration, Thomas Jefferson. Finally, on July 4, the delegations of 12 of the 13 Colonies (New York eventually followed 5 days later) approved the document before another Massachusetts delegate, wealthy businessman John Hancock (yes, the John Hancock) ordered Philadelphia printer John Dunlap to print hundreds of broadside documents to spread the word of the treasonous declaration.

On the very top of these Dunlap Broadsides spread across the colonies: the words IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776. With these words, a new holiday was born.

Yes, it is true that other nations around the world have picked far more dramatic events honor their national day. Mexicans enjoy feasts of Pambazos and drinks of Cerveza to commemorate Padre Miguel Hidalgo’s ringing of the bells of Dolores and rallying cry for independence. France blasts off more fireworks and parties well past midnight every July 14 to celebrate the famed storming of the Bastille prison in 1789. And Russia holds a massive parade (until this year) in Moscow’s Red Square every May 9 to celebrate the 1945 surrender of Nazi Germany and capture of Berlin by the Red Army. Yet for Americans, mere parliamentary procedure suits us just fine.

The founders’ attention to detail perhaps conveys a greater meaning. Rather than a rash, emotional, sudden, or violent act, the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence made sure that such a consequential document would leave no ambiguity, cross every T, and dot every I, for their determination to their cause. Indeed, 250 years of American history has been an exercise in exactly that. Through the elimination of slavery, groundbreaking invention after groundbreaking invention, and the ascent to a global great power status stronger than modern Britain and France combined, our entire existence has been a quest to achieve a more perfect union. And it all began on that hot summer in Philadelphia.

Since that fateful Thursday 250 years ago, the original document, scribed by Timothy Matlack, has survived war, mishandling, sunlight, and even a heist by Nicolas Cage. Yet the profound significance of the document, word by word, persists to this day.

Yorktown Beach today

Two months ago, this author examined General Ulysses S. Grant’s fateful decision to exhibit compassion over retribution when Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia surrendered to Grant’s Federal troops at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865. Now, in honor of America upcoming 250^th birthday, I will today chronicle the conclusion of a different war, the War of American Independence 84 years earlier and how the fateful day of October 19, 1781, turned the world upside down.

By October 17, 1781, British General Charles Cornwallis and his army of 9,000 men, trapped in the Virginia Tidewater village of Yorktown, were desperate. Suffering 24-hour bombardment by George Washington and French General Comte de Rochambeau, his defensive redoubts shattered and seized three days earlier, and with their horses slaughtered for food, Cornwallis knew he had little choice but to wave the white flag of surrender. On top of the seized defensive redoubts, a British counteroffensive on October 15 was answered by a wall of French cannon fire and a later last-ditch escape attempt was derailed by an aggressive, almost (at least from Washington and the Americans’ perspective) divinely ordained windstorm.

With three strikes of body blows to his army, Cornwallis ordered an officer accompanied by a drummer boy waiving a white handkerchief on his sword in the direction of American and French positions.

After tense negotiations, both sides reached a deal for the terms of the surrender of General Cornwallis’ army. On October 19, Cornwallis and his men marched between rows of Patriot and French soldiers each stretching longer than a mile, a spectacle certainly breathtaking to witness, to surrender their weapons. Despite Washington’s humane treatment of the now defeated British Army he once fought for, Cornwallis refused to reciprocate or show any respect to his captors. Deeply bitter over his defeat at the hands of an army he perceived as no more than a mutinous rabble, Cornwallis ordered his men to look away from the American side, only acknowledging the French soldiers, enemies whom he at least regarded as equals.

When word of Cornwallis’ surrender reached London five weeks later on November 25, Prime Minister Lord Frederick North, already managing an expensive and unpopular global war against France not only in North America but also in the Caribbean, Mediterranean, and even as far away as India, reportedly cried out in despair, “Oh God. It is all over. It is all over!” Thus began a nearly two-year peace negotiation that concluded in September 1783 with the signing of the Treaty of Paris by Britain, France, and the United States, as well as Spain and the Netherlands, where London legally recognized the sovereignty of the infant republic known as the United States of America with a territory stretching as far west as the Mississippi River.

And thus, a new nation on the North American continent, a nation no longer upheld by the divine right of monarchs but instead the principles of limited and republican governance, was officially born.

Popular American canon, amplified by the Broadway smash hit Hamilton, asserts that during the march, British military musicians played the popular British 17^th-century tune “The World Turned Upside Down,” a clear message of foreshadowing. While actual historical record of such a musical playlist relies on secondary sources and is largely debunked as myth by historians, there is no denying that the events that occurred on October 19, 1781, in Yorktown, Virginia, did indeed turn the world upside down.

245 years later, Cornwallis’ mutinous rabble has grown from 13 loosely associated colonies on the East Coast to 50 states and overseas territories as far away as Guam. This federation, now known as the United States of America, is now the undisputed global leader in finance, culture, technology, and military power whose economic and military strength vastly surpass those of modern Britain and France combined. Indeed, there is no single nation on planet earth whose voice carries a louder weight than the United States. And this triumph is something we should all be proud of.

And who knows, perhaps somewhere beyond the grave, even General Cornwallis cannot help but tip his cap at all the republic who humiliated him at Yorktown has achieved in only 250 years.

Budapest at Dawn

Well, my 2026 European vacation has finally ended. I apologize for my monthlong absence, but of course, when one is on vacation, work obligations drift far from the mind. This year’s edition was one of new discoveries, new friends, amazing food, and a most special encounter on my final day. In total, I touched down in exactly six sovereign nations (if one includes a brief stop at London Heathrow), all with their own distinct cultures and historical memories. Two of these nations, Hungary and Croatia, were long hidden away behind the Iron Curtain and thus often difficult for Americans, or even Western Europeans, to simply locate on a map. After all, for more of their recent history than not, these two nations were under some form of foreign occupation or functioning as a crucial fragment of a larger federation. And this was where truly the most interesting segment of my trip, comprising its first half, occurred.

Hungary dates its origins to 1,130 years ago in the year 896 when the Asiatic Magyar tribes crossed the Carpathian Mountains and settled into the Hungarian basin, where they have lived ever since. Budapest, the grand capital of Hungary, dates even further back as a Roman settlement on the northern frontier called Aquincum. Today, Budapest is the breathtaking Queen of the Danube with majestic vistas of dramatic architecture, exceeding the Habsburg imperial capital of Vienna, a city which has fallen into the same trap as all the rest of Western Europe. Once one understands that most Budapesters know fantastic English, then the formidable and unique Hungarian language, the secret code of the Hungarian people with its up to 27 grammatical cases (no one knows exactly how many) is no longer scary.

Beyond the grandeur, my must-see recommendation for anyone visiting Budapest is the House of Terror, a museum located at the former headquarters of the Hungarian equivalent of the KGB known as the AVH that demonstrates, in the most appalling manner possible, how devastating the communist era, imposed by Moscow, was for the Hungarian people. On top of the Szoborpark, a collection of the most intimidating and ugly statues from that era, one learns how Hungarians view the era of Soviet occupation between 1945 and 1989: as a foreign imposed suppression of the rights and dignity of the Hungarian nation in service of a hostile, colonial ideology from Moscow that shattered lives and families and devastated the Hungarian psyche for decades. People were deported and never seen again, all for the crimes of patriotism and free enterprise, or sometimes, nothing at all. What the Soviets did to Hungary was a crime against humanity, and shame on modern Russia for attempting to justify this heinous crime against an entire nation.

Budapest is certainly worth several days of your time.

The coastal nation of Croatia is quite young, only achieving independence in a bloody conflict with Yugoslavia in 1995. Unlike Hungary, Yugoslavia experienced a communist regime led for 35 years by Josip Broz Tito that was far more humane and tolerant, and shockingly, operated as a largely independent nation who ignored Moscow’s orders. Tito was certainly a dictator, but his rule was more along the lines of so long as you don’t actively oppose the party, you can do whatever you like. And Tito’s relative openness is why much of Croatia’s tourist infrastructure along the Adriatic coast was developed during the socialist era, a legacy that continues to this day. Of course, Croatian tourism has become so popular it is now often overwhelming, especially during the heat of the summer during the European summer vacation season and scorching temperatures pushing well into the triple digits.

This is why our family was fortunate enough (after two days in the Adriatic jewel of Dubrovnik, accompanied by only moderate crowds), to sail the Dalmatian coast by boat, through islands sometimes wild and remote and other times bustling with a culture best described as a baby conceived between Italy and Slavic Eastern Europe. Most crowded was Korčula, a former outpost of the Venetian Republic as well as the alleged, at least according to the Croatians, birthplace of legendary Venetian explorer Marco Polo whose gates still display the Lion of Venice. After an odd exhibition of swordplay I can best label as exotic, the day after Korčula my parents enjoyed their 25^th wedding anniversary, complete with a daring jump off the roof of the boat from which I almost chickened out, in a cove of clear blue seawater off the remote island of Šćedro. Ultimately, the Dalmatian coast offers far more, but I can only fit in so much for a short newsletter. All in all, wonder Croatia is so popular for tourists.

If you would like to know more about Croatia, feel free to ask me!

After the validation of experiencing two nations I have long studied but hardly experienced in a serious, on-the-ground manner, the second half of the vacation was concentrated in Western Europe, a place far more familiar to Americans. Yes, I have criticized Western Europe in the past, and these criticisms still stand. But this time, I endeavored to set aside all the negatives (which most of the ordinary people there play no part in implementing) and focus instead on the positives. After all, despite profound gaps between the Trump Administration and European elites over Iran, Ukraine, tariffs, and more, I surprisingly experienced little hostility from anyone due to my nationality. Thankfully, politics, for the most part, took a backseat in favor of genuine hospitality and stimulating conversations.

After the nonstop movement in Hungary and Croatia, it was nice to spend a week in Italy, for the most part, at a more relaxed pace. From May 31 to June 3, I enjoyed the Alpine village of Cortina D’Ampezzo, home to the most recent Winter Olympics. So far north is Cortina, that it really doesn’t even feel like Italy at all. Looking at the architecture of the homes and listening to the local dialect, you might as well be in Austria. And there’s a reason for that. After the Napoleonic Wars of the early 19^th century, the entire territory of the Republic of Venice, of which Cortina was the northern frontier, was annexed by the Austrian Hapsburgs. Even after the final Unification of Italy in 1871, Cortina sat perilously close to a vengeful Austrian Empire (and its many Alpine fortresses) bitter about the loss of its Italian holdings.

This tension finally came to a head in 1915 when Italy declared war on Austria.

With Austria distracted on the Russian front to the east, Italy sought to expand its defensive perimeter by launching an offensive deep into the Alps. The problem for Italy was, simply, mountain warfare is most useful for the defender, and most formidable for the attacker. With our guide, a German-speaking Italian citizen named Rupert, my family and I journeyed around the forts and trenches that dotted the rugged Tyrolean landscape only to discover that for much of the war, both armies preferred to camp as close to summit as possible— no matter how cold. For two years, neither side achieved substantial territorial progress. That was, until an Austrian offensive broke through the Italian lines and came close to Venice only to be halted as the centuries-old Hapsburg Empire began to collapse. After the war, in addition to the previously acquired Venetian region, Italy was awarded the Austrian province of South Tyrol, where 309,000 German speakers live to this day within the Republic of Italy.

So therefore, next time you want to embark on a journey to the Alps, you can skip St. Moritz and Innsbruck, and instead consider Cortina D’Ampezzo and the battlefields of South Tyrol.

Beyond a few hours in Frankfurt Airport in 2015, I somehow had, prior to this very month, never set foot in the Federal Republic of Germany. Despite all my visits to Europe, somehow, I had missed the large country right in the middle of it— a country where every current of European history has manifested since the coronation of Charlemagne in Frankfurt in the year 800. I ultimately chose to see the beer-drenched and lederhosened State of Bavaria, spending three nights from June 4 through June 6 in not one but two Bavarian towns north of the state capital of Munich. While I shockingly did not undertake even a sip of beer (sorry, I just don’t like beer), Bavaria is where I finally had the opportunity to meet my German (but not Bavarian) friend Karl, a subscriber and regular reader of this newsletter. While one may pigeonhole the Germans as a scowling, distant, and unfriendly volk, Karl shatters every one of these stereotypes.

A genuinely kind and joyful gentleman, he is someone I feel blessed to have not only become acquainted with, but also finally meet in person. While Bavaria may not be flashy, I would highly recommend a visit, especially to the adorable little town of Freising not far from the Munich Airport.

Finally, my journey across Europe concluded in the grand Spanish capital of Madrid, where, besides spending most of my time at the hotel writing this newsletter, I experienced something that would cross off anyone’s bucket list. On June 8, I witnessed, from the balcony of the Four Seasons Hotel, none other than his holiness himself, Pope Leo XIV, waving to adoring crowds while traveling in his instantly recognizable white Popemobile. Seeing the holy pontiff in the flesh was nothing short of surreal, and a moment I shall never forget. I cannot but consider myself blessed to have been given such an opportunity.

Looking ahead, I plan to remain comfortably within the borders of the United States for the remainder of 2026, with hopefully more plans for serious publishing in the works. And as for the Old Continent where Western Civilization began, Ciao!

As I approach a short hiatus from writing for some well-needed overseas travel, I will present to you one last newsletter before my departure, one encompassing, yet again, the state of the conflict in the Middle East and the US government’s difficult choices ahead. I will be thus taking a weekslong hiatus from publishing until June when I, assuming Europe’s jet fuel doesn’t run dry, will be back stateside. I cannot emphasize strongly enough how blessed I am for all the opportunities fate has given me to see the world, up to and in my now 32^nd rotation around the Sun.

Last week on May 6, Axios dropped a report claiming that the United States and Iran were “closing in” on a 14-point memorandum of understanding to bridge gaps substantially enough to formally halt hostilities between the two countries within 48 hours and transition towards a durable, long-term nuclear agreement. Naturally, Wall Street, eager for a resolution that resumes commercial maritime traffic in the contested Strait of Hormuz were thrilled. On the other hand, conservative hawks most stridently opposed to Iran’s nuclear ambitions such as Jewish conservative talk radio host Mark Levin and much of the conservative media ecosystem, were horrified.

Levin, ever the firebrand and a resolute supporter of Israel, dismissed the report as “largely fake” and “disastrous” if true, and went on to warn against talk of “exit ramps” with a “terrorist” regime who have “lied and cheated for 47 years, and they have no intention of changing based on their Islamist ideology.” Levin even went on to attack some Republicans privately encouraging such an exit ramp as “scared of their own shadows” and blind to the “existential” threat of Iran’s nuclear program. Particularly concerning for hawks were rumors of a de facto revival of Barack Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. According to the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, “It will be essential for Mr. Trump to hold firm, knowing that Iran has no need for domestic enrichment other than for a bomb, and that he can’t count on a change in regime behavior over time, a mistake Mr. Obama made.”

While the relationship between President Donald Trump and the Journal is strained, several of the most prominent Iran hawks are core figures in the president’s inner circle. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a man regularly demonized, sometimes excessively so, across the American political spectrum and deeply unpopular both at home and overseas, also remains in constant contact with the 47^th President even as Trump’s relationships with other foreign leaders have largely unraveled. South Carolina Senator and Trump golf partner Lindsey Graham, a man who has labeled the Iranian regime as a gang of “religious Nazis” was an indispensable member of the clique, who, like Netanyahu, has for decades urged a massive US attack on Iran. And don’t forget other conservative media personalities on places like Fox News, who, like Levin, Netanyahu, and Graham, believe it’s time to “finish the job” and wipe the Iranian regime off the face of the earth once and for all.

To reconstitute an Obama-like nuclear agreement, in their minds, is nothing short of surrender to the to the most dangerous regime on Earth.

To expect that Donald Trump, the executioner of the 2015 nuclear deal, will defy his core war backers and endure the personal humiliation of consenting to the same sort of arrangement that he has so sharply castigated, remains wishful thinking on the part of Trump’s opponents. While I, and most of the American public, may prefer a diplomatic settlement that stabilizes the global economy and allows a negligible level of uranium enrichment, even with a regime as repugnant and treacherous as Iran’s, those making the decisions right now in Washington carry sharply contrasting priorities. Despite more bad economic news and public opinion rapidly turning against them, I find it highly unlikely that the Trump Administration will back down from a threat they truly believe to be existential.

If the People’s Republic of China (where Trump is visiting imminently), the one nation I believe holds the critical leverage to compel Iran to back down as well by easing their death-grip on the Strait of Hormuz and dismantling their nuclear program, elects not to do so, then the Trump Administration and its core supporters’ life-and-death mindset means that the world may be stuck in this state of limbo and conflict for the long-haul.

On that cheerful note, I will see you all in within the next month with a special historical reflection. Arrivederci!

Not even the conservative Giorgia Meloni has escaped President Trump’s wrath

Hello from sunny Santa Barbara! While I may have the luxury of enjoying a break from my hectic lifestyle in Tennessee, I do not have the similar luxury of disengaging from the extremely complex and dangerous geopolitical situation many experts warn amounts to an unraveling of the entire world order. Indeed, you have a situation where a handful of powerful nations, including the United States, China, Russia, Israel, and Iran whose current policy of aggressively enforcing their national interests with little regard for the interests of smaller, weaker nations places the rest of the world in position of uncertainty at best and existential danger at worst.

This week, considering the highly fluid situation in the Middle East, where a US naval mission deemed Project Freedom to open the contested Strait of Hormuz by force was aborted as few ships dared to pass the Iranian-menaced passageway without risking destruction, I thought it necessary to look elsewhere and demonstrate the consequences, both positive and negative, of the ever-growing divide between the world’s great powers who set the agenda and middle powers who are forced to live with the consequences. With Europe in a state of total disarray and strategic impotence and much of Asia literally running out of fuel, the clock is ticking. However, there is one example that proves the Trump Administration right, and it’s right in our own backyard.

Triumph in Venezuela

The recent reforms in Venezuela are perhaps the strongest example where a great power acting unilaterally has manifested as a development for the greater good, rather than one of pure power politics. While the usual suspects hyperventilated in the immediate aftermath of the highly successful Operation Absolute Resolve that saw Venezuela’s criminal president Nicolas Maduro hauled off to prison, likely for the rest of his life, there is little doubt now of the degree of strategic benefit for the United States following Maduro’s dramatic downfall.

By 2025, years of expropriations, corruption, brain drain, replacement of technical experts with Chavista ideologues, and US sanctions had reduced Venezuela from a proud oil exporter to, in the words of one analyst, “the fallen angel of global crude markets.” Before Hugo Chavez took power in 1998, Venezuela produced more than 3 million barrels per day. By 2021, production had collapsed to barely above 600,000, mostly exported to China as few other nations had the leverage to defy US sanctions. To add insult to injury, Venezuela’s collapse also precipitated an environmental catastrophe on Lake Maracaibo, as rotting and leaky underwater pipelines have largely destroyed the ecosystem of the country’s largest inland body of water.

Now, with Maduro out of the way, Venezuela may turn out to be the Trump Administration’s biggest, though sadly underreported, success story. In recent weeks, executives from ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil, burned by past expropriations, have ventured down to Caracas to test the waters and begin the process of rebuilding the nation’s ruined infrastructure. With full diplomatic relations now restored, the opportunity is golden. In recent months, these executives have met directly with Venezuelan President Delcy Rodriguez, who in a total U-turn from Chavista doctrine recently approved major free-market reforms in the oil sector. While no major investments have been approved yet, Exxon CEO Darren Woods made positive hints about the future: “Venezuela is a huge resource that’s now opened up more freely to the world.” On the ground, production is on the upswing, with more than 1 million Venezuelan barrels per day exported on average in April, mainly to the US Gulf Coast where the crude is refined and shipped around the world.

It’s most unfortunate that the Trump Administration’s Venezuelan triumph has been underreported by a legacy media eager to underscore our misadventure in Iran. While the path towards fair elections, substantial economic recovery, and ultimately a total dismantling of the Chavista system remains long (Rodriguez and her cohort are understandably keen to avoid Maduro’s fate), Venezuela proves that with the right measures, even the most hostile regimes can soften their rough edges.

Transatlantic Rupture

It should be no secret to anyone that Donald Trump despises Europe— albeit not its people, but its political elites. The 47^th President has for decades, and will for the rest of his life, believe that European governments have unfairly been subsidized by American taxpayers and will forever leverage, in full Art of the Deal mode, the vast economic and military might of the United States to rectify an unacceptable transatlantic imbalance. Since he launched a war with Iran more than two months ago, the President has vented his frustration at multiple European leaders, claiming that without his decisive military operation, Iranian nukes would be menacing Rome, Berlin, and London, and Europe’s refusal to support Operation Epic Fury against Iran is nothing less than an epic betrayal.

This week, his harsh words have turned into action, with threats to hike tariffs on European automotive imports and an announcement that thousands of American troops will depart Germany within a year. As Germany is home to by far the largest US Armed Forces deployment in Europe, the world will take notice. While Congress has acted to tie the hands of the administration from making deeper cuts, such action is a powerful symbol of the wholesale rupture that has occurred between the United States and nations who were once its closest allies.

I make no bones that I am quite sympathetic to the so-called Old Continent, albeit sometimes excessively to the point of almost demeaning my own country. After all, Europe is where the history of Western Civilization was forged for centuries before passing the torch to the United States. The shift manifested after Europe suffered two devastating World Wars from which, in my opinion, the continent has never fully recovered. I also have several European friends, some of whom even read this blog. While I can assure all my readers that my personal loyalties have not and will not reposition themselves across the Atlantic and I will remain first and foremost an American at heart, I will always have a soft spot for the place, a soft spot that Donald Trump obviously lacks.

And that is why I am deeply saddened that transatlantic relations, once the bedrock of the global economic and security systems, seem permanently ruptured. President Trump is despised in Europe, even by right-wing and conservative leaders such as Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. Operation Epic Fury was also deeply unpopular there, strengthening the hands of European governments who will not, under any circumstances, engage in combat operations against Iran. And the American President is not a man who ever forgives or forgets, deep-sixing to any hope of reconciliation. In my humble opinion, it would be best for all of us, both in America and Europe, both for the sake of decency and the future of Western Civilization, to work out our differences.

While Europe may no longer be an equal to the United States, Washington slamming the door on the place will only damage both sides.

You may be thrilled with the Trump Administration’s assertive, unilateralist, and even aggressive America First foreign policy. You may also deeply resent it. However, whether for good or ill, there is no doubt that this policy has changed the course of humanity for years to come. Weaker powers, whether the new and reformed Venezuela, Italy, Canada, India, or anyone else have little choice but to come to terms with this inescapable reality.

Facade of the Washington Hilton

The long ladder of assassination attempts on the President of the United States has added yet another rung. And this history is full of coincidence and irony.

On Saturday night, most of you learned the startling news that there had been another assassination attempt on President Donald Trump. Thankfully, and I hope this outlook applies even to those readers who are no fans of the president, the third time was not the charm. Cole Allen, whose background does not deserve any attention, barged into the 2026 White House Correspondents Dinner (WHCD) at the Washington Hilton armed with a .38 caliber semiautomatic pistol and a 12-gauge shotgun and the intent to kill the President of the United States and multiple officials. After breaching the outer security perimeter, Allen began shooting wildly in the hallway, inflicting minor wounds on a Secret Service agent before being tackled by other agents as the guests rushed out of the room in panic and terror. The President and others were whisked to safety just as Allen was neutralized. Cole Allen has now been formally charged with attempting to assassinate the president and is now guaranteed to spend the rest of his life behind bars.

Unfortunately for the Washington Hilton, the WHCD incident is strike two. On March 30, 1981, a deranged young Texan desperate for attention from actress Jodie Foster named John Hinckley Jr. fired four shots at President Ronald Reagan’s entourage, severely wounding Reagan and three others. While Reagan quickly recovered, medical evidence strongly suggests he would not have survived without the immediate and heroic actions of both the Secret Service and the medical team at George Washington University Hospital. With such a rather macabre irony in play, I would strongly recommend to the Secret Service and the entire DC press corps to scratch off the Washington Hilton for any future presidential engagements— permanently. No one wants to gamble with strike three.

Saturday’s incident is the latest in a long series of usually unsuccessful assassination attempts on American presidents and presidential candidates. While only four presidents, Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, and John F. Kennedy have paid the ultimate sacrifice of an assassin’s bullet, I thought I would take the opportunity this week to list off several failed attempts in recent memory you may not have been aware of.

August 1864: Abraham Lincoln

Before Trump, there was no president whose life was more frequently endangered than Abraham Lincoln. In fact, it was something of a divine miracle that Lincoln lived as long as he did, considering the scale of the hostility he faced. Along with a brazen plot to infect the president and thousands of others with Yellow Fever, Lincoln’s life was almost ended 8 months before that fateful night at Ford’s Theatre. While the exact date of the Soldiers’ Home incident is unknown, the details are startling. That evening, the 16^th President was riding his horse Old Abe (apparently named after himself) to his summer retreat of Soldiers’ Home in Washington when a rifle shot spooked Old Abe who galloped nonstop until reaching safety. Private John Nichols spotted Lincoln’s signature silk top hat on the ground only to discover a bullet hole. Nichols returned the hat to Lincoln, who ordered the private to seal his lips lest there be any public panic. The identity of the gunman from that night remains unknown.

October 16, 1909: William Howard Taft

Shifts in the course of the Rio Grande River had left a lingering border dispute between the United States and Mexico around the city of El Paso. In an attempt to settle the quarrel over the Chamizal District, Taft traveled to El Paso to meet with Mexican strongman Porfirio Díaz to work out a peaceful solution. While neither wanted war, hatred of Yanquis ran deep in Mexico (still does) and Diaz’ attempts to solve the dispute were unpopular, and Díaz would be overthrown less than two years later. The excursion was still historic— never had an American and Mexican President met face-to-face. As the convoy carrying both men reached the El Paso Chamber of Commerce, two guards spotted a “sinister-looking man writing in a notebook” and grabbed his arms only to discover a .32 caliber handgun just as Taft arrived. The unidentified man was apprehended and, like the Soldiers’ Home incident, never heard from again.

To pile on yet more irony, the portly and kindhearted Taft completed his visit to Texas by, what else, riding in a top-down motorcade through the streets of Dallas to an overjoyed crowd. Sounds familiar, eh?

September 1975: Gerald Ford

Gerald Ford endured a rotten month of September 1975. Not once, but twice, just 17 days apart, both in the state of California, and both by female gunmen, the former University of Michigan linebacker and House Minority Leader looked death right in the eye. On September 5, on his way to meet Governor Jerry Brown at the State Capitol in Sacramento, Ford encountered Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a fanatic disciple of notorious Hollywood sex cult leader Charles Manson wearing a Little Red Riding Hood outfit and carrying a handgun aimed point blank at the president. Luckily for Ford, Fromme had completely forgotten to load her .45 caliber at all. While Fromme’s incompetent assassination attempt failed, Ford was about to face an even more dangerous brush with mortality.

On September 22, Gerald Ford was entering the St Francis Hotel in San Francisco when far-left extremist Sarah Jane Moore fired two gunshots at the president. The first missed Ford by inches before an ex-marine and Vietnam veteran named Oliver Sipple tackled Moore and caused the second shot to veer wildly before striking another bystander. The bystander survived, but Sipple’s reputation was ruined after he was outed as gay (this was San Francisco, after all) by the San Francisco Chronicle shortly afterwards. As for Gerald Ford, he quickly moved on from the assassination attempts and never brought them up again.

April 13, 1993: George H.W. Bush

Following his defeat the previous year, George H.W. Bush visited Kuwait to address the Kuwaiti parliament and receive honors from both the Emir and Kuwait University as gratitude for liberating the country during Operation Desert Storm. Before Bush’s arrival, Kuwaiti agents discovered and promptly dismantled a car bomb powerful enough to kill those up to 400 yards away. An FBI investigation revealed fingerprints directly linked to Iraqi intelligence, as the two prime suspects eventually confessed to having contacts with Iraqi agents who masterminded the attack as revenge for Operation Desert Storm. President Bill Clinton retaliated for the plot by launching Tomahawk missiles into Baghdad. Clinton too encountered a near-miss of his own three years later in the Philippines that was eventually traced to Al-Qaeda.

Conclusion

Being the President of the United States is, to say the least, a dangerous job. When one learns about all the plots whose endgame is to assassinate the most powerful man on Earth, it becomes obvious that it’s a miracle that only four of our presidents (including one I have highlighted in the past) have been fatally wounded by an assassin’s bullet. The number of miracle survivals is truly astonishing. Unfortunately, I would be most surprised if an assassin does not, at some point in our lifetime, aim correctly and gun down a president. Considering the virulent political polarization and hatred in this country, we have to consider this grim possibility. Every divisive comment or inappropriate joke that only serves to dehumanize your political opponents is no less than another rung on the ladder.

And for one final creepy irony, I thought I would share a clip of John Hinckley Jr.’s… musical talents.

Satellite photo of the Strait of Hormuz

Believe me.

I am about as sick and tired of the deeply worrying situation in the Middle East as you are. Like you, most of the region and the world, as well as in my opinion both President Trump and some of the less fanatical members of the Iranian leadership, I am eager to see this highly destructive war with global economic consequences behind us and never to be resumed ever again. Yet, here I am, about to publish yet another essay about this year’s dramatic escalation of the long-running so-called shadow war between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Last week, the news appeared quite positive. Both Washington and Tehran, through the persistent efforts of Pakistan, were on course to engage in Round 2 of diplomacy. Both sides had narrowed the gap between initial maximalist positions about the fate of Iran’s currently buried stockpile of enriched uranium. Best of all, last Friday, the Iranian Foreign Ministry announced that the Strait of Hormuz was finally open for business. Markets celebrated, believing that an end to the conflict and long-term tranquility, or at least, coexistence, between the United States and our most dangerous regional adversary was finally at hand.

Then, it all fell apart.

Trump promptly responded to the Iranian announcement with the characteristic bombast that defines his persona. In all caps, the President wrote “The naval blockade will remain in full force and effect as it pertains to Iran, only, until such time as our transaction with Iran is 100% complete.” Of course, Trump is a man whose entire brand is the “Art of the Deal,” the 47^th President’s time-honored tactic of imposing maximum leverage on a weaker business counterpart to achieve the best possible outcome. A weaker head of state would find a way to back down in the face of the overwhelming economic and military might of the United States of America. However, the Islamic Republic of Iran is no humble Atlantic City contractor, let alone a pathetic excuse for a world leader like Keir Starmer or Ursula Von Der Leyen. It is the world’s leading state sponsor of terror, and a state with a complete disregard for the welfare of its own citizens.

Predictably, Tehran reneged, and the Middle East crisis came roaring back with a vengeance.

While much of the world seems to blame the President of the United States for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, the Iranian regime, it seems, has almost received a free pass. And that’s because, despite outward claims of unity, it’s quite obvious that, at a bare minimum, Iranian officials are running in circles around each other and have not settled on a negotiating position. While traditional assessments of the Iranian government have sorted the men in charge into “moderate” and “hard-liner” camps, the reality is, as is everything in the Middle East, more nuanced. Unlike Trump, whose own announcements on Iran have veered between threats of hellfire and destruction and lucrative investment offers, the Iranian leadership is in total agreement on matter: the Islamic Republic must survive, and with it the repressive security apparatus and overall “resistance” narrative that has defined Iranian foreign policy for 47 years.

However, instead of one man with conflicting instincts, Iran’s leadership is composed of several men.

The most dangerous faction of all is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Iran’s deep state with a history of handcuffing both the regular army (known as the Artesh) and the civilian leadership from abandoning the revolutionary principles that are existential to the IRGC. Their leader, Ahmad Vahidi, has a history of provocative and dangerous behavior going all the way back to 1994 when Vahidi was the commander of the Quds Force, the IRGC’s military intelligence unit. On July 18 of that year, the AMIA Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires was bombed, killing 85 people. After a long drama that captivated Argentine politics for decades and even saw the investigation’s lead prosecutor murdered execution-style in 2015, Iran and Hezbollah were declared legally at fault for the “crime against humanity,” as the court stated, in 2024. With the dirty fingerprints of the Quds Force all over the attack, one can safely state that Vahidi was at least one of the masterminds.

Ahmad Vahidi is still wanted by Interpol for prosecution in Argentina.

There is another faction in Tehran who, unlike Vahidi and the Guards, at least seeks to stabilize Iran’s collapsing economy and seek some form of coexistence with the United States despite irreconcilable disputes. Case in point is President Masoud Pezeshkian, who privately engaged in a shouting match with Vahidi where the President, considered a moderate for Iranian standards, warned the economy would “completely collapse within three weeks to a month.” He has also opposed Vahidi’s orders to attack neighboring Muslim states. Likewise, Parliamentary Speaker Mohammed Ghalibaf has defended the diplomatic process as the only path to a “lasting peace.” However, these individuals are a minority within the Iranian power structure. In fact, there are factions who would rather not be negotiating with the United States at all. Rallies in Tehran regularly chant “death to compromisers” and promise revenge on those who attacked in February. These warnings have certainly been taken to heart by the Iranian diplomatic team, who all, for good reason, value their lives.

And finally, we must not forget that the Iranian security establishment is littered with Israeli Mossad agents, fueling paranoia and slowing down communication.

And that brings us back to Donald Trump. No matter how vile and aggressive certain factions in Iran have become, it remains a certainty that any blame for the paralysis of the peace process will almost certainly be thrust on the American president. Both at home and overseas, public opinion has turned sharply against him as the President’s piranhas deem his decision to take military action against Iran as a reckless “war of choice.” Of course, such opposition is unlikely to meaningfully matter in a conflict I suspect Trump truly believes is a just cause to thwart an existential threat emanating from Iran’s nuclear enrichment program. Furthermore, he has also indicated that has “all the time in the world” before relaxing the blockade on Iran, as such an act would remove the United States’ greatest source of leverage on an Iran whose entire export industry has ground to a halt. The goal: remove the nuclear threat once and for all.

Whether President Trump’s decision not to reciprocate the brief reopening of the Strait of Hormuz was a blunder that pushed the Iranians into a corner and entrenched a more militant posture or an Art of the Deal masterstroke leaving them no choice but to cry uncle is a matter of your interpretation. While it’s popular to blame the President for everything, we cannot forget that this most dangerous enemy is adept at a little Art of the Deal of their own, albeit in the most diabolical fashion. We will know more in the coming weeks.

Skyline of the Pakistani capital of Islamabad

I never expected I would say this… but thank God (or Allah) for Pakistan.

Now, I am no practitioner of the Islamic faith, nor rest assured will I ever be, but thanks to the herculean efforts of multiple Islamic countries to bridge prodigious gaps in trust, goals, and strategy between the United States and entirely illegitimate (in my honest opinion) Islamic Republic of Iran, catastrophe, at least for now, has been averted. While President Trump’s threat to wipe out Persian civilization may have shocked the world and ignited a deluge of condemnation, it was certainly one of the key elements that in my opinion allowed the current, highly fragile 14-day ceasefire in the Middle East to take hold. As of now, the southern coast of the Persian Gulf, a former playground of the global elite suddenly transformed into a war zone, is quiet. Though if you want me to be honest, I always believed these wealthy Arab states’ “stability” was a mirage— hard to be a safe haven when there sits a revolutionary state armed to the teeth just across a narrow body of water.

On Tuesday evening, humanity breathed a sigh of relief as the ever unpredictable President announced he would withdraw his threat to obliterate Iranian civilian infrastructure before the inevitable retaliation against existentially vital energy and water infrastructure across the region that would have sent an already fragile global economy into full-blown crisis. In this most delicate production of geopolitics, multiple actors played their roles to perfection. As mentioned before, Pakistan, a flaky US “ally” with Islamist sympathies yet still pragmatic enough to avoid the Iranian path of perpetual resistance and confrontation, was the star of the show. General Asim Munir, the main military leader in a country where generals are more powerful than elected politicians, is the rare bird who has not only successfully courted Donald Trump but also maintains a cordial relationship with Iran’s shadowy and dangerous Revolutionary Guards (IRGC).

Throughout much of the days following the announcement, hopes for a deal appeared dim as paranoid IRGC commanders continued to rebuke the peace process as a sham meant to mask American and Israeli efforts to regroup for another attack. Attempts by Pakistani, Turkish, and Egyptian officials to pass messages between belligerents with near zero direct communication appeared to be failing until another actor from far away joined the cast. Around the turn of the month, Pakistan’s foreign minister flew to Beijing. One cannot deny that for a while, China could rely on its vast emergency petroleum reserves and its hostility to the United States and merely sit on the sidelines as America sank into what appeared to be a quagmire. But even superpowers have their kryptonite, and for China, that is a vast dependence on Middle Eastern Oil. Despite being a top-10 producer, Chinese domestic demand vastly outstrips Chinese domestic production. And as the country who purchases the vast majority of Iranian oil exports, no one else can match Beijing’s leverage in Tehran.

And leverage, China did.

According to an official Pakistani source to The Guardian, “we were the mediator, not the guarantor. The main role was played by China. They became a guarantor of the ceasefire and pledged that the US would stand by the agreement and that talks would go smoothly in Islamabad (Pakistan’s capital). They told Iran to accept this deal.” Beijing even went so far as to ensure that Iranian officials would not be assassinated by Mossad (Israeli intelligence) during the talks. As everyone ought to know, if you’re on Mossad’s hit list, you will never be safe, and they will hunt you down, international backlash be damned. Israel, who since the dreadful and barbaric October 7 attacks has operated in a state of perpetual conflict on multiple fronts deemed a “forever war” by Nathan Brown the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, was understandably cautious about any kind of ceasefire.

Despite hiccups, and yet more international condemnation of an Israel who in my opinion bombed Beirut to signal its displeasure with the peace process, direct negotiations between US and Iranian officials this weekend in Islamabad went ahead as planned.

As I am sure you all know, the gap in trust between Washington and Tehran is absolute and barring a successful democratic revolution by the Iranian people, unlikely to be completely bridged by even a successful negotiation that solidifies a temporary ceasefire into a more durable long-term arrangement. Iranian demands for ‘security guarantees’ are distasteful at best to offer a regime that has slaughtered its own citizens, bombed its neighbors, and promoted international terrorism for decades. Also revolting is their gangster-like demand for a permanent “toll booth” to shake down commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, which has zero basis in international law, common sense, or basic decency. And of course, don’t forget about all that buried uranium, the primary and fundamental reason Trump and Netanyahu opted to start this conflict at all despite all the risks.

While this weekend’s diplomacy may have failed thanks to Tehran’s inflexibility, there remains hope that both sides will eventually be compelled back to the table, considering that Iran’s predicament has worsened significantly as the United States has now threatened to seize any ship bound to or from Iranian ports since the breakdown in Islamabad. With freedom of navigation and a permanent renunciation of nuclear armament as Washington’s red lines, the Iranians may be forced to cry uncle if they want the blockade lifted. If they can’t be toppled with outside force, we can only hope that one day the Iranian people will hit the jackpot and finally dislodge the destructive zealots of the Revolutionary Guard. Before that, however, we remain stuck in this state of perpetual conflict.

History is rarely kind or forgiving to those vanquished by war.

When approximately 91,000 surviving German Wehrmacht soldiers were captured by the Red Army after their defeat at Stalingrad in 1943, the hell they had endured for months was far from over. They were promptly herded like livestock on rail cars straight to Josef Stalin’s notorious gulags, where they were forced to work sixteen hours per day, seven days a week— all while enduring a starvation diet that wrought devastating outbreaks of typhus. It wasn’t until 10 years later that the last German POWs were repatriated to their homeland. Only 5,000 remained alive.

However, history also finds exceptions to these maxims.

By the Spring of 1865, the Confederacy was on its last legs. Richmond had recently been burned to the ground as President Jefferson Davis and his cabinet were on the run. Confederate General John Bell Hood’s offensive to retake Nashville had failed and the state of Tennessee was now entirely in Union hands. General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia was outmanned, outgunned, and out of food. Were Lee, the military and spiritual leader of the Confederacy, defeated, it would surely mark the end of the road for the Confederate cause. On the morning of April 9, a cornered General Lee opted for one last desperate battle in the town of Appomattox Court House in central Virginia to break through the Union lines and reach Lynchburg where he hoped to scavenge any supplies available.

Before noon, the battle is already lost, and the Confederacy with it.

With defeat certain, Lee informed his staff that rather than fight a suicidal struggle to the last man, he would write a note addressed directly to his Union counterpart and future president Ulysses S. Grant to discuss the terms of the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia. This decision, while necessary to save the lives of his men, was agonizing for Lee: in his own words, the old Southern gentleman “would rather die a thousand deaths.” The two titans of the American Civil War finally met at 1PM at the home of grocer Wilmer McLean, a refugee from war-torn Northern Virginia. After a brief exchange of pleasantries, General Grant gave Lee an offer he couldn’t refuse.

After surrendering their heavy weapons, the Army of Northern Virginia would be allowed to retain possession of their small arms and (upon Lee’s request) horses. Lee’s hungry remaining 25,000 men would also be given three days’ worth of food, an unthinkable gesture of generosity after a war that caused the deaths of 2% of the nation’s population and many more cases of lifelong physical disability and emotional trauma. Most radically of all, the surviving soldiers of Lee’s Army would be rewarded with full amnesty, free to return home to their families and rebuild their lives and communities. Even Lee himself never faced prison time. Both Grant and Abraham Lincoln, who advised his most trusted general to “let ‘em up easy,” strongly believed that such a path was essential to healing and ultimately reuniting a shattered nation.

By 3PM, both Lee and Grant shook hands, tipped their hats, and the American Civil War had ended not with bloody vengeance or a train ride to Siberia, but a Gentleman’s Agreement.

One cannot hide that while the United States successfully was made whole again after such a devastating war, this unity came at the cost of the rights of African Americans in the South forced to endure Jim Crow and vigilante terror for decades to come. Nashville, the city where I live, must still contend with the shame that the first convention of the Ku Klux Klan occurred at the Maxwell House Hotel in 1867.

Many of you may recoil when you hear the phrase American exceptionalism. However, today, I hope you are now reminded of its true meaning. When other countries and cultures resolve conflicts through violence and revenge, ours, for the most part, has discovered a different approach: one where even through our deepest divides we can still reach outcomes we can all not only accept but celebrate. And this is the legacy of the fateful events that occurred 161 years ago today at the home of Wilmer McLean in Appomattox.

Boy, it seems like forever ago, doesn’t it?

Shortly after the 2024 US Presidential election, I published a lengthy post-op diagnosing everything that went right for Donald Trump’s third presidential campaign. The victory was close to overwhelming, and the strategy was a masterclass, appealing to a cross-section of American society bridging across incomes, races, and generations. The only surprise to me was how Trump’s margin of victory wasn’t even wider, especially considering the pretty egregious flaws his opponent exhibited throughout her largely ad hoc 107-day campaign. Of course, the election was a long 17 months ago, and by 2026, the president’s popular support no longer reaches the heights it once achieved. Much has occurred since, and little has been beneficial for the president’s popular status. And launching a major war in the Middle East with serious economic aftershocks has only dug the hole deeper.

Worst of all, he appears to have lost the very Americans who made his victory possible.

According to monthly opinion surveys from Reuters, Trump’s approval rating in March sank in from 40% to 36%, a record low for his second administration, eclipsing his predecessor Joe Biden’s final approval rating of 38% in December 2024. On the ever-crucial matter of the economy, a concern which had always been Trump’s strength throughout his first term and the 2024 campaign, the president’s rating collapsed to an abysmal 29% approval, lower than Biden had endured at any point for his entire four years in office. Though if there’s one silver lining for Trump, at least he’s better off than most European leaders. Across the Atlantic Ocean, French President Emmanuel Macron achieves the grand prize of shame with a soul-crushing 17% approval rating. Could be worse, eh?

Much of this decline has been a direct result of what has been certainly the most consequential decision of either Trump Administration: Operation Epic Fury. According to a poll conducted in mid-March by The Economist, the American public is not on Trump’s side at all. When asked if they support or oppose the war with Iran, only 33% of Americans support it while 56% oppose. Yet worse for the Trump administration was how only 24% of the country believes that the United States ought to “keep fighting until all US objectives have been achieved” while an overwhelming 61% would prefer to “end the war as quickly as possible.” With Americans under 30, the demographic whose support for the former host of The Apprentice I have highlighted as integral to the results of 2024, Trump’s ratings are down to Macron levels: only 22% support the war and 64% are inclined to end it as quickly as possible.

And don’t take it only from a few boring statistics or the reflexively (and often unfairly) anti-Trump legacy media, but listen to the man whom I believe more than anyone else carried Donald Trump over the top in 2024: Joe Rogan.

17 months after his (albeit half-hearted) endorsement, the popular podcast host is clearly operating a state of buyer’s remorse. While Rogan’s about-face began well before the Iran war, it was Trump’s dramatic decision to launch Operation Epic Fury that truly illuminated Rogan’s anger. On March 10, Rogan (not always the sharpest knife in the drawer) called the war “insane” and warned, “this is why a lot of people feel betrayed, right? He ran on ‘no more wars,’ ‘end these stupid senseless wars’ and then we have one that we can’t even really clearly define why we did it.” Rogan even went so far as to sound the alarm, that along with conflicts in Ukraine and Palestine, the war in Iran was leading us all to “World War 3.” And the data backs it up: young men aged 18 to 29, Rogan’s core following, has seen its support for the president collapse to 33%— and this was before the war in the Middle East. If Donald Trump has lost the podcast bros, as Rogan and his ilk are labeled, he has officially bitten the hand that fed his victory.

Most striking, however, is the generation gap within the conservative movement that forms the backbone of Trump’s support, even when Joe Rogan and company fall away. According to the Pew Research Center, a solid 84% of Republicans 65 and older, those who grew up ducking under their desks in the mistaken belief that somehow a few blocks of wood could protect them from radioactive fallout, support the war with Iran. As expected, this share drops precipitously with age, with only 49% of Republicans 29 and younger consenting to the beliefs of previous generations. This younger generation is not only frustrated with the so-called “endless wars” in the Middle East against zealous Islamists who will fight to the death for their odious cause, but they are also far more skeptical of Israel. When you have online influencers, without evidence, spreading conspiracy theories that the President of the United States has been manipulated and puppeteered by Israel, Mossad, and Benjamin Netanyahu, messaging difficulties become an understatement.

This generation gap manifested most visibly at last month’s Conservative Political Action Conference in Texas, where older attendees “celebrated Trump for ending what they called a 47-year conflict in Iran, marked by the death of Iran’s supreme leader,” but one young conservative, who happens to be a veteran, went on the record with Politico: “(Trump’s) lied about everything, if you go into a war where there’s no end game, how is it going to end? There’s no clear objective.” Indeed, according to the article, young staffers at the White House also feel frustrated and betrayed to such an extent that they fear for their own reputations should they continue to be associated with such a toxic administration.

Of course, none of what I just wrote excuses the heinous conduct of the Iranian regime for the past 50 years. Nor does it excuse the legacy media for tearing down the president even for some of his more positive achievements. I also still believe the United States ought to do everything to contain Tehran’s worst instincts, whether in the Strait of Hormuz, in Syria, or even right here on our home soil. However, the Trump Administration has engaged in a catastrophic policy of overreach, with only the President’s most dedicated yet ageing followers behind him. While a term-limited Donald Trump may have nothing to lose personally from what appears to be a hopeless and unpopular war, the Republican Party is by all accounts on its way to a midterm catastrophe. By embarking on a war without an imminent national security threat against the wishes of the American public, especially the youth, the second Trump Administration is already a political lame duck.

Baku: Azerbaijan’s windswept capital on the shores of the Caspian Sea

I suppose I am about to break a promise.

Not so long ago, I vowed that I would cease publishing any content that deviated substantially from covering the news and events that are most relevant to today. Inevitably, this would mean a prohibition on niche topics regarding small, unfamiliar nations that many of you may not have heard of. I certainly have published articles I now regret in the past because they fell into exactly this sort of trap. Well, today, I will try to square that circle of why you ought to care about the former Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan and how it remains relevant in terms of the dangerous situation in the Middle East. So just for this week, please indulge me as I don my professor’s cap and take you on a journey to Iran’s northern frontier.

March 5, 2026.

The Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic, a West Asian geographic oddity consisting of sovereign Azerbaijani and home to 470,000 people soil yet stuck between Iran and Armenia, felt the war which had been raging in Iran and the Persian Gulf arrive on its territory. That day, Iranian drones were fired directly into the exclave, striking both its main international airport as well as close to a school in the village of Shakarabad. While there were no fatalities, four people were injured, and the airport suffered mild damage. Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliyev condemned the attack as an “act of terror against the territory of Azerbaijan, against the state of Azerbaijan,” and demanded that “Iranian officials must provide an explanation to the Azerbaijani side, an apology must be offered, and those who committed this terrorist act must be held criminally liable.” Aliyev even went so far as to threaten “retaliatory measures,” and thus dramatically escalate an already dangerous conflict.

However, only days later, both sides pulled back from the brink. Just as Aliyev, hardly a democratic head of state, was planning a major escalation, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, a man whose domestic authority is far from absolute, reached out to his counterpart in the Azerbaijani capital of Baku and denied any official responsibility for the attack and promised an investigation into the incident. Aliyev, opting for diplomatic courtesy over cathartic justice, responded by offering condolences for the death of slain Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and even went so far as to promise humanitarian assistance to Iran and discuss “the development prospects of joint economic projects. Tehran ultimately brushed off the Nakhchivan attack with its customary defiance as an Israeli provocation, the aid went ahead, and it was back to business as usual. More likely than not, I believe the attack was ordered by a rogue Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) commander operating in Carl von Clausewitz’s Kriegsnebel— The Fog of War.

So, what exactly is the role of this nation, situated on the shores of the Caspian Sea, about the size of the state of Maine, and most critically, the home of 7 billion barrels in oil reserves?

In 1992, Azerbaijan was a newly independent country surrounded by chaos and danger. To the north was Russia, the recently departed former colonial master, and Chechnya, a restless region on the verge of rebellion. To the south was Iran, a nation committed to spreading an Islamic Revolution across its borders, a perilous state of affairs for a highly secularized, yet predominantly Shia Muslim nation like Azerbaijan. To the west was Armenia, another former Soviet Republic with whom relations had always been, well… complicated. As Moscow’s moderating influence dissolved along with the Soviet Union, ancient feuds between Azeris and the Christian Orthodox Armenians flooded to the surface in 1988 as Azeri thugs began massacring Armenian populations in a manner which could only be described as ethnic cleansing.

A good reminder that Azerbaijan is not always a benign actor in the world.

While the bloodletting ground on for more than six grim years, one nation stepped up for Azerbaijan: Israel. For Azerbaijan, it was about survival, and any external patron would do against an enemy, Armenia, backed by the weight of Moscow. For the Israelis, the calculation was simple: find a Muslim state somewhere in the world to prove that Israel was not hostile to the religion of currently 2 billion people and enhance the prospect of other Islamic nations agreeing to make peace with them. Jerusalem was as well naturally intrigued by Azerbaijan’s reserves of black gold. It may have been a Faustian bargain, but more than 30 years later, this arrangement has sure been lucrative for both sides. And in this corner of the world, Faustian bargains are the only means for survival.

Today, the state of Israel sources more than 70% of its crude oil either directly from Azerbaijan’s oil fields or piped across the Caspian Sea through Azerbaijan’s pipelines. Augmenting this energy partnership, Azerbaijan’s main oil company, SOCAR, was recently awarded a contract to drill for natural gas off Israel’s Mediterranean coast. Interestingly, even the mercurial Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a practitioner of sharp verbal attacks against the Israeli war in the Gaza Strip, has sat on his hands rather than halt the flow of Azeri oil and gas to Israel, a strong indication that his hostility is performative, not primal. And beyond the raw materials sector, this partnership has extended to the fields of digitization, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, infrastructure, and more. Finally, let us not forget that 70% of Azerbaijan’s weapons are Israeli-made, an arrangement that has paid off quite handsomely for Baku.

In short, without Azerbaijan, Israel would lack the bandwidth to do everything it does, for better or worse— and vice versa.

Naturally, Tehran is furious about this partnership, hence why the Azerbaijan was attacked on March 5. Yet this was an isolated incident. One of the enduring mysteries of this complex region remains: why so peaceful between Israel’s archenemy and one of their closest allies? You may struggle to square this circle, especially following menacing rhetoric from the IRGC. One factor is quite obvious: Iran’s large Azeri minority. This ancient community of Azeris have for centuries been so well-assimilated into Persian culture that estimates vary widely of their exact slice of the population, ranging anywhere between 16 and 35%. In fact, there are more Azeris, even in the more conservative estimates, in Iran than the entire population of the Republic of Azerbaijan. Even President Pezeshkian and former Supreme Leader Khamenei are part-Azeri. Barring the most extreme elements of the IRGC, Tehran appears to have taken heed of the risk of ethnic unrest.

Even more significant is the 2021 Shusha Declaration, a mutual defense agreement between Azerbaijan and Turkey. While the radicals who provoked the Nakhchivan attack may have no problem attacking every single neighbor, particularly those Azerbaijani pipelines that fuel Israel, such attacks have not materialized. After all, Turkey, according to the Global Firepower Index, boasts one of the top 10 most powerful armed forces in the world. Thus, while maintaining a degree of economic engagement with existential enemies of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the ever envious and paranoid Russia, Azerbaijan has just enough room to maneuver where they can operate an independent foreign policy without seeking approval in Tehran or Moscow.

You may not hear very much about Azerbaijan, except in the context of a US-brokered framework for a final peace agreement between it and its old archenemy Armenia— another development that infuriated Tehran. However, without Azeri oil, Israel would not be where it is today, and the Middle East would look quite different. And for the former Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan, the current arrangement has been immensely profitable and gratifying. And I hope you all have enjoyed my little detour into this small yet critical nation in the heart of Eurasia.