a rendering of a Sentinel silo cap

Enter The Sentinel Project

The mostly worrisome trends mentioned in Part I are compounded by recent decisions by the U.S. military establishment. In direct response to the 2026 National Defense Strategy’s call for an urgent and speedy modernization of our land-based missile force, the U.S. Air Force has rolled out a hugely expensive and complicated “upgrade” by replacing Minuteman III rockets with a new Sentinel model. The Sentinel missile will carry the same single warhead as the Minuteman, but it will be housed in new silos and a revamped network of transportation and communication installations. These infrastructure improvements are complicated and expensive—so much so that the project is facing massive cost overruns and lengthy construction delays.

The project involves replacing all 450 Minuteman III ICBMs deployed in the continental U.S. with Sentinels. The transition will require new and permanent easements for approximately 1200 miles of utility and fiber optic corridors. The Army Corps of Engineers is responsible for negotiating (and compensating) an estimated 1300 landowners for this access. Sounds daunting, because it is. Since its inception in 2020, the Pentagon’s cost for Sentinel has increased 81 percent. The budget estimate is currently at $141 billion and continues to rise as supply chain issues (including tariffs) keep boosting prices for necessary inputs.

The project is stalled. The Minuteman missiles were supposed to end their service life in 2036; that date has now been extended to 2050. The Government Accounting Office has noted problems with staffing, delays in security clearance processing, numerous unforeseen challenges with information technologies. Here in Montana, that means some rather optimistic assessments of robust economic development prospects—thousands of jobs in Great Falls and in another community, such as Lewistown—are on hold. The economic benefits for local landowners, businesses, and communities promoted by Northrup Grumman (which holds an exclusive contract to build Sentinel) have to be considered in the larger context of American taxpayers’ ever burgeoning burden to shoulder multi-trillion-dollar federal budget deficits.

“Sentinel” was so named to evoke the image of a stalwart force that stands guard and keeps watch. The Air Force’s Global Strike Command, which is responsible for managing all silos (as well as aircraft-based nukes), touts Sentinel as the foundation for stable deterrence for the next 70 years or more. That’s a tall order, given the adverse trends mentioned above—in general the undermining of deterrence by highly effective non-nuclear asymmetrical means of waging war.

How will America’s nuclear adversaries respond to the Sentinel upgrade? Will China accelerate its already blistering pace of ICBM deployments? Will Russia double-down on its threats to use tactical nuclear weapons against our European allies? Might North Korea’s leader succumb to a fever dream during the transition period, if and when a cyber-attack compromises our capacity for a timely response to a Hermit Kingdom assault? These are unanswerable questions, but they underscore the importance of re-engaging in some form of nuclear arms control whilst “modernization” proceeds.

There’s one more dimension of logistical and strategic complexity to weigh as Sentinel is held in abeyance: to avoid creating an opportunity for our adversaries to exploit an advantage in readiness, at least some Minuteman III missiles would have to be kept on alert during the process of swapping them out for Sentinels. We should keep in mind the ultimate deterrent—our as yet undetectable 14 nuclear submarines roaming the ocean near and far from our enemies’ coastlines armed with 20 ballistic missiles each, all MIRVed—as a secure platform providing security while the transition on land proceeds in stages. Still, I hear a loud “ka-ching” here and see a lot of cause for consternation going forward with Sentinel.

Exit Sentinel, Enter the Golden Dome

President Trump has championed a homeland defense concept modelled after Israel’s vaunted Iron Dome system. The concept calls for a layered missile defense system with space and ground integration, designed to intercept ballistic missiles, hypersonic weapons, and cruise missiles. Trump’s depictions of it on Truth Social and other platforms are outlandish, but the basic idea has been set forth by professionals in various reports and publications. Glen Van Herck is one such proponent, and his advocacy in The National Interest in August, 2026 is as good as any I’ve seen.1

In the article entitled Why the Golden Dome Is Essential for Homeland Defense, Van Herck makes these points, which I will quote at length:

Strategic stability is eroding. The risk of deterrence failure is growing daily. Two oceans and friendly nations to the north and south no longer provide what was once considered a North American sanctuary. Our country faces daily attacks in the cyber domain and information space, often aimed at fanning the flames of internal discord. While drones receiving much of the attention today, China, Russia, and others, such as North, have relentlessly fielded, as well, highly capable ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missiles. They can carry both conventional and nuclear payloads. These weapons can be delivered from space, air, land, sea, and sub-sea. They can hold the North American homeland at risk, along with those of European and Asian allies.

Golden Dome will complement the US nuclear deterrent by strengthening deterrence against first-wave conventional attacks by defense denial. Deterrence works when an adversary concludes that an attack will fail to achieve its objectives or that the cost will far outweigh any gain. Golden Dome defensive systems, along with a comprehensive homeland defense campaign plan, will address that decisively. It will create a multi-layered shield—sensors and effectors, both kinetic and non-kinetic, operating from the ground, sea, air, and space.

An adversary contemplating any kind of conventional (or limited nuclear) attack against the United States will have to take account of the real possibility that many of its attacking weapons will be neutralized by a combination of Golden Dome kinetic and non-kinetic shields. The uncertainties and complexities created by Golden Dome will complicate foes’ planning, reducing the potential value of any missile or drone threat. Golden Dome will not replace nuclear deterrence.

Golden Dome is affordable and achievable. The current cost estimate for a focused architecture is $185 billion through the mid-2030s. The approach prioritizes affordability and scalability. Golden Dome will be fielded in a phased deployment, beginning with expanded terrestrial and maritime capabilities. It will eventually progress to space-based sensors and interceptors. Initial operational capability is envisioned for 2028, and recent tests have been highly successful. The alternative to Golden Dome—continued underinvestment in homeland defense while adversaries field ever greater capabilities—is not an option for protecting the United States in this new age of warfare.

Many analysts take issue with Van Herck’s cost estimates. Other independent sources figure the program could cost anywhere between $250 billion to $3.6 trillion! At that scale, I think it would behoove defense planners to consider an approach to multi-layered defenses that creates open-source opportunities. The Golden Dome could, through international diplomatic processes, morph into a planetary shield, protecting every continent from power-crazed fanatics and, dare I mention them, extraterrestrial aggressors along with the rogue asteroid or two.

The Golden Dome may turn out to be a monstrous boondoggle. It faces practical as well as budgetary hurdles. Drone swarms might be able to overwhelm sensor arrays and ground-based interceptors. Only a few ICBMs or hypersonic missiles launched from enemy submarines would have to penetrate the layered defensive shield to create chaos. No dome can deter determined hackers. The U.S. could be effectively disarmed if a cyberattack successfully brought down the electricity grid and other critical infrastructure. China has demonstrated the efficacy of fractional orbital bombardment systems, whereby space-launched weapons can change their trajectories in mid-flight. Before all these caveat scenarios, we don’t know, as with Sentinel, how the project will be perceived, and received, by America’s adversaries and allies alike.2

Golden Dome and the UN Treaty Prohibiting Nuclear Weapons are, in a sense, competing pipedreams. It would be a lot smarter and cheaper and safer, I think, to pursue nuclear disarmament, to get on board the treaty bandwagon at the United Nations. But let’s be real: people in power don’t believe that such a turnabout in strategic thinking would yield better results—more security--given the high and still growing degree of mistrust among the geopolitical movers and shakers of the world. Arms merchants and manufacturers have an enormous, vested interest in status quo thinking and modernizing weapons systems. Getting from MAD and the extended deterrence provided by land-based missiles to a multi-layered homeland defense will be a monumental challenge.

One last thing: The Golden Dome approach will be hugely deficient without the active cooperation and participation of Canada. For now, I’ll leave it at that—alluding to the undeniable facts of North American geography and the inescapable realities of missile trajectories.

Where do we begin? This is a question easily set to music. (Remember Graham Nash’s Military Madness, from his Songs for Beginners album?) How do we move the needle hand of the Doomsday Clock back to something sane, like brunch o’clock, or mid-afternoon naptime? The world needs some breathing room, a global relaxation of tensions to allow a return to rational thinking about nuclear war. Reagan and Gorbachev got it right in 1982: such an unwinnable war must never be waged. They were followed by 8 of the 9 nuclear-armed nations in 2025, issuing the same solemn proclamation. The momentum at the UN is growing, even as the contagion is spreading. Progress is possible.

How can the people of Montana, with help from citizens across the country and around the world, transform an array of deadly ICBMs into a network of purely defensive ground-based anti-missile interceptors? I won’t say write your members of Congress, since that hasn’t worked for years, and I won’t recommend measures of resistance that could land you in the hoosgow.

There is no protest movement against the Sentinel project, and it wouldn’t work even if one materialized. I simply don’t have a practical answer. However, I think the place to start is in imagining a future without nuclear weapons—the promised land evinced by the U.N. Treaty--and backtracking from there, pausing together to consider all the risks and trade-offs of replacing ICBMs with 350+ kiloton warheads with smaller, shorter range interceptor missiles integrated with terrestrial and space-based networks of sensors that comprise a purely defensive techno-bubble. Gimme Shelter!

Then—wait for it—we craft a made-in-Montana movie called The Golden Dome. It could be an emotionally moving blockbuster thriller with subthemes of espionage and even a love story without the script needing to resort to huge explosions and scenes of mass murder. Imagine a premiere of the film in Malta (the island country, not the little burg on the Hi Line), where heads of state from the U.S., the UK, France, Russia, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea might gather for yet another meeting on the status of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Recent history has shown how movies can shape public consciousness and even influence political leaders. Big screen productions have the power to turn heads around.

The Finish Line. Let’s repurpose Malmstrom. Instead of going forward with the Sentinel project to replace the Minuteman missiles, why not employ the whole bloody network of stuff to integrate Montana into a multi-layered domed approach to continental defense?

For the moment, and probably for a long while yet, Montana remains a vulnerable dry sponge. We’re still a big fat bulls-eye target for a first strike. I don’t want to come at this like a wet noodle, but clearly there is an opportunity on the horizon for a fresh start at nuclear diplomacy that could lead to de-escalation, détente, and disarmament. Let’s dome up our defenses, ratchet down the rhetoric, and win an Oscar and the Nobel Peace Prize in one fell swoop.

Stephen Maly, hiding out nowhere near Malmstrom.

The state of Montana combines a strategic location (nowheresville, population-wise) and a martial spirit (a broad-based warrior culture that pervades the collective psyche). The great distances from major urban centers on the Pacific coast and the Upper Midwest make Big Sky Country well suited for a land-based missile component of America’s nuclear weapons triad of ICMBs, Submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) and long-range bombers. Montana houses a little more than a third of the 400 ICBMs deployed in the West; most of the rest are in Wyoming and North Dakota, with a few in Colorado and Nebraska. Montana has no city with more than 150,000 inhabitants, and most of its mere 1.1 million population is dispersed in a half-dozen small (by national standards) urban communities.

From a national defense perspective, we’re the optimal target for a barrage of enemy missiles: tons of open space; not very many prospective casualties. This makes sense in a first-strike scenario, wherein Russian or Chinese or North Korean ICBMS are launched at ours to remove our capacity to strike back decisively. Of course, this makes no sense at all if one loves our landscape and believes in world peace and is inclined to deny the viability of deterrence theory, the survivability of nuclear war, and the morality of weapons of mass destruction.

This is where the aforementioned martial spirit kicks in. Montanans are not warmongers, but they have, in modern times, exhibited extraordinary enthusiasm for all things military. Montana ranks third in the nation for the number of U.S. military veterans per capita. (Most are home-grown, but many have migrated from other states to take up fishing and hunting and heal in open spaces.1 Gun shows are ubiquitous and feature sundry military-style semi-automatic weapons—not the sort of firearm one needs to down a deer or elk. Montana has the highest percentage (nearly 67%) of gun-owning households in the country. Military air shows are very popular. Tens of thousands of people attended the one in Billings earlier this month. Old folks and youngsters and everybody in between marveled and cheered as the Army’s Golden Knights skydivers jumped out of planes and the Navy’s Blue Angels’F-18s streaked across the sky.

It’s been a few years, but my memory has not faded in recalling an assemblage of local citizens in Helena emanating nearly heart bursting affection for a nuclear-powered fast attack submarine named the USS Helena (SSN-775), a Los Angeles-class sub equipped with the Vertical Launch System for Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles. The vessel was designed to hunt and destroy enemy subs and surface ships, and to project power ashore with the Tomahawks. Before the USS Helena was decommissioned in 2025, the mayor and a number of other notables enjoyed the much-envied privilege of an undersea boat ride off the cost of Norfolk, Virginia.

These are just examples of how military culture is alive and well in these parts, even if the state’s net contributions to national defense are marginal in terms of contributions to the country’s budget and the number of individuals in service.2

I figure most Montanans are aware of the missiles in their midst, and don’t have a beef with their location and mission. Deterrence is pretty much accepted dogma. Most people do not subscribe to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which has moved its doomsday clock to 85 seconds to nuclear Armageddon, the worst positioning the organization has ever set forth, so the urgent sense of vulnerability some folks feel (like me) is not widespread.

It’s easy to be blasé about missiles nestled in off-the-highway silos—out of sight, out of mind. Also, if you’ve ever stood near an inert ICBM, in a museum or on an Air Force base, it’s not at all like seeing a fighter aircraft, a Navy destroyer, or an Abrams tank up close. There is nothing exciting about a tall metal tube with a pointy thing at the top that can house one or more nuclear warheads. This experience offers no thrill, just chill. And we know through journalists’ interviews with missile operators that launching a hugely destructive ICBM carries no hint of glory. It doesn’t take courage, or bravery, just obedience to command and following practiced maneuvers with a key that must be turned in synch with your silo-mate’s matching one.

Again, as a bystander, the knowledge that a single, unrecallable ICBM can incinerate millions in a flash is mind-numbing. It’s easier to avoid that thought than wrestle with its moral and material implications.

The “madness” of nuclear deterrence is familiar to most Americans who’ve ever read a book, a journal article, a magazine essay, or a novel about modern warfare.3 Actually, knowing about the paradoxical nature of nuclear weapons—their perceived necessity counterbalanced against a taboo against their use, ever again, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki—doesn’t require any reading at all. Movies tell the tale, in horrific (but rarely heroic) detail. I remember being riveted by the 1964 film Fail Safe, with Henry Fonda making horrendously difficult decisions. Dr. Strangelove is an even more memorable item in the nuclear war genre, with Peter Sellers in multiple roles, George C. Scott at his best (prior to Patton), and Slim Pickens riding a nuclear bomb to ground as if were a Brahma bull in a rodeo. That was a doozy of a film, introducing like none other the perverse absurdity of nuclear war in ways to make one laugh and cry interchangeably.

I never saw Threads, a BBC production in 1984 that is reportedly the grimmest depiction of society in the wake of a nuclear holocaust ever produced. From what I’ve read, the film goes far beyond depicting the initial devastation of a thermonuclear exchange—stemming, by the way, from a crisis in the Middle East triggered by a U.S. attempt at regime change in Iran—by depicting the long-term degradation of social order and human development across generations, leading to the total demise of civilization.

Another of the films I DID watch was Helena Caldicott’s sobering and Academy award-winning documentary If You Love this Planet, which spurred such a firestorm of public concern that President Reagan’s Department of Justice labeled it foreign propaganda. On taking office in 1981, Ronald Reagan was a staunch proponent of building up America’s nuclear arsenal and vehemently opposed the idea of disarmament treaties. But he had a change of mind after watching The Day After, a 1983 film starring Jason Robards that had over 100 million viewers, the highest ever ranking for a made-for-television movie in American history. In his diary, Reagan recounts that his reaction to the film was to “do all that we can to have a deterrent and to see that there is never a nuclear war.” [Emphasis added, with a bit more on Reagan below]. More recently, Kathryn Bigelow, the acclaimed director of gripping war dramas such as The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, revealed to Atlantic writer Tom Nichols that she was alarmed by the lack of public debate on today’s ongoing and increasing nuclear peril. Nichols reported that “my hope is that her next film can serve as a modern day Fail Safe or The Day After and spur the kind of discussion that was inspired by those earlier movies.”

That next Bigelow film, released in 2025, is The House of Dynamite, which involves a situation wherein a nuclear missile is bearing down on Chicago. I watched it on Netflix. Pretty good, I thought; the movie received mixed reviews. More importantly, it seems to have little if any impact. I haven’t heard anyone I know even mention it. A dud, in other words, rather than a rallying cry for change.

In spite of recent research indicating that almost nobody reads anymore, some literary works may be making more of a dent in public complacency. In 2024 journalist Annie Jacobsen published Nuclear War: A Scenario, a mesmerizing and horrifically documented account of a minute‑by‑minute, fact‑based hypothetical nuclear war beginning with a North Korean first strike on the United States, escalating into global thermonuclear conflict within 72 minutes and causing an estimated 5 billion deaths. It’s a real page-turner.

I confess to having binged on precursor tomes such as The White House Office of Technology Assessment’s 1974 unadorned description of what a nuclear attack would do to Washington, D.C., and New Yorker writer Jonathan Schell’s 1982 The Fate of the Earth, a book that Walter Cronkite heralded as “one of the most important works of recent years.” New York Times Book Reviewer Kai Erickson went further, describing the publication as “an event of profound historical moment…In the end, it accomplishes what no other work has managed to do in the 37 years of the nuclear age. It compels us—and compel is the right word—to confront head on the nuclear peril in which we all find ourselves.”

I remember a few things about that book: the haunting concept of nuclear winter (so ironic now that global warming is a preoccupying threat) and the unforgettable phrase and chapter title that depicts the aftermath of nuclear war as “A republic of insects and grass.”4

Books and movies keep coming out, entertaining us with plausible scenarios of nuclear exchanges where civilization continues to exist, minus a few cities here and there—New York, Moscow, Shanghai, London—places like that, a long way from here. However, I have yet to see a film or read a thriller depicting the obliteration of much of our Treasure State in a first strike attack on land-based missiles, even though that is one of the more realistic eventualities if the U.S. and its nuclear-armed rivals continue down the path of mutual assured destruction. More importantly, I’m not aware of any film depicting the successful prevention of a nuclear holocaust through diligent diplomacy and new strains of military doctrine.

This latter absence of localized dramatic output strikes me as an opportunity to explore a different trajectory, one that leads to an alternative and genuinely defensive role for the missile network in Montana, a repurposing of the silos and the fiber network connecting them and the above-ground facilities from which command and control signals emanate in a 24/7 year-round pattern. Before launching into this preferred future, I want to establish some background to enhance our understanding of Montanans’ place in U.S. nuclear strategy and bolster the plausibility of a fantasy.

Today, the Malmstrom missile complex in Montana is the largest in the country. Covering 23,500 square miles, it transcends the boundaries of nine counties. The base in Great Falls is the center pivot of the state’s Minuteman array and an important driver of the local economy. The missiles have been in place since the mid-1960s. Nothing’s gone wrong; nobody’s ever seen, in real life, the concrete lid blow off a silo to enable the nuclear-tipped rocket to take flight across this continent and beyond. 5[Endnote 5] President Kennedy regarded these missiles as his “ace in the hole” during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. In the early 2000s, there were approximately 200 Minuteman missiles on constant alert in their silos, each capable carrying three 20-megaton warheads. This was a time when multiple independent re-entry vehicles—MIRVs—were in vogue. In accordance with the New Start Treaty between the U.S. and the Soviet Union in 2010, a measure to significantly downsize the arsenals of the two rival superpowers (from approx.15,000 to 1,500 deployed warheads each), the Minuteman missiles were reduced in number and, more significantly, de-MIRVED, i.e., retrofitted to carry a single warhead.

Following Russia’s refusal to allow inspections pursuant to New Start, the treaty expired in February of this year. There are no other nuclear arms agreements in place or negotiations in progress.

Back to Base. My connection with Malmstrom has always been tangential. Because of the base’s management role over the Minuteman missiles, Malmstrom became the target of grassroots groups demonstrating against the utter insanity of planning and preparing for nuclear war. Some of my Helena friends had the temerity (a blend of courage and ego-driven gumption) to drive to Malmstrom and chain themselves to perimeter fences. I never did that. I did serve as the designee of our local group (The Last Chance Peacemakers Coalition) to Western Solidarity, a multi-state endeavor aiming to stymie President Carter’s plan to place 200 mobile MX ICBMs on a circular railroad track connecting 4,600 shelters across a wide swathe of territory in the Rocky Mountain West. This experience furthered the unwelcome belief that grassroots opposition to nuclear deployments just wasn’t going to cut it. (The MX was cancelled after the Church of Latter Day Saints came out against making the whole of Utah another sponge for enemy ICBMs, and President Reagan opted for his Strategic Defense Initiative instead.] Demonstrations at Malmstrom and elsewhere didn’t do anything to undermine policymakers’ resolve to maintain our land-based nuclear arsenal. They never have.

My wife Alice and I lived in Great Britain for a year, during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, and residency at the University of Sussex brought me into close proximity to and contact with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament—CND and the originators of the peace sign for those in the know. Impressive people, great pamphlets, an enduring logo: but, in the end (meaning now), all for naught. The United Kingdom maintains a small but formidable submarine based nuclear deterrent force and also houses American weapons as part of its NATO commitments. A year before dabbling in CND literature and overseas rallies, Alice and I took a bus from Washington, D.C. to New York City to take part in the largest anti-nuclear war protest march in history. It was positively thrilling to be a part of something so huge and spirited in the Big Apple. Over a million people descended on Central Park, demanding nuclear disarmament and an end to the Cold War arms race. Not long after that seemingly significant event, the Reagan Administration introduced the Strategic Defense Initiative, aka Star Wars.

Now, I cannot fail to acknowledge that the President who pushed for a scary, destabilizing, space-based approach to weapons of mass destruction is the same one who met with Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavík, Iceland in 1982 where they proclaimed, together, that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be waged. That was a good stroke for the Gipper, for sure. Still, the buildup and modernization of our nuclear arsenal have continued, in fits and starts, ever since. Opposition movements have just not worked, and, nowadays, there isn’t much juice for futile gestures like marching in the streets. The No Kings rallies haven’t had much to do with nuclear weapons per se, but lots of folks are rightly dismayed that the President of the United States has to power to ignite the world on a whim, utilizing secret codes that only he can use.6

Ineffectual popular movements aside, there is international law—arms control treaties and whatnot. The trends in that arena are not auspicious. As noted above, the New Start Treaty has expired, and that was the last in a series of binding commitments to limit the number of nuclear weapons deployed by the United States and Russia. China is seemingly not interested in any effort to curb their own rapid and extensive buildup. Over the past six years, China has nearly tripled the number of nuclear weapons it has and is on track to have over 1,000 by 2030. The Chinese want to achieve parity with their superpower peers before engaging in negotiated limits with the U.S. and Russia.

Shifting Contexts. There are other worrisome currents in the military dimension of geopolitical rivalry. Examples:

The increasing disutility of deterrence theory. The stimulus of the Iran War combined with the Trump Administration’s ambivalence toward extended deterrence (the so-called nuclear umbrella protecting allies in Europe and Asia) is incentivizing regional powers to consider building their own nuclear forces. South Korea, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and others reckon that the extended deterrence system is a bluff; the U.S. will balk when Russia or China (or a nuclear-armed Iran) threaten their neighbors with nukes. The pledge in the 2025 National Security Strategy to put “America First” contradicts a prior commitment to wage nuclear war on behalf of allies. In the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs, Rose Gottemoeller writes that state and non-state actors are increasingly willing and able to hit nuclear powers with conventional weapons, such as drones and missiles. “That scrambles the traditional logic of nuclear deterrence. Deterrence by threat of nuclear retaliation, the tool that has ensured nuclear stability, is weakening.”

The fragile regime of nuclear non-proliferation is fast eroding. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1970 (NPT) is an ongoing expression of a global near consensus that the world would be better off without nuclear weapons. The five principal nuclear powers that are also permanent members of the UN Security Council (U.S., UK, France, Russia and China, often referred to as the P5) committed to eliminate their nuclear arsenals if the non-weapon states agreed not to acquire nuclear weapons and to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency to monitor their use and nuclear material and to make sure that none was diverted to weapons use. Experts figure that 44 countries are technologically capable of making nukes, but in the 56 years since the NPT came into force only three countries—Israel, India, and Pakistan—decided to build weapons outside the treaty and only North Korea reneged after joining it. In the treaty, non-nuclear states successfully insisted that disarmament be a feature of the agreement. Thus, nuclear weapons states have had an ongoing obligation under Article IV of the NPT to “move in good faith towards arms control and disarmament measures.” That ain’t happening.

In 2025, the P5 agreed that the era of nuclear arms racing was over and should never resume. In 2022 all nuclear-armed states (add India and Pakistan and North Korea to the principle five, but not Israel, which refuses to confirm its arsenal) agreed with the Reagan/Gorbachev dictum that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” But all of these countries are now modernizing and considering increases to their respective nuclear stockpiles. Larger arsenals beget larger arsenals. The U.S. military believes is has to build more nukes to deter both Russia and China simultaneously. China’s unique and commendable commitment to “no first use” of nuclear weapons is hard to square with its rapid and extensive buildup.

The desire for nuclear weapons is contagious. The entire NPT regime may unravel altogether if South Korea and/or Japan flout the agreement. Notwithstanding this increasing instability, there is a countervailing movement in the global arena: the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Said treaty was adopted in 2017 and entered into force in 2021. It aims to comprehensively prohibit the development, testing, production, stockpiling, and use of nuclear weapons of any kind. Ninety-five states have signed the treaty; 75 have ratified it; 98 have not joined in the cause. All the nuclear-armed states have declined the opportunity, as have all NATO members and nuclear-sharing countries like Australia, Japan, South Korea, and several European nations outside NATO. Considering the failure to honor pledges in the NPT and the rebutting of the UN Treaty by every country sheltering under nukes, disarmament is not currently in the cards.

There has been a whittling away of the nuclear taboo established by the gruesome tragedy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Survivors of that U.S. decision are dying and with them the memories of the horrific consequences of just two pygmy bombs. (At 15 kilotons each, the atomic bombs dropped on Japan were 30+ times LESS powerful than the 300-450 Kiloton warheads on modern ICBMs.) U.S. National Defense Strategy now emphasizes shorter range missiles with lesser payloads, making them more “useful” in a conflict with Russia or China et.al.

Nuclear war is no longer unthinkable by rational political and military leaders. Put another way, it’s never been unthinkable, really, but it appears to be increasingly doable, and probable. The depletion of high-end conventional weapons capable of shooting down incoming missiles lowers the bar for use of tactical nukes. In accordance with Russian military doctrine, President Putin has threatened to “escalate in order to deescalate” the war in Ukraine, and such assertions have the Baltic republics, Eastern European countries, and even the United Kingdom on tinder hooks. Meanwhile, Trump has bellowed about vaporizing Iran and Xi Jinping keeps repeating an oath to take Taiwan before leaving office, which means until he is deposed, or dies, or both.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is creeping into the niche of military decision-making. AI’s rapidly advancing large language models will soon (if they aren’t already) be capable of making autonomous decisions in crisis situations. An AI agent—in the U.S., in Russia, in China, and perhaps in other countries’ bailiwicks as well—could decide to launch nuclear weapons. European political philosopher Timothy Garten Ash, August 23 issued a post entitled “Are we heading for an AI Hiroshima?” He answered his own query in the affirmative.

By using similar logic, however, AI might also prevent a nuclear war from happening, by accident or on purpose. AI could conceivably outthink maniacal leaders in the White House, the Kremlin, the central leadership compound in Beijing, or an underground bunker in Pyongyang and thwart their efforts to strike first in hopes of an ultimate even if catastrophic “win”. It’s useful to keep in mind the many near misses the world has experienced since the 1950s, through miscalculation and miscommunication between fallible human actors monitoring missile launches and bomber flights. One particular incident springs to mind. In 1983, a Soviet technician correctly identified what appeared to be an launched from Montana or North Dakota as an optical illusion caused by an atmospheric anomaly. Assistance from AI might add considerable value to conventional monitoring protocols and thus reduce the likelihood of a fatal mistake.

END OF PART 1. Stay tuned for Part 2, available right away!

One of the participants in the Rewriting the Constitution course submitted a memo to the group’s shared Dropbox file entitled Self-Governance in the 21^st Century. He began with a set of assumptions that I believe captured the general consensus of the group. It goes like this, with only slight alterations to the original to avoid repetition:

1) The Constitution of the United States is no longer relevant to how the country is being governed.

2) Regardless of potential future events, the Constitution cannot be amended in any meaningful way so as to ensure that it can become the governing document of the country again.

3) Citizens of the U.S. are not willing to be governed by any other form of government than Self-Governance via a democratic republic.

4) The vast majority of American citizens are honest, thoughtful, patriotic people who want what is right for their country. They think and care wholeheartedly about their community, and all the communities that make up the United States. They want it to continue as a democratic republic that operates with their values so as to lead the rest of the world.

5) A future opportunity will present itself to the citizens of the U.S. where they will be able to put into place a governing document/Constitution that provides a functioning democratic republic that once again can endure for generations to come.

The author goes on to with detailed lists of what current constitutional provisions (the Senate, for example) and institutionalized practices (executive orders, political parties, et. al.) should be eliminated, what agencies and entities should be restored or retained, who and what should be replaced, what needs to be created. This set of lists is four pages long, single-spaced. I don’t agree with many of the recommendations, and others won’t either. That’s not what’s important; it’s the spirit of solidarity in which this remarkably detailed prescription was offered that matters most. That same spirit is what has driven the process leading to the Con Con in Philadelphia.

Let’s return for a moment to the prefatory assumptions above and focus on the tissue of truth connecting numbers 2 and 5. I believe it is correct that Americans will never embrace any form of self-government that is not fundamentally democratic. The principle of popular sovereignty is too deeply rooted in the history of our republic to allow an authoritarian regime (fascist, communist, military or otherwise) to gain anything but temporary traction in America. The intervention of military leaders and their imposition of The Protectorate would seemingly constitute a glaring contradiction, but in fact it has turned out to be the “opportunity…to put into place a governing document/Constitution that provides a functioning democratic republic that once again can endure for generations to come.”

I am not privy to the mechanics and logistics of the coup, which is undoubtedly an extralegal operation. There’s nothing in statute or the Constitution providing for such an extraordinary breach of law and custom in the United States. How the group of current and former military officers managed to convince a majority of state governors to go along with a plan to use National Guard troops to confront ICE and its accomplices and then to play an ongoing role to keep the peace in scores of urban centers remains a mystery to me; it will be the stuff of legend and doctoral dissertations in the years to come.

What I can say with gut-level self-assurance that irrespective of legalities, a sizeable proportion of the American people had become demoralized by and disgusted with the blatant corruption of the Trump Administration. They had lost confidence in the Congress, the Supreme Court, the Department of Justice, the civilian leadership at the Pentagon, and every member of the President’s cabinet. These same citizens, many of whom had been and continue to be severe critics of America’s unnecessary wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and who also harbor grave suspicions about the inhumane motives of the military-industrial complex, have not lost trust in the professionalism and authentic patriotism of the U.S. military. The Army, the Air Force, the Navy, the Marines, the Coast Guard (and yes, even the Space Force) are still highly regarded, especially by Veterans and families with members serving in the armed forces.

The Protectorate is thus a repository of public trust. It has not imposed martial law, or suspended habeus corpus. With its solemn promise to protect the integrity of the elections for the House, the Senate, and the Presidency in 2028, and to retreat to barracks once the outcome of those elections has been certified, The Protectorate is exercising a form of self-restraint reminiscent of George Washington, who demurred from invitations to power by resigning his commission after the victory at Yorktown.

George Washington stepping down and away from power

Now, a Cliff Notes-style summation of what survived the 6 months of political familial discourse in the regions and a long weekend here in the City of Brotherly Love.

There were lots of suggestions for subtle changes to The Preamble. Most of these were resisted. At the urging of Beau Breslin (he participated in the Rewriting course before becoming a member of the Advisory Council), one of our group asked Chat GPT to concoct a preamble. Recalling the inspiration of Providence that informed some of the Founders, another suggested that we listen to the voice of Claude. Playing with AI brought interesting results, but nothing more. Most of us preferred the original language in the Preamble.1

Here’s one rather eloquent statement in defense of leaving things as they are, and always have been:

I understand that the Preamble has no legal force, that it merely sets the philosophical and aspirational table for the structures and the laws that follow. But human beings are creatures who set their sails according to whatever story they’ve chosen to identify with. And that story is oftentimes nothing more than a few words artfully composed to capture the imagination. The Preamble to the United States Constitution is such a story. It is absolutely critical to get the story right.

In the end, only one change, but an extremely important one, was made to the sacrosanct Preamble. Inspired by phrases in the Declaration of Independence regarding “the pursuit of happiness” and deference to “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind”, the Con Con delegates decided on a composite phrase intended to advance Americans’ belief in fundamental freedoms and bolster public opinion about the salience of international law. Staunch support from delegates knowledgeable about human rights treaties overcame indifference to the subject, so the Preamble has a new cadence (in the italics):

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, make progress toward a better quality of life, secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity, and acknowledge the inherent dignity and inalienable rights of all members of the human family as the foundation of peace and freedom in the world, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Getting beyond the Preamble, what’s new, and what remains the same in the Constitution? At this juncture I want you to know why I’m not including the full text of the document that emerged from Con Con. It has been embargoed for a week. After that, the not-so-new but much improved Constitution will be published on-line and printed in a large, elegant font. The hard-copy publication will be distributed by mail to every household in the country. This marketing strategy was consented to by unanimous decision of the delegates in Philadelphia. It was born of the historical example of Thomas Paine’s highly influential pamphlet Common Sense, in essence a principled argument for the independence of the American colonies in the lead-up to the Revolutionary War. Paine’s tome sold over 100,000 copies, an astonishing number at the time. The millions of copies of the 2027 Constitution will be provided free of charge.

So, without revealing the document in its entirety, I will endeavor to provide a sufficient summary to satisfy your immediate curiosity and whet your appetite for the whole printed and downloadable meal of revisions.

The first and most notable change following the Preamble is the order in which the articles are placed. The Bill of Rights—amended somewhat, as I will explain in a moment—now comes before the structural articles. This change is designed to emphasize the special place that political freedom has in the hearts and minds of Americans, and how it distinguishes the United States from many other countries.

Most of the Constitution remains intact. The driving ethos of the constitutional revision process was to start fresh, but not anew. Basic principles have not been tossed aside: Separation of Powers? Keep. A bicameral legislature? Keep. A singular executive; i.e., a one-man/woman presidency? Leave as is. (This is not to be confused with the theory of the unitary executive, which was rejected wholeheartedly by the Committees of Correspondence.)

Now, the changes. First off, Article V has been amended. The two thirds majorities in both the House and Senate to set forth an amendment or call for a convention stays the same, but the requirement that ¾ of state legislatures are needed to ratify an amendment has been reduced to two thirds. There is also a new provision for an official review, by plebiscite, every 20 years (a bow to Thomas Jefferson, who famously asserted that the constitution should be redone every generation, to better fit the law of the land to a changing democratic society). If sixty percent of the voting public favors a new Con Con, it must happen within six months of the ballot measure. This change will likely usher in a period of high-octane proposals for more amendments, as has occurred in several periods of American history, most notably following the Civil War and in the years just preceding and following the First World War.

The first, third, fourth, fifth and all the rest of the original Bill of Rights amendments will still read as they have done for over two centuries. The ninth and tenth amendments are unchanged but will doubtless inspire lots of legislation (and litigation) in the years ahead, as states exercise their broad authority in a new political context.

I’d like to dwell on this theme for a bit. Here’s the unchanged wording but elevated status of the federalism amendments:

Amendment IX: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Amendment X: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

The Founders were concerned that the list in the Bill of Rights would foster the misunderstanding that other, inherent rights could be excluded from recognition, and that the federal government would, in future years, seek to encroach on the many areas of jurisdiction reserved to the states—education, elections, the licensing of trades and rules for commercial transactions, etc. They were prescient in this expectation, to be sure. Notwithstanding a general apathy towards and disdain for the role of state governments, there has been a robust movement among states’ rights advocates in recent years. Members of the long-standing Tenth Amendment Center, nicknamed “Tenthers”, are rejoicing in the rejuvenation of federalism. They’ve been joined by a new group, the “Niners”; together they make a formidable pair. I predict they are going to enjoy a heyday in years to come, as more and more citizens realize the relevance of state level governance in their daily lives and as federal overreach is increasingly resented.

States will fulfill the promise that Justice Brandeis foresaw back in 1925 when he characterized states as “laboratories of democracy”. State governments, at their best, can come up with new ideas that can be tested on a small scale to determine their nationwide viability. Under the 10^th Amendment, for example, each state has the power to determine the rules of corporate registry, and corporations do not have a right to engage in political spending. At the state level, they are not regarded as persons with unbridled abilities to influence campaigns under the cover of free-speech rights. Historically, it is worth remembering that twenty states and territories had enfranchised women prior to the passage of the 19^th Amendment in 1920.

Even some of the Constitution’s most controversial features, the ones made more so by recent Supreme Court interpretations, are untouched. For example, the Second Amendment (the right to bear arms) was furiously debated in every forum. Many delegates wanted to abolish it entirely; most wanted to alter it so as to mandate background checks and permit regulations such as banning assault weapons. A stalwart few won the day, however. They stuck to their guns with grim and principled determination, pointing out that many state constitutions also contain the same rights, and that citizens need to be able to forcefully resist criminals and a predatory government. Defenders of the status quo pointed to Virginia’s recent attempt to ban assault weapons, a failed endeavor that led to the largest spike in gun purchases in the state’s history. In the end, the Second Amendment was characterized as the third rail of constitutional revision. It stands as is, until such time as future Supreme Court renders a fresh interpretation of its original intent.2

Congress retains the sole power to declare war, but it has become a moot point. As everyone knows by now, there has been no such declaration since the Second World War. The War Powers Resolution, passed by Congress in the wake of the Vietnam War, imposing an obligation on the President to report on hostilities and seek Congressional approval to fund them after 60 days has never been put to the constitutional test. Most legal experts figure it would fail as a violation of the separation of powers. The Con Con delegates have set forth a more rigorous measure in Article I, complementing the declaratory power with a proviso that a failure to request Congress’s consent to continue any military engagement involving the use of force within 72 hours of initial combat will result in automatic impeachment.

The discussion of war powers was long and arduous. It involved a panoply of issues surrounding the pace and complexity of international conflict in the 21^st century. The Founders, after all, could scarcely imagine hypersonic missiles, drones, stealth technologies, nuclear launch codes, the prospect of autonomous decision making by robotic weapons of mass destruction. The main philosophical question was how to constrain a President from launching a war of his or her choice without involving the Congress in a timely fashion or consulting with the American people in any meaningful way. There were spirited efforts to articulate a meaningful distinction between threats to the nation (imminent and otherwise) and actual attacks; between offensive and defensive wars. As Jason Willick observed in his July 26 Washington Post column, How Congress Lost its War Power, “It’s a rare country that doesn’t justify its military campaigns as self-defense.” Absent any modern relevance to declaring war in an environment of potentially devasting conflict exploding without much warning or build-up, the only available lever to counterbalance and restrain executive action has been the power of the purse. With budgetary allocations made in advance of any pending conflict, that leverage hasn’t worked. Now, however, non-compliance with a new constitutional obligation to seek funding within a 72-hour period is bolstered by an instantaneous impeachment clause.

In the matter of impeachment, some significant tweaks have been made to the original language in Article I, so that votes to impeach a president in the House and to convict in the Senate will henceforth by conducted by secret ballot. Attempts to add details to the existing impeachable offenses of treason, bribery, and other “high crimes and misdemeanors”—such as corruption, gross ineptitude, abuse of power, obstruction of justice, violations of the Constitution, collusion with foreign governments, inattention to public duties—elicited a riot of rhetorical flourishes at the Con Con, but not a consensus. Instead of a florid list of behaviors warranting impeachment, the revised Constitution has a vote of no confidence feature (see below) integrally linked to impeachment proceedings.

Most of the proposals to tighten up the constitutional provisions involving Emoluments and Pardons were rejected, mainly because they were overly wordy and specific, but also because of the perceived effectiveness of an altogether new item, a Vote of No Confidence, that expressly applies to each. This measure is common in parliamentary systems, when legislative and executive powers are combined. But votes in the House and Senate to bring down a government and force new elections is foreign to our system, and, without skillful applications of nuanced logic, would violate the separation of powers. Leave it to the Advisory Council to come up with the workable language! From now on, a Vote of No Confidence by a two-thirds majority in either the House or Senate in relation to the President’s corrupt behavior, incompetence, ineptitude, or failure to faithfully execute the laws will trigger impeachment proceedings. Oh, I almost forgot, besides this clever innovation the Con Con has ruled out the issuance of blanket pardons to family members and business entities of any kind, both in a preemptive manner or for an after-the-fact offense.

The Electoral College is no more. There were reasoned arguments for keeping it and reshaping it to mimic and generalize the procedure adopted by Maine and Nebraska, which award their electoral votes in accord with poll results in voting districts. Another position taken to leave the Electoral College alone was based on high expectations for the eventual success of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC), which would obviate the possibility of another instance wherein the winner of the popular vote would be superseded by the final count of electors from the states. NPVIC would mandate that whoever wins the most votes in any participating state would be awarded all the electoral votes. As the Con Con convened, 18 states had adopted the NPVIC, with a total of 222 electoral votes. Forty-eight more votes were needed to attain the 270 necessary to achieve victory. Given the rather urgent circumstance of a nascent insurrection against the Protectorate, the majority of delegates did not have the patience to wait and see if the National Popular Voter Interstate Compact would enter into force and thus supersede the anti-democratic anachronism that was originally intended, believe it or not, to prevent a dictatorship brought about by an uninformed electorate enthralled by a populist demagogue.

The power of the purse, as stipulated in the Appropriations Clause of Article 1, Section 9, Clause 7 in the Constitution, has been supplemented with language prohibiting the Executive from impounding funds duly appropriated for specific or general purposes by Congress. This change effectively repeals the Impoundment Act of 1974 and its revisions, which didn’t restrain Trump’s Office of Management and Budget from cavalier refusals to spend Congressional appropriations that did not align with White House priorities.

There were motions to eliminate the Senate, established in Article I, Section 3. There were others to make that august body more democratic, by awarding additional numbers of Senators to states with larger populations. In one suggested formulation, for example, the four most populous states would have five; the next four would have four; etc. No state would be guaranteed more than one Senator, and the total would remain 100. None of these reasonable recommendations made the final cut.

Making the Congress more democratic will rely on an expansion of the House. That DID happen. Going forward, there will be 870 members (double the historic number). This will ensure better representation for ethnocultural groups and political minorities who have been denied voice by gerrymandering and winner-take-all elections. The House Chamber in the Capitol cannot accommodate such an increase, and there is no appetite to renovate the Capitol to such an extent, so Congress will have to come up with rules and schedules that allow members to participate remotely, from their respective districts.

In Article III, the implied principle of judicial review has been clarified. It took many delegates by surprise to not find language in the Constitution definitively outlining the Supreme Court’s authority to rule on the constitutionality of laws passed by Congress. Since 1803, in the landmark ruling of Chief Justice John Marshall in the case of Marbury v. Madison, such authority has been understood to be binding even in the absence of clear language. The discussion of this topic has given a minority of delegates ample opportunity to impugn the Supreme Court in both principle and practice. The legitimacy of nine unelected justices appointed for life terms deciding the fate of measures passed by both Houses of Congress and endorsed by the President has always been an iffy proposition. It is one of the more blatant anti-democratic features of America’s constitutional order. And yet, the Supremes remain in place, now with a clear-cut power to rule authoritatively on the constitutionality of Congressional legislation and Executive actions.

In lieu of a balanced budget amendment, the Con Con adopted a less strict fiscal requirement, branded the Keynes Amendment, in deference to the 20^th century British political economist whose ideas informed the Bretton Woods institutions (World Bank and IMF) and provided the intellectual foundation for modern finance. The Con Con had a number of neo-Keynsian economists as delegates, and most of them argued against a requirement to balance the federal budget for a variety of reasons, emphasizing the financial impracticality and political unreality of forcing massively injurious spending cuts on the American public.3 The Keynesians understand the need for deficit spending in times of recession and support budget cuts when revenues produce a surplus. They are also steadfast critics of long-term, unsustainable public debt. According to the Congressional Budget Office and several non-governmental organizations concerned with mounting fiscal problems, when the 48^th president takes office in January 2029, the federal debt is projected to approach $45 trillion, amounting to approximately 107 percent of gross domestic product, surpassing the highest debt-to-GDP ratio in American history, set in 1946 immediately following the Second World War. If the U.S. does not address the budget deficit, interest on the debt will mount, as will interest rates (including bond yields) as investors lose confidence in the U.S. and the dollar. As one critic put it, “Fiscal strangulation will result.” If that happens, as most of us must know, even if we won’t say it aloud, rebellion will follow.

Based mainly on borrowed concepts from the European Union, the new amendment establishes two fiscal thresholds: Congressional spending may not exceed 15 percent of gross domestic product, and the country’s debt to GDP is limited to 50 percent. (Currently, the figures are 38 percent and 131 percent.) There is an exception for times of national emergency, as declared by both the President and both houses of Congress concurrently. There is an enforcement mechanism: the penalty for violating the amendment is suspension of Congressional pay.

Here’s a few more hors d’oeuvres, as it were:

Ø Executive Orders, which were never a feature of the U.S. Constitution but have been issued with increasing frequency by Presidents of both parties in recent years—to bypass a deadlocked Congress in many cases—are now ensconced in Article I (concerning Legislative matters) and Article II (addressing the Executive branch). In the former, the House and Senate may, with simple majority votes, congruently authorize executive orders that are spelled out in detail. In the latter, executive orders are prohibited unless authorized by Congress. These reciprocal clauses should work to restore the legislative supremacy established by the Founders.

Ø In Article III, there are now age limits (75) and term limits (18 years) for Supreme Court members, plus an enforceable Code of Ethics.

Ø The Equal Rights Amendment passed unanimously. There was no debate; it was a slam dunk.

Ø I’ve already mentioned the Clean and Healthful Environment Amendment, with language borrowed from the Montana Constitution.

Ø The eighteenth and twenty first amendments (Prohibition and its repeal) are wiped away. Nobody in the Con Con wanted to memorialize a distasteful period of history dominated by teetotalers and temperance unions.

Ø There is now an affirmative and uniform right to vote for every American citizen, and penalties for interfering for this right.

Even though the Convention’s final draft is a triumph of collective will, there will be more changes to come in the years ahead. Considering the depth of discussion and debate among the Con Con delegates, and more so in the context of their predecessor Committees of Correspondence, here’s my humble prediction about constitutional amendments in the hopper.

· Age and term limits for members of Congress

· A six-year term for presidents, something to borrow from Mexico

· Further additions to fundamental human rights, borrowed from Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms

· Capping the number of Supreme Court justices at 15

· Adding Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. (but not Greenland or Canada!) to the roster of states

· A right to privacy (as in the Montana state Constitution)

· A set of definitions to accompany a detailed list of high crimes and misdemeanors in the Impeachment Clause

· Qualifications to Presidential immunity from criminal prosecution while in office (e.g., a definition of what distinguishes “official acts” from wanton behavior.)

These and other propositions have a better chance of succeeding now that the amending formula in Article V has been changed. But the hurdle is still high, so Congressional legislation will be the easier path in those instances (e.g. term limits) where a Constitutional amendment is not necessary to effectuate reform.

Both the Committees of Correspondence and the Con Con delegates came to grips with the need to not go overboard with recommended amendments to the Constitution. They were, collectively, broadly cognizant of how many of the problems burdening the American political system are better dealt with by statutory measures as well as administrative rulemaking at the federal and state level. For example, nothing in the Constitution can fix the obscene degree of wealth inequality in the country. While a clear majority of delegates across the country, as evidenced by public debates, identified this issue as paramount in restoring the public’s confidence in American democracy’s survivability, they couldn’t find a way to address it adequately in the form of one or more constitutional amendments. The constitution was designed to prevent and stave off incipient rebellion. It still is. But if politicians at the national and state level do not come up with implementable designs for tax fairness and plans to stabilize living costs and methods to curb the inexorable growth of inequality in a market-driven economy, there will be hell to pay.

There was a smorgasbord of suggestions regarding limits on campaign finance, gerrymandering, proportional representation, rank choice voting, open primaries, mandatory national service, the powers of regulatory agencies, a single payer health system, prayer in schools, tax and tariff policies, and more, but these issues were slid off the table and slated for further debate and lab work in Congress and the states.

THE OUTCOME

After all that verbiage on the substance of the Con Con, you may have forgotten the unprecedented spectacle of the military coup. It has not gone without serious consequence beyond domestic politics. Most worrisome is the effect it has had on financial markets. At the outset, when the Protectorate announced to the world that it had deposed the President, it looked like the Chinese government was poised to engage in a massive sale of U.S. treasury bills. Foreign affairs experts explained that the temptation to exploit America’s weakness was too tantalizing to forego. For different reasons, Japan and other allies of the U.S. were expected to follow suit. This bond market bombshell would have compounded the damaging effects of the huge sell-off in the stock market when the Artificial Intelligence bubble burst in December, wiping out trillions of dollars of investment capital. But cool heads have calmed the situation. The collective damage to the world economy of a sudden move to de-dollarize transactions in global energy, banking and commodity markets was judged to be too severe to execute. The Protectorate gained some breathing room by reassuring investors and lenders that the U.S. would continue to make interest payments on the massive national debt. The international financial community also welcomed the inclusion of the Keynes Amendment in the revised Constitution.

As the country (and the world) awaits ratification of the final text by at least 38 state legislatures (all 50 will be in session in 2027), my most salient reflection on the outcome of this high-stakes political drama is that it is Jenkinsonian in nearly every dimension.

Clay Jenkinson will probably dismiss this sort of tribute to his knowledge and skills as poppycock. But it might also make him blush a bit, with pride. Mr. Jenkinson is as self-deprecating as all the other members of the Advisory Council, but not more so. He will know how much influence he has wielded, both in terms of the substance of the revised document and the process that brought it to fruition. As a Jeffersonian scholar, and as a pragmatic American, he will have had to grudgingly accept the paradoxical necessity of a forceful intervention to prevent the end of government of the people, for the people, and of the people.

As the player coach of the Advisory Council, Jenkinson scored some hits. Of the 45 specific recommendations he made to colleagues in his Rewriting class, a magnificent seven of them have been taken up and enthusiastically endorsed by the Con Con delegates in Philadelphia. The amending formula, the Vote of No Confidence, abolishing the Electoral College, clarifying war powers, doubling the size of the House of Representatives, restricting the use of executive orders, term limits for Supreme Court justices: these are all products of Jenkinson’s febrile mind. Many of the rest of the changes on his list could be coming in the near future, as additional amendments, and through legislation.

Before ending this homage to Mr. Jenkinson, I want to offer a few samples of what I’ve learned from this sage on multiple stages.

How to admire perceptive turns of phrase, like this one,

“The United States is the most dynamic, hectic-paced, innovative and fast-changing nation in the world and yet it enshrines a constitution written by white men in wigs and buckled shoes, many of them slave owners, in a world that moved at three miles an hour.”

Here’s another, uttered long before admonitions of a rolling coup:

“The U.S. is undergoing a slow-motion nervous breakdown.”

How to appreciate what Clay calls the Kaleidoscope Effect, when a singular change causes many others in unpredictable fashion. It’s the perfect image to help remind ourselves that accurately thinking through complex challenges is often impossible.

How Jenkinson does not sugarcoat. In his July 13, 2026 missive on the Listening to America website, he writes “In the last 60 years, we have ceased to be a republic, and in some ways, a democracy, and while we were largely asleep at the wheel, have become an oligarchy bordering on a kleptocracy.” At the same time, or rather repeatedly, Clay has done his best to reassure his classmates and his broader audiences. “We’re going to get through this, of course” and, with typical eloquence:

“I continue to believe we have a secular-sacred national mission, grounded in the dreams of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, to be a template for human aspirations, human possibility, human rights, equality of opportunity, and self-government.”

Jenkinson has called for a “spiritual Manhattan Project”, something as coordinated, structural, and national is scope as that monumental endeavor to build an atomic bomb. The irony here is probably unintended—Jenkinson is no fan of weapons of mass destruction—but the allusion is otherwise apropos, as he has impersonated Robert Oppenheimer with great aplomb.4

People are waking up to the need for the informal recodification of political norms, such as mutual respect, consideration for the common good, placing country before party, and honoring American’s historic dedication to the peaceful transition of power. Even in the shadow of The Protectorate, the nation is experiencing a renaissance of civic virtue, the immaterial condition of social interaction that the Founders insisted was indispensable to sustaining a democratic republic. According to historian Thomas Ricks, they used the word “virtue” about six thousand times in the collected writings from the Revolutionary era, way more than “freedom”. Humility, responsibility, and respect for constitutional limits—these aspects of character and public-mindedness are norms that cannot be established in law.

Meanwhile, the calcified, non-constitutional duopoly of the Democratic and Republican parties is giving way to popular demands for a more diverse set of options that better reflect citizens’ values and preferences. In the 2028 elections, I anticipate there will be Democratic Socialists, mainstream (moderate) Liberal Democrats, and Greens, along with MAGA, Reagan Republicans aspiring to become once again the Party of Lincoln, and the new Common Ground Party—yet another offspring from participants in Jenkinson’s Rewriting course. The Preamble to the Common Ground Party includes these beginning and ending passages:

The Party is formed by citizens committed to the preservation of the American constitutional republic, the strengthening of civic trust, and the protection of liberty and opportunity for future generations…The Common Ground Party is founded on the belief that democratic societies endure when citizens seek common ground without abandoning principle. This party, therefore, exists to safeguard the democratic process, foster understanding across differences of principle, and to promote collaboration in service of the common good.

Not a bad start to unrigging a system of corrupted hyper-partisanship.5

The Founders of the republic had four principal fears as they crafted the Constitution: 1) a runaway, unbounded Executive; 2) that person’s decision to engage in unjust and unnecessary wars; 3) a debilitating national debt; and 4) the tyranny of the majority. Three of these fearsome conditions help explain and justify the Protectorate’s takeover of the Presidency. Ironically, further justification arises from the fourth item’s opposite—an ongoing and deepening tyranny of a minority hell bent on exploiting the leverage of constitutional loopholes and defying checks and balances. As Clay Jenkinson has said, “if you add together the Electoral College, the equal representation in the Senate, the Senate filibuster rule (not in the Constitution), our debased primary election system, unlimited money in political campaigns and gerrymandering, you are going to get minority rule in America.” To that I would add, as so many more learned people have done, the breaking of precedent by the current Supreme Court to strengthen the Executive, neuter the Congress, eviscerate voting rights, and defy public sentiments on key issues. To a large extent, the undemocratic features of the original Constitution have been left in place, owing to the Con Con delegates’ understanding that Congressional and vigorous state governments are the proper forums for many substantive reforms.

What will younger Americans think of this somewhat radical yet also conservative revision of the Constitution? Even with all the modernizing amendments, the document is still not easy or fun to read. Writing in the on-line Fulcrum, 17-year-old Prisha Tiwari at Princeton Day School points out that “Millennials and Gen Z are rapidly becoming the demographic center of political power; by 2028, they may account for nearly half the electorate.” A positive attitude toward the nation’s basic law will matter more than ever. The spectacle of corruption and the federal government’s unwillingness and inability to address fundamental questions about arresting climate change, funding health care, regulating artificial intelligence, ensuring the quality and affordability of ordinary life, and preventing the seemingly ceaseless instigation of wars of choice has severely undermined youthful Americans’ sense of civic pride and responsibility. I think we can all agree that the Constitution cannot compensate for a vacuum of responsible, ethical leadership. Will there be an American Moses or an American Princess to inspire Americans young and old, galvanize a new-found unity, and lead the country forward? Time will tell, and the emergence of new parties signals fresh, hopeful pathways of collective civic engagement.

CONCLUSION

As William Kristol and his colleagues at the Bulwark put it in their July newsletter, “The assault on liberal democracy is a whole-of-government Trumpist project.” These long-time conservative pundits were echoing the sentiments of many other organizations and pop-up platforms with liberal and libertarian bona fides. The burning question on the cusp of the 2026 midterm elections was Will the United States survive as a democracy? Strange as it is, a cabal of seasoned and disciplined military officers answered in the affirmative. So has the Con Con. In sequence, and in synch with cherished values, the Con Man and his insufferably authoritarian political machine have been defeated.

All of this came about because a sufficient number of well-educated, well-informed, and well-intended citizens combined their critiques, their opinions, and their aspirations for a rejuvenated democratic republic under a constitution designed to guide the politics and meet the needs of a civilizational state that is America. Most of the ideas for the constitutional amendments described in this report came from individuals from different walks of life and different life experiences. I haven’t named names, because I don’t have anyone’s permission to ascribe phrases and concepts to specific authors. There was a general consensus that something needed to be done with and to the Constitution to preserve the republic. Something had to happen. I was there. It was astounding—the experience of a lifetime.

Right now, in signing off from this lengthy letter to no one in particular, I am hearing a wonderfully refreshing polyphony in my mind’s ear, a chorus of many diverse voices cheering, like sports fans in celebration…

USA! USA! USA!

Re: A Resurrection of American Constitutional Order

Dear fellow Americans,

I was in the room where it happened. An assembly of 100 representatives from each of the 50 U.S. states gathered in Independence Hall to vote on the final draft of a revised federal constitution that had been discussed, debated, and deliberated by 435 citizen delegates for six months. This Constitutional Convention (hereinafter the Con Con) had been called by forty state legislatures in the immediate wake of the shocking and unexpected intervention of a multi-branch military cabal called The Protectorate that had taken over the White House after an attempt to remove the President by invoking the 25^th Amendment had failed and he declared a national emergency to nullify the 2026 midterm elections results. I’ll have much more to say about the details—and legitimacy—of the coup later on; my immediate focus will be on the electrifying results of the last day of frenzied but productive commotion, as the gathered luminaries hemmed and hawed and finally hammered out the details of a revised fundamental law for the nation.

On July 4 of this year, the last of many scores of votes on the altered and augmented constitution resulted in a unanimous AYE! vote. The Chair of the gathering, a former Vice-Admiral in the U.S. Navy, stood up from the chair she’d occupied for the duration of the proceedings and related procedures that day and proclaimed the rebirth of the world’s oldest republic. At that moment, a reporter whispered in my ear that the sun carved into the back of the chair George Washington had sat in during the Constitutional Convention in 1776 was rising again, not setting. (Then and now, one could perceive it either way.) I learned later that this was a reference to Benjamin Franklin’s response to a question about the trajectory of the country on the date of its declaration of independence 251 years ago.

Independence Hall, Philadelphia

After a full ten minutes of sustained applause, I and several other unofficial observers repaired to a bar located nearby in an historic building which for many years had housed Bookbinders, Philadelphia’s best-known and widely cherished steak and seafood restaurant. As we walked the short block separating the disparate meeting places, I noticed a buzz in the air. It wasn’t cicadas. There were drones circling overhead, monitoring the site of the Con Con) to provide protection from anyone or any group seeking to disrupt the gathering by storming or bombing the building.

We entered what’s now called The Fox and Hedgehog Tavern. The place was packed. A waiter ushered us to a stairway that led to a large but much quieter upstairs meeting room. There we encountered the members of the Con Con Advisory Council, perhaps the most extraordinary group of individuals dedicated to civic engagement and renewal since America’s founding generation. This illustrious dozen thinkers and doers had been labeled by some detractors in the media as “the self-anointed gerontocratic elite” out to remake the country’s basic law in their own “liberal” image. It was an unfair characterization. The members are all of a certain age, to be sure, but they had been informally vetted and approved by scores of pundits and public officials as they labored openly to guide the process of constitutional renewal.

They were all there. Seated at the head of a long table was Clay Jenkinson, the renowned humanities scholar, perhaps best known for his on-stage impersonations of Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt, but also widely acknowledged as the chief instigator of the constitutional renewal project. In the late spring of 2026, Jenkinson led an on-line course entitled Rewriting the Constitution that attracted 40-odd participants who labored together for several hours on four successive Saturdays to address what was wrong with the U.S. Constitution, and how to make it right. I was part of that group, one could say the oddest of the lot, lacking the academic background and the practical political experience most of the others brought to the fore. I was deeply impressed by the candor of the participants, and even more so the quality of their discourse, which extended well beyond the live, on-line conversations that were both led and facilitated by Mr. Jenkinson.

And so, when I showed up at the bar everyone was talking over one another in an animated and, I must say, joyful way. The beer and wine helped, no doubt, but it was the shared realization that something momentous had just occurred that contributed so much to the salubrious occasion. I can’t recall the seating chart, as it were, but here’s the roster of celebrity celebrants, with just of a bit of biographical data for each:

Beau Breslin, professor of Government at Skidmore College in upstate New York, and the author of several books, including the 2021 A Constitution for the Living: Imagining How Five Generations of Americans would rewrite the Nation’s Fundamental Law. This counterfactual history draws on a famous exchange between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Jefferson believed that “the earth belongs…to the living, the dead have neither powers nor rights over it”, meaning each generation should actively endorse, renounce, or rewrite the nation’s basic law. Madison argued that a constitution must endure across generations to maintain legitimacy.

Jill Lepore, whose 2025 analysis of the Constitution entitled We the People stirred a largely complacent public to pay attention to the history of amendments and why any further changes are almost impossible. She also wrote the outstanding history of the U.S. entitled These Truths (2018). Ms. Lepore teaches at Harvard, where she once worked as a secretary. Remarkable.

Joseph Ellis, a prolific writer of histories and biographies of the country’s early leaders, foremost of which, just because I’ve read it, is his 2001 Pulitzer Prize winning Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation. Even in this pantheon of aging scholarly specialists, Ellis is the veritable eminence grise of the genre.

Randy Barnett is an American legal scholar and a Professor of Constitutional Law at Georgetown University Law Center, where he directs the Georgetown Center for the Constitution. A noted libertarian legal theorist and originalist, he has authored influential works such as Restoring the Lost Constitution and Our Republican Constitution.

Lindsay Chervinsky is director of the George Washington Presidential Library. She’s young and brilliant and frequently engages in verbal bouts with Jenkinson on his podcast Listening to America. Chervinsky champions John Adams; her host has repeatedly had to qualify his devotion to Jefferson (though never surrendering entirely) in deference to Lindsay’s charming strength of mind and command of history.

Sanford Levinson is a professor at the University of Texas Law School, Levinson is the author of Our Undemocratic Constitution and is best known for his criticism of excessive presidential power. He and his wife Cynthia Levinson published an updated version of their wonderfully informative Fault Lines in the Constitution: The Framers, Their Fights, and the Flaws that Affect us Today in 2025.

J. Michael Luttig, a former Federal Judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals who worked in the White House for Presidents Ford and Reagan and also served in the Department of Justice. Luttig has become a fierce critic of the Trump Administration and has excoriated the Supreme Court for their grant of absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for any crimes he might commit in violation of the Constitution or the laws of the United States.

Danielle Allen, a political philosopher whose current research and projects focus on democracy renovation through civics education and institutional reforms. Allen is a professor at Harvard University and the author of Justice by Means of Democracy (2023) and other works.

Liz Cheney is an American attorney and former U.S. Representative from Wyoming who served on the Commission on the January 6 insurrection. Cheney is known for her conservative views and vocal opposition to Donald Trump.

David French is a New York Times columnist who writes about religion in politics. As an Evangelical Christian, French probes how the Republican Party under Donald Trump has effectively won over many religious voters.

Yuval Levin an Israeli-American conservative political analyst, academic, and journalist. He is the founding editor of National Affairs and the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Levin is the author of the 2024 book American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again.

There you have it, twelve prominent experts on the Constitution, who have acted as grandiose jurors of a sort, casting non-binding verdicts on the philosophical sensibility and practical applicability of scores of proposed amendments emerging from the official gatherings across the country. As the seriousness of this endeavor began to soak in, I noticed some other notable citizens arriving and quietly taking seats against the curtained walls surrounding the main table. Forgive my name dropping, but you’ll understand why I just can’t help it: Adam Kinzinger, former Republican Congressman and presidential aspirant; Fareed Zakaria, a popular sage of foreign affairs in public media; Richard Haass, former CEO of the Council on Foreign Relations and author of the celebrated The Bill of Obligations; Doris Kearns Goodwin, biographer extraordinaire; Christopher Armitage, mastermind of the Existential Republic and its detailed analyses of state’s roles in combatting federal tyranny; Sarah Longwell, publisher of The Bulwark; Stacey Abrams, the Georgia-based politician, lawyer, voting rights activist, and bestselling author, Deb Holland, former member of Congress from New Mexico, Director of the Department of the Interior in the Biden Administration and a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe; Luis Valdez, the Hispanic playwright and filmmaker, perhaps conjuring a Broadway hit and/or blockbuster movie about this historic drama. Heather Cox Richardson, author of countless Letters to America and a learned participant in voluminous on-line forums, was also part of the wise-chatting observers. Ms. Richardson had early on said No! No! No! to a constitutional convention, fearing, with just cause, that it would be commandeered by right and left-wing wing crazies and thus a disaster for the country. In these strange, unpredicted circumstances, she’s come around to cheer for the Con Con’s output.

What an august gathering of civic minded souls! I couldn’t help imagining a movie about the 2027 Con Con, where the members of the Advisory Council play themselves. The scriptwriter better get on it. The Q-tip factor is relentless.

I must move on from this introductory splash and get into the deeper dimensions of the Con Con process and its consequences. This will take some time. It’s complicated. I will do my best to summarize events succinctly without sacrificing details that are necessary to clarify how and why the story has led to this sunny day in Philadelphia.

For many months—several years, in fact--preceding the U.S. midterm elections in November, 2026, many scholars and activists conversed in public about the necessity to modernize the national Constitution through amendments. At the same time, many of the same patriotic citizens concluded that amending the Constitution in a time of acute and deeply divisive political polarization would be impossible. Polls indicated that most Americans thought the Constitution was okay as is, so there was no grassroots groundswell for change. A sizeable minority of voters agreed that some basic changes were warranted, but not for the same reason: some favored restrictions on gun rights, others a balanced budget amendment; lots advocated equal rights for women while a few wanted to rescind women’s right to vote altogether. The leaders of both political parties argued against proposals to alter the Constitution, mainly because they feared that substantive changes to the status quo would result in a diminution of the overwhelmingly dominant Republican and Democratic parties. (It’s worth noting here that nothing in the Constitution speaks to or supports a two-party system.) There was widespread apprehension about one faction or another “running away” with the Constitution and stripping away basic civil and political rights to remake the country into something other than a democratic republic. In a July 6 interview with historian Joe Ellis, Clay Jenkinson asked what it would take to engender a Constitutional Convention in the midst of so much public anger, consternation, indifference and apathy. His reply: “A catastrophe”. Turns out he was right. More about that momentarily.

The primary cause of the constitutional conundrum was the amending formula itself. Article V sets forth two ways of making formal structural adjustments to the nation’s basic law: 1) An affirmative vote of 2/3 of the members of each Congressional body—the House of Representatives and the Senate--- calling for one or more amendments, or 2) Two thirds (i.e. 35) of the states could call for a Convention of the states for the purpose of an amendment (or several thereof) to the Constitution. In either case, ratification of any change requires the consent of ¾ of the states (38 in total).

Thus, even just amending the amending formula in Article V, which is what many groups had been advocating for a long time, seemed completely out of reach. The bar was simply set too high and could only be met in political circumstances radically different from those in the months leading up to the mid-term elections, heralded by factions and parties and special interest groups across the ideological spectrum as the most important in the nation’s 250-year history.1

What to do? The aforementioned on-line class led by Clay Jenkinson elicited many thorough written suggestions and even more thoughtful comments on what struck most if not all of the participants as an existential challenge. The country was in peril; democracy was at stake; the world’s oldest and most successful republic seemed to be on the brink of failure.

And fail it did, albeit, as I will endeavor to explicate below, not permanently. In general terms, the Congress proved to be neither resilient enough nor resistant enough to stop the juggernaut of the Trumpian Administration from trampling civil rights and hijacking the 2026 elections. The federal court system’s attempts to arrest the development of a one-party authoritarian regime were nobly ineffectual, because The Supreme Court majority had genuflected in a series of cases to the spurious logic of the unitary executive theory, the brainchild of the now deceased Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and an ideological plank in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. The Court’s compliance with Trump’s demand for immunity from prosecution was the most egregious example of buckling to the concept of unbridled executive power and related authoritarian values.

As you will have seen and read repeatedly over the course of the past six months, the midterm elections were rigged by Trump’s minions in a multitude of ways to ensure that Republican candidates for the House and Senate could not lose. If the vote counts indicated otherwise, they would be nullified. It was a strategy that had been in play for a long time. This complex set of political maneuvers, some questionably legal, others blatantly unconstitutional, did not come out of the blue, and the public was forewarned. Tim Wirth and Richard Gebhardt, both former members of Congress, wrote an article in June that was carried in multiple publications describing in detail the incremental “rolling coup” that had been in process since Trump’s re-election in 2024. The authors cited President Trump’s September 25, 2025 signing of a National Presidential Security Memorandum titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence (NPSM-7) as an exceptionally dangerous measure. Its language designates as targets of federal counterterrorism authorities Americans whose sponsors are labeled “anti-American”, “anti-capitalist”, “anti-Christian”, or “hostile to traditional American views on family, religion and morality.” Wirth and Gephardt put it plainly: “No statute authorizes the federal government to treat protected political speech as terrorism. NPSM-7 does it anyway.” The rolling coup, they go on to say, “is not the seizure of power on a single day but the methodical construction of an apparatus designed to identify, arrest, prosecute, and if necessary, forcibly suppress Americans whose only offense is opposition to this administration, by an executive who has openly declared that opposition itself is the enemy.”

These chilling statements were congruent with many similar alarm bells that had been going off in the months preceding election day. Former deputy for Homeland Security Miles Taylor and David Frum, a prolific political analyst at The Atlantic and a former speechwriter for George W. Bush were among others with inside knowledge of the White House were messaging to the public in loud and clear voices that a sinister plot to undue our democracy was unfolding in plain sight.2 In a recent on-line interview, lamenting the scope and scale of the Trump clan’s overt corruption, Jill Lepore said “We are in freefall. There is no precedent for this presidency in the history of this country.”

We are all familiar now with how the Trumpians in the White House, in collusion with the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, undertook a number of measures to create electoral chaos and generally undermine public confidence in the election process. In a number of Democrat-led “blue” and purplish swing states, ballots were seized, poll workers were threatened, and mail service was disrupted. President Trump’s prime time speech on July 16 was one of many overt attempts to delegitimize any national election result that was not a Republican victory. In addition, by claiming foreign interference in prior elections, and having dismantled most of the measures to detect and thwart such interventions, the speech was in part an invitation to Russian and Chinese hackers to have at it—thus creating a justification for draconian tactics.

In November, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers and partisan paramilitary gangs (including individuals who had been convicted of and later pardoned by Trump for violent crimes for their actions on January 6, 2021) stalked voters in many key precincts of so-called battleground states. Their goal was to intimidate voters at polling places and generally stoke fear among the electorate. They succeeded, but only partially. While countless thousands of people steered clear of voting booths, and others simply refused to take part in what seemed a wholly corrupted political system, millions of mail-in votes appeared to have tipped the balance in favor of Democrat candidates. This was in spite of the Administration’s order that the U.S. Postal Service not deliver ballots to households wherein data sets obtained by a series of raids on state election offices indicated support for Democratic Party candidates.

A much-consolidated media ecosystem deliberately misinformed the American public about the causes and legality of these disruptions in the elections process. The President declared a national emergency. When state and local government officials challenged the White House to justify this executive order, Trump invoked the Insurrection Act, authorizing the use of military forces to assist state and local law enforcement in protecting federal officers, federal property, and, more ominously, as Wirth and Gephardt had warned, in going after supposed anti-government, anti-Christian activists and the mythical “antifa”, all labeled as domestic terrorists.

The Catastrophe

In the two weeks following November 3, 2026, nobody really knew the results of the election. In several key states where the Senatorial races were expected to be close—Michigan, Maine, Ohio, Arizona and Alaska--Homeland Security and Department of Justice officials seized ballot boxes. Even though many poll watchers and press reports declared that a massive turnout had produced slim but certain Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate, there was no universally accepted verifiable vote count. A political crisis ensued.

Mass protests occurred in many American cities, large and small, mainly in California, the New England region, and in the upper Midwest. Fearing an eruption of violence, a number of Governors called out their respective national guard forces to help local law enforcement keep the peace. In Ohio, in and around the Cleveland area, large contingents of ICE agents were joined by gangs of white supremacist paramilitary groups—the Proud Boys, the Patriot Front, the Oath Keepers, among others—in facing down huge numbers of protestors who were marching on streets, banging on pots, brandishing signs, and using bullhorns to demand proof that the victories of Democrats and several Independent House and Senate candidates were legitimate.

Things got out of hand. An undertrained and trigger-happy ICE agent shot into the crowd. Someone fired back. (Police investigators are still trying to determine whether it was a protestor or a paramilitary agent provocateur.) Within just a few minutes, fourteen people had been killed by gunfire. Scores of others were wounded. It was a shockingly brutal and bloody mess.3

In the ensuing melee, with people tripping over each other to escape the scene, National Guard troops came face to face with a crudely organized and heavily armed contingent of ICE officers and contracted paramilitaries—Trump’s private army. This was a uniquely dangerous moment when armed federal officials were directly confronted by the Ohio state militia. At this juncture of high tension and potential mass-scale tragedy, a cease-and-desist order came from the White House.

But not from the President of the United States. He had been forcibly removed from office and transported to Camp David, a place Trump had always disdained as unkempt and too isolated. The Vice President, several cabinet members, and most of the White House staff (Blanche, Bessent, Miller, Vought and Wiles et. al.) were ushered out of the building and onto buses bound for a holding facility at Joint Andrews Air Base, where they were met by assorted family members and a bevy of lawyers.4

At this juncture I must remind my readers that repeated calls from members of Congress and from outside the government to exercise the 25^th amendment in response to the President’s inability to carry out his responsibilities and comply with the law had failed.

A military coup had taken place, performed by a veritable phalanx of high-ranking officers from all of the branches. Some were veterans of the first Trump Administration, others had served under President Biden, and still others—the ones in charge of the operation--had been demoted or fired by Trump in the last 18 months. From the outset, The Protectorate made a solemn promise to the American people that the suspension of normal political processes would be temporary. After overseeing the scores of settlements that needed to occur in order to certify the midterm election results, the new masters of the Executive branch would act to ensure the integrity of the next presidential election. For the time being, Congress would be frozen in an enforceable hiatus, unable to undertake the body’s constitutional duties until state election officers, litigants, and judges had sorted out the actual, verifiable results. In short, the Protectorate had stopped the steal and would henceforth provide a blanket of security to protect election integrity.

Why did most Americans accept this wholly unprecedented seizure of executive power by the military? The main reason was a general lack of confidence in the other institutions of governance, and that reflected a widespread recognition among all sorts of socioeconomic groups—working class, small business owners, union members, the congregations of mainstream churches, non-profit organizations et. al.—that the American political system had become hugely corrupt. Revelations in the Epstein files and other examples of moral and financial corruption among elites tipped the electorate towards placing their trust in the military leaders who came together to oust a grossly incompetent and unabashedly corrupt regime headed by President Trump and managed mostly by Heritage Foundation alumni.

THE PROCESS.

Following the Jenkinson course and similar educational endeavors to revise the Constitution, a group of activist participants had coalesced to form the nucleus of a movement to vigorously advocate for a Convention called by the states. This self-titled Advisory Council acted like consultants, generating learned essays, white papers and lists of proposed amendments, and supported financially by a consortium of philanthropies who labeled themselves The Bright Money Group. The Advisory Council enlisted volunteers from coast to coast, who then formed Committees of Correspondence who convened in person and in on-line in communities located in every economic and cultural region of the country.

The specific facts about how this came about, who said what, who did what, who was in charge--they are all important and will doubtless be the focus of academic analysis for years to come. I will confess that I am fuzzy about them all; it was a complicated and confusing set of circumstances that enabled a cadre of canny individuals to come up with the game plan. One thing for sure is that the Committees of Correspondence were modelled after the eponymous gatherings in the 1770s of Americans seeking to gain greater autonomy if not outright independence from Great Britain. These groups were instrumental in informing the first Continental Congress and inspiring the authors of the 1776 Declaration.

Again, the details are sketchy; what matters most is that this repetition of the organizational form in a modern context actually worked. Saying so reminds me of the heady experience I had reading Novus Ordor Seclorum, Forrest McDonald’s 1959 marvelously descriptive analysis of the intellectual origins of the U.S. Constitution. (I picked it up for $3 at a public library book sale and couldn’t put it down.) Much has been written about the Founders’ “miracle of Philadelphia” in 1787, but this book is not of that ilk. McDonald’s depiction was more akin to a circus of erudite and opinionated sophisticates who somehow managed to produce a work of political genius.

Calls for a Convention of the States ramped up immediately following the coup. The Advisory Council and the Committees of Correspondence realized they had to seize the opportunity to forge ahead in the rarest of conceivable circumstances. Not every state jumped aboard this fast-moving bandwagon, but FOMO got the best of recalcitrant governors and resistance to the movement collapsed by mid-January 2027.

Rather than conducting convention works in all fifty states, the Advisory Council recommended a regional approach. The Protectorate weighed in favorably on the concept from a security standpoint. It would be far more cost-efficient and much less risky to deploy National Guard units at a dozen community sites than in every state capital. The gathering sites were picked somewhat randomly. The organizers concurred that none of them would be state capitals, mostly because they would be captive to elected officials and self-interested lobbyists who swarm around capitol buildings like locusts, or hornets, or yellowjackets—pick your favorite pest. So commercial and educational centers with efficient and convenient transportation connections became the preferred locations. Here’s the list:

Eugene, Oregon; Oakland and San Diego in California; Houston, Texas; Pocatello, Idaho; Golden, Colorado; Omaha, Nebraska; St. Louis, Missouri; Memphis, Tennessee; Charlotte, North Carolina; Monmouth, New Jersey; Orono, Maine; Baltimore, Maryland; Ithaca, New York; Savannah, Georgia; St. Petersburg, Florida—and Philadelphia.

How to pick the delegates, numbering 435 in all? Each state was assigned the same number of delegates as they had representatives in Congress. Examples: California 54, Missouri 10, North Dakota 3, Pennsylvania 19, and so forth. Secretaries of State across the nation conducted tests to determine who was eligible to serve as a delegate. It was relatively easy and simple to administer the same test given to immigrants seeking to become U.S. citizens. Lots of people were eager to qualify, and many did. However, most Americans were not interested in the process, either because they were indifferent to the Constitution or because serving as a delegate would require extensive time away from jobs and family commitments. After the more actively motivated citizens had passed the examination, they were entered into a lottery. The lucky ones won the privilege of participating in the regional Con Con assemblies. Delegates coalesced in the above-named cities on a regional basis. For example, the members from Utah, New Mexico, and Kansas joined their counterparts in Colorado; Washingtonians and Alaskans journeyed to Oregon, etc. Each state’s delegates chose what pair in their midst would make the journey to the final Con Con conclave in Philadelphia. Somehow it all came together.

Despite a host of logistical complications, the process was remarkably transparent. Private and public media companies, including the giant Paramount conglomerate, PBS, and streaming services, partnered with C-Span (cable operators performing a public service) to establish a multi-cast system. There were twelve concurrent channels, available on over the air broadcasts, on cable, and as video streams, so that all the proceedings of the Con Con could be accessed by the general public. This was gavel-to-gavel coverage, without editing. A team of moderators provided only the most basic intros and outros with contextual graphics to ensure people knew what they were tuning into at various stages of the process.

YEAH MONTANA!

Before carrying forth with an assessment of the substantive changes to the Constitution that made their way from the regions to Philadelphia, I want to briefly divert your attention to the curiously outsized influence of Montana in our political drama.

Montana is a big state, the fourth largest in the country by territory, but it has more cattle than people (just over a million), dispersed into seven small cities. There is no metropolitan center; no center pivot for commerce or politics. Montana has 4 electoral votes; only a half dozen states have fewer.5 So I reckon it’s the state’s uniquely modern political history that ushered into the Con Con a positively disproportionate set of process and content related concepts.

I’ll start with the procedures adopted here in Philadelphia, at the penultimate stage of the constitutional rewrite. As mentioned above, each state was represented by two delegates who’d been selected by their peers in the months’-long deliberations in a dozen cities across the country. Rather than allow a natural and probably inevitable clustering together of partisan, like-minded individuals in the meeting room of Independence Hall, resulting in the veritable “aisle” separating Republicans and Democrats in most legislative chambers, including the U.S. House of Representatives, the delegates were seated alphabetically. This procedural rule was modeled after the Montana Constitutional Convention in 1971. On that momentous occasion, which lasted 54 days and resulted, following a statewide referendum in 1972, in the most progressive constitution in the country. Observers and participants of Montana’s Con Con agreed that this simple but highly unusual maneuver of alphabetical seating really did the trick, compelling seatmates to get to know each other as next-door neighbors, regardless of ideological orientation. Organizers of the Philadelphia Con Con copied the Montana example and achieved similar results.

Another brilliant stroke of replication was staffing the national Con Con. As was the case in Montana, the secretariat consisted of nonpartisan professional researchers and scribes. These highly educated individuals were indispensable contributors to the substance and the demeanor of the confab. In some instances, key staffers were subtly elevated by struggling delegates to the role of referee.

Montana’s legacy figures large in the substantive changes to the U.S. Constitution as well. The language in the proposed amendment to the Bill of Rights establishing the right to “a clean and healthful environment” was lifted straight from the Declaration of Rights embodied in the 1972 Montana Constitution. Said right will doubtless inspire and instigate boundless litigation, as it has done in Montana, but I expect it will be one of the most popular of the new measures set forth in the ratification process. The people of America cherish their landscapes, their natural resources, and certainly clean air and clean water.

A third example of the Treasure State’s impact here has to do with proposed amendments that didn’t survive the crush of debate. There was considerable churn over the 2010 Citizen’s United Supreme Court ruling that underscored the already established precedent that money is a form of speech and therefore political campaign contributions cannot be limited by government rules. Nearly everyone at Con Con voiced strong opinions about the corrupting effect of money in politics, but those demanding an amendment to overturn and bury, for good, the logic and substance of the Citizen’s United decision, did not constitute a majority. At a crucial moment, when it seemed like the Convention might blow apart on this issue, the Montana delegation stepped in to explain how a citizen initiative had passed that made political spending subject to the state’s power to regulate corporations.6

This was, in effect, an end run around Citizen’s United. Several other states were following suit. Hawaii’s legislature had passed a similar measure and had thus far survived legal challenges. The momentum behind this approach to ending corporate elites’ domination of the political system is building. So the demands to undo Citizen’s United by constitutional amendment were nullified by actions taken at the state level. A future Supreme Court may well overturn Citizen’s United, but for the time being a deeply divisive issue has been mooted by clever thinking and citizen engagement.7

Please don’t stop now! There’s more to come. Stay tuned for Part II of this essay, following immediately on the Freshpolitique Substack column.

Montana’s state motto, Oro y Plata, was chosen to symbolize the wealth and promise that drew people to a territory aspiring to statehood. According to Emily Carter, a writer for roamingmontana.com, Spanish was the lingua franca of precious metals mining in the Americas. Miners from California, Mexico, and South America brought mining terminology and practices northward. Using Oro y Plata was a way to connect with a global mining tradition. Carter explains that “when Montana’s territorial legislators gathered in Bannack in 1864 to organize their fledgling government, they needed symbols that captured the essence of why anyone would brave this remote, harsh landscape. The gold and silver that had drawn tens of thousands of fortune-seekers seemed like the obvious choice.” The motto has come to represent the whole of the state’s mineral wealth, not just gold and silver. It serves as a reminder of the state’s enduring connection to the earth’s riches and thus to the world’s mineral markets.

Precious metals got things started in this state, but copper proved to be a much more powerful driver of Montana’s economic development. My way of marking Montana’s historical trajectory is simple: There’s Before Butte and After Butte. This is because this industrial city perched on a slope in the northern reaches of the Rocky Mountains is unique in several ways, all of which render Butte, America (this is how boosters underscore Butte’s reach beyond state boundaries) exceptional in a state renowned for its forests and fields--a place that is, in the public’s imagination, profoundly rural, peopled by cowboys and Indians, farmers and ranchers. Those storied groups exist, of course, and continue to play vital roles in the state’s economy and culture. In fact, however, most modern Montanans live in medium-sized cities and small towns, not out “on the land”. They work in office buildings, retail shops, gas stations, schools, etc.—the usual places for the vast majority of Americans who have become urbanites.

The same is true in Butte, but in a different way. Butte has never been a place for cowboys. It has tall buildings that remind one of cities “back east”. Adjacent to an historic downtown core is a scattering of decrepit headframes that remind us that Butte’s story is almost exclusively about mining, mine workers, and the ancillary service enterprises—notably bars and brothels--that clustered around the business of digging deep into the earth.

The political economy of Montana has always been based on resource extraction. Long before Butte became the world’s mother lode for copper, in the early decades of the 20^th century, mountain men were trapping beaver and transporting pelts to tradesmen connected to distant markets. On the plains—two thirds of Montana’s huge expanse of territory—the main object of exploitation were immense buffalo herds whose hides brought high prices in fashionable cities. After Butte, the years (in my self-styled chronology) following the shuttering of the giant copper mining operations in the early 1980s, corporate investors and state government skewed toward agricultural and energy and lumber exports to sustain economic growth.

The common thread connecting these sequential periods before and after the copper mining boom was neatly summarized by K. Ross Toole, perhaps this state’s most illustrious historian, in his 1959 tome Montana: An Uncommon Land. “The object of men” he wrote, was “to trap it, mine it, shoot it, and get out.”

Montana has long been regarded and treated as a resource rich colony. Although modernizing today at a rapid clip, with tourism, technology firms, and digital business services overtaking natural resource industries in terms of jobs and incomes, Montana’s economic trajectory has resembled that of developing countries in Africa and Latin America, depending on outside (often foreign) capital to finance its industrial development, which was in turn focused on boosting exports to distant metropoles. The foremost example of this structural paradigm was the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, which brings me back to Butte and the intense, 80+ year interregnum between my “Before” and “After” scenario.

Beginning in the 1890s the Butte copper mines attracted workers of the world to a relatively isolated location in North America. They endured harsh working conditions and an oppressive (often violent) anti-union corporate enterprise. Rival unions battled with each other even as they jointly resisted the depredations of rival tycoons, the celebrated Copper Barons who constricted the rights of workers and opportunities to dissent by means of what was called The Copper Collar.

By the early 20^th century, Butte had become the world’s foremost copper producer. Its mines, smelters, refineries and transportation linkages were part of a massive integrated system controlled by the Anaconda Company. From its beginnings in 1882 to 1980, when the Company shut down the Butte mines, the copper complex grew to consist of some 10,000 miles of lateral underground tunnels and vertical shafts. The consolidated enterprises (which included the largest smelter in North America in nearby Anaconda and smaller one in Great Falls), were basically responsible for electrifying America and supplying copper to the country’s military industrial complex during both World Wars. The mines attracted workers from far away countries, notably Ireland, Finland, Serbia, Slovakia, Cornwall. Chinese laborers built and ran laundries and restaurants. Butte was a multi-cultural smorgasbord of different languages, customs, and cuisines.

After World War II, the mining industry underwent rapid decline. Production shifted to other continents. The Anaconda Company bought and developed a huge copper mine in Chile, a maneuver that severely damaged the firm’s financial stability such that it sold its remnant operations in Butte to the Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO), which were shuttered in the early 980s. Concomitantly, Butte and other smaller mining communities elsewhere in the state became less heterogeneous, a trend that has continued to this day.1

The cultural diversity in Butte’s heyday has not been forgotten. Nostalgia is highly marketable. The preservation of ethnic heritage has become a popular draw for tourists—not a bad thing, to be sure. Still, the monocultural aspect of today’s Montana can be a bit shocking. My wife and I moved to Helena from Washington, D.C. in 1982. Shortly after arriving in the capital city—a lovely place, then and now—the first thing we noticed was how “lily white” (I recall those words exactly) the people on the downtown walking mall were. It’s not that we were expecting an Adams Morgan scene of ethnic and cultural color, but I was quick to realize that the place I had read so much about before the move—Butte, America—was an anomaly.

William Lang wrote a chapter in the large and photo-rich Montana Century entitled Alloyed Montana: Ethnic Components of a Twentieth Century People, published in 1985. In it, he underscores the connection between mining and immigrants.

Montana’s twentieth century population has been an alloy of lighter and darker skins, of oriental and occidental cultures, of Christian and non-Christian faiths, and of two dozen or more languages. A metallic metaphor is appropriate, for it was mineral mining and smelting that had so much to do with attracting such a polyglot population to the state. In places such as Butte, Red Lodge, Philipsburg, Anaconda, and Great Falls, ethnicity marked every aspect of life, from parish and congregation to saloon and political club and during holidays and festivals. And as in modern metallurgy, where sophisticated alloys suggest high technique and progressive science, the people of Montana often congratulated themselves on their engaging diversity and social intelligence, even believing that occasional conflict among groups built a well-tempered community.

I will return to the theme of minority cultures in Montana in a future missive. For now, I just want to emphasize that Butte spirit is bespoke. The solidarity of the community is visible, audible, and palpable. Nightly TV newscasts emanating from various network affiliates in Bozeman, Missoula, and Billings almost routinely include upbeat stories about Butte locals coming together to rescue a struggling business, a failing building, a lost pet, a homeless person. In the state legislature, the Butte delegation has always consisted of a particular form of Democrat, one far more concerned about the parochial interests and concerns of the Butte area community than liberal ideology. This overt collective self-interestedness has manifested in business-friendly positions taken on environmental issues, which seems ironic, since Butte’s mine-born pollution problems are immense, and the interests and activities of large corporations have run roughshod over local concerns. K. Ross Toole was a prescient historian. In his aforementioned book he captured an important aspect of the state’s socioeconomic challenge.

“Communities evolve like human beings. Like human beings, also, they can be warped by the external problems that beset them, they can suffer from chronic afflictions, and they can develop distinct character from the crucibles in which they are formed.”

I think “crucible” is an especially apt term in the context of Butte. The foundations of community solidarity in Butte include generosity of both the material and spiritual kind, but there’s something else too, a history of shared suffering. This may be commonplace among collectivities of abused people—taking pride in the experience of having endured misery and having adapted to adverse working and environmental conditions. This sentiment is a real thing in the mining city: a paradoxical pride in having been betrayed and sometimes brutalized by Big Business, in Butte’s case by the Anaconda Company and its corporate overlord, Standard Oil.

As mentioned above, there was a precipitous decline in Butte in the postwar years, culminating in the shutdown in 1980. After that, the community was faced with a host of environmental challenges. The so-called Richest Hill on Earth begat one of the deepest and most toxic pits on the planet. The Anaconda Company closed the Berkeley Pit in 1982, turned off the pumps, and let the water fill. The pit holds over 50 billion gallons of highly acidic toxic brew. Three thousand snow geese died after landing on the water during migration. The successor firms of Anaconda, Atlantic Richfield and Montana Resources, are required to treat the poisonous pit water in perpetuity.

I’ve long wondered what became of all those foreign mine workers when everything closed. Did they move somewhere else? Did they drift away or settle into other jobs and livelihoods? Yes, all of that, plus a lot of mining families are still engaged in the Continental pit and milling operation. Others have found their way into the safer and sometimes lucrative downstream industry of federally required cleanup CERCLA (the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act), otherwise known as Superfund. This is the federal law that governs, through the Environmental Protection Agency, the cleanup of hazardous waste sites and the assignment of liability for compensation. The Verdigris Project, affiliated with the Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (see www.verigrisproject.org) outlined in a recently published radio transcript how Butte’s legacy has become somewhat complex: “It now has the distinction as one of the largest Superfund sites in the nation while also being the home of active open pit mining right on the edge of town. In the end, there was life after copper in this old mining camp, and Butte can now count itself among the leaders in a whole new industry of environmental science and reclamation that employs hundreds of people in this community. Who could have known that the mess made by mining companies would become the livelihood for a whole new generation of geologists, hydrologists, and other scientists?

To date, the twin pits (Berkeley, the old one, Continental the new) have consumed some 3000 structures that made up entire ethnic neighborhoods, (mainly Italian and Finnish), and together with other mining properties “comprise 7000 acres of moonscape that is an impassable mangrove of legal liability, corporate entanglement, and environmental devastation.” The unnamed author concludes that notwithstanding multiple financial settlements following a sequence of Superfund Consent Decrees that have mitigated lingering pollution hazards, “the damage done to the land in Butte is here to stay and will only be truly resolved on a geologic time scale.” For readers unschooled in earth science, that means a really really long time.

The citizens of Butte and nearby Anaconda have learned how to leverage collective trauma to people and the landscape alike. Both places are greening up, to be sure, and the sense of pride in victimization has receded. We are in a new era. There is no more “copper collar” suppressing workers’ rights, choking off dissent, controlling both the politics and press of an entire state. Dennis Washington, the CEO of Montana Resources, is probably the richest billionaire in the state, but he is nothing like a baron. His family foundation is among the foremost philanthropies in Montana.

While the temptation is great to delve further into Butte’s multifaceted history as an exceptional community, I don’t want to wander too far from Montana’s international connections. Having focused on Butte to illustrate one of the ways that the state has played a vital role in supplying necessary minerals to both develop and defend industrial democracies, the remainder of this missive will touch on how some of Montana’s lesser-known mineral resources are being recruited to serve national security.2

Rare earth minerals are essential to the fabrication of bullets, bombs, aircraft, missiles, magnets, lasers, wind turbines, electric vehicles, and smart phones. 3 The U.S. was a global leader in rare earths from 1965 through the mid-1980s. The Mountain Pass mine in California supplied about 15,000 metric tons a year, about three times the amount produced in the rest of the world. Environmental damage and tightening regulations increased operating costs in the U.S. Most of the manufacturing base for rare earths shifted to China, where labor costs were significantly less and regulations were less stringent.4

U.S. production fell to near zero in the early 2000s. China has systematically built and maintained its dominance in rare earths since the 1990s. The weaponization of access to essential materials represents a clear and present danger to national security. Beijing has accomplished a near monopoly over the mining and processing of critical minerals that underpin nearly every advanced technology central to modern life. Now, about 90 percent of rare earths extracted in the U.S. and allied countries is shipped to China for processing. Since 2024, the U.S. has relied on imports for 80 percent of rare earth compounds and metals.

Having honed its industrial strategy (subsidies, export controls, lax environmental standards, etc.) to corner the world market for rare earths and other strategic minerals such as lithium, the Chinese government has a chokehold on the materials that are indispensable in the production of modern weapons systems. China’s recent restrictions on exports to Japan and to the U.S. has caused a scramble to find other sources. It has also induced unprecedented intervention and investment by the federal government in the mining industry.

In an October 23, 2025 article by Greg Pollock and Joshua Busby, the authors point out that the U.S. initiated a few small-scale investments in domestic mining projects and conducted limited research on material substitution, but “the core vulnerability remained unaddressed: the lack of processing and refining capacity outside China.” Even raw materials mined in the U.S., they point out, “still need to be sent to China for separation and purification, which gives Beijing leverage over the value chain.”

What comes next in the After Butte era? Perhaps Butte Encore. The city is still situated on a rich hill. It sits atop a huge working open pit mine, the Continental, that is right next to the toxic reservoir, the Berkeley Pit. The scientists and engineers working for Montana Resources Corporation (MRC) have figured out ways to extract, mill, and ship copper and molybdenum concentrates to distant markets at a profit. Copper is still an essential conductor for electrical wiring, and further electrification of just about everything will undoubtedly sustain global demand. In addition, copper is a critical component in cars, solar panels, wind turbines, and other clean technologies, not to mention the globally ubiquitous smart phone.

Meanwhile, the deepest and dirtiest mining pit may soon yield a harvest of mineral riches. MRC is poised to accept and use federal grant funds to demonstrate the feasibility of chemically milking the poisonous water in the massive Berkeley tailings pond for a number of rare earth elements. MRC’s Vice President for Environmental Affairs Mark Thompson was quoted in a May 14, 2025 New York Times article by writer Jim Robbins: “We’re turning a giant liability into something that’s contributing to defense. There’s some high-level metallurgy going on here. Real egghead stuff.”

The fast-emerging reality of Butte’s resurgence must be understood in a larger context. Mining is undergoing a renaissance in other parts of the state. It’s part of what a number of observers have described as a modern-day gold rush in the critical minerals industry.

Surging demand for critical minerals is generating interest and investment in a number of new and restored mines up and down the spine of the Northern Rockies: the Canadian-owned Black Butte copper mine near White Sulphur Springs; another Canadian firm, the Almonty Corporation’s Gentung Browns Lake tungsten project in Beaverhead County; an expansion U.S. Antimony Corporation’s smelter outside of Thompson Falls (the only one in the country) and U.S. Critical Mineral’s Sheep Creek gallium and other rare earths mine located at the headwaters of the Bitterroot River in southwest Montana.

There’s another important mining operation worth noting. The South African-owned Sibanye-Stillwater mine near Columbus in south central Montana is one of only two platinum and palladium mines in North America. (The other is in Canada.) The main sources of these geologically and technologically related metals, essential to auto emissions control and also used in electronics and complex chemistry (in addition to high end jewelry) are in Russia and South Africa. In recent years, Russia has flooded the world market, depressing prices and causing the mine to lay off 700 of its thousand employees and cease most production. U.S. laws against dumping were invoked, leading to the imposition of protective trade measures and pricing floors that will enable at least a partial restoration of the Sibanye-Stillwater project.

The Montana Environmental Quality Council, a body of state legislators, private sector representatives, and a Governor’s appointee, has issued a letter to the federal government urging it to facilitate the extraction of critical minerals by expediting permitting timelines and encouraging closer coordination between regulatory agencies. They emphasized the efficiency of utilizing tailings pilings (in effect, re-mining legacy sites) including the Berkeley Pit and the Anaconda smelter site.

All of these projects align with U.S. government initiatives to enhance critical mineral independence, particularly for defense and advanced technology sectors. This complicates things for local citizens and statewide environmental groups who oppose mining in their neighborhoods, all of which benefit from being situated in relatively pristine areas with existing and potential real estate and tourism potential. This clash of values is a symptom of a changing economy. Real estate, and closely related housing construction, accounts for more gross domestic product in Montana than mining and agriculture combined. Faced with critical minerals developments in and around attractive and environmentally sensitive areas, Montanans face a bit of a conundrum—reconciling appreciation for the state’s natural beauty with the nation’s economic and security needs.

The controversies will continue. Circumstances in the world at large, especially the arms buildup in the U.S. and China and the insecurity of global supply chains for critical minerals, combined with volatility in financial markets, will determine just how sustainable the mining boom in Montana will be. At any rate, this flurry of new digs suggests that Beyond Butte would be the better moniker for the years on the near horizon.

Montana is less a colony of outside investors and distant corporations than in the heyday of the Copper Kings. The most significant difference between then and now, in my somewhat limited view of the full scope of economic activity in the state, is the availability of suitable intellectual capital ready for action. Processing critical minerals is a dirty industry. Separating rare earths involves processing with solvents and acids. Operating a refinery or separation facility in compliance with regulatory standards requires expertise in pollution control, waste treatment, and sustainable process design—the “egghead stuff.” Today’s mining industry is heavily mechanized and relies on highly educated and highly skilled mine engineers and operators, not hordes of workers willing to brave the depths of the earth and suffer the consequences of ill health and low pay. The labor force requirements are now met by university graduates, not impoverished immigrants, and Montana is well positioned to supply educated workers for new mines in the state and nationwide.

Montana Technical University in Butte (where it’s simply “Tech” in local parlance) is recognized for its expertise in mining, geological, metallurgical, environmental and energy-related engineering fields, with faculty and students conducting research that supports industry innovation and workforce development in Montana and beyond. The University’s website features a wealth of promising connections. For example, Montana Tech has signed a memorandum of understanding with Battelle Energy Alliance LLC to expand collaboration in critical materials, including extraction technologies, mineral processing, innovative methods for recovering valuable elements from mine waste and tailings, and site remediation and restoration.

Montana Tech is not the only educational enterprise engaged in forward-thinking research and training to further develop Montana’s mineral riches. Montana State University (MSU) is actively engaged in critical minerals research through both targeted academic programs and strategic industry partnerships, with a strong focus on rare earth elements, national security, and advanced technology applications. One of MSU’s most significant collaborations is with MITRE, a federally funded research and development center. Under a memorandum of understanding signed in August 2024, the two organizations are working to reduce U.S. dependence on Chinese rare earth elements and to pioneer advances in material science for quantum applications.

Helene Nguemgaing and Alan Collins, from the University of Maryland and West Virginia University respectively, published a piece in the on-line Conversation last May 11 entitled “The missing link in America’s critical minerals push isn’t mining—it’s processing expertise.” A successful domestic supply chain, they write, “will require workers who know how to separate neodymium from praseodymium, operate solvent extraction circuits and maintain hydrometallurgical plants within regulatory standards. These are highly specialized skills that take years to develop.”

I can barely read this sentence without stumbling over the pronunciation of technical terms, but I interpret the meaning thusly: Montana Tech graduates and Montana State University researchers are likely destined to fulfill vital roles in service to U.S. national security.

Reliance on the extraction of materials from Montana’s “treasure chest”—from copper to timber to wheat to cattle to petroleum and coal, and now to critical minerals—places these industries at the mercy of national and international demands, market forces, political decisions, and competitive labor forces. The historical constant has been that external decision making has driven a succession of boom-and-bust cycles. The emergence of China as a hypersonic economy has shifted the direction from which these outside forces emanate, but little else has changed. A state with just over a million people, no big city, and nothing like a sovereign wealth fund or pool of domestic financial capital continues to be susceptible to volatility in mineral commodity markets and in the global financial system.

The Treasure State will remain connected to the world at large in ways that it always has been, as a resource “colony” that is considered a reliable source of valuable mineral resources that are essential for national security. What’s new is the local development and availability of a highly educated and technically skilled workforce. As we’ve seen, Montana mines once drew workers from all over the world. Today, and even more so tomorrow, the state’s most treasured resource will be a talent pool for the critical mineral industry worldwide.

Haven’t made that trip, and don’t expect to anytime soon. [Endnote] For now I must await and hope for circumstances (financial and otherwise) that will enable me to make excursions to places I haven’t been to yet, such as the Caucasus Region (Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan), the Basque Country, Kashmir, Somaliland (on the Horn of Africa), and the Falkland Islands. In the meantime, I will be issuing shorter essays in preparation for and parallel with a course I’ll be teaching in October for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at Montana State University. Entitled “Montana in the World”, this Global Civics mini-course entail explorations into the various roles my home state and its citizens have played and continue to play in the world at large.

My first offering in this vein is actually an only slightly modified version of a piece originally published in 2001 in The Interim newsletter, an official publication of Montana’s non-partisan Legislative Council, where I worked for a decade as a Research Analyst, drafting bills and staffing committees. Please note that in this instance I am going BACK twenty years instead of leapfrogging two decades into the future with para-diplomatic Dispatches, and that I will be setting aside my alter ego Mr. Breen to sign off as just plain moi. Plumbing actual memories should prove to be somewhat easier than imagining geopolitical constructs two generations hence. But be advised: The Kestrel Group—Christopher Breen’s NGO—will make at least one appearance in the months to come, mainly because it is an entity embedded in my mind even though it hasn’t materialized in “real” life. Somewhere in the realm of imagination is the borderland between fact and fiction.

So here we go. The first composition in A Montana Medley is called In a State of Pretending. The original text has not been changed, but I have annotated some statements and sections as a means of updating a few (but not all) items that underly the narrative. These modernizing quips will appear in italics and a different font right after original paragraphs. Some footnotes attached to the original have been removed to prevent cluttering up the Substack pages.

It’s called Big Sky Country, and it could be a country, as big as Japan, or the whole Balkan peninsula. We know the outline of its borders by heart, the way the French know the shape of France. Montana is a homeland, a place to come back to, happily and with a sense of relief, after venturing outward into the fraying sprawl of other states or the cacophonous maw of metropolitan areas foreign and domestic. The state of Israel has a Law of Return on the books; here there is an unwritten law that compels Montanans who have drifted purposefully away from the scarcities of the Treasure State to return, enriched in many ways by prolonged exposure to the elements and hustle and bustle that are so abundant in the East and the West, but yearning to slip back into old coats and under the down comforter of the way things generally are in this part of the world, freezing on the outside by never cold of heart.

Let me digress already. I live in Helena. It’s far from perfect. As everyone who lives here knows, it’s a hundred miles from real stores and way too many hundreds of dollars’ worth of Delta Sky Miles from a genuine city. Helena’s material progress is incremental, and its cultural efflorescence is sometimes muted by the dampening inertia of its largest working class—we bureaucrats. Still and all, Helena holds great promise and lends perspective.

Montana’s state capitol

Promontories on the periphery of the capital city give rise, at least in my mind, to strangely instructive geographic allusions. From the top of Sugarloaf (which does not resemble in any way the famous landform towering over Rio de Janeiro), one can get a good view to the south and east of Mount Baldy, a 9,400 ft. peak on the outskirts of Townsend. The top of Baldy is usually covered with snow, and at such a distance it appears whiter than white, like a radiant crown. I call the mountain “My Kilimanjaro”, after the celebrated peak in East Africa. Up the slope a bit from Sugarloaf is a ridge that most locals know as Meatloaf, but for me it’s always been the Golan Heights. Many an early autumn morning, and sometimes at dusk, I’ve walked my golden Labrador up on “the Golan”, always pausing to look down at the capitol and then over at the cathedral, pondering the juxtaposition of church and state, now and tomorrow, and realizing over and over again the significance of “commanding heights” in geopolitical history. We now live in another part of town, in the shadow of Mount Helena, and one of the trails we frequent with the dog is fairly steep and narrow and my name for it is the Khyber Pass. I’m always in a hurry to get up and over this little track, as if there were Pashtun bandits with long rifles (or Russian-made RPGs) ready to execute an ambush.

I no longer live in Montana’s capital city. Upon retirement in 2021, we moved to Bozeman, a different kind of community, energized by a flourishing land grant university, a thriving tech-oriented private sector, wealthy fancy-dressed newcomers, Hispanic construction workers, and hordes of tourists. Bozeman is a fast-growing city with a verdant local landscape and snow-capped mountains on multiple horizons. I’ve lost the urge to re-label Hyalite Peak as my Mont Blanc.

I realize that such tampering with local placenames and the stretch for some exotic connection to current events borders on the pathetic, but this little confession has a purpose. I really do believe that Montana suffers from a provincial cast of collective mind: we’re too insular for our own good, and this mentality exacts a price. The splendidness of physical isolation is greatly reduced if it is accompanied by isolationist thinking and protectionist ideologies. I would like to advocate, therefore, for a broader perspective, a global view, and one way of reaching in that direction is to pretend to be something more significant than we really are—not just a state of the federal union, but a country in our own right, as worthy of international recognition and World Bank loans as Nauru, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, and a host of other members of the United Nations General Assembly with less than a million people.

As of 2025, Montana’s population clocked in at 1.14 million, thanks in part to post-Covid in-migration from California and Washington State and to a fairly robust economy that is keeping young Montanans from flying the coop in search of opportunity. 2The state has no major metropolitan center, but rather seven distinctly different urban communities that barely register as cities in national statistical terms. Census figures show that the population is 89 percent white (including 5 percent Hispanic or Latino), and that only 2.3 percent are foreign born. I’ve been stunned repeatedly by encountering 3^rd and 4^th generation Montanans who have never traveled outside the country, including to any one of the large adjoining provinces of Canada.

Montana is the only state to border three Canadian provinces.

This flight of fancy is facilitated by the fact that in the academic jargon of international relations, nations (or “nation states”) are known simply as “states”. It’s not unusual to see clusters of subnational states and provinces and even cities present themselves for comparison with nation-states. For example, the Pacific Northwest Economic Region (PNWER) is a statutory, public/private partnership composed of legislators, governments, and businesses in the Northwest states of Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington, and the Western Canadian provinces of British Columbia, and Alberta, plus the Yukon Territory. PNWER promotes greater cooperation among these entities to enhance the region’s global competitiveness while striving to maintain or improve its environment. Now, here goes:

If it were a nation, PNWER would rank 11^th among the world’s leading industrial economies, with a combined population of more than 18 million and an annual gross domestic regional product of over $350 billion.

In addition, it has become fashionable in the marketing and promotion of real-life states and provinces to speak of “world class amenities”, “two-nation vacations”, and “transcontinental trade corridors”. Hey, we’re there—we’ve got all those things and more.

The Northwest Territories and the province of Saskatchewan are now member of PNWER. For updated information about this organization are at: PNWER - Pacific NorthWest Economic Region

If Montana were a country, what would we call it? Montanastan? Upper Missouri? Perhaps, in keeping with the shotgun marriage approach in places like Bosnia-Hercegovina, we’d name it Bobcat-Grizzly.

Historic sports competition between Montana State University’s Bobcats and the University of Montana’s Grizzlies are legendary and ongoing. References to this rivalry are relentless and ubiquitous in nearly every social context, including political rallies and sports bars.

If Montana were a country, how would we conduct ourselves in international affairs? What sort of alliances would we enter into, and with whom? What image would we want the world to have of Montana? An article in the September/October issue of Foreign Affairs by Dutch researcher Peter Van Ham analyzes the trend from straightforward advertising to “branding”, which gives products and services and, he asserts, countries too—“an emotional dimension with which people can identify.” According to Van Ham, places like Ireland and Singapore have become “brand states” whose geographic and political settings seem trivial compared to their “emotional resonance among an increasingly global audience of consumers.”

A couple of weeks ago I enjoyed the coincidence of reading the aforementioned article and hearing both David Gibson, the newly hired CEO of the Governor’s Office of Economic Opportunity and Mark Simonich, Director of the Commerce Department, describe their respective efforts to map out a strategy for Montana’s economic development. Mr. Gibson made passing reference to a consultant’s finding that among business elites outside the state Montana does not suffer a negative image; rather, it has no image at all. Executives think of our state as a place to recreate, not create jobs. This situation, in Gibson’s view, has to change. Mr. Simonich, in a subsequent presentation, handed out some new promotional materials, including a metal lapel pin in the shape of a cattle brand—with an “M” inside a circle. Peter Van Ham writes: “These days, individuals, firms, cities, regions, countries, and continents all market themselves professionally, often through aggressive sales techniques. Indeed, having a bad reputation or none at all is a serious handicap for a state seeking to remain competitive in the international arena. The unbranded state has a difficult time attracting economic and political attention.” I think our guys are on to something!

Back in 2001, a sassy and brassy French parfumier named Claude Montana was attempting to copyright and thus control all commercial uses of the word Montana. My footnote suggested that he “go jump in the English Channel”.

For what it’s worth, if Montana were a country it would rank in the top 10 nuclear weapons states.

I will return to our state’s nuclear posture in much greater depth and detail in a later edition of Montana Medley.

If Montana were a country, it would be regarded as rich, but not powerful, notwithstanding the nukes. Our per capital purchasing power would be on par with folks in Austria, Australia, Iceland and Kuwait. In terms of population, we’d be a pygmy state, in the ranks of Fiji, Cyprus, and Qatar. I can’t tell you how we’d stack up in terms of foreign direct investment—job creating capital coming in from the outside world—but in the real world, Montana is very near dead last in comparison with the other states in the USA.

Being a country, or at least acting like one, would probably cause Montana’s political leaders to place greater emphasis on the thoughtful husbanding of strategic resources—like fresh water (in a headwaters state) and platinum and palladium (since we’ve got the only known deposits of consequence in the Western world). The government would likely pay more mind to developing certain advanced technologies, such as fuel cells and biological pest controls, and to nurturing the state’s human and social capital, through larger investments in technical schooling, distance learning, and community art centers. Maybe we’d design, build, and send up our own communications satellite, Big Sky One, and sell transponder space in the global market. Maybe we’d be forced to get creative in our attempts to synergize the services sector of the economy, like mixing tourism and gambling on the Maverick Train, a passenger rail novelty connecting a tribal gaming complex on Flathead Lake to a non-Indian mining theme casino district perched on the lip of Butte’s Berkeley Pit, with pretend highwaymen holding up the train near Deerlodge and collecting tribute for statewide charities.

The Maverick Train remains one of my favorite fantasies. It never got traction, even when I gussied up the narrative description to include the Gary Cooper lounge car (in honor of Helena’s homegrown movie star), a policy banning electronic gaming (so as to promote Live poker games) and an on-board micro-brewery serving Moose Drool (an amber ale crafted in Missoula). What I did not anticipate then is an actual serious effort, now ongoing, to restore Amtrak passenger service on a once functioning southern rail route connecting Chicago with Seattle. I have a scheme for financing this endeavor!

As a country, Montana would have to deal seriously with its balance of payments. Absent crop support programs and other manifestations of federal largesse, there might be less attention paid to commodity exports and more to sustainable agriculture. Instead of being on the receiving end of a stream of transfer payments from Uncle Sam, Montana would have to compete with a host of other, far more populous and “needy” countries for highly conditioned handouts from the International Monetary Fund. Yikes!

At the time of this writing, in 2001, the federal government spent $3,109 more on each and every Montanan than they collected from the state’s taxpayers. Only New Mexicans fared better. Montana ranked #1 in the country in non-defense discretionary spending. See Endnote for updated figures.3

If Montana were a country, it would be graced with one of the most remarkable constitutions on the planet. We’d be a model nation state. We’d be like Switzerland. We’ve already got a lot in common with the Swiss: the initiative and referendum, a right to privacy, a deeply felt devotion to individual freedom, a statutory construct designed to attract clean financial capital from refugees, aristocrats, and expatriates. I’m sure I’ve seen and heard Glacier Park described as the Switzerland of the Rockies. Just think, Montana could be like a great big Swiss Family Robinson, full of modest people with lots of practical know-how in the crafting of clever buildings and irrigation systems and garden plots that are uniquely suitable for our climate and topography.

The Montana State Constitution, substantially revised in 1972, is still widely regarded as the most progressive in the country. The “statutory construct” mentioned above refers to the Foreign Capital Depository, described inadequately by pundits of the day as Montana’s Swiss Bank, is now moribund. Both it and the Constitution will be featured in future missives in the Montana Medley series.

Of course, Banff and Jasper Parks fit the Swiss Alps brand-image too. Now here’s a twist: If Alberta were a state, more Montanans would notice it. More of us would go there. In global economic terms, we’d know what we were up against, or, more positively, we’d realize the scale of opportunity afforded us by our proximity to one of the most prosperous areas of North America. Alberta is an economic powerhouse. If IT were a country, it would far outstrip Montana in everything that counts, save nuclear weapons. For reasons that are both mysterious and mundane, the 49^th parallel remains a formidable barrier to clear thinking about the scope and breadth of Montana’s nearby trade and investment possibilities. Albertans are much less provincial; they are gung-ho for freer trade, they have well established relationships with countries in Asia, Europe, and Latin America, and they regard Montana as the gateway to their most important market by far, the United States.

President Trump’s recent proposals to make Canada the 51^st state have spurred a spirited wave of Canadian nationalism right across the country. Nevertheless, ongoing tensions between the federal government in Ottawa and the province of Alberta have given rise to a separatist movement advocating for independence from Canada. There may be a referendum on the issue later this year. Imagine this: in lieu of remaining a vassal of the government in Washinton, Montana could seek to be annexed to an adjacent new country to the north.

This may all sound silly. Montana will never be a country. Texas and California are the only western states to have experienced life as independent republics, and neither lasted long as such. Moreover, the future of those colossal and complex communities is bound up in a transnational regional relationship extending across the Rio Grande and deep into the new political economy of Old Mexico. The value in considering the “what if we were on our own in the world?” is in thinking a bit differently, and more expansively, about the economic and cultural potential that exists in our great big small town called Montana, potential that is shackled from time to time by inwardness and a lack of collective self-confidence. To bend a shopworn phrase, we’re not at our best in last place.

The Last Best Place is a 1988 anthology of some of the greatest stories and storytellers of the American West. Edited by William Kittredge and Annick Smith, this hefty tome (over 800 pages) was sort of a secular bible for Montanans twenty years ago. Today, notwithstanding its evergreen literary worth, the book serves as a doorstop in many households. The title phrase has nevertheless become a cliché for many contemporary columnists and commentators.

I know and you know that Montana is never going to be an independent country. It would be annoying to further belabor the pretending stance. Going forward, I will be reckoning with certain facts of history, geography, political economy, the law—all components of my Global Civics approach to understanding reality. Montana has played both subtle and significant roles in world affairs and still does. The state is part of a transnational region and serves as a model of sorts worthy of emulation by communities outside the United States. Please stay tuned for further verses and refrains in The Montana Medley.

Subsidiarity is a relatively obscure term, rarely encountered outside the confines of scholarly journals and think-tank conferences about world order. We at OSP readily acknowledge that readers of this memorandum may have never used the word in a sentence, let alone uttered it in polite (or even impolite) dinner conversation. Further, subsidiarity’s close cognate “subsidiary” immediately conjures images of billboards and television commercials featuring the logos of energy, banking, food, and other commercial enterprises with readily identifiable corporate subsidiaries. That’s not what subsidiarity is about.

It’s easy to confuse the terms “subsidiary” and “subsidiarity” and thus conflate their separate meanings. So this is where we must start, separating both a noun and an adjective from an all-too-similar sounding but somewhat distanced principle. We’ve already addressed subsidiary as it relates to a company controlled by another, larger firm. Synonyms include a branch, division or satellite. Subsidiaries are regarded as dependent, peripheral, derivative, adjunct, or tributary to the main corporate entity. As an adjective, subsidiary generally means less important than but related or supplementary to something. An example from a quickie internet search: “Many environmentalists argue that the cause of animal rights is subsidiary to that of protecting the environment.” Some synonyms for this usage are subordinate, secondary, ancillary, auxiliary, lesser, and minor.

As stated at the outset, there is no good replacement word for subsidiarity; it is what it is—and we will explicate its unique and important meaning in due course. To warm things up a bit, these are words and phrases often used in policy discussions and academic treatises on the subsidiarity principle: devolution, decentralization, local control, regionalism, and federalism.

Onward, now, to a definition of sorts: The concept of subsidiarity refers to the idea that matters ought to be dealt with by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent unit.

Please be mindful of the term “competent”; it will figure significantly a bit later on. For the moment, to be slightly more succinct, subsidiarity is about the decentralization of authoritative decision-making.

There is an additional dimension to the principle, one that is rooted in antiquity but has gained significant salience in the modern world. Even though subsidiarity slipped into our political vocabulary in the late 19^th century, and has become ubiquitous in specialized academic discourse, the idea has an intellectual history as old as European political thought. Thomas Acquinas and other theologians addressed the merits of decentralized authority long before democracy became a legitimate form of government. The concept of limiting royal and imperial power from within, in accordance with philosophical understandings of social justice, permeated the Holy Roman Empire and later informed subsequent Catholic ideologues who were seeking a sort of middle way between the perceived excesses of both laissez-faire capitalist society and Marxian socialist alternatives. The ethos of subsidiarity echoes in the works of Montesquieu, Locke, Tocqueville and Lincoln. In recent decades, subsidiarity has been recognized as the core principle of the complex organizational structures of the European Union, which is both a federation of separate sovereign states and a supranational body exercising significant yet limited executive power over the whole community.1

Subsidiarity now carries global significance. It is firmly embedded in international human rights law. In a lengthy journal article by Palo G. Carozza, an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame, the author sets forth that “subsidiarity is the principle that each social and political group should help smaller or local ones accomplish their respective ends without, however, arrogating those tasks to itself.” Carozza goes further:

The concept is not a rigid or precise one, and it is characterized by internal tensions and inherent paradoxes that need to be identified, especially its combination of intervention and noninterference. When used in its original and most comprehensive sense, subsidiarity has deep affinities at its roots with many of the implicit premises of international human rights norms, including presuppositions about the dignity and freedom of human persons, the importance of their association with others, and the role of the state with respect to smaller social groups as well as individuals.

That passage is tightly packed, and worth reading more than once, linking as it does the notion of individual dignity that is both inviolate and integrally linked to other people in community. Eleanor Roosevelt, one of the chief authors of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, speaks with simpler language to this interstitial continuum:

Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home—so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any map of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere.

Subsidiarity is a good fit for international human rights law. It integrates international, national, and subnational levels of social order on the basis of a substantive vision of human dignity and freedom while encouraging and protecting pluralism. We will step back in history to glimpse how this construct evolved.

Pope Leo XIII was the first to issue an encyclical that included, though somewhat obliquely, the subsidiarity principle. In Rerum Novarum (1891), Leo wrote that “whenever the general interest or any particular class suffers, or is threatened by harm, which can in no other way be met or prevented, the public authority must step in the deal with it.” However, the state “must not undertake or proceed further than is required for the remedy of the evil or the removal of the mischief”. Pope Pius XI (1922-1939) referred to Rerum Novarum as “the Magna Carta” of Christian social action and refined the formula that both justified and mandated this concept of intervention-but-not-interference. Thus, we witness the origins of the still emerging doctrine of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) in international law, a response to modern occurrences of genocide in Sudan, Rwanda, Bosnia and other places. 2It will not be surprising if the new Pope, Leo XIV, will be morally compelled to remind the great powers of their duty to intervene in the domestic affairs of other sovereign states when—and only when—their governments fail to protect basic human rights.

Let us proceed with general considerations, once again relying on the scholarship of the above-named professor from Notre Dame. Subsidiarity rests on several key premises. The first is human dignity. Every individual is endowed with inherent, inalienable worth. Because of this, all other forms of society, from the family to the state to the international order, ought ultimately to be at the service of the person. “Their end must be the flourishing of the individual”, says Dr. Carozza.

Second, all persons have a social identity. Associating with others makes it possible to become authentically human. Relationships with others cannot be separated from the full expression and realization of inherent, primary value. (In the Office of the State Philosopher, this concept is bandied about as “The We in Me”.)

Third, each larger grouping is understood to serve the smaller ones, and all are understood to serve individual dignity. In reverse sequence, the individual and all other levels of human association are understood to be organically linked, by structure and purpose, to a higher level, e.g. the nation, or planetary civilization.

Let’s build upon these underpinning realities and create a fuller picture using the “negative” and “positive” aspects of the principle in human rights parlance. The negative aspect of subsidiarity is the recognition that a government (or governmental entity) is obliged to limit its intervention into lower forms of social organization, and to do only that which the lesser group cannot accomplish for itself without assistance. The positive aspect holds that the state not only MAY intervene in such situations, but that it has an inherent right to concern itself with the common good and, moreover, a duty to exercise that right. Subsidiarity limits the state yet empowers and justifies it. It limits intervention yet requires it. It exposes both a positive and negative vision of the role of the state with respect to society and the individual.

As Professor Carozza put it, “While the specifics may be debated, as a general matter the position of the state with respect to human rights is clearly dual: both to refrain from violating them and to take affirmative measures to ensure the appropriate conditions for realizing them. Thus, the canon of international human rights, like the idea of subsidiarity, combines intervention with non-interference.” This is R2P in a nutshell, and the logic is indispensable.

Subsidiarity has many applications. The principle is not confined to international relations. Consider the circulatory system of the human body, with the heart at the center of a distribution network of arteries, veins, and capillaries, all connected yet with separate functions that one could call competencies. (A vein is not competent to do what an artery does, even though they are anatomically similar.)

One example of subsidiarity in nature is both weird and wondrous; it might be the veritable apex of decentralization. An octopus has no central brain; its sentience resides in nerve cells spread to the farthest reaches of its tentacles.

In the realm of human society, the marvelously efficient acequia system of water management in the desert environment of the American Southwest, a design that was apparently imported from Yemen, exemplifies the value of subsidiarity in infrastructure. Contrast acequias with the grossly inefficient methods of providing steam heat from a centrally located coal plant to homes and apartment blocks during cold winters in countries of the former Soviet Union. Modern electrical grid systems are not much better, wherein a centralized power generation source (a dam, a plant, a reactor) is connected to far-flung localities through long-distance transmission lines tied into smaller-scale substations, transformers, and wires. Subsidiarians (a neologism fresh from the State Philosopher’s lexicon!) are proponents of distributed generation schemes such as commercial and household solar arrays supplying local energy needs and exporting surplus power to a regional grid.

In these examples, we are consciously pushing the boundaries of subsidiarity, and bending a principle most properly located in national and global governance models to demonstrate a broad pattern that permeates earthly existence. State philosophers are prone to such overstretching. We shall return to the grand central arena of world order, but not before setting subsidiarity in several tangential contexts. As you will quickly surmise, they are most assuredly relevant.

· Social size matters a lot, and small is oftentimes beautiful. In The Breakdown of Nations, published in 1957, Leopold Kohr presents a compelling argument for decentralization and the dissolution of large nation-states into smaller, more manageable units. Kohr argues that the primary cause of social ills, such as crime, war, and oppressive governments, is the “cult of bigness”. The book draws on historical examples from the Middle Ages and the Greek city-states to illustrate how relatively small polities have led to greater creativity and prosperity among their citizens. In smaller states, leaders are more accessible and responsive to the people’s needs. Consider the modern fact that the Scandinavian countries repeatedly top the global indices of happiness and social well-being. None of them are very big.3

· Consider the Islamic Republic’s mosaic approach to national defense, whereby military commanders spread throughout Iran’s 31provinces are not heavily constrained by orders from (or disorder within) titular leadership cadres in Tehran. The American and Israeli war against Iran has shown that decapitation is ineffective against a hydra-headed Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Similarly, American military forces are said to be superior to almost anybody else’s because sergeants and platoon leaders are authorized to exercise autonomous decisions. Ukraine benefits from this model in its defense against Russian aggression, a highly centralized military operation. (We will consciously avoid the temptation to talk about AI-empowered autonomous weapons systems, as we are not prepared to push subsidiarity beyond that event horizon.)

· In the realm of religion, Paul Spinrad, a contributor to the on-line Main Street Journal, points to historical patterns that reveal a spirit of subsidiarity. He points out that Rabbinic Judaism, Islam, and Protestantism all started by valuing decentralized text and local community over centralized image, spectacle, and hierarchy. They were revolutions of word against image, of resonant ideas against consolidated power.

· In American domestic politics, the prolific Substack author Christopher Armitage presents a remarkably detailed analysis of and agenda for radical decentralization in response to creeping fascism in the United States. From his website The Existentialist Republic, Armitage employs clever language— “oppositional federalism” and “soft secession”, for example—and publishes pamphlets explicating the legal and political steps states, local governments, and individual citizens can take to stop the juggernaut of Trumpian authoritarianism. [See: The Existentialist Republic | Christopher Armitage | Substack]

· Michael Shuman and his colleagues also publish on Main Street Journal. The July, 2025 issue presented A Localism Manifesto. [See: Decent Tuesdays | The Main Street Journal | Michael Shuman | Substack] Shuman begins with the admonition that “it’s time to figure out how to reorganize our increasingly centralized and dysfunctional political and economic systems.” Recalling Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis’ famous characterization of states as “laboratories of democracy” in the American federal system, Shuman says “I would prefer we think about the 36,000 laboratories in our cities, towns, and villages.” He defines localism as “a commitment to place, supported through the decentralization of power, action, and our economies.” Without going much deeper into the text of the manifesto, we will highlight one additional passage that clearly connects the localism argument to the subsidiarity principle that infuses the evolution of authentic federal states: Localism is not utopian. It describes the reality of power for most of human history. And it can be seen today—however imperfectly—in the federalist structures of countries like Canada, Germany, and the United States. Perhaps the closest living example of localism is Switzerland, where the national government is so minor that almost no one can name its President, and yet the country ranks at the top of the global rankings of economic, social, and environmental performance. 4

This is all well and good. However, there are obvious challenges to and complications for just and effective governance in the application of subsidiarity to real world situations.

In varying degrees, nearly all federal states (there are several dozen extant today, including Russia, Nigeria, Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, and the U.S.) face the complications inherent in overlapping jurisdictions. In the U.S. there are innumerable squabbles between municipal and county governments and between state and federal agencies. The legislative and executive branches of the U.S. government are often at loggerheads over Issues related to treaty partners and participation in international organizations. There are no “bright line” demarcations of authority in most federal systems, a cause for extensive intergovernmental litigation. There are also perennial disputes, often turbocharged with disinformation, about how much authority the United Nations exercises within the legal and territorial confines of a nation-state. (The simple truth: precious little.)

We must also note the unfortunate absence of transnational regional assemblies with binding jurisdictional authority to manage ethnic, economic, and ecological issues that transcend political boundaries. The ongoing polycrisis of existential threats requires collective action at the regional level (e.g. in the world’s major riverine watersheds) and in a truly global context (such as nuclear weapons proliferation and climate change). National governments lack the necessary competence to successfully resolve matters beyond the scale of that sovereign state.

We dutifully acknowledge that world order can suffer from too much of a good thing. Decentralization can get out of hand. In many historical circumstances, localized political autonomy has resulted in the use of terrorizing and totalitarian tactics on the part of law enforcement and/or deputized paramilitary groups. Consider the perverse consequences of devolving military and law enforcement functions to the level of the Russian Wagner Group in Africa and the Ku Klux Klan and The Proud Boys in the United States.

Subsidiarity is not simple, as evidenced by the double-edged quality of the states’ rights cause in America. On the one hand (in keeping with the 9^th and 10^th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution), assertions of state sovereignty to prohibit federal government intrusions into various arenas of domestic policy are a positive means of preserving and enhancing personal freedom and an economy that serves the needs of the people. Conversely, states can abuse their authority by aiding and abetting blatant discrimination against racial, socioeconomic, and political minority groups. Subsidiarity requires constant efforts at achieving balance with other principles, most notably sovereignty and legitimacy, in order to avoid corruption and injustice.

It’s time to “land the plane”, as it were, on the tarmac of world order. In his recently published corrective to misinformed history, The Once and Future World Order: Why Global Civilization Will Survive the Decline of the West, Amitav Acharya sets forth a vision of the future that is almost upon us already. Starting with a description of world order as “the power structures, economic links, political ideas, and leadership designed to ensure the stability and peace of the world”, Acharya argues that It will be multi-civilizational and will not be dominated by any single country—not China, India, a resurgent United States, or any group of nations under such banners as NATO, the EU, BRICS, or “the West”. Acharya eschews the ubiquitous use of “multi-polarity” in current discussions, referring to the shared dominance of the world by a small set of Great Powers. He offers instead a “global multi-plex” image in which large, medium, and some innovative smaller nations, as well as people operating through companies, corporations, non-governmental organizations and other groups in civil society employ new forms of interdependence and interaction. He points to social media, artificial intelligence and amassed financial fortunes as active players in the drama, acting with as much agency as many countries.

The OSP finds credence in Aharya’s analysis, especially as it underscores the salience of subsidiarity. Silicon Valley billionaires; major league philanthropists, science labs, mercenary militias, the multifarious clusters of executives that gather in Davos each year: all will exercise strong influences within and outside national borders.

The future world order will be a kaleidoscopic hodge podge. Stable peace, sustainable prosperity, social justice, ecological health and everything else that matters, including the progressive realization of human rights, will manifest in diverse cultural and political circumstances, not in a universal model of governance. Pluralism will flourish as the cult of bigness gives way to various embraces of subsidiarity. The optimal balance of centrality and power diffusion in world order is not the exclusive preserve of liberal democracy. Majoritarian systems can override, suppress and usurp the autonomy of constituent social groups, just as a monarchy can govern in ways that respect and assist them.

Finally, we urge citizens of the world to be mindful of the enduring fact that seemingly all-important matters of public policy such as taxation, the regulation of commerce, fiscal and monetary discipline, and even military preparedness are subsidiary to the central organizing principles of sovereignty, legitimacy, and--as we have attempted to demonstrate with clarity and aplomb, SUBSIDIARITY.

It is written, and to be filed in accordance with the official protocols of the Office of the State Philosopher.

I will begin with a statement that can be found in nearly every scholarly and journalistic account written in the past hundred years: “The Kurds are the largest ethnic group in the world without a state.” In the very near future, if things continue to go as they have done since the end of the Iran War, such phraseology will be relegated to the proverbial dustbin of history. Having overcome internal disputes—most of them tribal—having withstood unrelenting pressures from external powers—mostly regional--and having endured a tragically repetitive pattern of betrayal by supposed friends—most notably the United States, the Kurds are now on a path to legitimate sovereign statehood.

I will explain a complicated and unexpected situation as briefly as possible in this dispatch. I must preface my remarks with an admission: I am experiencing an extraordinary degree heartfelt and gut-level excitement about what is taking place here in a run-of-the-mill rug shop in central Istanbul. It’s a rare thing to witness the birth of a new country, the dream of which has inspired generations of Kurds inhabiting adjacent areas of Iraq, Turkey, Syria, and Iran.

I am surrounded by a culturally diverse entourage of Kurdish leaders representing nearly 40 million people who share a common ethnicity and a singular purpose, to lay the foundations of an authentic Kurdish nation state. Their collective positive energy is almost electric. Even though Einstein likened nationalism to the measles, and many other intellectuals have decried nationalist sentiments for their proven susceptibility to political violence and war, this gathering of a people renowned for centuries for their military prowess feels like a high school reunion on steroids: boisterous, sentimental, and exuding a sort of fierce joy I haven’t witnessed in decades of para-diplomatic immersion. The Kurdish rash is communicable; I’ve caught the bug.

We are assembled in a spacious gallery not far from the famous Blue Mosque. All the rugs have been rolled up and stacked in the corners. There are low tables festooned with small tulip-shaped glass teacups and dishes with apricot walnut candies. There is a huge bowl of pomegranates gracing the center platform, where microphones indicate that florid speeches will inevitably be forthcoming. As the various leaders of Kurdish parties and paramilitary groups assemble, a lot of traditional garb is on display: longish tunics, baggy pantaloons, wide, ruffled cummerbunds. There are no weapons in sight, save for some curved ceremonial daggers. Peshmerga guards are stationed outside, presumably carrying concealed handguns. (Peshmerga translates as “the men who face death”; the term has endured for centuries in the Kurdish lands.) The sentries are noticeable by their battle fatigues and their perpetually fierce visages—Kurdish warriors are famous for their piercing eyes and an arm-waving excitability that scares strangers who are unfamiliar with the Kurds’ going from ferocious to rapturous joy in a split second. The guys they are guarding inside remind me of field geologists, gesticulating wildly as if their coming together is like a shared discovery of a rich vein of precious ore.

Kurdistan’s emergence marks a seismic shift in the political contours of the Middle East. Did you know that tectonically the Zagros Mountains that have sheltered Kurdish tribes since time immemorial are the result of the collision of the Arabian and Iranian plates? This is a relevant aside, Commissioner, because Kurdistan’s economic success will depend in large part on mineral extraction and refining. More about that a bit later.

I am here, as usual, at your request. The UN is deeply interested in the political mosaic of the Kurdish state and its implications for human rights. Failure to carry through with solidarity and democratic norms could trigger a catastrophic mass migration and renewed destabilization of the entire Middle East. Success will bring rapid and remarkable gains in the material quality of life for tens of millions of Kurds as well as the proverbial blessings of liberty that are much the same in a Muslim-dominant context as in a Western liberal one. Human rights, as we both believe, are universal. The Kurds get it, and are determined to prove themselves a cut above every other country in the region.

My task is to quietly observe the proceedings and analyze the potential consequences for human rights of political positions taken in the aftermath of the historic treaty signing at Lake Van in southeast Turkey last year. You will recall that ceremony, which featured delegations from the host country as well as from the “rump” states (my label, not an official appellation) of Iran, Iraq, and Syria. The presence of Russian, American, EU and Chinese officials looking on substantiated the solemnity and legitimacy of the occasion. You may recall that a representative from the Vatican was seen standing next to the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople (“first among equals in the autocephalous Orthodox churches) amidst a cluster of mullahs from Arab countries. Global media folks were there in droves. All in all, quite the spectacle, both long-awaited and unexpected.

I’m not the only outsider to be invited to this carpet shop gathering. A colleague representing the UN High Commissioner for Refugees is also on the scene. His charge is to anticipate transborder refugee flows from contiguous conflict zones in the four countries affected by Kurdistan’s political consolidation. There is a team from the European Commission and also several members of the European Parliament. The EU is playing a crucial role in supporting the Kurds’ bid for recognition by the international community. There’s an American, of course. Her calling card no doubt features an embossed under-secretary sort of title from the U.S. State Department. Everyone knows she actually works for the CIA. The Agency is not well respected in this crowd, but the Kurds continue to acknowledge, as they have for decades, that American connections are crucial to their economic, military, and diplomatic prospects.

The Kurdish flag

To understand what is transpiring here, there is a whole lot of history to recount. I know you know it well, since your tenure at the UN spans five decades and each one of them was marked by violent and tragic events in the Middle East. Nowhere else is the sad salience of war as the driving force of history more vividly on display. Modern Kurdish history consists of litany of traumatic events, most of them involving failed attempts to establish a sovereign homeland.

After World War I, in 1920, the Treaty of Sevres paid tribute to Woodrow Wilson’s principles of self-determination for nations that had been held captive by the Ottoman Empire. The Kurds were promised a state. But in 1923, the Treaty of Lausanne put paid the prospect of Kurdish independence because Western powers were eager to defer to the nationalist dictates of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the godfather of modern Turkey. The Kurds were subsumed and subordinated.

During and just after World War II (1941-46) there was a Soviet-supported Mahabad Republic in the Kurdish northern region of Iran, but it was short-lived. (The Iranian monarchy and the Islamic Republic were equally persistent in repressing the Kurdish minority.)

In 1975, the Algiers Accord between Saddam Hussein and the Shah of Iran was in essence a pact to put down Kurdish upstarts in Iraq and Iran. Saddam waged all-out war against the Kurds in the 1980s. His infamous Anfal campaign (the term refers to spoils of war and comes from the Koran) included the horrific massacre of thousands of Kurdish civilians in the village of Halabja using poison gas.

Turkey repeatedly carried out armed incursions into Kurdish areas of Iraq because they feared the approximately 15 million Kurds inside Turkey (nearly 20 percent of the population), many of whom were suspected of being allied with the separatist and outlawed Kurdish Workers Party, would join forces with their ethnic brethren across the border.

This tortured history of suppressed desires continued for several more decades, albeit with lesser degrees of viciousness. The Kurds learned to play the long game, accepting provisional roles as partners in federal constructs that have afforded them significant degrees of internal self-rule. In the wake of the 2003-2011 Iraq War, American and its allies advocated for a “soft partition” that would enable a loose constitutional confederation of Shi’ite and Sunni Arabs and the Kurds. The northeast quadrant of the country was designated and respected as a quasi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government. The nadir in this arrangement brought competing Kurdish dynastic rival families, the Barzanis and the Talabanis, into a state of civil war in the early 1990s. Nobody in the outside world wanted to aid or abet a fratricidal conflict, so the Kurdish cause was written off until the warring clans finally reached a settlement.

The pinnacle of Kurdish success within Iraq came in 2005, when Mahmoud Barzani was elected president of the country—he won out over Sunni and Shia Arab parties representing the majority of Iraqi citizens—and Jamal Talabani became president of the Kurdistan Regional Government.

The seemingly everlasting “Kurdish Question” (in historians’ lingo) came to a head in a September, 2017 referendum called by President Barzani. Multiple outside authorities condemned this maneuver ahead of the vote. The New York Times opined that the referendum would unleash ethnic violence, tear Iraq apart, and fracture the American-led coalition that was fighting the Islamic State insurgency. The Economist weighed in with this admonition: “Kurdistan is far from ready for statehood. The government is steeped in debt; its coffers are empty. The Peshmerga, its vaunted fighting force, is split between multiple family-led factions.” Turkey threatened invasion and warned that it might block the Regional Government’s oil exports by turning off the tap of the pipeline transiting Turkish territory.

Barzani wasn’t deterred. Nearly 90 percent of the population, including Kurds in Kirkuk, which just outside the autonomous zone, voted in favor of independence. This result did not oblige the President to formally declare separation from Iraq; Barzani insisted on a negotiated process with the government in Baghdad. No deal. Barzani quit his post when the Iraqi government declared the referendum null and void and negotiations went nowhere.

I sometimes think of the Kurds’ timeline as an elongated musical composition, punctuated at many intervals with repeat signs. At this festive moment in Istanbul, surrounded by happy warriors, I’m sensing an end to the inglorious repetition, and a lyrical leap to the hoped for coda.

The coda sign in musical notation.

As an American steeped in painful foreign policy history, I am compelled to highlight the repeated enlistment of the Kurds by the United States to serve as military proxies, only to be betrayed and abandoned time and time again. American administrations have backed Kurdish uprisings in Iraq since the late 1950s. In 1968, following the coup that put Saddam Hussein in power, the U.S. cooperated with the Shah of Iran to arm and support Kurdish insurrectionists. In the 1970s, Henry Kissinger directed that military support be provided to the Kurds to weaken Iraq’s central government. In 1991, at the close of the Gulf War that kicked Iraq out of Kuwait, President George H.W. Bush encouraged the Kurds (and Shi’ite factions in southern Iraq) to revolt. In every case, Kurdish militias, known collectively as Peshmerga and universally acclaimed as fierce fighters, were crushed.

The most egregious example of American indifference to the fate of the Kurds is when Saddam was given license after the Gulf War to use American (and Russian) helicopters to rain unholy hell on Kurdish villages. More recently, in 2026, Kurdish elements of the Syrian Defense Forces that successfully defeated the extremist Islamic State Caliphate (ISIS) were basically laid off by the U.S. and told to meld themselves into the Syrian state. This pattern of incitement and abandonment cemented the widely held belief among Kurdish people that their only real friends are the mountains, the tough terrain that has provided refuge from military assault time and time again.

There was a singular and highly significant exception to this tawdry tale. After the Gulf War, when the U.S. elected to leave Saddam Hussein in power and thereby knowing he’d go berserk against disloyal Kurds, The Americans teamed up with British forces to launch Operation Provide Comfort. A joint force of fighter jets created a no-fly zone above the Kurdish provinces in the northeast quadrant of Iraq. This protection from aerial attack lasted for years. It created a virtual umbrella for investors invited to advance (and profit from) rapid economic investment in Kurdistan. A 2006 Investment Law guaranteeing foreigners rights and legal standing equal to local business enterprises worked wonders for the Kurdistan Regional Government. Now, almost 40 years later, the benefits continue to accrue. The consolidation of the Kurdish Republic will only strengthen the economic and financial sinews of the nation.

Please forgive that lengthy immersion in the past. This is what happens to outsiders struggling to understand what’s what in the Middle East, and to comprehend how this gathering came to pass. The numerous and complicated events leading up to the present moment are overwhelming. Still, I must soldier on just a bit further. 1

The Iran War in 2026 completely undermined the long-held and determined resistance by Arab countries and Western powers to the redrawing of borders in the Middle East. The war resulted in the collapse of the Islamic Republic and the disintegration of the Iranian state. It didn’t happen overnight. Internecine squabbles among factions of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) metastasized into a fractured, full-blown and multi-faceted civil war. The IRGC, which owned and controlled all key sectors of the economy as well as the million-strong volunteer militia, the Basij, never manifested a leader or an elite cadre that could unify the country. The decentralized “mosaic” defense strategy that worked so well to ensure the regime’s survival under intense American and Israeli bombardments failed to keep the IRGC allied to the country’s regular army, the Artesh. A protracted period of chaos ensued. In the maelstrom of warlordism, minority ethnic groups chose to run for the hills, literally. Azeris fled to Azerbaijan, many stopping short to stay with the already self-deported Kurds; Baluchis joined up with kindred groups in the southwest of Pakistan.

By 2035, the implosion was over. Physical, mental, and material exhaustion ensued, until a clique of military officers joined ranks with the masses of disaffected Iranian civilians to form an authoritarian democracy not unlike that of neighboring Pakistan. Prior to the Iran War, the Islamic Republic was a hybrid of theocracy and autocracy. The new regime has sidelined the mullahs and embraced some principles of democracy—periodic elections, secular education, and, not least, enforceable guarantees of women’s rights. The Iranian State is focused on restoring its Persian identity and has given up any effort to regain the loss of three northwestern provinces to the emerging Kurdish Republic.

Kurdistan is being birthed in a blighted neighborhood. The surrounding countries are experiencing stagnant economic growth, depleted financial and material resources, and blunted militaries. They are preoccupied with rebuilding damaged cities and restoring basic infrastructure. Iraq is a seemingly hopeless and perpetual morass of dysfunction and corruption.2 Syria remains fragmented; the northeastern province of Rojava has broken away to join Kurdistan and the government in Damascus lacks the will and the means to take it back.

The situation in Turkey is not so dire. A remarkable turnabout following the defeat of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party in elections in 2028 led to a profound reformation in Turkish thinking: political leaders overcame the mental confusion spawned by Erdogan and his party with their incompatible aims: 1) to fortify a strong nation-state with a unitary identity and 2) to maximize Turkey’s reach and influence throughout the Middle East—in essence to recreate the Ottoman Empire. The current Turkish regime is dominated by the Peace and Democracy Party, which has reoriented the country to Europe with hopes of finally being accepted into the EU and remaining the bastion of Western-aligned military strength in the post-NATO era. In this context, the Turks have accepted the loss of territory and people to the de facto Kurdish state.

Farther afield, Israel is recovering from the civil war between liberal Zionists and parties devoted to the delusions of a Greater Israel exercising hegemonic power throughout the Middle East. Lebanon is still struggling to maintain some semblance of sustainable power sharing among Christian, Muslim and Druze communities in the wake of the devastating Israeli bombardment and invasion that was concurrent with the Iran War.

Back to the present: After the festive preliminaries today, Kurdish luminaries will be getting down to the serious work of crafting a constitution. Their starting point will be the 2044 Treaty of Van, which formalized the external boundaries of the Kurdish Republic through enlistment of an international commission tasked with redrawing maps of the region. The new country will be highly decentralized. An American friend likens this early stage of a Kurdish constituent assembly to the Continental Congress that adopted the Articles of Confederation. That arrangement lasted a decade before financial crises and a series of minor rebellions compelled the semi-sovereign states to write and ratify a much stronger federal constitution in 1787.

The looseness of proposed constructs is purposeful and pragmatic, designed to maximize self-determination for each of the Kurdish groups who still cling to cultural encumbrances resulting from being subsumed for over a century by the majoritarian states in which they were embedded. This arrangement should also minimize the tendencies of resentful “rump” regimes in Iraq, Turkey, Syria, and Iran to renege on treaty obligations to honor the territorial integrity of the Kurdish Republic.

Kirkuk will be the country’s economic hub, while the central government will be housed in Erbil. It’s much like the roles that New York City and Washington, D.C. play in the United States. From what I’ve gleaned from written proposals, there will be four regional governments, each with their own legislative assembly, and exercising limited but significant jurisdiction over education, business licensing, environmental regulation, and local essential services including infrastructure development. Kurdish Federal agencies will handle foreign, industrial, monetary and natural resource policies as well as natural criminal law, which should be uniform across the country and reflect a blend of Sharia and Western legal precepts.

Official tolerance and protection of religious diversity will be the law of the land. This is emblematic of Kurdish traditions as well as a modernizing secular culture. There is a sizeable Jewish community in Erbil and Kirkuk; in other parts of the country, Nestorian Christians, Yazidis, and Ba’hai suffer no discrimination by the Sunni majority. Kurdish political culture is shaped by a unique admixture of faith traditions: Islamic, Christian, Jewish, Yazidi, Bah’ai. and Zoroastrian. What has emerged from this rich mixture has been called “plural secularism” by social scientists.3

On the human rights front, the Kurds have exhibited a consistently welcoming attitude toward immigrants and refugees from Iran, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon. I’m told there is a sizeable community of newly arrive Israeli expatriates fed up with Zionist extremists and exhausted by interminable conflict over Gaza and the West Bank. This relatively liberal approach to outsiders will no doubt be codified in Kurdistan’s basic law, as will women’s rights to marry, divorce, own property, participate in civil society and hold public office.

According to the statements I’m hearing at this meeting, the constitution is intended to last a generation, but it will contain provisions designed to facilitate an orderly transition toward an “ever closer union”—a phrase borrowed from the succession of treaties that established and continue to refine the governance structures of the European Union. Notwithstanding the importance of continued access to American investment capital, arms supplies, and commercial markets, the Kurds will doubtless continue to lean into their ties to Europe as sources of development assistance and institutional models. London is the enduring hub of the Kurdish diaspora, which is large, moneyed, and influential in the corridors of corporate enterprises and non-governmental organizations. It’s important to remember that the United States has proven to be an untrustworthy ally, even though the Kurds harbor strong collective affection for American people.

A crucial factor in Kurdistan’s political trajectory is the faded relevance of oil and gas resources. While they still play an essential role in energy markets and remain the core industry upholding the area surrounding the city of Kirkuk, hydrocarbon fuels are no longer the linchpin of the economic prosperity required for lasting independence. The broader regional context is telling. Iran’s closing of the Strait of Hormuz and its damaging attacks on liquified natural gas export terminals in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates catalyzed huge and impatient investments in renewable energy projects worldwide. Wind, solar, and geothermal installations enjoyed infusions of private and governmental funds. Both large and smaller-modular nuclear energy plants were brought online in the aftermath of the war.

The political economy of the Kurdish Republic will necessarily feature a panoply of diversified developments, ranging from minerals extraction to high technology endeavors fostered by international investors and nurtured at the new country’s universities and technical schools. Ukraine has pledged to assist with developing a modern, drone-based defense industry. The central government in Erbil will oversee the careful management of limited water resources by provincial agencies, who in turn will rely, in the early stages of development, on imported specialists and technologies from Israel.4

A Kurdish dam

Kurdistan’s countryside looks a lot like a combination of Nevada and Greece—lots of desert-like terrain, lots of wild shrubs and scrubby trees in the foothills, mostly barren mountain slopes. The country also has lush green and highly cultivated valleys devoted to agriculture. This area of the greater Middle East has been identified by international organizations as being highly vulnerable to the environmental depredations of adverse climate change. Water projects will be the key to sustaining adequate food production for domestic and export purposes.

Speaking of food, even before this historic coalescence of social and political energies, the Kurds were developing a robust eco-tourism industry. Now it’s going strong. Hardy trekkers from Germany, Poland, Australia and other countries are flocking to the Zagros Mountains. The capital city of Erbil as well as regional urban centers of Sulaymaniyah and Doka are already enjoying fruitful and friendly competition in the great game of gastrodiplomacy. Who makes the best Biryani (aromatic rice with meat and veg), the finest Kubeh (spicy meat-filled dumplings), the tastiest Yaprax (dolma) and the sweetest cardamom cookies? The jury’s out, but there are many thumbs up on social media and some Michelin stars are sure to follow.

The Kurds will have a new lifeline, something never envisioned in past decades. The Turkish government has ceded a territorial strip connecting Kurdistan’s northwestern extremity to the Black Sea. This will ensure maritime access to the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. The Medean Corridor, named for an ancient people the Kurds trace their lineage to will also feature a paved highway built for heavy trucks and pipelines to carry natural gas and, more importantly, potable water from the Chinese-built port facilities and the long-established Russian-run desalination plants offshore.5

Overcoming its hitherto landlocked position and all the vulnerabilities that go with it (such as reliance on imported goods that could be blocked by neighboring states) is a monumental achievement. One of the key agenda items for multilateral negotiations that will follow immediately after this convocation will be security guarantees for the protection of the land corridor. A UN-sanctioned coalition force comprised of aerial and ground units from Turkey, Russia, and Azerbaijan has already been structured on paper. Turkey’s role carries with it the imprimatur of the European Union and the force structure of its post-NATO collective security arrangement.

Kurdistan’s horizons are brightening. International recognition of the new country by most member states of the United Nations is assured, as evidenced by several supportive non-binding resolutions of the General Assembly that gained over a hundred votes, and by the Security Council’s engagement in securing the Medean Corridor. It would not surprise me, Commissioner, if Kurdistan is elevated to the now-twenty-five states roster of the Council within the next decade. It’s size, relative stability, and economic strengths will make a compelling case for the Kurds to hold the seat representing the Middle East region.

I want to convey my profound gratitude for this assignment. I am witnessing a political transformation of enormous importance: the Kurds are no longer the world’s largest cultural nation without a sovereign state. They have successfully engineered a path to independence. Kurdistan is the world’s newest country; it is also a rare example of an authentic nation-state. The road has been long and tumultuous. I am suddenly reminded of Gustav Mahler, of all people. The Kurdish composition resembles a Mahler symphony in its majesty and complexity. After tortuous repetitions of repression by the suffocating states surrounding the Kurdish lands and the serial betrayal of American administrations, the Kurds have finally reached their coda. This final swelling section of the dramatic score to Kurdistan’s creation appears to be ending on a triumphant note.

Signing off until my next assignment, yours truly,

Christopher Breen

Order and Discontinuity

In his recent book entitled Wasteland, Robert Kaplan, a conservative sage on geopolitics, insists on the primacy of order. Without it, he writes, “there is no freedom for anyone.” He continues: “Human nature being what it is, order must remain the paramount political virtue. Without it there is no one, as Hobbes says, to adjudicate right from wrong, to separate the guilty from the innocent, so not only is there no freedom but no justice.”

Kaplan is reiterating here the central realization of classical conservative thinkers such as Edmund Burke in the 18^th century and Roger Scruton in the 20^th century. He also defers to Reinhold Niebuhr, an influential American Protestant theologian and political philosopher, in considering the enduring legitimacy of monarchical states in our own time. The institution of the monarchy, shorn of its absolute power—this is a critical conditioning fact—possesses virtues that arise from “the continuing will and unity of a nation as distinguished from the momentary will, embodied in specific governments.”

The value of continuity that is distanced (but not far) from the volatility of politics is also manifested in parliamentary systems, including but not exclusive to constitutional monarchies like Britain and Canada, wherein the head of state (the Crown) is separate from the head of government (the Prime Minister). This distinction is also evident in Israel’s governing system, where the elected President has nominal symbolic power, but the Prime Minister wields the face cards, as it were.

In the United States, the President is both head of state and head of government. Notwithstanding the constitutional separation of powers between the legislative, executive and judicial branches, the legislature’s power of the purse, the supreme court’s long-established power of judicial review, and the extensive arenas of jurisdiction reserved to the individual states, the Presidency has become the centralized locus of enormous power. The current American regime is undermining its legitimacy by threatening the historical continuity of the world’s foremost democratic republic. The thoroughly unconservative theory of “the unitary executive” is prevalent in certain echelons of the Republican party. The phrase, as lawyer James B. Kobak Jr. points out in the March 14, 2026 edition of on-line publication Fulcrum “is nowhere to be found in the Constitution”.

Kobak continues: The priorities of the President are entitled to great weight, but so are the priorities of Congress and thousands of state and local officials we also elect. A President may have his wish list, but the real bullet points in the nation’s agenda are the statutes and funding bills passed by Congress. And the framework is the rule of law, the Constitution, and the weightiest priorities of all—the Bill of Rights. Let a President brush all that aside, and we are in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, not the United States of America.

There are only a few theocracies extant in the modern world. The Islamic Republic of Iran has been the most prominent and powerful example since its revolutionary founding in 1979. The Iranian regime is enormously complex, harboring parallel systems of government—one commanded by Muslim clerics, the other built on secular and quasi-democratic structures. The mullahs have consistently had the final say on foreign and domestic policy, but they could be upended in the chaos that will almost certainly follow the American/Israeli War against Iran.

Our general observation is that despite the waning of theocratic rule per se, religion permeates nearly every regime type, albeit in widely different intensities. In Iran, the religious leaders’ reliance on an avowed sacred purpose has been overt; it is still the ideology of the embattled state. In democracies, deference to religious principles and beliefs by elected officials is usually more nuanced, but not subtle. Consider, for example, the American ritual of swearing oaths of fidelity to the Constitution in many settings and to the truth in courts of law with a hand on the Bible. There is also the seemingly obligatory invoking of God’s blessing ad nauseum.

The declining religiosity of the American electorate, as measured by polls and church attendance figures, is accompanied by the rise of theocratic-minded political elites with support from Christian Nationalist pastors in mega-churches scattered across the country. The Office of the State Philosopher (OSP) is resolutely opposed to the idea that the conflict in the Middle East heralds the apocalyptic Armageddon foretold in the Book of Revelation—a theory being proffered to American troops by the deranged Secretary of Defense.

The aforementioned Kaplan makes another strong point in Wasteland—the relevance of individual character in the maelstrom of systemic social forces, such as demography, geography, class struggles, natural disasters, technological innovations, that shape world history. Personalities matter hugely in times of crisis. Winston Churchill springs quickly to mind in this context, as do Mikhail Gorbachev and Nelson Mandela, each in a different vein and context.

Kaplan and others’ assertion of individual agency is more sophisticated than the time-worn “Great Man” theory set forth by some historians, but the main point is the same: when conditions are ripe, and social forces align, persons of extraordinary character emerge to wield extraordinary influence in affairs of state, just as they do in all sectors of civil society—families, businesses, religious congregations, sports teams, etc. We here at the OSP are always on the lookout for sterling characters, men and women who, given the right circumstances, could be elevated to the status of philosopher kings and queens and thereby govern nations with superlative poise and equanimity. From such leadership, we surmise, lasting legitimacy would flow; justice and peace could flourish.

Absent such beings, and mindful of Niebuhr’s counsel that humans are morally capable but inherently flawed, the search continues for imperfect solutions to the problem of leadership. Lo and behold, sometimes we find them. Consider, for example, the rare, unexpected, and sometimes wonderful strangeness of political evolution within authoritarian dynasties.

Chiang Kai-Shek became a brutal dictator after his Nationalist forces lost to Mao Tse-tung’s Communists in the Chinese civil war and retreated to the island of Formosa. Chiang set up the Republic of China on the island now called Taiwan. By all accounts, his reign was brutal. When he died in 1975, the Generalissimo was succeeded several years later by his son and head of the secret police, Chiang Ching Kuo, who surprised everyone by ushering in democratic reforms, especially late in his tenure, which ended with his death in 1988. Chiang relaxed government controls on the media and speech and permitted native Taiwanese to take up political positions, all of which led to Taiwan having the most democratic government and most successful economy in Southeast Asia. Nobody saw this coming!

Consider the current situation in North Korea. Could Kim Jung Un’s successor pull a Chiang in the years ahead? Think about Iran. Might the newly appointed Supreme Leader do the same? Let’s entertain each prospect of promising discontinuity in governance style even when the bloodline of despotic dynasties marches on.

Kim Jung Un’s harsh rule over the “Hermit Kingdom” allows no room for dissent. However, strict dictatorship might yield to a less rigid type of authoritarian governance when either his sister or his daughter takes his place. The Supreme Leader is known to have serious health problems. In a situation of untimely death or serious disability, his sister Kim Yo Jong would most likely assume power. Otherwise, the daughter, Kim Ju Ae, thought to be aged 13, appears to be Kim Jung Un’s first choice as heir apparent. In either case, the path of succession seems to be leading ineluctably toward the investiture of the country’s first woman ruler.

Ambitious and misogynist officers in the military could disrupt the continuity of multiple generations of cult-like leadership in the lineage that began with North Korea’s founder, Kim Il Sung, but not without violating the legitimacy of the hereditary dictatorship. The ascension and acceptance of a female supreme leader would not guarantee a softer governing touch, to be sure, but it is conceivable, especially in light of internal economic conditions and external diplomatic efforts to mitigate the threat of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, that the next Supreme Leader will pursue a liberalizing course of action similar to that of Taiwan’s Chiang Ching Kuo.

Now, to Iran. Mojtaba Khamenei has been chosen by the Islamic Assembly of Experts to succeed his father, who was killed with scores of other clerical leaders in the opening day of the war. The new Supreme Leader is thought to be more ideologically rigid than his father Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who ruled the roost with an iron fist for thirty-seven years. Mojtaba appears to have the support of the country’s military, economic, and cultural institutions as well as his fellow Mullahs. Could this fierce leopard of militant faith change his spots?

The thought of Khamenei turning his regime around under the crush of American and Israeli bombardments is improbable yet tantalizing. The longevity of the ruling coalition is questionable, given its loss of popular support, but legal and structural realities (combined with force of arms) reinforce the theocratic state. Because the Islamic Republic’s constitution stipulates that the “guardianship of the Islamic jurist” (a translation from Farsi of velayat-e faqih) is the supreme institution overseeing the state, doing away with it would require a new constitution. Mojtaba’s father imprisoned any and all reformers who advocated for such changes, and thus far the anointed son shows no signs of reversing course; just the opposite, in fact, a doubling down on repression. Still, under certain conditions—the end of the war, for starters—there’s a chance of a Chiang-like Khamenei epiphany.

There is another prospect, waiting in the wings of exile, one that might restore the earlier continuity of a mostly secular and non-revolutionary Persian statehood. Reza Pahlavi was named Crown Prince by his father Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi at age 7 (in 1967). He has lived in the United States since 1979. Pahlavi has offered himself up as an interim leader who could steer Iran towards a democratic transition. In 2023, he proclaimed that “my only mission in life is to ensure that the Iranian people can ultimately determine their own future in a free and fair election.” If returned as the leader of the nation, he promises to hold a referendum within 4-6 months on whether people want a republic or a constitutional monarchy.

In the current context, Pahlavi’s chances of success strain credulity. Yet no other individual comes close in terms of name recognition abroad or popularity inside Iran—the dual test of legitimacy. Before the war, a Dutch poll found roughly a third of Iranians supportive of Pahlavi. Javah Shah! (Long Live the King) was their mantra on the streets of Tehran. Another third was opposed, the rest undecided. Meanwhile, the splintered, disorganized opposition probably suffered losses in leadership potential when the regime clamped down and killed tens of thousands. The crop of aspirants was likely winnowed by targeted killings and imprisonment. Reza Pahlavi is still alive.

The war is hardening the already hard-core zealots that command the Islamic regime’s complex system of governance. Despite widespread anger toward and dislike of the continuing theocracy, the destruction of so much property and infrastructure and the killing of Iranian civilians by American and Israeli bombs is fueling nationalistic impulses to repel the infidel foreigners before rebelling against the despised regime.

Whichever leadership figure survives the maelstrom of war, positive surprises could be in store for the Iranian people. On the other side of the world, before another war gets started, the North Koreans might also experience a liberating discontinuity within the existing hereditary order. Our tentative and tenuous conclusion on this aspect of legitimacy is that once in a blue moon monsters can morph into Teddy Bears.

A Bestiary of Hegemons; a Menagerie of Middle Powers.

In a recent essay by Canadian Michael Ignatieff, he writes that “America, China, and Russia are prowling the world, turning a rule-ordered playing field into a jungle in which the rule of the strongest prevails.” Ignatieff credits Harvard Professor Steven Walt for coming up with the phrase “predatory hegemons”, which seems quite fitting and discomfiting at the same time. It also conjures images of animals that the hegemonic states set forth in colorful propaganda campaigns that are indulged by the international media.

It is a curiosity unexplained in philosophy parlance how so-called great powers so often portray and symbolize their greatness by utilizing images of predatory animals. Perhaps an explanation resides in the realm of social psychology. Could it be that invoking beasts of prey is a subconscious attempt to disguise fear (and the moral rot) amidst the leaders of corrupt regimes? We are venturing beyond our bailiwick here, but we can offer some examples of how non-human creatures are often used to symbolize aggressive countries with beastly ambitions and temperament.

· The People’s Republic of China is a fire-breathing dragon.

· The Russian Federation is a bear, with fearsome claws and beady, murderous eyes.

· The United States is always and everywhere likened to a bald eagle with huge talons and a sharp beak.

There have been some interesting variations of theme over the years. Benjamin Franklin is known to have championed the rather non-threatening (perhaps passive-aggressive?) turkey to serve as America’s avian symbol. The big bad bear image of modern Russia is mostly the result of English political cartoonists in the 19^th century, who borrowed from fables and legends anchored in antiquity wherein bears were venerated as totems of virile and cruel strength. During the Cold War the bear became a metaphor for the bloodthirsty policies of the Soviet Union. The official emblem of Imperial Russia and of the post-Soviet Russian Presidency is the double-headed eagle, an ancient symbol signifying the unity and balance between spiritual authority (the Orthodox Church) and temporal power (the Czar). The double-headed eagle looks East and West, thus casting its gaze across the whole of Eurasia. This symbol of Russian identity is less frightful than that of a gigantic Ursus Horriblis, but just barely.

It is notable that very few nations of any size or stature have chosen snakes as a prominent motif. Mexico is an exception. The Mexican coat of arms at the center of the national flag depicts a golden eagle perched on a cactus while devouring a serpent. It’s basically a good over evil analogy. We cannot diminish the enduring significance of the Gadsden Flag that was popular in the American Revolution—the one featuring a coiled rattlesnake and the slogan “Don’t Tread on Me”--because it is still bandied about as a banner of resistance against government authority. (This flag made many appearances during the January 6 mob assault on the U.S. capitol in 2021.) Anyway, snakes don’t fit a hegemon’s self-image.

We must also take note of the frequency with which real and wannabe hegemons employ the lion in their imperious imagery. Israel’s ongoing war against Iran is called Operation Roaring Lion. Some Iranian groups in opposition to the Islamic Republic have invoked the Lion and Sun flag of the Pahlavi dynasty. Lions have held powerful position in Great Britain’s coat of arms for centuries, connoting the Godly right and just legitimacy of a world-spanning empire.

The Tibetan flag includes a fanciful depiction of the snow lion. In the future, when the unique cultural nation of Tibet is free from the yoke of China’s Communist regime, we think it not improbable that Buddhist monks will wave banners in Lhasa embossed with the image of a turtle. This would signify homage to the 14^th Dalai Lama, who once said that he learns as much from a turtle as from a religious text. As an aside, it is interesting that the native peoples of North America sometimes refer to themselves collectively as a turtle nation inhabiting a continent-sized Turtle Island. There must be something to this, and we surmise that there must be something akin to animal spirits connecting all indigenous peoples on the planet.

It is a curious fact that no sovereign country, hegemonic or middle ranking, has adopted the elephant. With their immense strength, gentle nature, and symbolic representation of wisdom, loyalty, and power, elephants have long captured the human imagination. For centuries, elephants have held significant cultural and historical importance in Africa and Asia. Given their presence in mythology, religious iconography, and as symbols of royalty, why hasn’t this magnificent creature been emblazoned on a national flag? India would seem a fitting candidate to incorporate an elephant of the small-eared variety. No aspiring African hegemon has yet adopted the hippopotamus as its totem, but it might happen and it would be apropos; hippos are renowned for their strong jaws and a hefty mean streak.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has urged fellow middle powers to band together in order to “develop greater strategic autonomy” and resist the hegemonic coercion of Trump’s United States and Xi Jinping’s China. (Personalizing these two countries is intentional here, as it alludes to the earlier dual theme that individuals matter and they don’t last forever.) Picture a herd of musk ox in formation, fending off the dragon, the bear, the scavenging eagle.

We can go further down this rabbit hole. Carney reminded others in a celebrated speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland that “if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.” Let’s imagine, then, a round table surrounded by creatures emblematic of their respective middle-ranking nations. You may already be thinking of the famous dogs playing poker painting. Keep that image in mind but replace the dogs with a beaver (for Canada), a reindeer (that’s Finland), a porcupine (reflecting Taiwan’s defense strategy), a hedgehog or, alternatively, a marmalade-eating Paddington (representing lesser Great Britain). There are a Kiwi and a Kangaroo at the table, for the middling friendlies Down Under. You get the picture.

Strictly speaking, a menagerie refers to exotic animals kept in captivity. The coercive strengths of the predatory hegemons notwithstanding, our coterie of middle powers are not to be trifled with; they have strong cards to play. Plus, things change, in nature and in the Game of Nations. Lions can lay down with lambs. Eagles are often deterred by a murder of crows. Perhaps someday the great civilizational state of China will evolve beyond its militant defensiveness, jettison its fire-breathing dragon imagery, and replace it with something less fearsome. The votes are in from all of me: Pick the panda.

This Memorandum is the product of a consensus of the “many minds” in the Office of the State Philosopher, which happens to be occupied by a single personage. There you have it: a singular example of a 21^st century schizoid man. (If that seems obscure, check out King Crimson - 21st Century Schizoid Man (Including “Mirrors”)) Please consider what follows as the precipitate of a brainstorm, not the results of a deep and thorough study of a pithy subject.

To begin, the purpose of government in the modern era is to serve the needs and interests of the people, not kings, emperors, presidents, prime ministers, or mullahs. There are many ways to achieve this end, but they are not innumerable, as humanity has and continues to organize itself in accordance with well-wrought historical patterns that manifest in basic types of political order: Democracy, Autocracy, and Totalitarian Dictatorship. Within each category there are subtypes with multiple and often overlapping shades of the overarching framework. These days we are witness to a dizzying variety of “liberal” and “illiberal” democracies; hereditary and constitutional monarchies, theocratic and secular autocracies; fascist and communist dictatorships: all encapsulated in the same basic construct of sovereign “nation-states”. (Owing to a pervasive linguistic error in foreign affairs terminology, which ignores the fact that most modern states are composed of multiple ethnocultural nations, we shall forthwith use “state” and “nation” interchangeably, without the hyphen.) Our task is not to catalogue and contrast these various shapes of political order in any exhaustive manner, but rather to examine, in a somewhat cursory way, the role that legitimacy plays in both the upholding and overturning of disparate regime types.

Before we get to all that, one must admit that legitimacy defies clear definition. It is an immaterial yet palpable reality that cannot be measured in any precise way. Legitimacy as a principle of governance blends individual and collective consciousness. It resides simultaneously in public discourse and in the recesses of the mind. Legitimacy is both fluid and “concrete” in the dual sense that it is a permanent condition of citizen sentiment that nevertheless doesn’t stay put. Legitimacy migrates over time, even if it always retains its moorings in the hearts and minds of people. In many circumstances, legitimacy is outcomes based. Illegitimate means and methods that result in broadly acceptable results are often regarded, after the fact, as legitimate. This lamentably contingent aspect sets forth a nearly constant challenge for people to maintain fidelity to a fixed principle in an often-volatile international environment.

So much for the abstract nature of a basic principle. Let us briefly reflect on matters historical. What was considered legitimate governance in ancient Greece and Rome, in the British Raj, in the Ottoman Empire, in Czarist Russia, in Colonial America, just to consider several examples, is, in retrospect, morally and intellectually challenging at best. In each case—and there are many others, of course—free citizens and slaves coexisted in hierarchical orders in accordance with formulas that contained elements of raw coercive power as well as the perceived blessings and beneficence of Providential authority. While the basic idea of legitimacy has remained constant, its component contents have changed rather dramatically over time. Add to this the rather shocking current phenomenon of efforts to legitimize Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. Revisionist history presents a clear and present danger to our belief in legitimacy as a constant in the calculus of global politics.

Let us proceed. The legitimacy of popular revolutions is a thorny topic too thick to fully penetrate here; the complications can both blow and bloody the mind. Perhaps a future Memo will address the issue in a systematic fashion, but for now we offer several brief observations. The French Revolution led inexorably to a Reign of Terror and an aggressive military dictatorship. The Bolshevik Revolution culminated in Stalinist tyranny and the Gulag Archipelago. Mao’s Cultural Revolution destroyed the lives of millions of Chinese citizens. The Iranian Revolution produced the unholy mess of the brutalizing Islamic Republic. The American Revolution, by most accounts, was qualitatively different—uniquely revolutionary in that it established the legitimacy of a democratic republic fashioned to champion and protect individual rights. The creation of the United Nations after the Second World War was another revolution of sorts. It birthed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which in turn established a threshold of legitimacy that most governments aspire to, at least rhetorically.

Eleanor Roosevelt was America’s chief drafter and champion of the Universal Declaration.

Leaping ahead to today’s world stage, questions of legitimacy are at the core of many controversies and conflicts in current affairs. Here’s a short list: Russia’s aggression against Ukraine; Israel’s genocidal violence against Palestinians, juxtaposed to Hamas’ genocidal intent to eliminate the Jewish State; the Islamic Republic of Iran’s sponsorship of terrorist organizations; the United States’ violent abduction of the president of Venezuela plus the Trump Administration’s threats against Greenland, Canada, Panama, and Cuba; and, not least, its unlawful war against Iran.

The deepest dilemma of the legitimacy question is rooted in the diminution of sources of moral authority which are essential prerequisites to common understandings of what’s right and what’s wrong. The public debasement of government institutions is a worldwide phenomenon. Defiance of national statutes and even constitutions, coupled with outspoken indifference to international laws, is becoming a recurrent theme in many quarters of the globe. It’s as if the world has been deluged by an atmospheric river of lawlessness and corruption.

The situation is far from hopeless. One could say that just as the international community has acknowledged that the best way to characterize and codify human rights law is to speak of its “progressive realization”, unfolding in time as material resources and political will allow, the progress of legitimacy as a foundational principle is similarly incremental. Arguments that history is non-linear can seem compelling. For example, British philosopher John Gray posits in The New Leviathans that we are re-entering a Hobbesian world order in which states seek to control not just actions but thoughts and beliefs as well, suffocating liberal progress. There is ample evidence of such trends, but this Office of the State Philosopher finds confident solace in the enduring spirit of the laws (we defer here to Montesquieu) and the resilience of Enlightenment concepts championed by conservative and liberal conservative thinkers alike, from Edmund Burke in the 18^th century to Michael Ignatieff in our own time.

Montesquieu authored the influential “Spirit of the Laws” in 1750.

The sovereign state has been considered the legitimate political construct in world order since the mid-17^th century. It still is, but there are strong intellectual arguments in the global public square about its future viability as a sturdy vessel for legitimate governance. It is states, after all, that violate human rights and otherwise do damage to the needs and interests of the people. (Non-state actors like terrorist organizations also take their toll, but they are invariably supported by sovereign regimes.) Until such time as some durable forms of supranational governance take shape, and are widely accepted as legitimate, the paradox of states being both the violator and protector of basic rights and freedoms remains, with oftentimes unenforceable international laws serving as the only legitimate bridge toward a more just world order. More on that in a bit.

It is important to distinguish the legitimacy of basic institutions from that of political behavior. Our focus is on the state (aka “country” forthwith) as distinct from its governing regime. States in the modern international system achieve at least nominal legitimacy through mechanisms of mutual recognition. The most obvious example of this phenomenon is membership in the United Nations. Every member country is recognized as such in accordance with the legal principle of sovereign equality. Thus, a menagerie of disparate states, including all manner of democracies and autocracies and blended monstrosities, achieve an almost automatic legitimacy in the framework of international relations.

The second type of external legitimacy is more problematic, because it hinges on judgments rendered by national governments about the legitimacy of regimes in other countries. Arguments and accusations launched in the UN General Assembly and other diplomatic venues are usually about the behavior of the government of one or more member states. With the exception of Israel, the legitimate existence of which is challenged perennially by a host of Arab Muslim and other states, public debates are not about a state’s legitimacy but rather the legitimacy of its domestic and/or foreign policies. For example, human rights abuses are often condemned as illegitimate--notwithstanding the hypocrisy of many accusers. The abusive regime is held culpable while the country it governs retains its status as a legitimate, albeit victimized, member of the international community.

This gets us to the most significant aspect of legitimacy, the internal dimension, which is all about whether most of the people in any given country consent to being governed by an elected leader or administration, a military junta, or by a self-appointed or hereditary ruling elite. Consent is expressed in different ways in different systems. The acceptance of election results; mass demonstrations of support (as in rallies and parades); passive acquiescence rather than organized resistance to established authority: these are all indicators of internal legitimacy. In general, the absence of systematic coercion on a large scale is a sure sign of legitimate rule.

You may be fast approaching a simple question about this lengthy prelude: So what? You may also be ruminating on the venerable and venomous Stephen Miller school of thought on international relations: that might makes right, or, as the seemingly evergreen Greek historian Thucydides set forth in the Melian Dialogue regarding the Peloponnesian War: “The strong do what they will; the weak suffer what they must.” This poisonous perspective on legitimacy is a prescription for anarchy, and endless violent conflicts among nations. The combination of external and internal recognition of legitimacy safeguards the virtues of justice and nurtures political stability. Legitimacy matters.

Adherence to the Rule of Law is a foundational principle of modern secular democratic states. It also applies in different degrees and in variant formats, in countries governed by authoritarian dictators and theocratic regimes. The legitimacy of constitutions is obviously contingent on an underlying belief in the rule of law. Even ruthless regimes routinely pay lip service and go to great lengths on paper to honor that principle. The Soviet and Communist Chinese constitutions, as read, strike one as paragons of legitimate basic laws. Brutal and systemic violations of these constitutions did not render the Soviet Union or the People’s Republic of China illegitimate in any formal sense. Neither suffered the loss of international recognition, and there were no successful attempts to undo these regimes by internal popular movements. Stalin’s crimes against the Russian (and Ukrainian) people in the 1930s and the Chinese government’s crackdown on Tienanmen Square in 1989 were at the same time both legal and tragically immoral.

Legitimacy flows from the law, except when the laws themselves are unjust, and therefore not legitimate. How can we determine which laws are just and which are not? Rigid formulas are not reliable. The Period of the Warring States in ancient China gave rise to the Legalist School of Governance. In a time marked by political fragmentation and constant warfare among various states within the Chinese empire, the Legalists held that the mostly Confucian traditional methods of governance were inadequate for addressing the chaos. They asserted that only a system of clearly defined laws administered by a highly centralized authority that could use harsh punishment for transgressions was the proper way to maintain order. It worked for two and a half centuries and entailed huge volumes of injustice.

In democratic societies generally, the default position held by most citizens is that legislation crafted and implemented by freely elected representatives of the people is nearly always just. The proof is in the process. If unexpected or unintended outcomes reveal serious problems, laws can be changed by amendment or repeal. Unjust laws can also be undone by the courts. This is most vividly evident in landmark U.S. Supreme Court decisions overturning legalized racial segregation and other forms of discrimination, i.e., rendering them illegitimate. Many unjust laws have been undone through similar judicial processes in many other countries. Still and all, in modern times, Legalist-style interpretations of statutes and strict enforcement tactics are used to justify repressive measures such as deportation of undocumented (mostly black and brown) immigrants in the United States and the rounding up and sequestration of stateless people, such as the Roma (Gypsies) in Europe.

National laws are prone to bouts of illegitimacy. The citizens of democratic states have always to contend with tyrannies of two sorts, that of a majority (wherein the rights of minority groups are diminished, discounted, or discontinued completely) and that of a concentrated minority, e.g. when monied elites hijack the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government to subvert constitutional guarantees and seek self-aggrandizement instead of the public good. Laws emerge from the popular will, which is increasingly susceptible to propaganda gushing forth from government ministries and social media platforms. Disinformation, disseminated and accelerated by algorithmic systems utilizing artificial intelligence can be the genesis of bad law. (So can the Bible, replete with stories justifying horrific violence.) The philosopher Hannah Arendt warned the world about the breakdown of norms in the conduct of politics. She emphasized the danger of organized, official lying: “If everybody lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but that nobody believes anything anymore...and a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and judge.”

The problem is both plain and perplexing. Just because something is legal doesn’t make it morally right. People of conscience have a duty to challenge and even resist unjust laws, including those written and ratified by legitimate processes of legislation. One of the several paradoxes of legitimacy is that both the tyranny of the majority and the tyranny of an elite minority can occur in democracies as well as authoritarian states.

International Law, by contrast, does not suffer this dilemma. It is the product of multiple sources, none of which suffer the fever dream effects of aroused public temperament. Treaties, customary laws, general principles of law, judicial decisions, and scholarly writings are the foundational elements of the “Law of Nations”. Even without the capacity for rigorous enforcement, the legitimacy of modern international law has stronger footing than legislation in the domestic arena of individual states. Norms are still, by and large, at the leading edge of justice in the international arena. The partisan passions that often enflame national politics can lead to discriminatory laws and the legitimization of real and virtual lynch mobs. Such outrages do not afflict international law, where criminal tribunals, not mean streets, are the locus of justice.

You may rightly ask: Are ANY international laws fundamentally unjust? Reaching back in time to centuries prior to the end of the Second World War and the United Nations Charter, there are numerous examples of treaties that are now considered odious, such as: The Treaty of Tordesillas that drew a line through the mid-Atlantic, dividing with Papal blessing the rich colonization opportunities into a Spanish zone (Latin America) and a Portuguese one (Africa and Asia); The General Act of Berlin in 1885 that carved up Africa to suit the material interests of European empires; The Hitler-Ribbentrop agreement in 1939 that split Poland between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. The convening of the United Nations in 1945 heralded the dawn of a new order: The UN Charter and subsequent conventions changed the substance and character of international law by delegitimizing colonization and outlawing aggression. Thus, we are hard pressed to find any current international law that is unjust.

Let’s stray momentarily from the arena of legal precepts and speak to ordinary cognizance. The core element of legitimacy is a commonly held sense of wrongness. This concept is best illustrated by examples of wholly wrong behavior:

· violence against women and children

· the murder of innocents

· collective punishment

· genocide

These strong notions of illegitimate behavior reflect a collective intuition born of shared lessons about the rule of law in public and private schools, coupled with the individual spark of conscience that is every person’s birthright.

There are many cases and causes of unjust injury against non-combatants that rest on a shaky shelf of legitimacy. “Collateral damage” is widely considered an acceptable if tragic consequence of military action. However, the unintentional killing and maiming of people in harm’s way is categorically different than the above-named crimes against humanity.

There is tacit agreement among nations that espionage is a quasi-legitimate form of extra-legal foreign intervention in the domestic affairs of sovereign states. Examples of semi-secret and mostly non-violent campaigns of sabotage and subterfuge are legion, in real life as well as in spy novels, movies, and television. Assassinations are a different story: there are well-established norms and even domestic laws prohibiting the assassination of foreign heads of state and government. Recent breaches of these rules in the Middle East and elsewhere are undermining the efficacy of unspoken agreements among democrats and despots alike not to murder existing or aspiring heads of state. Legitimizing this kind of killing, and the increasing acceptance of civilian casualties, is a recipe for repetitive and vicious cycles of revenge.

Can we say that all violations of international law are illegitimate? From a philosophical perch, sure we can! The Law of Nations, which includes the UN Charter, Conventions against genocide and lesser crimes such as torture and Treaties in favor of nuclear non-proliferation and responsible management of ocean resources and various agreements and accords on many important issue—all of these lawful agreements are duly recognized by signatory nations as legitimately binding. Yet we know that many nations steer clear of such laws and often disparage them as illegitimate restrictions on state sovereignty. For example, neither the United States, Russia, nor China adhere to the Rome Treaty that established the International Criminal Court. Their refusal to recognize the ICC’s jurisdiction is a perverse way of signaling acknowledgment of the institution’s legitimate origins and purpose, since the leaders of these Great Powers fear criminal indictments.

The fact that regimes routinely pay homage to the Rule of Law and yet refuse to countenance compliance with International Law is nothing short of a conundrum. We are back to the frustrating concept of progressive realization. We will get there, somehow, someday, but as societies deeply ensconced in national sovereignty, we’re not there yet. Continued application of the dual (external/internal) recognition standard will help guide the international community on a path toward a global human rights regime.

We have just a bit more to say about the behavior of governments. In international relations, power is the ability to get others to do what you want. This goal can be accomplished by coercion, payment, or attraction. The first two are hard power, consisting of such things as gunboat diplomacy, economic sanctions, foreign aid with strings attached. The third is soft power, which ranges from overseas broadcasts to welcoming foreign students to engaging in international sporting events to the export of dance troupes, music, film, and television programs. The increased relevance of soft power in world affairs is a hopeful sign, deserving of further analysis and support. For now, our focus is on the hard stuff.

The use of hard power, including violent force, is legitimate when exercised in individual or collective self-defense, a principle well-ensconced in the UN Charter and international law in general. Hard power is not legitimate when it’s used in contravention of the basic tenets of modern international law, i.e. when it violates the territorial integrity or political independence of a sovereign state. Thus, all armed interventions across national borders, without regard to consequences intended or unintended, could be branded as illegitimate—except when sanctioned by the United Nations Security Council, under Chapter VII of the Charter. A further exception is the emerging and highly principled doctrine of “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P), a Canadian construct with many nominal adherents in the international community. R2P is an attempt to not only legitimize but compel states to intervene in the domestic affairs of another to prevent, forestall, or mitigate genocide.

In plain language, the legitimacy of any armed intervention across borders is qualified by its primary purpose. If it is to save lives, or liberate an oppressed people, okay; if it is to seize resources, take territory, or overthrow a legitimate foreign regime, not okay. The NATO bombing of Serbian assets to protect Albanian Kosovars from ethnic cleansing in 1999 meets the test of legitimacy even if it failed the test of legality, since the UN Security Council did not authorize the mission. The U.S. “decapitation” operation to remove Nicolas Maduro from office (and Venezuela) failed both tests. Abducting a brutal dictator but leaving his regime otherwise untouched and proclaiming effective control of Venezuela’s oil resources exceeds the boundary of legitimacy. The U.S. war against Iran, still in its infancy, is not legitimate. The Trump Administration’s military actions are illegal under U.S. and International Law. Operation Epic Fury violates the War Powers Act and the UN Charter. The United States is committing an act of aggression. It could result in a regime change that benefits the Iranian people, the Middle East region, and the whole world. Nevertheless, a fortuitous and improbable end does not cancel the illegitimacy of the means. It is difficult yet imperative to not succumb to the temptation to adopt a retrospective, results-based version of legitimacy.

The OSP holds firm that we can and must distinguish wars of necessity from those of choice, convenience or opportunity. The latter types are fundamentally illegitimate. The United States has not waged a necessary war—an armed conflict to preserve the nation’s freedom from aggression or occupation, to safeguard its very existence—since, arguably, the Second World War. Similarly, Soviet and then Russian wars against Afghanistan and Ukraine were/are unjust, and thus illegitimate. The Just War Doctrine confirms these sad facts. Criteria for a “just war” have ancient origins, but they were summed up for modern consideration by Dutch philosopher Hugo Grotius in the 17^th century. Drawing from medieval Catholic theologians, Grotius crafted this seven-point test. Legitimate wars must have: 1) a just cause; 2) a right authority (i.e. a legitimate sovereign); 3) right intention; 4) a proportional use of force. Further: 5) force must be a last resort [emphasis added]; 6) it must be undertaken with peace as its goal; 7) it must have a reasonable hope of success. This and similar theories of Just War light the path of progressive legitimacy through darkening times.

It is high time to offer a conclusion of sorts. Legitimacy, like sovereignty, is a many- splendored thing. It is not only permissible but also commendable to regard kings, queens, constitutions, elected executives, legislative bodies, the people at large in any given society and even the reincarnated personage of a Buddhist Lama as bearers of legitimate authority. Wars, revolutions, and natural disasters can undermine everything, of course. But what can truly drain a regime’s reservoir of respectability within the international community and its acceptability in the hearts and minds of the governed—is corruption. Revelations of private and public corruption on a grand scale are the surest form of self-imposed and self-destructive delegitimization.

Real despots, like the late Supreme Leader Khamenei in Iran and the murderous Vladimir Putin in Russia, have the means and the will to crush dissidents by the thousands, and target opposition leaders for assassination by poisoning or other methods. Such tyrants can last a long time, but their regimes ultimately collapse when confronted with public disclosures of perfidy. Remember the spectacular demise of the Ceausescu regime in 1980s Romania; it surely haunts the Kremlin today. Overtly corrupt behavior breaches public trust, as exemplified by the Iranian mullah who imprisoned women for not wearing head coverings but was videotaped parading his daughters to her wedding altar in a strapless and revealing gown. The recent revelations of Prince Andrew’s dalliances on Jeffrey Epstein’s island have damaged an already tarnished reputation of the Windsor-Mountbatten Royal Family in the United Kingdom. The further uncovering and un-redacting of the Epstein Files remains the most potent source of delegitimizing an already blatantly corrupt class of global VIPs. Summing up, we assert that to consent to the normalization of illegality and corruption is a serious breach of legitimacy—and wholly wrong.

This memorandum is not meant to be a mere rumination on a basic principle of governance in international relations and related domestic political affairs. The Office of the State Philosopher is charged with providing guidance of a practical nature, to spur action when action is warranted. The unavoidable nuances and contingencies inherent in a discussion of political legitimacy can be profoundly befuddling. Determining whether a country and/or its governing regime is legitimate or not is a matter of conscientious individual discernment, but what matters more is whether one’s own judgment comports with that of a sufficient mass of fellow citizens as well as others beyond national borders. Volume and reach are essential.

Finally, there is something deeper and richer than the recognitions that constitute legitimacy: the innate human desire for freedom, which is what has generated the vibrant philosophy of universal human rights. We hereby acknowledge a realm of spirit inhabited by people of all nations, no matter their ancestral origins and diverse cultural attributes. This is why the American Declaration of Independence resonates across space and time, and why the American Revolution exudes a kind of legitimacy that is lacking in the other revolutions noted above. Without it, the human rights revolution might never have happened and evolved to become the bellwether of civilized life in the 21^st century.

A portrait of Thomas Jefferson pondering self-evident truths in 1776.

There was a singular item on the debate agenda: whether the EU should sign onto the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of nuclear weapons. I appreciate that your summons on this occasion is because the prospect of nuclear war has been and remains one of the most profound challenges to human rights on the planet. Mass murder—largely indiscriminate and accommodating to the tragic normalization of “collateral damage” undermines everything we believe and strive for in the human rights community.1

The contested question is a result of an EU-wide citizens’ initiative spearheaded by the Europa Party. Both the method and the movement are relatively new features on the continent’s political landscape. Europa is the outgrowth of the European Peoples Party, and can be fairly characterized as liberal, centrist, quasi-populist and social democratic (or democratic socialist). It’s a “big tent” organization that has attracted adherents from other, smaller parties in recent years. The Europa Party played a crucial role in the ratification of The Constitution of Europe in 2030.2 Europa now has a plurality of seats in the Parliament, while an assortment of nationalist and nativist parties occupy the rest.

The Europa Party is intentionally and determinedly transnational in its ethos, organization, and trajectory. Europa is shaking things up, applying acidic policy proposals to dissolve the legendary sclerosis of EU bureaucracies and vigorously pursuing the progress of the Single Market and its founding principles regarding the continent-wide free movement of goods, services, capital and labor continent-wide.

The debate was highly spirited. The public gallery above the huge chamber where the elected Members (MEPS) were seated was chock full of lobbyists, journalists, party hacks and hangers on, and doubtless lots of foreign visitors and observers like me. The topic gave rise to emotion-laden rhetoric reflecting deeply held convictions and anxieties. The sovereigntist parties called for national nuclear arsenals rather than an EDF joint force or nuclear disarmament. There were multiple references to the Doomsday Clock, which the widely read and respected Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved to a mere 60 seconds—the closest ever to the midnight of Armageddon.

Long-standing apprehension regarding nuclear weapons has been greatly exacerbated by two incidents in recent memory: the partial meltdown of reactors at the Zaporizhia power complex in Ukraine, and the supposedly accidental, AI-induced launch of a ground-based hypersonic missile armed with a tactical nuclear warhead from a Russian base in Belarus. Both incidents were caused by Russian military malfeasance. Neither resulted in catastrophic damage, but these potentially disastrous near misses scared the living daylights out of most Europeans, east and west.

A number of speakers also invoked Sisu, which connotes the fighting spirit of the Finns. This feisty approach to citizens’ defense to complement military forces has been embraced by other Nordic countries and adapted to bolster the national pride of other “middle powers” such as the Baltic countries, Austria, Slovenia, and the Czech Republic.

The debate lasted for 5 hours. Every political group was allocated speaking time in proportion to its number of seats. (Even the dozen or so independent MEPs had their voices heard.) The speeches hit on a wide variety of defense-related topics: drone swarms, cyber weapons, space platforms, the security of undersea cables linking Scandinavian countries with the European mainland and the U.K. What emerged from this vigorous and detailed discourse was a multi-faceted display of Europe’s new-found confidence. It has the collective strength afforded by mutually reinforcing arsenals of modern, high-tech weaponry. Simultaneously, there is growing popular support, especially among younger generations, and manifest in the increasingly relevant European Parliament to join with other nations in a renewed campaign to abolish nuclear weapons. The logic of deterrence and the futility of arms races coexist at this juncture. It’s peace through two kinds of strength: hard power and determined human will to avoid its use.

The staged arguments did not end with any party’s decisive victory, or a binding resolution indicating a workable consensus. That’s still to come, and it probably will in the months ahead. Europa is on the march. All in all, the debate struck me as a healthy exercise with a promising trajectory. Here’s a segment of the capstone speech delivered by the leader of the Europa Party.

Europe has become the primary bastion of freedom in the world. It thrives because of its strong social, economic, political institutions, and its intellectual foundations. The EU has attained a near optimal balance of sovereignty, legitimacy, and subsidiarity, the triad of organizing principles that enable stability, sustainability, and a just peace among and between nations sharing a kindred spirit. Europe survives on the basis of sound foreign and defense policies that combine realistic assessments of adversaries’ capabilities and a progressive willingness to move toward a global order not threatened by nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction.

I was pretty much wowed by these remarks, and I greatly admired the style in which they were delivered. She was smiling! (This, as you know, is not a common trait here in Belgium.)

After a long day at the office, as it were, I took refuge in the Museum of Musical Instruments, one of the many quirky wonders of Brussels. It was there, on the fourth floor, when it came to me: The complexity of Europe’s political institutions and the array of assembled parties speaking with different voices (in 25 languages!) in the Parliament brought to mind the structural complexity of a modern musical cantata--mellifluous at times, cacophonous at others. The cantata form combines voices and instruments in alternating recitatives and arias in multiple sections or movements. Cantatas can be sacred or secular or a blend of the two; the European Union—increasingly referred to unofficially as The United States of Europe—consists of the fusion of faith and rationality in its ongoing endeavor to create and sustain “an ever-closer union”, the stated goal of the Lisbon Treaty and the clearly implied purpose of the European Constitution.

Civilizational erasure hasn’t happened. Au contraire: there is a palpable solidarity across borders and cultures that one could fairly describe as a renaissance of Western Civilization that is struggling to flourish in spite of the combative ideological crusades emanating from Russia, China, and the United States. Europe has become the leader of what Canadian philosopher-pundit Michael Ignatieff calls the Liberal Project, a powerful if fragile coalition of states willing to resist authoritarian impulses within their borders and deter (which implies the will to combat) the aggressive maneuverings of electoral autocracies.3

Clearly, Europe is not “finished”, or even in relative decline. With America’s about-face on democracy and human rights and other Western values concerning trade and the environment during and following the Trump regime twenty years ago, the torch of liberty has been passed across the Atlantic, back to its original roots, one might say. All of the sudden, dear Commissioner, my head is spinning with snippets of remembered lectures about Greece, Rome, the Dutch Republic, the British Empire; the poetic expressions of Cicero, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Goethe, and Spinoza; forced readings of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and the essays of Vaclav Havel, Jurgen Habermas, Primo Levi and Bernard-Henry Levy. In tune with this mental whirlwind, it would not surprise me if many civic-minded Americans yearning to break through the brutal carapace of a neo-fascist federal regime are now steeped in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and our home-grown Federalist Papers.

The European Union flag symbolizes a shared political project uniting all Europeans, transcending diversity and bordered loyalties. The circle of stars connotes unity; 12 suggests perfection of a kind, alluding to the Apostles, the sons of Jacob, the labors of Hercules.

I’ll finish up. I’m on the train to Strasbourg, that lovely Alsatian city in eastern France, near the German border, and in essence the secondary capital of Europe. My embarkation early this morning was preceded by some preparatory reading referred to me by your staff in New York. It explained why I’m en route to observe proceedings of the Council of Europe, a highly respected antecedent to the European Union that remains separate from yet closely aligned with the EU; it’s an important component of the European Project that is little known in the rest of the world.4

Before boarding at Gare Central, I stopped at a vending machine in the waiting area. It had all the usual stuff: KitKats, Cadbury Caramelos, Swiss and Belgian bon bons, an astonishing array of crisps (have you ever tried Lobster and Onion flavor?) and, at the tail end of the bottom row, a Three Musketeers bar. I didn’t know those were still in circulation. I’ve never liked them much, but I bought one anyway, just for the wrapper. It reminded me of the Alexander Dumas adventure novels I read as a child, and of fashioning wooden swords out of fencing materials (no pun intended). My brothers and I would ramble through our suburban neighborhood, brandishing our rough-cut rapiers and proclaiming All for One and One for All! That pretty much sums up the Spirit of Europe these days.

With great respect and profuse thanks for this assignment, I am your humble correspondent,

Christopher Breen

From: Christopher Breen, Kestrel Group (NGO)

Dateline: January 25, 2045

Dear High Commissioner,

I have spent the past few days in Brussels, per your request. I’m on route to Strasbourg now, but I’ll save my remarks on that score to the end. As usual, I’ll begin my formal dispatch with some background remarks.

It’s cold in Belgium at this time of year, but weather has never deterred me from walking outdoors to the Grand-Place, the city’s beautiful central square. My first mission was to obtain a hot waffle from the various vendor carts who operate year-round. I chose savory over the sweet variety on this outing. Of course there were many other people milling around, stopping at chocolate shops and diving into restaurants and cafes to escape the winter wind. I did the same—one mustard laden waffle was not enough—and found a small place advertising moules et frites, Belgium’s signature offering to world cuisine. The food was warmly comforting, and the bowl-shaped flagon of dark ale was the perfect accompaniment.

Grand-Place in Brussels

Before getting down to business, I must mention a few things that surprised me as I lingered over my repast. A small group of locals were hovered over a bowl of mussels, and one of them gesticulated with her spoon with great energy and proclaimed, “Europe is finished!” Strangely, I recalled witnessing the very same expression of existential dismay twenty-five years ago, on my first visit to the city. The demise of the European Union, also referred to less formally as the European Project, or simply as Europe, has been forecast (and deeply felt, apparently) for a long time, off and on during its formative years, in the 1990s and throughout its evolution via complicated multi-layered negotiations that subsequently led to a succession of treaties resulting in the penultimate Lisbon Treaty, finalized in 2009. Brexit really did a number on many Europeans’ sense of sustainable unity in 2020, and ever since then a profusion of populist and nationalist parties across the whole of Europe has soured public sentiment on the concept of a positive common destiny. The Americans’ imposition of punitive tariffs and abandonment of NATO further undermined collective self-confidence.

But things have turned around, as you know, even if my fellow diners didn’t seem to think so. Widespread skepticism within and outside the continent has been countered by the Armistice in Ukraine—still holding strong—the accession of Ukraine and Balkan countries to the EU, Britain’s return to the fold in 2027, and the adoption of The European Constitution in 2030, which consolidated most of the preceding treaty provisions. All of these developments in recent years have marked a profound transition toward democratic solidarity among the EU’s member states and the remaining outlier countries such as Norway and Switzerland. There is no supranational institution attempting to govern and micro-manage the whole of the European space; rather a new form of social federalism is being invented, tested, and set forth on the global stage.

While lingering over a double espresso (my version of dessert), I also overheard a group of American expatriates sharing stories about their respective experiences in voluntary exile. They were on holiday from domiciles in Ireland and Amsterdam. I couldn’t help but notice a tone of regret interspersed with brief mentions of great museums, beautiful churches, modest back gardens, malt vinegar, mushy peas, and vast arrays of Dutch tulips. The general gist of the conversation seemed to be “We really did have to leave the United States because of Trumpism, but we miss America, and we’ll never really fit into this wonderful place called Europe.”

During the course of the evening, I also heard a surprising amount of Spanish, not a language one expects to encounter in a place where French and Dutch-like Flemish are official, and English is ubiquitous. I figure the new timbre of casual conversation is the result of the European Union’s recently ratified trade agreement with Mercosur, the commercial bloc consisting of Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia, along with Brazil, thus creating a combined market of over 700 million people. America’s erstwhile attempt to revivify the Monroe Doctrine isn’t completely moribund, but Europe’s trade and investment links with Latin America have made noticeable mockery of new-style Yankee imperialism.

I will return to the trade picture after a few more introductory remarks. This medium-sized and beautiful city continues to serve as the capital of Europe. It’s geographically situated between France, Germany, and Great Britain, the main progenitors of European integration in the late 1950s.1 Brussels houses the main governing institutions of the European Union: The European Commission (the executive branch), and the two bodies that jointly comprise the legislative branch--The European Council (representing each of the 27 member states), and the European Parliament (whose 720 members are directly elected by the people. Brussels also hosts the European Defense Force, the headquarters secretariat for which now occupies the same real estate formerly inhabited by NATO Command. (The judicial branch, the European Court of Justice, is located in Luxembourg. You might want to send me there someday soon.)2

You will be familiar with all this backdrop, but I include it anyway to keep myself on track. Twenty years ago, almost nobody believed Europe had the economic muscle or the political moxie to improve and sustain both its competitiveness in the global market and its ability to defend itself without relying on America’s nuclear umbrella and NATO’s collective security blanket-- especially the Article 5 assurances that an attack on any member state would trigger a swift and rallied response. Structural weaknesses were abundant in 2025: Europe lacked sufficient natural resources to achieve energy self-reliance, supply chains for fuels and other imported goods were extremely vulnerable to Russia’s clandestine disruptions, defense industries relied heavily on purchases from the U.S., productivity was slipping and high debt to GDP ratios constrained every European government’s ability to improve the quality and distribution of social welfare benefits. Many older citizens of the member states seemed indifferent, at best, to policies and prescriptions emanating from the EU’s Brussels bureaucracy, and a panoply of so-called “alt-right” political parties were trumpeting nativist warnings in synch with the Trump-Vance slams against immigration.

That was then. Over the course of the past two decades, Europe has taken enormously ambitious strides to bolster energy security and achieve sustainable prosperity. Huge offshore wind farms in the North Sea and a growing network of small nuclear reactors now contribute to the continent’s integrated grid networks, extending from the shores of the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the Mediterranean coast and the Black Sea. The European Union has stable free trade pacts with India--this was called the “mother of all trade deals” when it was signed in 2026—and Mercosur, the bloc of South American countries I mentioned earlier. Canada has become the foremost supplier of LNG, and Chinese firms have flooded the market for solar panels and cheap electric vehicles.3 As a consequence of this vast expansion of trade and investment reach, the Euro is basically on par with the U.S. dollar as the preferred currency in world markets. Through steady development of its own digital services industry (once dominated by American tech giants) and shrewd husbanding of U.S. securities (most notably Treasury bills), Europe now commands substantial leverage in global finance. In sum, the EU is now the world’s largest integrated international market.

On the collective security side of the ledger, joint weapons production programs have resulted in substantial rearmament. The European Defense Force, jointly commanded by French, German, and Italian officers, has forged strong partnerships with Britian’s military as well as with the Nordic and Baltic countries. Germany has financed and Poland has built, with technical support from Israel, a sophisticated anti-missile array to deter Russia. Ukraine now plays a central role in Europe’s defense strategy and is an important contributor to the region’s political economy, adding enormous value to the community as a supplier of food, energy, weapons, and advanced technologies of all kinds.

Russia continues to be a threat, employing hybrid measures to sabotage Europe’s electrical grid, pipelines, and telecommunications networks and maintaining its huge nuclear arsenal as the ultimate lever of raw power. However, the Russian Federation is increasingly fragmented. Following the mystery-shrouded defenestration of Vladimir Putin at his palace near Sochi, the confusing array of military and oligarchic succession factions and the destabilizing upsurges in Chechnya and the Russian Far East have compelled the country’s leaders to focus inward.

The most significant contextual factor overhanging the EU is the Great Rupture that occurred in early 2026, at the annual gathering of global elites at Davos, Switzerland. That’s when U.S. President Donald Trump spent much of his overlong and rambling speech denigrating Europeans for their weakness and overall lack of courage and smarts. This now infamous address followed closely in time after the release of a U.S. National Security Strategy document describing Europeans’ self-imposed “civilizational erasure”.

I’m not alone in likening these interconnected expressions of disorder to the schisms in earlier centuries that splintered what we now call the West into separate spheres of political culture.4 The Great Rupture solemnized a salient but unwelcome truth that still shapes our reality. The rules-based order that governed trade for decades has collapsed. The world has regressed into spheres of interest characterized by predatory, mercantilist capitalisms dominated by hegemonic states. Global consumers are bitterly nostalgic for an affordably decent quality of life, and millions of workers have been displaced by AI and less exotic forms of production technology. Every country is wary of its neighbors as well as fearful of a vainglorious China filling the void left by an imploding Russia and a retreating America.

In the aftermath of that Davos event (the meetings keep happening, buoyed by wealthy elites) there were some back-channel efforts to restore public confidence in America’s 80-plus years of robust transatlantic economic ties and commitments to collective security through the NATO alliance. But Europe became increasingly untethered to the United States. Robert Kagan, a prolific historian and commentator, issued a warning in 2026 that “a passive Europe could become a collection of fiefdoms—some under Russian influence, some under American influence, some perhaps under Chinese influence—its states’ sovereignty curtailed and its economies plundered by one or more of the three empires…But, if history is any guide, they will choose rearmament instead.”5 Well, they did so choose. It was a monumental task, requiring more defense spending and, echoing Kagan, “a full-scale strategic and economic reorientation toward self-reliance—a restructuring of European industries, economies and societies.” Twenty years hence, the now 34 members of the European Union are struggling to find consensus on what shape the necessary rearmament option should take.6 The Rupture has not been mended. European countries, Canada, Japan, South Korea and a panoply of other countries in the Global South (Asia, Africa, and Latin America) still support the concept of a rules-based world order and reject a return to an order based wholly on relative power, measured in military might and coercive economic relationships. The spheres of interest approach to international affairs taken by the United States, and welcomed by Russia and China, is repugnant to these small and middle power states. Internally, the Rupture provided a catalyst for accelerating the EU’s timetable for reform, which included fresh provisions for narrowing the type and number of official policy changes requiring unanimity—a much-maligned feature of past decision-making by the EU’s Commission and Council.7 Long story short, the context is complex, and somewhat dynamic. You know the paradoxical phrase we love to share over drinks at the end of any given workday: Constant change is here to stay.

Apologies for that lengthy prelude. I needed to get all that off my chest and out of mind before reporting on the main event of this visit.

END OF PART 1.

The coming decade will include America’s 250-year anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (2026) and the U.S. Constitution’s ratification (2037). It will be a great time to reimagine and reinvigorate our civic culture. Civics education should address the global dimensions of modern citizenship, and for many practical and moral purposes it must include the stories of our North American neighbors. With respect to history, for example, the exploits of Lewis and Clark ought to be accompanied by treatments of Canadian and Mexican explorers such as Samuel Champlain, David Thompson, Alexander Mackenzie, Juan Bautista de Anza and Franciso Vazquez de Coronado. There should be comparative study of the U.S., Canadian, and Mexican constitutions. There should be lessons about Azatlan, the mythical place where ancient indigenous cultures coalesced in the region of basins and ranges stretching between the southwestern deserts of the United States and the central highlands of Mexico. Similarly, everyone should learn about the Metis, the mostly French-Indian mixed blood people who played an outsized role in settling the northwestern prairie regions of Canada and the United States. And so much more. What follows is an imagined consequence of an expansive embrace of a continental consciousness. I think such a change is plausible, and that the continuation of intentional chaos plaguing our imaginations at the moment is not inevitable.

This is a brief account of a hike to the summit of Triple Divide Peak, so named because at its apex of slopes water drains to the Pacific, Atlantic, and Arctic oceans. This unique headwater spot is in Glacier National Park, in northwest Montana. I made the 7-mile slog from a small parking lot to the top of the eight-thousand-foot mountain in a mental fog; I knew where I was headed, but I was not sure why.1

On reflection, and after a bit of research, now I’ve got the answer. My brain fog was in actuality a fugue, a specific type of dissociative amnesia catalogued in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. A fugue is a flight from reality, usually triggered by stress, often characterized by a person’s sudden travel and a break from normal consciousness. Someone experiencing such fugue appears normal despite their internal confusion. Not really inclined to grasp this scientific explanation for my state of mind, I determined that in ascending this particular mountain I was actually undertaking something akin to a vision quest—the spiritual journey that countless individuals from indigenous tribes in the region have taken into these Northern Rocky Mountains over thousands of years. The Indians, I’m told, perform this exercise to discover purpose and identity within themselves. My endeavor was prompted by something slightly more prosaic but nonetheless significant—the need to sort out a welter of conflicting ideas about the future of North America. I was in search of a coherent understanding of how the United States, Canada, and Mexico could cohere into a genuine and sustainable transnational community.

So there I was, on top of my immediate material world. Multiple visions were preceded by voices in the wind. Linda Rondstadt was singing in my mind’s ear about growing up in the Sonoran Desert. I could hear echoes of Pete Seeger and chorus celebrating this land made for you and me, while Gordon Lightfoot captured the romance of railroads and Stan Rogers traced one warm line through ice in the Northwest Passage. The deeply gruff voice of Leonard Cohen waxed poetic on democracy, Celine Dion sang beautifully in French about love. There were others: Dan Fogelberg, The Byrds, Los Lobos, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young. It was quite a medley; more like a mental melee really, but eventually the music subsided and I opened my eyes to an amazing vista of evolving possibilities.

I could see the continent as a tripartite community consisting of complex economic and military interdependencies. a political economy characterized by dense networks of interconnected electrical grids, ecologically sound water conveyance systems, and transportation corridors, all facilitated by the free movement of goods, services, financial capital, and “labor” (farm workers, baristas, business executives, engineers, environmental consultants etc.) across the transnational community’s managed yet porous internal borders. I observed that intra continental trade is tariff-free, while other barriers to commerce are subject to negotiated phased-in harmonization of standards and regulations. Canada, the United States and Mexico have imposed a common external tariff affecting goods from other parts of the world. There is a common currency, the North American dollar, which bears the images of a loon, Quetzalcoatl, and Benjamin Franklin. The huge geographic area wherein citizens can travel freely across continental borders without the need for passports or visas is dubbed The Eagle Zone, in honor of the gloried raptors that frequent the highlands of all three countries.

Invisible to the naked eye but anchored in a shared sense of confidence is a scaled down version of the Golden Dome defense strategy, utilizing space-based, ground-based, and offshore weaponry to provide both sufficient warning and a means of defeating any launched from Eurasian enemies. There is a joint U.S.-Canadian approach to Arctic security, and a U.S.-Mexico task force to combat narco-terrorist cartels and to interdict drug boats (e.g. carrying precursor chemical components of fentanyl) before they reach coastal ports. A trilateral consortium of medical experts, behavioral scientists, and law enforcement authorities has been established to develop social programs to prevent and manage drug addiction.

There is something akin to the Monroe Doctrine in play, supplemented with the Continental Corollary, established by an agreement between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico to ensure that China and Russia both realize the diminishing returns of meddling in the Americas. Puerto Rico is a state. Cuba is a democracy. Greenland has entered into a sovereignty association agreement with Canada, modeled after an accord between Quebec and the Canadian federation.

From my lofty vantage point, and in an altered state of mind, I can describe the spiritual landscape as an undulating horizontal plane of plasticine stained glass--a cosmopolitan Christian mosaic. Judeo-Christian values are dominant, and firmly embedded even among non-believers, but not to the exclusion of Islam and other faiths brought to the fold by immigrants. Christian Nationalist ideology has been supplanted by a great reawakening of the Social Gospel—a movement which energized progressive politics in both the United States and Canada in the 1920s and 1930s.2

The battle between rival evangelicals is pretty much over. The New Apostolic Reformation and affiliated groups supporting white (and mostly male) supremacy still exist, but their leaders have slipped down and away from the so-called Seven Summits of social power (Family, Business, Government, Education, Media, Arts and Entertainment, Religion) that they once believed they were mandated by God to conquer. There are some white ethnocultural enclaves in Texas, Eastern Washington, the Idaho panhandle, New Hampshire, and Florida, most of them representing vestigial clusters of Christian nationalist die-hards, but these small communities are increasingly isolated and alienated from mainstream currents of thought and social organization.3

The racist and nativist theories derived from both literal and bastardized interpretations of the Bible have been shredded by more reasoned approaches to what’s good for a largely secularized society. The wall separating church and state has been maintained, even though politics are still suffused with both active and latent religious sentiments.

Looking south, the venerable cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe that permeates Mexican culture remains sacrosanct; it resonates with the centuries’ old catholicite that undergirds French Canadian culture, notwithstanding Quebec’s modern secularization and insistence on so called laicite laws to prohibit the wearing of religious symbols by public servants and religious expressions on public property. By and large, North Americans believe deeply in freedom of conscience and are committed to religious freedom.

I see a continental community made up of three dominant cultural communities, identified mainly by language: Spanish, English, and French. In addition to Mexico City, Chicago, Toronto and New York City, the most vibrant urban centers are Houston, Santa Fe, Vancouver, and Montreal. There is an increasingly prosperous and self-reliant archipelago of indigenous quasi-sovereign indigenous tribal communities, many with recently restored languages of their own for use in the home and on the land. Each level and arena of governance supports exchanges to facilitate cultural cross-fertilization in music, literature, science and art.

The geo-cultural and ethnocultural landscape does not conform to state, provincial, and national boundaries. Its contours are shaped by historical patterns of agricultural and industrial development, common attitudes regarding land and water resources, and a shared sense of belonging to a physical and social area that is different from other parts of the continent. As I swivel to look in all directions, I recognize the Nine Nations of North America so persuasively outlined by journalist Joel Garreau way back in 1981. His basic assertion was that a map based on culture and values does not reflect the arbitrarily and sometimes perversely drawn state and national boundaries. His conception of the nine nations has held up well, mainly for this reason, in his words: “When you’re from one, and you’re in it, you know you’re home.”4

I briefly reveled in an 8,000-foot view of a changed constitutional order. The United States and Mexico are still federal republics, and Canada remains a constitutional monarchy. But in America, a Convention of the States has brought about much needed modifications to the U.S. Constitution—equal rights for every citizen, a provision to limit political campaign spending, clarification of War Powers, a conditionality clause to reign in debts and deficits and some other amendments, all of which have been ratified by three fourths of the state legislatures in accordance with Article 5 of the original document. (Meanwhile, the legal doctrine of originalism has been summarily rejected ahistorical and irrational bunkum by a majority in the U.S. Supreme Court.)5

Canadians have removed the notwithstanding clause in their Constitution, which used to allow provincial governments to perform legal end runs around key provisions of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Concurrently, the Canadian Parliament approved a measure memorializing the recognition of Quebec as a distinct society. The Canadian Supreme Court has rendered a decision that clarifies Aboriginal title issues across the country, avoiding a potentially drastic destabilization of property rights.6 From what I could discern at a great distance, the Mexican Constitution has not required changes as much a need to be rigorously adhered to. One of its unique features, allowing only one six-year term for presidents has bolstered political stability and prevented the overreach of executive authority

Within these separate constitutional jurisdictions, there is a convergence of human rights laws and practice. All three countries have rededicated themselves to the Four Freedoms Franklin Roosevelt outlined in 1941: Freedom from Fear; Freedom from Want; Freedom of Speech and Expression; Freedom of Religion. In the revamped constitutions of each country, there is now an explicit right to freedom of conscience.

On the way down the mountain, my mental fugue had turned into a riotous reverie. A lightning storm was fast approaching. I was awestruck, experiencing simultaneously incredible joy and abject fear in the face of awful beauty. My scalp tingled, my hair went skyward, my hiking pole vibrated. I was too scared to stay put, so I started running and laughing uncontrollably. A few miles down the trail the weather changed, the wind shifted, the clouds broke, and my emotion-charged consciousness reset to normal.

In a follow-up to my scarily exhilarating descent, I’ve taken some time to test the efficacy of my alpine visions. Not surprisingly, some of my great expectations have gravitas, while others seem illusory. Having regained my senses in the library, I now know that imagining a North American Union is sort of crazy. People cling tenaciously to their respective national identities. Sovereign states don’t willingly forego their powers and prerogatives. Borders are considered inviolable. Nation-statism is rooted in strong ideological foundations. However, history proves that nothing in the realm of social evolution is immutable. The current wave of existential challenges now confronting virtually every country on earth is as powerful a force for change as anything on the books, as it were. Climate change will compel mass migration, both within bordered states and across political boundaries. Even slightly less gargantuan eventualities—another world war, a global depression, an axis of autocratic empires, the unpredictable consequences of generative artificial intelligence for just about everything everywhere—will undoubtedly lead to a diminished attachment to state sovereignty as the accepted dogma of socio-political organization.

The concept of a formalized North American Community is not new. At this stage, I can point to the work of the late John Wirth, an accomplished historian from Stanford University, and his colleagues at the North American Institute (NAMI), a not-for-profit organization that was headquartered in Santa Fe, New Mexico with satellite offices in Mexico City and Vancouver, British Columbia. For a brief shining decade or so, the structures and functions of a trilateral association were ably articulated by the Institute’s small core staff. NAMI was instrumental in the creation of the Montreal-based North American Commission on Environmental Cooperation, which dovetailed with the ascendancy of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). In 1995, Wirth and Robert E. Earle edited and published a book entitled Identities in North America: The Search for Community. It explored the socio-cultural forces that define the nations and the potential for a functional community to emerge from their disparate loyalties and castes of mind. It examines the core values of each society, makes the case for transnational regionalism, and concludes with a recommendation to think of North America as a whole.7

NAMI’s positions met with hefty criticisms from groups wary of what looked like and sounded like an abdication of national sovereignty in deference to supranational concepts, constructs, and institutions. The Society for American Sovereignty (now defunct) condemned what they viewed as an alarming plan endorsed in 2005 by the George Bush Administration and the Council on Foreign Relations called The Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP). The plan recommended the creation of a common security perimeter around North America within which people and goods would flow freely between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. The Society railed both against the substance of the proposal and the way it was evolving, stealthily, without the involvement of Congress or the American people. The SPP came to naught, but carefully reasoned arguments for federating the United States with its northern and southern neighbors did not die with its demise and the dissolution of NAMI.

Sometime in 2026, bureaucrats will begin the tedious task of negotiating changes to the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). The tinkering may well fail for lack of consensus, and a commercially successful three-way partnership could dissolve and be replaced with lopsided bilateral agreements, i.e. deals that heavily favor the United States. But things could go another way. In March 2025, Nouriel Roubini, Professor Emeritus of Economics and International Business at New York University, produced this deeply informed commentary on the sensibility of going well beyond the boundaries of the USMCA.

Trade and political tensions between the United States and its immediate neighbors, Canada and Mexico, are at historic highs, raising fears of a full-scale trade war and the collapse of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), which itself was a renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

While the most likely outcome is an eventual renegotiation of the USMCA that leads to some modest tariff increases but mostly maintains the free trade area, this would be a sub-optimal scenario. To resolve the fundamental sources of tensions, avoid future conflicts, and increase growth and welfare for North American, all three countries should start drafting plans for a North American Economic Union: a single market with full free trade not just in goods—as in the current free trade area—but also in services, capital, technology, data, and information.8

So, the idea of a North American Union is not so wild as it sounded to lots of die-hard national sovereigntists 50 years ago. There are good kinds of crazy, after all; lots of learned people believed that Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman, the chief architects of the European Community (one French, the other German) were out of their minds to believe that historic rivals could fashion a polity based on common interests, values, and aspirations.

The War of 1812 that pitted the United States against British Canada and the Mexican American War that gained the U.S. nearly half of Mexico’s territory through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 were nowhere near as calamitous as the two world wars that ravaged the European continent, including much of Russia. Bitter memories persist, as the descendants of United Empire Loyalists in Canada and Pancho Villa in Mexico will attest, but they are relatively shallow. Absent any fresh outrage, like military incursions into Mexican territory or an actual attempt to make Canada the 51^st American state (an absurd notion in so many ways), there are no insurmountable emotional obstacles to “an ever-closer union” between the three large countries of North America.

The imperial tendencies of the United States, fueled in part by the evergreen belief in Manifest Destiny, are easily overestimated and not attractive to younger Americans. When I was a student (four-plus decades ago!), I wrote a term paper entitled Canadianization: An American’s Dream. Reading it now, I wince, not in pain, but in a sort of nostalgic anguish. My opening salvo included this quote from then Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who was both fiercely resistant to American pretenses and power plays and a prescient public intellectual: “The glue of nationalism must become as obsolete as the way of the divine right of kings.” A bit deeper in the text, I expanded on the history of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, a movement propelled by proponents of the Social Gospel that became the New Democrat Party in Canada, as unabashedly democratic and socialist as the newly elected mayor of New York City. The United States will never annex Canada; the more likely evolution of political attitudes and policies south of the 49^th parallel will owe much to the emulation of Canadians’ grasp of the virtues of moderation, a mixed economy, and multiculturalism.9

I looked up the other definition of fugue—the one we recall from learning about and listening to the music of J.S. Bach. It’s a composition in which a short melody or phrase—the subject—is introduced by one part and successively taken up by others and developed by interweaving the parts. Not simple, yet sonorous. The subject here is a North American identity, one that transcends but does not supersede or replace a citizen’s sense of belonging and devotion to a local community, a state or province, one of the nine nations, or the respective nation state that appears on conventional maps. The weave incorporates political economy, common defenses, a reshaping of constitutions, secular states infused with religious principles, and cultural diversity expressed most poignantly in a multiplicity of languages. North Americans constitute a genre of civilized society, as do Europeans, Latin Americans, sub-Saharan Africans, Muslim Arabs, modern day Persians, the peoples of Central Asia, South Asians, East Asians et.al. They all make good music.

From: Christopher Breen, Kestrel Group (NGO)

Dateline: December 15, 2045

Dear Commissioner,

Greetings from the 12^th floor of the World Bank headquarters building in Washington, D.C. I’ve just attended a meeting with a rather large group of bank employees, government officials, and private consultants on the status of several projects and developments that fall within the far extending rubric of “Water and Power”. The human right to water was on the agenda, but way down the list, as usual, below hydro dams, large-scale diversions, inter-basin transfers, water-enhancing technologies and transboundary rivers.

I’m here at your request, to observe the proceedings and attest, if and when I’m invited to comment, to the need to prioritize drinking water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH is the acronym in vogue) in all of the endeavors of the Bank, which is still the number one source of lending to fund major water infrastructure projects worldwide. The Bank’s extraordinary leverage depends on willingness of key member states (The U.S., Japan, China, Germany, the UK and France) to contribute funds from their respective treasuries, all of which are tapped out from incessantly excessive deficit spending. 1 Contributions will doubtless continue to flow, as there is no shortage of development projects in process. Shifting priorities is proving a heavier lift.

World Bank HQ, Washington, D.C.

Critics of the World Bank are a sizeable global scrum. There are 189 member countries, i.e., almost everybody has a stake and some standing in the institution. The main complaint from non-governmental organizations is about the Bank’s historical predilection for co-opting dissenting grassroots voices while proceeding with its own priorities. This is fair, from my still cursory reading of the literature on the bullying tendencies of all big lending institutions. People in control of huge sums of money tend toward authoritarian decision-making. There’s also the complicating issue of competing factions within the Bank itself. The financial folks emphasize loans, the engineers favor large-scale infrastructure, others are keen on green values, including social and environmental protections. Almost nobody emphasizes human rights. I’ll have more to say about that shortly.

The meeting took all day. We drank a lot. I didn’t do the arithmetic, but there were scores empty glass bottles on the conference table tops and window counters, all with alluring labels and brand names: Perrier, Poland Spring, Pellegrino, Aqua Panna, Voss, Topo Chico and everyone’s favorite, Fiji. There weren’t any empties from the Ganges and Brahmaputra basins, if indeed there are any export-oriented bottling operations in India.

Pepsi was available, but no Coke products, owing to the divergent facts that Pepsico was the first big beverage company to declare support for water as a human right, whereas the Indian delegation forbade the Bank from allowing Coca Cola on account of that company’s overexploitation of Delhi’s groundwater for its bottling plants. Our bank hosts offered small dishes of almonds as a snack. Whilst savoring a wasabi coated nut, I suddenly remembered that the cultivation of almonds in California is extremely water intensive. I would have advised offering Kirkland brand cashews instead, which are sourced from a dozen relatively water-rich countries in Africa and Southeast Asia. But after a handful of nuts, I kept my mouth shut.

The Bank staff were earnest and peripatetic, offering to guide participants to the hyper-modern washrooms, equipped with no-flush toilets and low-flow faucets. They energetically catered to the various culinary and voluminous photocopying requests of the official delegations from China, India, Egypt, Ethiopia, and South Africa. The latter country, I want to note, is still the only one to include the human right to water in its (post-apartheid) constitution.

Speaking of the word apartheid, it has become the favorite term of less developed countries in Africa and Asia to describe their unjust internal situations wherein rich neighborhoods enjoy robust water infrastructure for plumbing, lawn watering, and swimming pools while poorer ones suffer leaky pipes (if there any at all) and are at the pricing mercy of bottled water vendors to fulfill daily needs. Notwithstanding South Africa’s forthright assertion of a right to water on paper, recent reports indicate that citizens suffering poverty there have reverted to drinking and bathing in polluted river water because the urban conveyance systems have broken down due to neglected maintenance and bottled water is too expensive.

I did some homework before arriving in D.C. Years ago, I’d pulled out a section of the Economist bearing the title “For Want of a Drink”. Here’s an excerpt.

Aquifers are falling, glaciers vanishing, reservoirs are drying up and rivers no longer flow to the sea. Climate change threatens to make things worse. Everyone must use less water if famine, pestilence and mass migration are not to sweep the globe. As it is, wars are about to break out between countries squabbling over dams and rivers. If the apocalypse is still a little way off it is only because the four horsemen and their steeds have stopped to search for something to drink.

The Economist is renowned for its penchant for wry phrasing as well as accurate reporting. I will offer several addenda to update this savvy narrative, which dates to 2010!

1. Climate change HAS made things worse, much worse. For example, Rapid warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions is making the Arctic rainier and melting its ice, both on land and at sea. Much of this excess water makes its way into the North Atlantic, so scientists’ fears that this could disrupt the processes that draw warm water up from the tropics are being realized. The consequences for the climate are already far-reaching: frostier winters in Britain, stronger hurricanes in the Eastern United States and, perhaps most troublingly, shifts in the rain belts that feed people across Africa, South America and Asia.

2. Water wars have NOT happened, not yet anyway, thanks mainly to deft diplomacy. One example: Ethiopia’s Grand Renaissance Dam, which controls the mainstem Nile below the confluence of the Blue and White Nile tributaries issuing forth from Sudan and other African countries, could cut-off Egypt’s essential lifeline. Ninety-five percent of Egyptians live on or near the river, and the country’s agricultural production is wholly dependent on sustained and predictable flows. So far, the Ethiopian government has never denied Egypt its 25 percent share of the Nile. Another instance of surprising success is the recent updating of the Indus River Treaty of 1960, a bilateral agreement between India and Pakistan who remain bitter rivals, both claiming Kashmir, both wielding (and occasionally brandishing) nuclear weapons. India has threatened to cut downstream deliveries to punish its historic rival, but it has not done so.

In general, temptations to weaponize water have been tempered by the mutual self-interests of countries which share waterways and river basins. “Water bombs”--purposeful floods—remain a concern, but no country has used this weapon since the Russians did in Ukraine back in 2022. Retaliatory dam building to disrupt downstream food production is a more worrisome prospect. There is also the perennial concern about environmental “terrorists” plotting to sabotage hydro facilities. A transnational group calling themselves The Damned Dam Busters are allegedly armed with high explosives but have thus far only engaged in cyber-attacks on control rooms.

I need to elaborate a bit further on why there haven’t been more wars over water in the past few decades. There is no simple answer, but much credit is due to countries’ adherence to the Convention on the Protection and Use of Transboundary Watercourses and International Lakes (aka the UN Water Convention), which is the main instrument of international law that applies to internal waterways as well as shared rivers and basins. One hundred and fifty-three countries have territory within at least one of the world’s 286 transboundary river and lake basins and 592 transboundary aquifers. The Convention obligates signatory states to establish joint bodies that identify, monitor, and implement cooperative measures to meet and serve mutual interests. This is the essence of environmental peacebuilding, a burgeoning and much needed sector of hydrologic diplomacy.

1. The apocalypse is STILL a little way off, as it has been for the past 100 years or so. Humanity continues to churn through the complex conundrums of post-modern globalization. We’re still working on ways to slake a powerful collective thirst on the blue orb of earth where only a fraction of its water is fresh and clean and life-sustaining.

This leads me back to the World Bank boardroom scenario. Everything started with a sobering assessment of general conditions on the planet. They are, in a word, dire. The maldistribution of water resources and water conveyance systems is a worldwide challenge, as is the basic issue of freshwater scarcity. On the other hand, the overall situation has been much worse in prior decades, and things are getting better, at least in some countries and regions. To provide some context from this Dispatch, I’ll summarize some highlights from the discussions about persistent problems and some promising fixes to the world’s water woes.

Ninety seven percent of the earth’s total surface water is salty. Of the paltry remainder, over half is still frozen at the North and South poles, locked in permafrost, or stuck in glaciers. Rapid melting due to global warming has caused huge releases, but these supplies of freshwater are subsumed by the seas. Nobody has figured out a way to collect meltwater efficiently or effectively and attempts to haul huge icebergs from Greenland to the Middle East and Antarctica to Africa have failed for a number of reasons, cost being the most obvious.

Even though many nations are experiencing demographic decline, mostly due to aging populations, there are still some 9 billion people on the planet, and every one of them needs, according to the World Health Organization, about 50 liters of water each day to meet basic needs, including water for drinking, food preparation, sanitation, and personal hygiene. It doesn’t sound like much--I’ve read that Americans consume over 100 liters per day on average, more than anybody else—but too much water is allocated to other purposes.

Despite the planet’s rich water resources, scientists estimate that 4 billion people—roughly half the world’s population, don’t have enough water for at least one month each year, and 500 million don’t have enough throughout the entire year. Factor in climate change and a global population expected to reach 10 billion by 2050, and it becomes clear the world is only going to get thirstier. To slake that thirst, scientists and engineers have been searching for solutions to the growing problem of water scarcity.

Agriculture accounts for roughly 60 percent of water withdrawals from rivers and lakes worldwide. That’s down from 70 percent in 2025, thanks to improved farm practices utilizing satellite imagery, no-till cultivation methods, and technology-enhanced ditches and canal systems. Consumption patterns vary widely. In India, farming still takes 90 percent of available freshwater, whereas in Great Britain agriculture claims only 3 percent.

Groundwater resources are overtapped. India is the worst offender, accounting for a quarter of global groundwater withdrawals. Jordan, the 4^th-ranked water deficient country on earth, is sucking groundwater from an aquifer it shares with Saudi Arabia—a potential political problem—and much of the mined water is contaminated by deep deposits of radon. The promiscuous pumping of deep water exemplifies countries’ unwillingness to live within their hydrological means.

Nine countries account for 60 percent of all available freshwater supplies. Of these, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Indonesia, Russia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, can still claim abundance. The United States is fairly well off, since it shares the Great Lakes with Canada. India and China, on the other hand, with over one third of the global population between them, have only 10 percent of the world’s freshwater.

With such an uneven distribution, how can it be possible for every country to even pretend to guarantee every citizen the right to an adequate supply of water? The question begs others, given the multiple uses of clean water that go beyond subsistence. Enormous amounts of water are still required to grow food. Modern industries have become water dependent as well. Massive data centers to fuel the Artificial Intelligence sector use water to cool vast arrays of computers. The manufacturers of advanced microelectronics (chips, etc.) require super-clean water to wash and lubricate robotic machines. Coal-fired thermal power plants—there are still millions in operation—need lots of water for cooling. The list goes on and on. The concept of long-distance inter-basin transfers as a means of bringing supply to demand is largely discredited for a host of financial and ecological reasons.

Hydropower is the world’s most widely used form of renewable energy, propelling economic development in South America, parts of China and India, and much of sub-Saharan Africa. This is why dammed rivers were the main topic of the day. Over the past 20+ years, waves of extreme drought have wrought havoc on this critically important supply of energy. Hydropower is particularly vulnerable to climate change. This is most evidenced in Africa. When there’s insufficient water to drive the turbines, urbanites resort to burning coal for heat and cooking, while people engaged in village agriculture do something even worse--they cut down trees to make charcoal, accelerating deforestation and thus eliminating vital carbon capture.

Global warming has greatly reduced the reliability of hydro, and thus it has increased political instability. Hundreds of millions of people live without electricity; a substantial subset of these suffer from unreliable power. Without electricity, jobs are scarce. Joblessness feeds desperation and despair. Desperate measures are undertaken when factories shut, bakeries close, butchers have no meat to cut, and householders don’t have water to cook with. It’s a recipe for rebellion. In short, much of the world’s disorder is rooted in resource insufficiencies closely tied to water supply.

Dams are a microcosm of broader development debates. They require political choices and trade-offs between infrastructure needs, financing, environmental sustainability, social equity and economic impact. Fresh thinking at the World Bank and other lenders has led to more local consultation and stakeholder engagement, more “social inclusion” (especially as regards downstream minority groups) and more robust environmental safeguards. In a nutshell, this amounts to greater commitments to “participatory development”, which was a seemingly obligatory phrase of the day.

All parties in attendance agree that downstream benefits and costs must be considered. There are clear trade-offs between much needed electricity created by hydro facilities and the social and ecological disruption caused by damming rivers. There is a dam in a remote northwestern province of Laos that has, like so many Asian hydro sites, disrupted communities and drowned biodiverse areas. At the same time, it has become a vital source of electricity to Thailand and an unequaled contributor of export revenue to the Laotian government. To date, more often than not, building dams has been deemed more beneficial than letting rivers run.

Three Gorges Dam in China used to be the world’s largest, and most destructive.

We had to wade through a number of presentations by national delegations about big ideas and major projects before getting to the human rights question. I’ll summarize just two.

The Americans went first, owing to their still-dominant position as the leading contributor in the Bank’s weighted voting system.2[Endnote World Bank]. The current President of the institution, a former Wall Street executive named Jesse James Workman, opened the discussion with a brief yet illuminating historical overview. He reminded the group that mega-projects in the 1930s—Hoover Dam, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and many others built and managed by the U.S. Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation—inspired many other countries to replumb their respective land masses to harness the power of water, protect industrial facilities from its destructive force, and increase agricultural production through irrigation.

Workman recounted how things have changed in recent decades. Water sharing arrangements coupled with advanced technologies have mitigated the effects of prolonged drought driven by climate change on the over-tapped Colorado River, which sustains agriculture in the West and provides water for 40+ million people across seven U.S. states, thirty American Indian tribes and parts of Northern Mexico. Federal and state agencies have successfully dismantled dams on the Snake and Klamath Rivers to restore ecological balance and salmon fisheries. The 1909 Boundary Waters Treaty between the Unites States and Canada and its bilateral administering body the International Joint Commission were offered as model for avoiding disputes over transboundary rivers.3

Workman waxed rather eloquently on the legacy and renewed relevance of John Wesley Powell’s advocacy for a watershed governance model way back in the 19^th century. Reconfiguring borders to conform to hydrological geography was a radically sensible approach to settlement in the arid American West. It holds even stronger appeal now, and the Bank executive lauded the efforts of a UN Working Group assigned to study and report on the feasibility of establishing transboundary watershed regions with transnational jurisdictions.4

John Wesley Powell’s prescriptive map of watershed jurisdictions

The bearded and cowboy-booted American then took an abrupt turn in his narrative, concluding that the brutal and irrefutable evidence of mass displacement of rural communities (many of them indigenous) and ecologically disastrous consequences of damming large rivers has compelled scientists, engineers, financiers and political leaders around the world to radically revise their understandings of the benefit-cost calculations associated with humongous hydroelectric projects.

This was an unceremonious and insinuating segue to the presentation by a team of pinched face blue-suited bureaucrats from the People’s Republic of China. The Chinese are the third-ranked contributor to the Bank. However, for the past 50 years, the PRC regime has chosen to forego Bank loans encumbered with regulatory and accountability measures. (The PRC abjures red tape!) With hundreds of dams constructed using internal funds and other foreign capital without burdensome social and environmental restrictions, China is now in earnest to displace the United States and assume for itself a leadership role in the World Bank and a host of United Nations agencies.

China has a firm grip on the commanding heights of the Tibetan Plateau, often referred to as Asia’s “water tower”. Six of the continent’s most important rivers originate in this region: The Brahmaputra, the Ganges, the Mekong, the Yangtze, the Yellow, and the Indus. The Chinese government has built scores of dams that are ruinous to Tibetan people and culture, and which pose a threat to downstream states, including India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam.

One example makes the case. In July of 2025, China announced it was constructing the world’s largest hydroelectric dam. The Motuo Hydropower station, located on the upper reaches of the Brahmaputra in the Tibetan Autonomous Region of southwest China, was built at a cost exceeding $180 billion. This mega-project has generated enormous pride on the part of the Chinese Communist Party. It tops the Three Gorges dams that preceded it in size, output, engineering glory, and downstream suffering. China has refused to publicly address the potentially colossal social and environmental harms as well as outright dam failures caused by the positioning of these huge facilities in seismically active zones. They are also notorious for not sharing hydrological data and are disinterested in water sharing agreements.

Midway through this presentation, which was embellished by sophisticated 3D presentation graphics (Power Point is a fading memory), the head of the Chinese delegation referred repeatedly to Xizang. I know the term but pretended otherwise. “What is Xizang?” I asked. All the members of the China team scowled in unison. Their leader’s response was terse. “Xizang is the pinyin term for the Tibetan Autonomous Region of China, as you know.” Yes, we all know about the Chinese Communist Party’s penchant for renaming places to emphasize its enduring dominance.5 [Endnote: I was glad nobody brought up the widely discredited term “Gulf of America” that still appears on maps made in the USA.] During this brief and acidic exchange, I was reminded of a classic tome by Karl August Wittfogel entitled Oriental Despotism. The author’s main thesis was that hugely overbearing bureaucracies and extremely centralized authorities have characterized many regimes’ efforts to dominate societies by controlling water.6

Next up was a coterie of consultants delivering an encouraging briefing on how technological innovations have yielded many partial solutions to the multifaceted global water crisis. Some are well-known: Drip irrigation, lined canals, groundwater storage fed by wastewater and stormwater runoff, urban recycling systems and “grey water” applications, large-scale shifts away from cattle production and irrigated agriculture in drought-prone areas. Two items stood out as the most promising, and remarkable.

There are massive, solar powered desalinization plants anchored offshore in the Eastern Mediterranean. Jointly financed and operated by a consortium of Middle Eastern countries, including Turkey, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, these platforms are a proving ground for desalinization that used to be inordinately expensive and dependent on fossil fuels.

Scientists and a growing number of companies that make air-from-water devices are working on harvesting water from the atmosphere in ways that are practical, efficient, and inexpensive. A number of companies in different parts of the world are trying to tap the moisture in the air. The ubiquity of air--it’s everywhere, even in the desert—lends it the potential to help water-deprived people no matter where they’re located. The atmosphere contains as much as 1.29 x 1016 liters of water in the form of clouds, fog, and water vapor. In global terms, that number is small, only 0.001% of the world’s total water. But in relative terms, it’s a deluge—six times as much water as what’s in the world’s rivers, the foremost source of drinking water. Devices that pull water from the air show promise and with continued innovation could make the thirstiest parts of the world a little less parched.7

All in all, this gathering underscored the need for an ongoing comprehensive rethinking of water management. While there is still no sturdy consensus on these issues yet, there is an emerging formula for sustainable water security. Among the critical components are vigorous conservation measures (to reduce overall demand), strictly enforced programs to enable groundwater recharge, overhauls of irrigation systems to improve their efficiency (e.g. lined canals to reduce leakage), transboundary cooperation to mitigate (or prevent altogether) violent international conflicts over water, and the integration of upgraded climate models to inform water policymakers and managers about changing weather patterns and their effects on monsoons, ocean currents, and melting glacial and polar icepacks.

It’s refreshing to observe that almost everyone in the room today is an ecologist of sorts, ready to acknowledge that water is the elemental convergence resource that connects energy, food, and the environment. The linkages connecting ecological systems to social and economic conditions are now common knowledge. Water and sanitation are vital not only for public health but for housing, education, business development, manufacturing industries, etc. Water touches everyone and is embedded in everything.

And now, finally, the issue of water as a human right. Here’s a reasonable and respectable starting point. “The right of every human being to safe drinking water and basic sanitation should be recognized and realized.” This statement does not come from any formal document—not the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, not the legally binding International Covenants that followed, not the UN Water Convention or any other treaty on the books. The quote is from Mikhail Gorbachev, in 2010. His logic was and remains sound, and while some progress has been made over the years since, there is no explicit right to water—for drinking, washing, irrigating, navigation, or anything else—in international law.8

Given that access to clean drinking water is fundamental to human health and survival, it seems an odd omission. As I’ve noted, there are a number of international conventions concerning water, several of which were touched on during today’s deliberations, but the absence of an overarching human right to water is striking. Both the symbolic Declaration and the legally binding Convention do have provisions for food security, and these measures have been interpreted for decades to underscore, indirectly, the essential nature of water.

One could say the right to water has been taken for granted; it’s one of those “needless to say” sort of things. Water is everywhere, in some form, and people use it for all sorts of things. But now, in an age of prolonged drought, rampant pollution, and festering disputes over riverine borders, and the impacts of large dams, assuming that water availability is as good as a right to its use is an untenable position.

It is still abundantly clear that many national governments will continue to struggle to guarantee their citizens even the minimum requirements for WASH. There are too many claims on water resources that command higher priority.

Advocacy for water as a human right has been accentuated by scientific measures of biological need and quality, and by increasing water scarcity. Everyone knows now how much is needed, on a per capita basis, and how fast the availability of freshwater is receding.

The proliferation of ecological thinking across disciplines will likely accelerate advances toward the realization of humans’ right to water more than anything else. Consciousness about the interdependence of natural and human-engineered systems is more prevalent than ever, especially among “specialists” who used to constrain their R&D work to intellectual silos.

Further—this is something for other forums and venues--legal recognition of rivers and streams as a type of person will speed the plow of progress even more. Successful litigation over stream preservation, the harms to biodiversity and rural communities caused by dams, the discharge of industrial effluents into rivers, the fouling of waterways resulting from irrigation runoff and other agricultural activities—all that lawfare can add up to wholesale improvements to both the quantity and quality of water available for drinking, sanitation, and other household uses.

I can see in my mind’s eye your furrowed brow as you read this, High Commissioner. Human rights ought not be subordinated to causes that depend on the machinations of lawyers in courtrooms. But frontal assaults in the battle for human rights take too bloody long. You and your predecessors at the UN have been preaching the human rights gospel for decades, largely to little avail.

This is not meant to be harsh criticism. The human rights mission needs its proselytizing pastors. My point is that it will be easier for governments to honor their promises and obligations to provide good clean water for every citizen when there’s enough of it to go around. When rivers have legally protected and politically enforceable rights, people may finally enjoy a sustainable right to water. More simply put, when overworked rivers have rights, people will too.

Okay, I’m done. I’ve been invited to an informal World Bank Group golf tournament. As much as I love to play the game, it seems a bit tawdry to follow up a long day’s deliberation on water issues with a recreational activity on well-watered links. D.C. isn’t a dry place, but still.

Well, I just changed my mind. I’m going to join the others and tee-off. I want to beat the Chinese. I pledge to think about how to create and sustain global golf as a showcase of effective water management.

Signing off. Will report again from Stockholm, where the human right to water will get top billing on the agenda for international water week . The results of that global get-together will greatly influence the tenor of the larger, more significant UN Water Conference, set for April of next year in Addis Ababa.

I’m toasting you with tasteless tap water, one of the wonders of the modern world.

Christopher Breen

From: Christopher Breen, the Kestrel Group (NGO)

Re: An exercise in pastoral para-diplomacy, tracking a positive movement

Dear High Commissioner,

I’m writing this dispatch late at night, as usual, following a surprisingly thrilling day of conference proceedings at The Home of Cooperation, where meeting rooms are conjoined with a coffee bar and a library in what used to be the UN-administered buffer zone between the mostly Greek Cypriot side of Nicosia and the other part belonging to the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.

Until just a few years ago, Nicosia was the last divided capital city in the world. One could walk and drive through official portals without much hassle, so long as passports were in hand, but the relationship between the separated communities was marked by fear and mistrust. Now, the gates are no more, the barbed wire has been taken down, the warning signs barring photographs in the uninhabited buffer zone are relics of a troubled past. The longest running United Nations Peacekeeping operation is closing down, and the world’s newest international peace park is opening up.

There’s much to tell, a lot to unpack. I’ll try to be succinct. Before launching into a narrative about the concepts and principles that were the main topics of today’s symposium, I enthusiastically refer you to a 2018 documentary “primer” on international peace parks crafted by a public television team from Montana in the United States. It’s quite good! Here’s the link:

I realize you might have time for an hour-long video, so I’m inserting some of the voice-over script that accompanies a short animation piece near the beginning of the program. Here goes:

Peace parks are places and spaces where borders are dissolved, and common problems are dealt with in a holistic fashion.

Today, more than ever, border regions are coming together to promote and support livable communities, vibrant economies, and healthy landscapes.

Transboundary peace parks are a practical mechanism for conflict resolution, reconciliation, and cultural interchange in transboundary regions.

Imagine this: a time when people young and old can travel the world to visit and volunteer at a panoply of international peace parks!

There you have the set-up for the rest of this dispatch. Here on Cyprus, I feel as if I’m immersed in the first movement of a beautiful global eco-friendly symphony, the score for which has been composed by a transnational team of outdoor enthusiasts, wildlife experts, peace advocates and seasoned diplomats. A succession of UN officials has fulfilled the role of conductor. In the weeks ahead, I will be following the music emanating from widely dispersed orchestras in half a dozen other peace parks in former conflict zones in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. I will share some brief details about this peripatetic itinerary in my closing below.

But first things first. Did you know that Cyprus is an ophiolite?1 That was the first question posed to me at an outdoor café on arrival at Larnaca international airport. I didn’t know that, and of course I had to look up a word I’d never heard before. After a brief but illuminating lesson in plate tectonics and related aspects of geology from my smiling waiter, he insisted that I drive to the top of Mount Olympus and also visit the ostensible and revered birthplace of Aphrodite. I did both.

I have traveled light, carrying only two books for this first phase of my assignment: Lawrence Durrell’s Bitter Lemons of Cyprus, a memoir of the waning days of British colonial rule on the island, and the more contemporary Lonely Planet guide, written by Jessica Lee. Her introduction includes this teaser: “Cyprus encapsulates the convoluted and fascinating history of the eastern Mediterranean, all wrapped up in one bite-sized package.” Here’s another tidbit to further engage your curiosity: “Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot societies are intrinsically different yet incredibly similar, linked by the still-strong role of traditional family life and a rich history where food cultures and folk customs have intermingled, but have been divided by belief.”

The history of this island is indeed complicated. During the course of over two millennia, it has been the locus of invasions and occupation by Phoenicians, Greeks, Byzantines, Venetians, European Crusaders (including Richard the Lionheart), the Knights Templar, an aristocratic dynasty from France and the Ottoman Turks. In 1821 Greek Cypriots sided with mainland Greece in a revolt against Turkish rule. Britain leased the island from Turkey for 40+ years and then annexed it in 1914. An offer to give Cyprus to Greece in 1915 was turned down, and in the 1920s Cyprus became a British Crown Colony. In more recent years, a movement to meld with Greece (called Enosis) was violently opposed by Turkish Cypriots. The conflict culminated in an invasion of the island by Turkish troops and tanks in 1974 that compelled vigorous UN intervention and the uneven division of the island into an internationally recognized independent Republic of Cyprus and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, recognized only by Turkey. The UN “Green Line” separating the Greek-oriented two thirds of the island from the Turkish sector has been described as a scar right through the heart of Cyprus, patrolled by UN peacekeepers and scrawny cats. But we can see now the beauty inherent in scar tissue that has been left to its own efflorescent desserts. Sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself.

The UN Green Line separating Cyprus from the Republic of Northern Cyprus appears in red.

The United Nations Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP) has maintained a tenuous peace for the past 70 years. No other peacekeeping operation comes close in duration; none has been as successful. Violent incidents have been rare and contained. The peacekeepers from a variety of countries have served as multi-tasking custodians of the demilitarized buffer zone dividing the island have not acted like nor been perceived as an alien police force. The UN’s white Toyota SUVs have patrolled along the Green Line separating the two communities without encountering ambush or even protest.

The influences of outside interests have been a different story. In recent decades, political conflicts between Greece and Turkey over offshore energy resources and complicated linkages to the vexing problems of the Middle East and between NATO and Russia have precluded reunification of the island’s two territories. The political culture of the island has been bifurcated by disparate ideologies on the left-right spectrum informed by national affiliations with Greece and Turkey and religious identities of Orthodox Christianity and Islam. Reunification talks were repeatedly undermined by diverse and often strident voices from Athens and Istanbul as well from neocolonial Britons and cadres of nouveau riche expatriate oligarchs from Russia. The conflict remained frozen for decades.

I won’t further belabor the recent history attempts at conflict resolution on this island. In the last five years, things have changed, and very much for the better. Enlightened leadership from within both communities, bolstered by the calming and stabilizing presence of UNFICYP, have brought Cyprus to a fresh inflection point. The people are poised to make progress together on multiple fronts, including tourism, energy development, and participation in the European Union.

To give you a sense of the fresh sociocultural mentality in this place, a short and informal interview with a staff member at the House of Cooperation yielded this expression of new-found patriotism: “We are Cypriots, proud citizens of a bicommunal democratic republic. Most of us are of Greek heritage, imbued with Orthodox Christian values and traditions. The rest of us—and that’s a goodly number, well over half a million--have Turkish roots, with modern Islamic customs and cuisine. Together, we are happy to be citizens of the European Union. We carry two passports across borders, one issued by the federated national government here in Nicosia, the other by the European Commission authorities in Brussels. We thrive and prosper in the Schengen Zone of the EU, which permits us to travel, work, and invest our money across the continent. We are like a warm and aromatic soup, and our union nourishes our souls.”

Such healthy sprigs of hope are the outgrowth of efforts to establish a peace park that stretches across the breadth of the island. The park—four miles wide in rural areas, less than 20 feet across in central Nicosia--is a place of natural wonder, an ecosystem that has been almost untouched by human industry, horticulture, and recreation for nearly six decades. There are unique flowering plants, exotic bushes, rare warblers, lemon trees and an astounding array of feral cats. People can enter the park space from a number of arched gateways, inside the city, but also at other places along the buffer zone connecting opposite Mediterranean coasts.

UNFICYP gave birth to the park project twenty-odd years ago, but it has been nurtured and developed by mostly young Greek and Turkish Cypriots meeting together over the course of a dozen years at the House of Cooperation. Countless espressos, lattes, and smoothies have fueled intense discussions about how best to organize and implement a peace park maintenance plan. In effect, these dedicated volunteers crafted a bicultural conservation corps that has been blessed by UN administrators here and at HQ in New York.

The conference I’m attending is the third in a sequence of international gatherings of peace park advocates, practitioners and donors. The first one was in North America (more on that later), and the second was in South Africa, where the Peace Park Foundation is headquartered. Today there were several panels with papers, all rooted in the pioneering publication Peace Parks: Conservation and Conflict Resolution, edited by Saleem H. Ali. Prior to this groundbreaking 2017 publication, most knowledge and experience with nascent peace parks was anecdotal. There was very little systematic analysis of the role transboundary parks can play in the peaceful resolution of conflict. The book remains an indispensable introduction to the theories and practices of this genre of borderlands phenomena.

There’s a lot of terminology to get used to in the realm of peace advocacy. There are subtle yet not insignificant differences between peacemaking and peacebuilding, peacekeeping and peace enforcement. You know all about that. What matters here is the distinction between transboundary protected areas (TPAs) and international peace parks. TPAs have proliferated from 60 in the late 1980s to over 200 in 2045. All of the 15 established international peace parks are essentially combinations of mostly but not always contiguous transboundary protected areas, but only a dozen TPAs are also peace parks. The discussion can get tedious; it’s the nature of academic discourse. The main thing to keep in mind is this definition, crafted by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN): An international peace park is a protected transboundary area that spans across recognized borders, rendering the area within the park a zone of cooperation without jurisdictional divisions lines.

All of this must be couched in the context of ecological reality. The winds, the rain and atmospheric currents do not recognize political frontiers. Neither do plants and animals. National governments are increasingly compelled to acknowledge the growing influence and salience of bioregionalism—the realization that ecological management must be defined by natural delineations such as watersheds and biomes rather than through strict adherence to national borders that were established by colonizers indifferent to nature or are the result of wars and the sometimes arbitrary designs of geopolitical strategists.

Political scientists have crafted theories regarding the intersection of conservation ethics and conflict resolution. I won’t attempt to summarize or criticize them here. What I’ve learned is that the main premise of environmental peacemaking is this: There are key attributes of environmental concerns that can lead acrimonious parties to consider them a means of cooperation. This is sometimes referred to as threat or “harms” aversion. It goes like this: We (as in the royal we of two or more sovereign states) both want to avoid these borderland pollution problems, even if we can’t stand each other, so let’s work together to protect nature and clean things up. Lo and behold, the working together can lead to a larger end—trusting relationships between and among influential people. Thus, peace park work can serve as the catalyst for improved relations between neighboring states; it’s a peace-building process that can pay outsized dividends in areas prone to conflict.

My dwelling on terminology may look and sound overly academic, but I’m convinced now that it is the combining of this kind of analytical thinking and observation with on-the-ground experience that has built a strong foundation for peace park advocacy. The confluence of theory and practice is known as praxis, another much-used term of art at this conference.

Peace parks are still rather “fringe” or “niche” accomplishments that fit into a much larger and more general frame of reference. The growth of transnational networks of civil society—religious institutions, philanthropies, associations of legal and scientific scholars, green parties, indigenous human rights organizations and more—are diluting state sovereignty in the common pursuit of environmental protection and sustainable development. International peace parks are a specific manifestation of the voluntary surrendering of sovereign authority to achieve a common good and to protect common resources.

There is a peace park problem set. That’s how I characterize the inherent tension between national economic development priorities and regional and localized efforts to protect and conserve natural resources.

For starters, many countries instinctively take a “fortress” style approach to natural resource conservation. Pride of ownership often comes to the fore: “This is our land. Respect the border. Mind your own business.” Ecological perspectives are generally subordinated to a traditional outlook on national sovereignty.

Here’s another challenge. In the linkage between wildlife tourism and peace park formation, there’s an incipient danger that the economic interests of developers and donors will marginalize the poor communities living at the periphery of parklands. There are well-heeled international environmental organizations (the Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife Fund, Conservation International et.al.) who tend to run roughshod over indigenous communities that depend on hunting and fishing for their livelihood and/or welcome more industrial activities such as mining and agri-business endeavors to improve their material standards of living.

At the conference, I learned that some peace park projects are managed from above, by government and private sector elites. Others emerge from the grassroots. The buffer zone approach taken here on Cyprus is a hybrid. There is no doubt that outside technical expertise is vitally important to the task of building peace parks, but it also seems clear that donors and governments are better suited to backing rather than directing the work of community-led conservation endeavors.

Economic development and peace parks can and do coexist, but everything has to be done just right. Process, procedure, and protocols are the feedstock of sound policy. It is essential that economic development schemes incorporate and encompass local projects. Small-scale grassroots business ventures must not be regarded as less valuable than aggregate indicators of wealth generation, such as GDP.

While global governance of environmental issues is still a seemingly distant goal, even in the midst of a protracted pollution and climate change crisis, environmental protections that directly impact human lives and livelihoods are achieving the same moral ascendancy as human rights. This is the thrust of the peace park movement, and this is why you’ve enlisted me to show and tell some results.

I can’t help but dwell, for a moment, on the implication that transboundary peace parks could prove to be wellsprings of cooperation on a much larger bioregional scale. Consider the notion of geo-sympathy, the deep and natural affinity people share for the landscapes they inhabit. From my little barstool here at the House of Cooperation in Nicosia, I can envision a grand convening of scholars and activists and government officials at Tahoe or on the shores of Titicaca to explore commonalities among “peoples of the Lakes”. That same sort of gathering could occur in the Caucasus, the Tatras, the Dolomites or the Sierra Nevada (in California or Andalusia) to confer about “peoples of the Mountains”. Geo-sympathy can connect peoples of the sea, and to the constructed architectural wonderlands of world cities. It is not inconceivable that vast areas of the planet could be configured into huge parks, where national borders are as porous to humans as they are to birds, bees, plants and animals.

You must excuse my flight of fancy, Commissioner. You may have guessed already that Cypriot limoncello can stir one’s imagination.

Tomorrow’s gathering will include a formal departure ceremony for the soldiers and diplomats heading up UNFYCIP. The contingent has been housed for decades at the Ledra Palace Hotel, once a 5-star luxury hotel, but in recent years a rundown hostelry that is nonetheless conveniently located adjacent to the Home of Cooperation. In the morning, UN officials will remove their blue berets and distribute green ones to the newly formed Peace Park Rangers, mostly young people from both sides of the buffer zone who are enamored with both the ideas and the practical realities that will sustain a shared park that will span the entirety of the island. In the afternoon, the Rangers will disperse to project areas scattered along the Green Line.

The IUCN and other closely allied non-governmental organizations have established a network of peace parks on every continent. For the next six weeks, I’ll be traveling to the most established and successful transboundary parks on the planet, the ones well along in the development as eco-tourism destinations of the highest order. I know I will enjoy the luxury of glamping in exotic natural settings and at the same time contribute something of value to each enterprise, whether that takes the form of cultivating a garden, helping to construct a home, tending sheep or counting elephants. I have great expectations for this para-diplomatic expedition. I’m bringing leather gloves, sturdy boots, and a phone equipped with the freshly minted peace park App. The Foundation has issued me an informal peace park passport, with the first page featuring the stamped logo of Cyprus. I can’t wait to collect others on the journey ahead.

I hope you will forgive the carbon footprint I’m about to make, as the flights will require many thousands of miles in the air. (My hat is off to the aerospace industry and its ongoing effort to replace petroleum with biomass derivatives in jet fuel.) The logistical complications ahead are being expertly managed by the Foundation staff here in Nicosia. They have become consummate travel agents, realizing that forward progress toward peace parkers’ participation in a new ecotourism opportunity will depend in large part on handling the complications of transcontinental transportation combined with short hop flights, boat trips, and some longish hikes to some of the more remote locations.

Here’s a synopsis of my travel plan:

The Balkan Peace Park conjoins the mountainous border areas of Montenegro, Albania, and Kosovo. The Peaks of the Balkans trail is now a well-trod eco-tourism pathway that includes well-spaced clusters of hut accommodations with meals and showers provided to weary hikers.

These three Balkan states have not been at war with each other but are the locus of many traditional clan rivalries and feuds.2 The main thrust of the park, aside from demonstrating that eco-tourism partnerships can attract international investment, is to forge effective water management policies that will block aggressive hydro-electric development schemes to the detriment of downstream communities, especially in Kosovo.

On the trail through the Balkan Peace Park

The Jordan River Peace Park is largely the creation of an innovative multi-cultural NGO called Eco-Peace Middle East. The group consists of Israelis, Palestinians, and Jordanians who have been working together to restore to ecological health the river that forms the border between Israel and Jordan. Despite its Biblical as well as political significance, the Jordan has suffered from dewatering diversions and polluting effluents for decades. The peace park is bringing it back to life, and then some. Eco-Peace Middle East has constructed solar energy arrays fueling desalination plants and pipeline pumping stations connecting the Mediterranean with the arid interior of Judea and Samaria, formerly known as the occupied West Bank.

Siachen is the largest glacier in the Himalayas. It sits on the border of India and Pakistan, in the Karakoram range of northern Kashmir. It has been the site of a high-altitude border war for nearly 60 years. The conflict has defiled the environment; there are piles of spent artillery shells and all sorts of human detritus littering the landscape. Thousands of oil drums full of human excrement have been pushed over the edges of glacial crevasses, and their deterioration has fouled the rivers emanating from the glacier. Siachen is essentially uninhabitable, but ecologically valuable as a vital source of freshwater. The war caused thousands of casualties, the vast majority due to harsh conditions, not combat. Now it’s over. India and Pakistan figured out a way to detach a senseless territorial dispute stemming from different interpretations of a cease-fire line established in 1948 (following the partition of India) from the larger and more intractable issue of how Kashmir will be governed.3 Now there’s a multinational Science Center on the glacier, set amidst The Siachen International Peace Park. The chore of removing the wastes of war will take years, but lots of expertise has been brought in from the environmental organizations that managed the cleanup at Base Camp on Everest.

The Korean DMZ that has served as the formal armistice dividing line between South and North Korea is shaping up as a peace park with diplomatic tendrils that reach into the highest echelons of both republics. The 2.5-mile corridor that lies along the Demarcation Line has remained untouched by human activity for 80 years. Bounded by razor wire and landmines for all that time, the DMZ has been a wild natural sanctuary for native plants and animals. Now the entirety of the wide strip crossing the whole Korean peninsula is officially parkland, with “peace villages” located at various junctures where conservationists from both the North and South work together to preserve the native species germplasm threatened by industrial activities on both sides of the border. The DMZ development has contributed to a flourishing of trust between former enemies, which in turn is influencing negotiations to establish the Koreas as a binational zone free of nuclear weapons.

Quemoy and Matsu are two islands controlled by Taiwan very close to the shores of mainland China. Once the scene of a 20^th century crisis that threatened to trigger a nuclear exchange between the United States and the Peoples’ Republic of China, the islands are now being treated as neutral territory administered as a peace park by naturalists recruited from the finest universities and technical institutes—there are many! —in China and in Taiwan. In addition, the park boundaries are being extended offshore, to demonstrate the viability of jointly monitoring and protecting marine resources.

The Rio Grande River Corridor is the outgrowth of efforts undertaken by the staff of Big Bend National Park in Texas and Mexican conservationists on the southern side of the river. A 20-mile-long stretch of the waterway and several acres of land on both adjoining banks is now designated as a transboundary peace park. Each year since it opened in 2042, the binational park administration has invited the U.S. Border Patrol and its counterpart federal agency from Mexico to join the residents of local villages for a two-day festival featuring a giant Tex-Mex picnic and mariachi bands from both countries. The park has become a thriving testament to a vastly improved relationship between the United States and Mexico.

I’ll be wrapping things up at Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park (WGIPP), the mother ship of peace parks elsewhere in the world. Through your good offices, I’ve received an official invitation from a joint committee of Rotary Clubs in southern Alberta and northern Montana to attend their biennial “Hands Across the Border” celebration, which will be held this year at Many-Glacier Hotel on the U.S. side of the park.

WGIPP is where it all started, back in 1932, when Rotary clubs lobbied their respective national governments to fast-track legislation to create the world’s first transboundary park. The U.S. and Canada were not in conflict, but bilateral relations were not great, and the Great Depression was putting a serious damper on anything not directly related to economic relief. It took a long time and a lot of effort to convene peace park practitioners from outside North America in an effort to build solidarity and the rudiments of a transnational network. It happened in 2017, the same year that the aforementioned Saleem Ali compilation was published, thanks to a small unit of researchers attached to the University of Montana. (The story is encapsulated in the video documentary I recommended above.)

Now Waterton-Glacier serves as a venerable and virtual band-aid on a sorely wounded relationship. In response to American proposals to annex Canada, and to harmful trade measures designed to punish Canadians’ unwillingness to surrender their national sovereignty to a bullying neighbor, the Canadian government has successfully forged strong relationships with Asian countries and the European Union. This diversification and departure from what used to be the most successful two-way commercial and military relationship in the world has not damaged the common cause of sustainable transboundary conservation that is at the core of the international peace park movement. We shall see how the Rotarians handle themselves in the convivial atmosphere of an historic hotel with views of a beautiful sub-alpine lake and a majestic mountain backdrop. The recent rupture shouldn’t spoil anyone’s appetite or attitude. I know I’ll be bringing a weary body but an energized soul to the occasion.

I’m leaving this island wonderland in two days. Cyprus is a time worn and battle-scarred ophiolite that has become a successful democratic federation and peace park launch pad to boot. Of the many tectonic shifts taking place in the sphere of global geopolitics, the focus on transboundary bioregional protected areas is certainly among the most positive. I think we should consider the international peace park movement as the tip of a velvety green spear.

At the end of this journey, I will be sending you some treasured souvenirs, including a facsimile of my Peace Park Passport (I’ll be keeping the original until I die!), a stone from the Siachen Glacier, collected by yours truly at 12,000 feet, and the compact edition of the just published guidebook “Let’s Go Peace Parkin”, which includes links to a phantasmagoric collection of photographs to accompany detailed summaries of a dozen transboundary parks and lots of information about how to get to each, find accommodations, what to eat, and how best to engage in the sundry volunteer activities that will earn the unofficial yet coveted and emotionally invaluable passport stamp.

I will also send you an annotated list of locations for future excursions on the peace park trail, as it were. The gathering here in Nicosia attracted participants from all over the world, so there were lots of suggested targets for advocacy and investment, including prospective transboundary parks connecting Venezuela and Guyana, Armenia and Azerbaijan, Tanzania and Mozambique, Ethiopia and Eritrea, the huge Great Lakes region in Central Africa, and on the Kurile Islands, where a long-standing dispute between Japan and Russia has been festering since the second world war. The linkage between peace parks and human rights is indirect, but irrefutable, and theory and practice combine to underscore the fact that environmental protection and conservation efforts in protected areas can leverage peacebuilding endeavors more generally. Picnics are perfect staging grounds for diplomatic progress.

Best regards to everyone toiling in the offices and in the field. I am your willing servant on a happy and ennobling mission.

Christopher Breen

The Arctic area is in many ways a mixing zone where a number of established nation states with martial histories and imperialistic interests come in direct contact with an aboriginal culture that is also a nascent transnational community. Inuit are a tiny minority spread across a vast and forbidding landscape. They have endured millenniums of harsh living conditions and several hundred years of cultural and economic penetration by industrial powers in search of energy and mineral resources.

The intersection of national power and ethnic perseverance is best characterized by a somewhat strange irony, or perhaps a paradox: The same powerful countries that want to own and control the Arctic have, over the past half century, recognized in law and diplomacy the legitimate indigenous claims to land ownership, otherwise known as aboriginal title. The enduring strength of the Inuit is thus partly rooted in the moral fiber of “white” culture—Canadian, American, Russian, and Danish. The Chinese are sort of welcome interlopers, with no history of colonial activity in the Arctic and no need for terrestrial properties, but with the political will and scientific prowess to help keep the peace and preserve the environment.

Despite the dark shadows case by powerful rivals engaged in this version of the game of nations being played out in the Arctic, a great deal of collaborative transnational scientific research continues apace. Here’s one specific example that caught my attention: There is a large biotech facility in Iqaluit devoted to the development of indoor hydroponic food production. Inuit families in this “urban” center have long subsisted on white bread and potato chips to accompany fish and seal meat. Air-freighted fruits and vegetables from the south have always been expensive and in short supply. The Canadians run the experimental garden—the staff is mostly Inuit—but there are also Danish and Russian scientists in residence.

The Arctic is a proving ground for the efficacious implementation of international law. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea is being put to multiple tests. Russia claims the Northern Sea Route as its internal waters. Canada does the same with the Northwest Passage. The United States considers both marine highways to be in international waters, outside the jurisdiction and regulatory reach of any one state. The transpolar route is entirely in international waters, but seabed resources are subject to regulatory norms and procedures.

For Russia, the country’s Arctic lands and adjacent ice waters have become a crucial source of income and national pride. For the United States and its NATO allies, most notably Canada, the region is the northern frontline of continental defense. China views its Arctic endeavors as an opportunity to diversify the country’s global economic interests. The contest for hegemony over critical mineral resources, maritime shipping routes, fisheries, seabed mining, satellite ground stations and polar orbit launching stations crucial to the space race has arrived.

The Inuit are a crucial social element in all of this, because as collective and interconnected landowners, they can curb the appetites of nation states for command and control of economic resources in a geostrategic space. Their cultural influences fly under the radar, so to speak, even as these same people help operate and maintain hardcore military installations.

The main challenge ahead is to avoid a shooting war at the North Pole. Hybrid forms of warfare, including commercial sabotage via underwater drones, will doubtless continue. The stepped-up presence of Canada’s Inuit Rangers on Ellesmere Island and elsewhere in the country’s Arctic Archipelago serves to tap the brakes on more overt confrontations. The Greenlanders’ resistance to America’s imperial designs likewise limits the extent of militarization on the world’s biggest island. The constancy of the Inuit Circumpolar Council’s peaceful agenda counteracts urges to exploit the Arctic’s plentiful resources without regard to environmental harms. The influences of aboriginal culture are not forceful. The Inuit exercise a unique form of soft power, backed up with hard truths about what it takes to survive in the Arctic.

The Inuit understand that we are deeply immersed in a mass extinction event. Their cosmic consciousness is a rarity, but it’s not unique. Recall the Australian Aborigines phenomenon of Dreamtime, sometimes called “Everywhen”, and described as a semi-mythical experience of encountering, in the present moment, an out-of-time ingathering of everyone all at once. Just think of it, the whole of history condensed into a febrile moment of awakening that leads to, let’s say, public policy sanity.

That’s all I’ve got, dear Commissioner, a set of dissonant preludes to war and peace at the warming apex of the planet.

I will await your next assignment.

Yours truly, Christopher Breen.

From: Christopher Breen, The Kestrel Group (NGO)

October 15, 2045

Dear High Commissioner,

I am completing this dispatch where I started my inquiries two weeks ago, here in Iqaluit. This small city, with a population hovering around 8,000, is situated at the water’s edge of Frobisher Bay at the southern end of Baffin Island. Iqaluit is the capital of Nunavut, a semi-autonomous and largely self-governing territory in Canada’s north that was carved away from the Northwest Territories in 1999 in order to accommodate the needs and demands of the majority indigenous Inuit people.

I am writing to you at midnight. The sun is out, low on the horizon. The sky is a leaden haze. Through the double-pane glass of my hotel room, I can see Inuit children outside playing some sort of chasing game. Some are on ramshackle bicycles, the others are running in all directions, screaming happily. Their youthful gaiety belies the frosty air.

I’m here, as usual, at your request, not to make a big splash, but to discern the status of indigenous (and other people’s) rights in a zone of brewing conflict. Can the Inuit withstand the social and environmental pressures of geopolitical rivalry in the Arctic? Can they play a role in preventing a revived and complex Cold War from going ballistic, thus threatening the basic rights of everyone living and working in the Far North? Considering the further penetration of the Arctic by mining and commercial shipping ventures, what are the human rights trade-offs in balancing the Inuit people’s cultural concerns with their material needs and wants?

I won’t purport to provide fully satisfactory answers to these questions on the basis of my brief sojourn, but I’ll take a shot at some preliminary findings.

I find myself witnessing, in real time, an advancing confluence of two monumental disasters: the continued rapid melting of the Arctic ice cap, including the Greenland ice sheet, and an increasingly aggressive arms buildup likely to culminate in violent conflict between Great Powers. The environmental meltdown is not only threatening the livelihoods of local people and the natural ecological systems on which they have relied for centuries. It is also causing problems all over the world, as rising sea levels threaten to inundate heavily populated coastal areas and the influx of freshwater into the Atlantic Ocean is interfering with currents that keep northwestern Europe temperate. Indigenous peoples’ rights and global warming are inextricably linked everywhere on the planet. Nowhere is this interconnection more acutely significant than in the Arctic.

I will summarize in short order the military machinations of Russia and the United States as well as lesser powers, including Canada and Denmark, operating in the area, but I want to mention at the outset the counterintuitive reality that China regards itself as a full-fledged “Arctic Nation”. This is a significant advancement beyond its claim to have legitimate “near Arctic” status in the 2020s. China anchors its broad interests in the importance of the fast-growing open water trade corridor transiting the North Pole and connecting Europe and East Asia. China has also become the world’s foremost advocate for technologies to mitigate global climate change, the effects of which are both manifest in and generated by the loss of permanent ice in the Arctic Ocean. I didn’t meet any Chinese on this trip, but I’ve been briefed on the giant tanker ships transiting during ice free months en route from a giant Russian coastal Liquid Natural Gas facility to an LNG intake port at Beihai in Guangxi province.

I was privileged to attend an annual gathering of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, a multinational organization created to strengthen ties among indigenous Arctic peoples and promote their rights and interests in the international arena. The ICC includes representatives from Inuit communities in Canada, Alaska, Greenland and the Chukotka region in Russia’s far northeast. The organization is recognized as a permanent participant in the Arctic Council—I’ll explain who that is in due course—and is actively engaged in the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issue. The Council has two basic priorities: Cultural Preservation (including language, heritage, and traditions) and Environmental Advocacy, which is now focused on mitigating the impacts of climate change on Arctic ecosystems. The first ICC meeting took place in Barrow, Alaska, way back in 1977. Michael Amorook, then president of the Inuit Tapirisat (Brotherhood) of Canada, remarked then that “For the first time in history, we have become one people”. A lot of history has transpired since, much of it destructive of indigenous culture, but the Inuit remain united in their struggle for a self-determined future.

The meeting was held at the Inuit Cultural Center, an ultra-modern structure designed to blend into the landscape on the outskirts of Iqaluit. The opening sessions were preceded by a cocktail party, of course. It was appropriately labeled an “ice breaker”, and it featured chilled flavored vodkas and an atrociously seductive herbal liqueur called Caribou that the French Canadians brought up from Montreal. Matters of degustation in diplomatic settings are endlessly fascinating, but I digress.

The elected leadership of the ICC has been consistent with its messaging over the past half century. Here’s Amorook again, early on: “Every culture has to have a home. All over the world these [indigenous] cultures are demanding their homes again…It is a human right, and time will show whether the so-called democratic societies will live up to their own human rights. No more than others can we tolerate the rights to our homeland being negotiated away by other people.” I heard a similar statement at the meeting two weeks ago: “If white society will appreciate that we have fundamental rights, and that we are particularly well qualified for protecting the Arctic environment, then we will have no fight with white society. We have merely decided to defend ourselves.”

The ICC has a charter, and I heard many spoken references to its provisions over the course of two days, including:

· Self-determination and local self-government

· Safeguarding and protection of resources of the Inuit homeland

· Preservation, retention, and further development of Inuit language and culture

· Development and improvement of adequate and safe transportation and communication systems

· Consultation and participation in all discussions affecting the Arctic homeland

· Proper and adequate game management

· Establishing funding mechanisms

The central theme of the Charter, and this conference, is that the Inuit constitute one people with a common language (Inuktituk) who are united through centuries of battling the harshness of nature for survival as whalers, hunters, and fishermen, and by the shared struggle against the depredations of resource exploitation by external corporate enterprises in league with national governments. The Inuit are resilient and resourceful people with a deep sense of collective destiny.

Let me pause before further mention of my itinerary. I need to address several aspects of sovereignty that are particularly salient in this part of the world. Sorting out sovereignty in the Arctic region is complicated, because the nation-state players do not have a well-established regime of rules that everyone adheres to--international law being largely unenforceable--and the indigenous Inuit constitute a transnational community attempting to safeguard their land rights and cultural traditions from the domineering instincts and policies of the industrial countries of which they are a part.

On land, the Inuit in Canada have achieved a significant degree of limited sovereignty through the creation and on-going governance structures of Nunavut. Native Greenlanders have done likewise, as the majority Inuit now enjoy a status and legitimacy equal to their Danish counterparts, who now constitute only 20 percent of the Island’s population but still retain high offices with respect to external relations. Alaska Native communities situated on the Arctic littoral exercise a lesser degree of sovereignty because they are more tightly integrated with Alaska state (as distinct from national) policies. Their indigenous Siberian neighbors have much less autonomy, given the relatively centralized nature of the Russian state. The inclusive membership of the Inuit Circumpolar Council is what provides considerable leverage for each group in relation to their respective “big powers”. The organization is a platform and backstop to Inuit land claims in each national jurisdiction.

On the ice and in the water, it’s the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) that helps to define sovereignty in the Arctic. The treaty allows states to declare adjacent waters extending for 12 nautical miles as Territorial Seas and for the establishment of Exclusive Economic Zones 200 miles out. UNCLOS also provides for underwater claims based on accurate mapping of continental shelves and has established an International Seabed Authority to govern deepwater mining. Most of the Arctic Ocean is regarded, and respected, as international waters, available to any nation to navigate freely. UNCLOS is all well and good, but the United States has yet to ratify the Convention, and military activities are outside its regulatory scope.

For the still politically dominant non-indigenous entities in the Arctic, all of the sovereignty issues stem from the same desires and fears: the desire to safeguard routes for military and commercial shipping, the desire to own the mineral, energy, and aquatic resources of the region, and the fear that others may gain what you lose. Until recently, for example, mineral riches were theoretical, but the melting ice has made the theoretical in many cases de facto reality: the stuff is there, it’s mineable, it’s merchantable, it can be brought to market in a cost-effective way.

Who owns the maritime resources in the Arctic basin? The issue is largely unsettled. In 2007, Russia sent two submersibles 14,000 feet deep in the Arctic Ocean to plant a titanium flag on the undersea floor. It was a dramatic expression of imperial ambition. Years later, naval maps crafted in Saint Petersburg included a name change; forthwith, the “Russian Ocean”. But nobody else acknowledges the legitimacy of Russia’s claims. 1

The stage is set for ongoing hybrid warfare rather than overt military confrontations on land and under the sea. Half of the Arctic coastline is Russian territory. Russia operates twice as many military bases in the Arctic Circle than all NATO members combined—that’s the U.S., Canada, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland. The Russians have built cities in the Arctic, powered by permanent nuclear power stations constructed to withstand enormous pressures of sea ice. Everyone else maintains middling and tiny villages, with relatively insecure supply lines often disrupted by weather events and highly susceptible to cyber-attacks and undersea cable cutting. Electronic jamming of surveillance and monitoring networks has become routine. Nuclear powered submarines—some presumably armed with nuclear weapons—prowl about and shadow each other under the ice. There is widespread speculation, bordering on expectation, that the next phase of competition will involve underwater drone attacks on commercial shipping.

The Arctic has become NATO’s freezing cold and vulnerable underbelly. The late 20^th century strategy of keeping the Chinese out, the Americans in, and the Russians down has all but failed. An increasingly detached and disinterested Unites States over the past two decades is the main cause. The so-called Golden Dome multi-layered air and missile defense scheme turned out to be a grotesquely expensive and unfeasible pipedream. While the U.S. and Canada have jointly maintained a sophisticated radar-based North Warning System in conjunction with the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) but both of these defensive structures have been made largely obsolete by technical advances in Russia and China, such as highly maneuverable hypersonic missiles and satellite-based aircraft cloaking devices. The Americans’ failure to woo Canada into outright annexation and the ingloriously unsuccessful attempts to purchase Greenland accelerated a shift of foreign policy focus to Latin America and the Caribbean.

Tim Marshall wrote a prophetic opening paragraph in a chapter devoted to the Arctic in his 2015 book entitled Prisoners of Geography. “When the icemen come, they will come in force. Who has the force? The Russians. No one else has such a heavy presence in the region or is as well-prepared to tackle the severity of the conditions. All the other nations are lagging behind and, in the case of the United States, do not appear to be even trying to catch up. America is an Arctic nation without an Arctic strategy in a region that is heating up.”

The disparities continue to widen. Russia has over three dozen ice breakers, ten of which are nuclear powered. The Americans maintain a fleet of only five so-called Polar Security Cutters and only a half-dozen ice breakers, which are still necessary for half the year. Canada and Denmark combined have thirty ice-worthy vessels. The United States is behind the eight ball, while America’s main adversaries have put their resources in every corner pocket. China and Russia’s “limitless partnership” has proven to be resilient enough to endure many stresses and strains in other parts of the world and has held firm in the polar region.

A four-hour flight on a Canadian Northern passenger jet transported me from Iqaluit to Yellowknife, capital of the Northwest Territories. Canada’s Northwest Territories and Nunavut comprise an area half the size of the United States. Two-thirds of the Inuit people live in these adjoining jurisdictions. They are scattered across the whole area north of the timber line from the Mackenzie River Delta near the Yukon border and Baffin Island in the East.

Yellowknife is the headquarters of the Dene nation, the largest tribe in the Northwest Territories. The Dene and Inuit are believed to have common roots in deep history, but the former group adapted to the forest environment, while to latter accommodated themselves to snow and ice. These different paths of development continue to influence debates about quality-of-life issues in the North; e.g., to what extent the material wellbeing of indigenes depends on the largesse of outsiders and their money. The Dene point to the benefits of the flourishing diamond mines spread across the Northwest Territories. They generate jobs, incentivize infrastructure (air transport, some seasonally accessible roads, telecommunications), and provide much needed revenue to support education and social services. The Inuit are more concerned about the loss of wildlife and the desecration of the landscape that accompany mining operations.

At the Territorial Government’s official chambers, I was granted the privilege of a front row seat to witness first-hand a meeting of the Arctic Council, the membership of which includes Canada (this year’s host), the United States, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Sweden, Finland, and the Russian Federation. It was a large gathering of mostly Nordic looking diplomats. (The American reps hailed from Minnesota and North Dakota.) In addition to delegations from the official member states, other countries were also represented, including France, Germany, Poland, Italy, the Netherlands, Japan, India, and China, all of which have official Observer Status at the Council. There were also teams from a half dozen permanent indigenous organizations (Indian and Inuit) with formal attachments to the Council that do not include voting rights but are nonetheless significant because they facilitate frequent expressions of native views on a variety of regional subjects.2 The Arctic Council is somewhat a smorgasbord of overlapping sovereignties, some more powerful but not necessarily more significant than others.

The Council’s emphasis has been and continues to be on practical environmental and commercial matters, not issues of national security. Those increasingly prickly items are dealt with in different forums, including NATO and the United Nations. Marine oil pollution (mostly related to the risk of drilling platform blowouts) used to be the primary concern. The south’s desire for fossil fuel resource development has always been counterbalanced by respective governments’ wish to prevent environmental disaster. An oil blowout in the Beaufort Sea would devastate arctic fauna and thus the native people that still depend on it for basic sustenance and cultural survival.

With the collapse of the hydrocarbon industry in the Arctic region, owing mostly to less costly production opportunities in safer and warmer climes but also to the now steadily advancing “greener” energy technologies (solar hydrogen, nuclear, and offshore wind), all of which have been globally distributed by mostly Chinese public/private enterprises, the current challenge is methane releases from the warming tundra soils.

According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Arctic area is warming four times faster than the rest of the world. Half the reflective sea ice has melted. Due to the albedo effect, this loss of reflectivity has added the equivalent of 25 years of worldwide CO2 emissions.

Arctic permafrost contains an estimated 1.8 trillion tons of carbon, more than twice as much as what is suspended in the atmosphere. Continued warming and increased wildfires are causing the Arctic tundra to emit more carbon than it stores. When it thaws, much of the released carbon evaporates as methane, which is orders of magnitude more powerful than CO2.

The Council’s science teams have been and continue to sound the alarm about all this, adding to their data sets the well-documented assertion that climate conditions can tip quickly in a non-linear way, with impacts that are profoundly out of proportion to added warming. I am out of my depth in all of this, but the lingering notion that global warming is a hoax has been thoroughly debunked, at least above the Arctic Circle.

Not everything “up here” hinges on the weather. Arctic states know that theirs is a tough neighborhood, less so because of competing national interests than the challenges presented by its geography. As Tim Marshall has summed it up, “There are five and half million square miles of ocean up in the Arctic; they can be dark, dangerous, and deadly. It is not a place to be without friends.” The denizens of rival governments know that for anyone to succeed in the region they may need to cooperate, especially on such issues as fishing stocks, search and rescue, and localized mining disasters.

That last item is particularly important. As mentioned above, the fossil fuel craze has crashed in the Arctic. Tensions over planned oil and gas pipelines connecting offshore rigs to southern refineries have receded. Meanwhile, mining operations have expanded. Nickel, copper, lithium, rare earths, and diamonds are attracting Canadian, American, Australian and Chinese investors.3

After the Council meeting concluded, I booked a flight on a VTOL Twin Otter aircraft to Ice Station Narwal, a remote outpost on Ellesmere Island. This turned out to be a hazardous 1200-mile journey that took two and a half hours. The pilot had to maneuver through rough weather and landed in a dense fog. The flight crew seemed unfazed, uttering quiet praise for the aircraft brand’s venerable reputation for sturdy reliability in the Arctic’s dangerous circumstances.

Ellesmere is huge. It has one permanent settlement, called Grise Fiord, located 720 miles north of the Arctic Circle. It’s the northernmost civilian settlement in Canada. It’s also one of the coldest places on Earth, with an average annual temperature of 2 degrees Fahrenheit. Ice Station Narwal is even further north; I cannot disclose its exact coordinates.

It was still light when we arrived, but way too cold to stay outside. I did relish an unforgettable glimpse of a band of Musk Ox in their famous defensive formation off in the distance. These hardy creatures have inspired a slew of papers published by military tacticians about how to mobilize and maneuver clusters of combatants in hostile environments. Alluding to Taiwan’s multi-pronged canopy of anti-ship and anti-drone missile batteries to deter a Chinese invasion, one analyst has characterized the Musk Ox as the “Hedgehog of the North”.

Inside the heavily insulated igloo-shaped building that harbors Narwal’s kitchen and dining space, my hosts were quick to offer Musk Ox pate as an amuse bouche before dining on grilled Arctic char. Eating well is a high priority in the Arctic.

The commanding officer at Ice Station Narwal was an Inuk from Rankin Inlet, a hub hamlet on the Kudludlik peninsula that fronts Hudson Bay. He voiced pride in his heritage and his position, to be sure, but he set forth explaining the role of the station in a typically Inuit modest tone. We couldn’t talk much about the specific duties of this small contingent of Canadian Arctic Rangers, because the bulk of their mission is closely connected with top-secret high-tech sensor networks, listening devices, and radar systems. Instead, we focused on the general, overarching purpose of their deployment in this remote spot in the “barren lands” of the high Arctic, which is to physically represent and demonstrate Canada’s sovereignty over vast stretches of its northernmost territory.

In earlier decades, the mostly Inuit Ranger battalion was provided with snowmobiles and bolt action rifles. Canadians from the south (where 90+ percent of the population reside) used to make jokes about the inadequacies of the country’s northern defense perimeter. They figured it didn’t matter much—the Americans would guard the zone. Things have changed. The “Use it or lose it” mentality of Canada’s national defense establishment is now fully ingrained. Monitoring and guarding the country’s northern territory is serious business, even with limited capacities when compared with the Americans, the Russians, and now even the Chinese.

It was at this lonely station that I was informed by an Inuk shaman about Sila, an enigmatic god-like persona/force that is both omnipresentn among and infinitely far from the people. My host showed me an amulet he had inherited from his ancestors. It was a small bundle of esoteric items collected from nature—some sticks, some fur, some stones—all of which are believed to provide protection from injury and evil spirits. It dawned on me that the old and worn St. Christopher medal dangling from a silver chain around my neck is supposed to lend a similar sort of invisible support. I wear it irreligiously, but with virtual fingers crossed.

I left the station a bit dazed and confused. Here’s a place where military modernity coexists alongside aboriginal mythology. Both are embodied in the laboring souls of individual Inuit soldiers. Considering this in a much larger context, it struck me that the Arctic is a place where the world is simultaneously self-destructing, and saving itself, through the spiritual “good offices” of the Inuit. It’s the same all over; indigenous people are key to human survival.

I didn’t make it to Greenland, but I learned a lot about it from my Canadian interlocutors. The giant icy island occupies a strategic location and has a large array of untapped mineral resources. Notwithstanding Inuit Greenlanders’ and Denmark’s rejection of repeated American offers to purchase and threats to occupy the island, the United States continues to operate Pituffick Space Base at Thule. The local government (and Denmark’s treasury) lack the financial wherewithal to build the roads, harbors, and airstrips necessary for natural resource development. Mining in Greenland, as in all parts of the Arctic, is expensive, bureaucratically complex, and politically sensitive. Native Greenlanders are wary of foreign investors, who are in turn averse to the environmental, financial, and political risks involved. China has become an important trading partner for Greenland, which supplies enormous amounts of fish (mostly mackerel and Atlantic cod) for an increasingly food-short Chinese market. The Chinese are showing strong interest in helping build new transportation and communication infrastructure on the island.

Indigenous Greenlanders have long lusted for greater autonomy from Copenhagen. Like their kinfolk counterparts in Canada and Alaska, they have attained formal recognition of their fundamental rights to the land. The Danish government granted Home Rule to Greenland in 1979. This arrangement provided for a legislative assembly to take care of local affairs, including education, culture, communication, industry, the labor market, and social services. All matters related to defense, foreign policy, and resource extraction and development have remained in Danish hands. Modern telecommunications technology and the advent of Inuit-owned and operated regional airlines has transcended the so-called “Ice Curtain” through the Davis Strait, separating Greenlanders from their North American Inuit cousins.

My next and last stop will be on Svalbard, the centerpiece island in an archipelago locatedat the convergence of the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans. It lies about midway between the northern coast of Norway and the North Pole. This part of the mission will not be focused on indigenous rights; it is both a personal quest to satisfy my curiosity about Norway’s underground seed bank (the so-called Doomsday Vault) built to gather and preserve all strains of grains and other foodstuffs in case of global catastrophe, and an informal intelligence gathering endeavor to substantiate our mutual concerns about impending military clashes. Regarding the latter, Svalbard’s adjacent maritime corridor, nicknamed the Bear Gap, constitutes a potential chokepoint that the Russian navy could use to block NATO reinforcements into the Arctic. By the same token, Svalbard could be used by NATO to bracket vessels and submarines from Russia’s Northern Fleet and supplement its alleged “kill zone” in the narrow seas between Greenland, Iceland, and the United Kingdom.4

The Svalbard Treaty of 1920 recognized Norwegian sovereignty over the archipelago then called Spitsbergen. (The name change occurred in 1925.) Norway is in charge of military affairs and commercial regulation, along with taxation. The main island has become a multinational community, with roughly 4,000 inhabitants, sixty percent of whom are citizens of Norway. There are 40 signatory parties to the Treaty, an indication of how important the islands are to the search for critical minerals and for related research and development endeavors. Russian companies are active. China has had a research station since 2004. Russian and Norwegian coal mining complexes were phased out decades ago and have been replaced with nuclear power plants.

Svalbard is officially a demilitarized zone. The treaty prohibits military activities. But in this place, as across the whole of the Arctic region, the lines between civilian and military operations have become increasingly blurred. Dual purpose technological applications abound, most evidently in the proliferation of undersea cables, increased marine traffic, and prospecting for critical minerals on the seabed and the surface. The data collected on ice, wind, and atmospheric and ocean currents is crucially important to military contingents and businesses alike. Norway’s SvalSat complex has over 150 antennas as well as large array of satellite receivers, uplinks and transponders. The. Russia claims that Norway is violating the Svalbard Treaty because much of this infrastructure is tied to NATO’s Arctic surveillance regime. The Norwegians have shrugged off the challenge, hinting strongly that Russian agents operate in the area with impunity. Svalbard is a frigid hotbed of security services and corporate spies. You will no doubt sense my attraction to the place.

THIS IS THE END OF PART 1. STAY TUNED FOR THE SHORT CONCLUDING PART II, WHICH IS COMING RIGHT AWAY!

The Office of the State Philosopher is not generally attuned to popular game shows, but we find it noteworthy that in 2027, the long-lived televised American-based game show Jeopardy featured an invitational episode wherein Trusted World Leaders was an official category. Contestants were seen and heard to choose “global leaders” for $400, $600, $800, $1,000 etcetera. (The U.S. dollar was still the dominant currency.) Mini video biopics were used to describe individual leaders of the time. Interestingly, the answers to the “Who is” question included European Union Commssioner Ursula Van der Leyen, International Monetary Fund Chief Executive Kristine Legard, and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. There were zero Americans on the roster of choices.

A Global Jeopardy show in 2030 DID include a number of Americans, but they were expats living in France and Denmark—two medical scientists and a geologist! who had left the U.S. during the Trump/Vance transition period. The game show is now ancient history.

OK, one more snipped snippet.

Can we trust national leaders “to be themselves”, through the course of their tenure in office? The three national leaders of countries with superpower status twenty years ago were seemingly candid about their aims, their methods, their sense of self. Donald Trump’s colossal narcissism; Vladimir Putin’s claim to represent an uncorrupted Christendom; Xi Jin Ping’s paternalistic style of ruthlessness—these were all seemingly authentic expressions of these leaders’ respective identities.

Consistency is one thing, but trust among despots and dictators is another. Too often, in the historical record, treaties of peace and friendship have been treated by tyrants as worthless sheafs of paper. (Hitler reportedly delighted in tearing them up.) Suffice to say here that save for the still mysterious effects of dementia, wherein people become slightly more kind and empathetic, or meaner than ever, political leaders rarely change their stripes.

September 15, 2045

It is tempting to proclaim at the outset of this Memo that the level of trust between and among nations/states in the international community is at an all-time low.1 The situation is not good--that is the plain truth. But we must also acknowledge recent trends that signal an upswing in collective trust levels in both domestic and international arenas. We will mention a few positive developments on the trust front, but not before accounting for a disturbing deterioration over the past two decades. We are issuing this Memorandum in the early Autumn of 2045, with sobering recognition that so much of what is true now hinges on events twenty years ago. As has been said many times in many ways and in many places, the past is prologue.

We will preface our assessment with some general observations. First, there are clearly limits to our capacity to measure an immaterial aspect of social interactions on any scale, including the global. We know that trust is indispensable, but it is also unquantifiable. Trust cannot be mapped, observed from space, or predicted by large language models.

There are metrics, and we employ them daily in the OSP’s vigilant analysis of how well countries are getting along with each other, and how much they depend on each other to prosper, thrive, or even just survive. Compliance with bilateral and multilateral treaties, adherence to the principles of international law, entering into new security, trade, and environmental agreements, the tenor of cooperation and the tone of rhetoric on the global stage: these are some of the barometers we use to gauge levels of trust among nations.

In recent years, one could fairly assert that trust is an increasingly scarce commodity, given the harsh behavior on display in international affairs, as evidenced in the abrogation of arms control treaties, the ubiquity of rhetorical threats to rain hellfire on adversaries, the destabilizing issuances of tariffs and non-tariff barriers applied to trade and investment flows across borders, the proliferation of economic and financial sanctions intended to punish states and prominent individuals for corruption and other sorts of bad behavior. In the first three decades of the 21^st century, many learned observers were predicting a near total collapse of trust across the board, affecting domestic politics almost everywhere as well as foreign affairs.

It's worth noting at this juncture that while OSP’s main focus is on international relations, we have to incorporate domestic issues into our analysis because they correlate strongly with trends and conditions on the world stage. There is no neat dichotomy separating public trust within national borders and the trust required to sustain successful diplomatic relations.

Trust is more than a condition; it’s an ecosystem. The trustworthiness of a country depends on myriad dimensions of trust in its domestic domains, including but not limited to:

· Trust in government, including its capacity for transparency, the accuracy of its statistical data and the integrity of elections

· Trust in other institutions of civil society, including schools, churches, and business organizations

· Trust in the convertibility of fiat currencies into goods and services

· Trust in the practical wisdom and self-restraint in elected and/or autocratic leaders, especially as regards the use of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction

· Trust in the scientific community and its dedication to the public good

· Trust in treaties, which is based on a deeper trust in the rule of law.

Trust everybody, but cut the cards. W.C. Fields

The OSP is working toward a unified theory of Trust. The project is in development. Thus far, we have drafted a typology, linked it to a braided spectrum, and posited a continuum that contains—but not yet fully explains—the ebbs and flows of trust across earthly time and space. This is a heady and challenging endeavor. We feel an obligation to share some of our work transparently. So, briefly, here are some propositions and hypotheses.

There are two basic types of trust: implicit and earned. The former stems from a common human yearning for friendship, the latter a reflection of the equally normal sense of skepticism arising from betrayals large and small. Implicit trust can be further characterized as visceral and emotional, whereas earned trust is more cerebral, even intellectual—certainly more data driven.

The combining of implicit and earned trust manifests at all levels of human interaction. It’s like a twisted braid with uneven features. Sometimes the implicit trust strand is larger than its more demanding counterpart, and vice versa. In general, this lumpy double helix is what gives people confidence in the mechanics of modern life. We trust the structural engineers who build bridges and water systems, the biochemists who craft vaccines, the doctors and nurses and dentists and farmers and plumbers and auto mechanics et. al. upon whom we rely for basic sustenance and security. Trust permeates the professions and trades. Without it, nothing works, chaos reigns.

In the realm of foreign policy, implicit trust gives rise to good faith arguments and what used to be called “gentlemen’s agreements”. Brotherly love, the concept of Sisterhood, belief in the commonwealth of humanity, these are wellsprings of implicit trust. Large-scale transactions, binding contracts, written (and honored) guarantees are pathways to earned trust. The real life of international relations involves both kinds of trust on a spectrum, from complete distrust to unbridled belief in good faith and goodwill.

The deep and fundamental value of trust is often enhanced by imbuing it with something supernatural, such as trust in the Lord, in Allah’s grace, in karmic justice. This occurs at all levels of consciousness, individual and collective. This is the main reason we theorize that individual behavioral patterns can be projected onto nations, and that there is a meaningful neural network connecting all the variations of trust spanning the globe. The metaphysical dimension of trust is ubiquitous, albeit less visible than the routine manifestations of implicit and earned trust.

Sadly, instant trust is not a product on the market, and virtual trust (as in the algorithmic machinations of Artificial Intelligence) cannot replace the genuine article. However, there is such a thing as an almost automatic and immediate trust between individuals and even sizeable groups of people. Trust emerges and rises quickly in emergency situations, when private citizens and formal first responders act swiftly and effectively to rescue people (and pets) to save lives.

Instantaneous trust also exists in more mundane circumstances, such as in airport lounges and waiting areas, lines at the grocery store, at trailheads and boat ramps. It is not unusual for complete strangers to enter into a trusting dialogue on the spot, sharing personal stories that are otherwise kept strictly confidential in the company of family members and friends, i.e. one’s trusted loved ones. Trust between and among individuals can happen in a flash, usually based on the look in one person’s eye meets and matches a similar look in another’s.

It seems unfortunate, given acute vulnerabilities on our shared planet, that nothing of this sort happens in the interactions of states. National leaders may experience genuine bonds of affection for their counterparts, but trust is another matter entirely. The building blocks of mutual trust between countries usually involve lengthy immersions in nonpublic retreats, in joint military exercises, in multilateral negotiations, and in shared cost and benefit scientific explorations.

Verifiable facts and figures matter the most in the earning of trust between countries. Stable relationships require nations to show and tell their economic and military data, except the secret stuff. Governments trust one another to keep secrets, and to engage in espionage, but usually in the shadows of otherwise well lighted cross-border interactions.

U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s admonition to “trust but verify” in dealing with the Soviet Union continues to be wise counsel for the security establishments of China, Russia, the United States, India, and the larger members of the EU as well as lesser but rising Powers in the Global South. Most small and middling states lack the technical means and broad capacity to verify the truthfulness of larger prospective antagonists. They are largely stuck with leaps of faith, resonant with Ernest Hemingway’s quip that “the best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”

Countries great and small do not enjoy the opportunity to engage in the same kind of trust-building exercises as smaller groups of people like families and tribes do. There is no equivalent, for example, in international relations, to the falling backward into the arms of someone you don’t even know in a small circle of participants. When relatively small and weak states seek trustworthy ties to larger allies, they must warily gauge the risk of seeking shelter in the arms umbrella of a proximate and powerful neighbor. Oftentimes, this is more fingers-crossed expectation than real trust. Hoping for the best doesn’t always end well in international relations, but distrusting everyone all the time is no recipe for small states’ security.

Having set forth a draft theory connecting interpersonal to international trust, and including the continuum in-between, we will continue this open-ended inquiry utilizing a quasi-Socratic Q&A format.

Can we imagine a robust renaissance of trust in governments’ ability to safeguard national interests and make further progress toward the realization of universal human rights? Certainly, transnational solidarity and collective security are always imaginable, because there are periods of modern history when such objectives were achieved, even if temporarily and imperfectly.

The United Nations, established in 1945 to end the scourge of war, and fashioned in part with due recognition of how and why the League of Nations failed, is the strongest case in point. Soon thereafter, in 1949, The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was established as a defensive alliance, exemplifying a renewed commitment to collective security. Détente between the United States and other Western allies and the Soviet Union manifested the capacity for a live and let live relationship between rivals during the Cold War. The Apollo-Soyuz space program went further and built trust among American scientists and Russian engineers. This collaboration grew stronger and deeper with the advent of the International Space Station. The Strategic Armaments Limitation Treaties, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the 1975 Helsinki Accords that accorded human rights a permanent slot on the Cold War agenda: all were based on a modicum of trust.

That middling and pragmatic level of trust between Russia and the West was always tenuous, but it was all but obliterated in the 2020s, with the Ukraine War’s corrosive effects extending well beyond the European theatre.

What destroys trust, at any level and in any context? In a word: Betrayal. In domestic, even intimate contexts, infidelity, the abandonment of familial obligations, and bullying constitute betrayals of trust generally regarded as sacrosanct. In the international arena, cheating on treaties, bullying the weak, and failing to fulfill commitments at crucial times are all examples of consequential betrayals of trust. In this context, appeasement of aggressive dictators illustrates betrayal on a grand scale.

We’ve chosen two historical examples linked thematically by the term appeasement that illustrate the gravity of betrayal.

There is no more instructive example of the tragedy of misplaced trust than the story of the Munich Agreement in 1938, when British Prime Minister Chamberlain proclaimed he had achieved “peace in our time” by caving to Adolf Hitler’s demands to seize the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia.

Chamberlain bears the brunt of post-mortem condemnation, but he was in large company at home and in France, where political leaders disavowed the country’s obligations to defend Czechoslovakia against any aggressor, most notably Germany.

As author J.W. Wheeler-Bennett explains with painstaking detail in his classic Munich: Prologue to Tragedy, Chamberlain had no credible alternative in signing onto the Munich Agreement. Britain was ill-prepared for war, having eschewed investments in armaments. There was a lack of unity at home and across the Commonwealth. French morale had collapsed. Soviet Russia was an enigma: suggesting a willingness to help the Czechs but lacking the capacity to do so. The Soviets were also suspected of harboring their own designs on Slovak majority areas.

Even accepting this set of contingencies Wheeler-Bennett asserts that the shame and humiliation of Munich can never be sloughed off. “In order to save our own skins—because we were too weak to protect ourselves, we were forced to sacrifice a small Power to slavery.” The blend of implicit trust in a Civilized Germany and what appeared to be earned trust in the form of solemnized pacts of mutual security in the 1920s failed utterly in the face of Hitler’s aggressive lebensraum agenda.

The shadow of Munich overhangs the whole of Europe a century after its defining moment. Fast forward to 2025, and a succession of Munich moments wherein the United States backed away from its support for Ukraine and its guarantee of broader European security in response to unprovoked Russian aggression. This betrayal was heralded by then Vice President Vance at the annual security summit in Munich, where he verbally chastised the European Community for being anti-democratic on the basis of not sufficiently respecting the free speech rights of right-wing political parties. Vance’s sympathies for neo-Nazi organizations were well known, and everyone knew he had the confidence of President Trump, whose admiration of Hungarian leader Victor Orban and his strange affection for Vladimir Putin were also common knowledge.

This regrettable Munich Moment was followed by a series of other betrayals, beginning in Anchorage, Alaska later that same year, when President Trump fell for Putin’s deceit at a bilateral summit expected to produce a ceasefire in Ukraine but resulted in talks that were pronounced “useful” and were followed almost immediately by massive Russian drone and missile attacks on civilian targets in Kiev and other western Ukrainian cities.2 The un-trustworthy spectacle of Anchorage was followed up more quietly by the Trump White House announcing its intention to halt long-term security programs for Europe, including an initiative to fortify the Eastern flank against prospective attacks from Russia. Now, in 2045, with J.D. Vance at the helm, the United States has all but forfeited the trust of its erstwhile allies in Europe.

The parallels of Munich 1938 and America’s Munich moments are stark and disturbing. In the end, the difference between these examples of appeasement is that the latter example did not result in World War III. This is mostly because the so-called Coalition of the Willing in Europe, and most notably France and Great Britain, did not repeat the moral and strategic blunder of appeasing a blustering dictator. They stood their ground, coalesced around a European Defense Force concept to replace NATO, and stuck to the guarantees of security for Ukraine, the Baltic Republics, and Poland. These guarantees were and remain embodied by highly trained professional armies, robust air forces, and precision tactical nuclear weapons, along with accelerated satellite and communications networks that have replaced America’s historic security umbrella.

Can we trust the information we gather and disseminate to fortify an accurate understanding of relationships between nations? Agreed to facts of political history and science-based reality are the foundation of trust in domestic and international affairs. Propaganda is a perennial problem. Twenty years ago, the U.S.-based RAND organization coined a phrase to encapsulate the blurring of facts with opinion and spin: “Truth Decay”, which was identified as a threat to national security by weakening military readiness and eroding America’s credibility with its allies. The RAND researchers also spoke to a deeper crisis, not that people believe in every fake, but that they begin to doubt everything, including authentic material. Persisting in this pattern produces “the liar’s dividend”—the erosion of confidence that ANY evidence can be trusted. What’s at stake is not only accuracy but the very idea that facts matter.

George Orwell and Hannah Arendt, among others, identified the ability to make stuff up as the core of totalitarianism. More recently, Jonathan Rausch states in his seminal tome The Constitution of Knowledge that one of the great achievements of the modern liberal state is “fact-basing”. Rausch further asserts that the whole point of general agreement on what constitutes a fact is that it forces people—and nations—to at least attempt to settle disagreements and disputes through persuasion, not violence.

We won’t belabor the fact that modern propaganda methods have undermined public trust in the media. It is a worldwide phenomenon. Would be and accomplished autocrats have taken cues from Hitler and his Nazi henchmen: big lies, repeated often enough, and reinforced with fear tactics, can become broadly perceived and accepted as the truth. We could easily issue a warning that serial liars cannot be trusted. As academicians, we prefer to put it another way, somewhat paradoxically--congenital liars CAN be trusted to lie repeatedly, and often.

Given the proliferation of politically manipulative fake news and deepfake videos generated by self-regarding Artificial intelligence, it’s a wonder that we can we still trust our own eyes, ears, and minds. Thanks in large part to the pioneers of digital literacy, trust in the news media and official statistics is on the rebound. Further, as trust in the so-called mainstream media has waned there is new-found confidence in the unfiltered freedom-oriented “news community” of independent commentators and podcasters on social media platforms.3 The concept of the “wisdom of the crowd”, wherein large groups collectively make smarter decisions than individuals, continues to be tested. Its success depends on a well-informed citizenry. Otherwise it simply equates to the wisdom of lemmings and sheep. To counteract the dangers of group conformity, it is essential to foster and environment that encourages diverse opinions, independent thinking, and critical analysis within the crowd, thereby promoting a more balanced decision-making process.

The OSP is openly biased toward democratic systems of government. As such, we refer our constituencies to a brief passage from the prolific scholar-diplomat Haass:

Democracy requires a foundation of trust. Citizens need to know that facts are facts. We can and should debate how to interpret them and what policies should flow from them, but we can only have such debates if we can agree on the relevant facts.4

Can nations be trusted to be true to their word? Are states capable of achieving, and sustaining, long-term trusting relationships? Is there such a thing as permanent friendship in international relations? In order, that’s a No, a nuanced Yes, and another No. Whether or not a once-sundered trust can be rebuilt yields a definite Maybe. It was very difficult to imagine, for example, that the mutual trust holding together the special relationship between the United States and Canada would be betrayed so swiftly, and with such vigor. Repairing that breach completely may prove impossible, whilst partial repairs here and there continue to be a pragmatic necessity.

The realist school of thought in geopolitics has long been dominant. The struggle for hegemonic power, the pursuit of a balance of power as the second-best choice, and the belief that national interests supersede international friendship always and everywhere are core principles of realism. We are in search of a way to freshen things up, without succumbing to idealistic flights of fancy along the lines of the Kellogg Briand Pact, a 1928 treaty outlawing war as an instrument of national policy, or the agreement China made in 1987 when it promised to govern Hong Kong under the principle of “one country, two systems” for 50 years following Great Britain’s handover of its colony. Outlawing war and trusting Communist China to honor its commitments to Hong Kong’s autonomy both turned out to be losing propositions.

Lasting trust between rival Great Powers is an anomaly. The patterns of ancient and modern history have a habit of re-emerging in fresh displays of murderous chicanery. The 1939 Molotov -Ribbentrop Pact—the mutual promise between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia not to attack one another (and to carve up Poland between them to boot) is perhaps the most obvious case in point. Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, ushering in years of barbarous slaughter.

In August of 2025, on the 4^th anniversary of Ukraine’s sustaining its independence in spite of Russia’s invasion and partial occupation, the visiting Prime Minister of Canada uttered a plain truth: “Vladimir Putin cannot be trusted.” He did not say Russia cannot be trusted. This is just one of countless illustrative examples of how individual leaders (and their henchmen) can and must be distinguished from the nations they represent, and, to a varying degree, command.

It is an uncontestable fact that Russia’s behavior in the whole of Eastern Europe since 1945 has earned it profound distrust in the region, hence the accession of Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and the Baltic states of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania to the NATO defensive reliance. Russia’s aggression against Ukraine brought Finland and Sweden into the fold. Putin exemplifies the principle that leaders bear responsibility for their actions, but does he typify Russian identity and behavior more generally? There is something deeply Russian at play here. It is tempting to assert that Russia can be trusted to “be itself”, meaning the population is always prepared to endure great suffering at the beck and call of the top leader(s).

I trust no one, not even myself. Joseph Stalin

Nations are not persons, yet they are often ascribed with personality traits, usually referred to as “national character”. Some examples: Americans are loud and brash; Germans are haughty and disciplined, Canadians are shy and self-deprecating, Israelis are arrogant and argumentative; people from India are duplicitous. We could go on and on with such hyper-generalized assertions of national character. Acknowledging that clichés always contain at least an outsized kernel of truth, we must nonetheless beware speaking glibly about the DNA of national communities or religious cultures. Consider Germany’s transitions from the Weimar Republic to National Socialism to the social democracy of postwar Germany. Take note how the intellectual composition of Zionism has changed dramatically since the movement’s founding and the establishment of Israel. It is changing again.

Has the level of trust between nations grown over time, through shared experience and a coalescence of common interest, or are state interests paradoxically both immutable and fickle, rendering international friendships untrustworthy? We find, with great disappointment, that trust is a non-linear condition of international life. It comes and goes; it wanes and it grows.

Trust in alliances based on the concept of collective security depends on high degrees of mutual trust. Article 5 of the NATO treaty, for example, expressly commits each signatory country to come to the defense of any other member(s) under external attack. The European Defense Force pact mimics this feature of the now moribund North Atlantic Alliance.

Joint military operations on land, sea, in the air and in space are essentially trust-building exercises. The sad irony is that these bonding experiences are preparatory for war, the ultimate failure of trust between international competitors. We can still trust in the foreign policy construct known as deterrence: The threat of force is often as productive as the use of force itself, particularly when force is available to back the threat when necessary. Mutual Assured Destruction continues to underscore trust in nuclear deterrence as a means of avoiding Armageddon.

One thing is certain, and enduring: Performative displays of trust are not to be trusted. The mutual respect implied in a voluntary handshake, a pat on the back, or a perfunctory hug on diplomatic stages ought never to be interpreted as genuine expressions of affection, even if they sometimes are. Feelings are ephemeral; interests are more permanent. The interests of nations and states can and sometimes do change over time. Trust is part of the built environment, which in turn reflects innate social instincts for safety and security. The accrual of trust allows for a softer, gentler approach to relationships. Over time, absent violent ruptures, anger and resentments fade, expressions of loyal and durable friendship become stronger and more frequent.

Is it possible to find trustworthy leadership figures outside of our domestic tribes and external borders? Yes, we are witnessing a transnational transfer of trust in leadership. For all its faults, globalization has created opportunities, especially for young people, to find political figures abroad worthy of confidence and trust. A case in point: Nelson Mandela, from South Africa. Long dead, Mandela continues to inspire hope and courage across the globe. Another example: Jacinda Ardern, the former Prime Minister of New Zealand, who graced the world with a fine memoir (A Different Kind of Power) and continued service as a world citizen by a leadership development consultant in the United States. And here’s a trustworthy bunch: The Elders. This non-governmental organization, founded by Mandela in 2007, is an independent group of global leaders working for peace, justice, human rights and a sustainable planet. The membership includes Mary Robinson, the first female President of Ireland, and with emeritus status alumni including former UN Secretary Kofi Annan and the late Jimmy Carter.5

This transference of trust across political and cultural boundaries is the strongest indicator we’ve found that a restoration is on the horizon, if not immediately at hand. Cooperative multinational developments on the Moon and beyond holds great promise.

One further assertion will conclude our Memorandum. Common interests are the bedrock of trust between nations. Increasingly, in the face of existential challenges to humanity, common interests are universal. This is now widely recognized, and such recognition is refueling trust in the United Nations and its myriad agencies and links to organizations dealing with global climate change, nuclear weapons proliferation, economic inequality, ecological sustainability, and the enforcement of international covenants concerning human rights and the laws of war.

The confluence of developments that link the domestic and international realms of public trust have been expressed with elegant simplicity in former American Secretary of State George Shultz’s shared memory on the occasion of his 100^th birthday. In an op ed in the New York Times, Shultz recalled receiving this guidance from his friend Bryce Harlow.

When trust is in the room, whatever room that was—the family room, the schoolroom, the coach’s room, the office room, the government room, or the military room, good things happened. When trust was not in the room, good things did not happen. Everything else is details.

There, once again, it is written. The Office of the State Philosopher has failed to find a definitive way to speed the plough of trust, or to prevent the deterioration of trust in international law and institutions of world order when domestic politics become corrupt and the grand betrayals of diplomacy repeat themselves. A world devoid of trust is a bleak prospect. The empirical evidence is overwhelming. But trust us, we will keep trying to shore up bastions of implicit and learned trust—to reinforce the flow and constrict the ebb of universal trust. For now, take care and follow Shakespeare’s advice: Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.

From: Christopher Breen, the Kestrel Group

August 20, 2045

RE: Astropolitical Developments on the Moon

Dear High Commissioner,

I endured without mishap or anxiety the 3-day journey two weeks ago aboard a Russian rocket launched from the spaceport in Kazakhstan to the joint Sino-Russian-Indian space station in lunar orbit. After a day of rest and some logistics briefings, I joined a half-dozen cosmonauts in the Space X Starship Human Landing System and touched down near the European Space Agency’s Moonbase Metternich, where I have been housed for the duration of my mission.

Thus far I have had the opportunity to observe meticulous preparations for the upcoming 50^th convening of the Conference of Parties (aka COP 50), hosted by Mongolia, and which will entail the first-ever simulcast transmission to and from Earth of multilateral public discussions and debates on the continued existential threats to humanity: climate change, nuclear war, global pandemics, and cosmic-scale natural disasters including collisions with asteroids and geomagnetic storms triggered by solar outbursts. The scientists assembled here in coming months will provide briefings to their terrestrial counterparts gathered in Ulaan Bataar next April. Many world leaders hope that COP 50 will solidify plans for a full-scale Moon Summit in 2050. So far, so good; hope is a many splendored thing.

At your invitation and directive, I have been temporarily seconded to the United Nations Office of Outer Space Affairs. My week-long orientation from the staff in Vienna was exhaustive and thrilling all at once. Attending a meeting in April of the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPOUS) was illuminating as well. That group, with representatives from over 100 UN member states, is earnestly trying to craft a legally defensible property rights scheme applicable to the Moon and other celestial bodies, including mineral-rich asteroids and, of course, Mars.

More on that shortly. I believe I am sufficiently prepared now to share some observations, and indeed some “findings” that I know will be of great interest to you and your colleagues in Geneva and New York. I know many people might question the relevancy of human rights issues in the environment of outer space, but those folks have not had the privileged experience of spending time amidst contingents of astronauts, cosmonauts, taikonauts (an informal appellation for Chinese spacefarers) and others whose perspectives on the human condition have been forever altered by their immersion in cosmological phenomena. Despite ongoing political turmoil on Earth, the degree of cooperation and mutual aid among a diverse ethnocultural mixture of Moon dwellers is truly remarkable. It all started with the International Space Station, which brought American and Russian and other spacefarers into very close and friendly proximity even while relationships on Earth were increasingly tense. This theme of space-based goodwill will come up again and again; I hope you’ll tolerate the repetition.

For now, suffice to say the further colonization of the Moon, and eventually establishing a self-sustaining human presence on Mars, raises a number of human rights concerns, including the real prospect that a technocratic elite will employ highly discriminatory policies toward various ethnocultural groups, women, mixed gender individuals. There is also the likely emergence of strict authoritarian hierarchies armed with advanced surveillance and social control technologies. “Technate” is the word for used by those who worry most about illiberal governance in space.1 Such a troublesome trajectory would obviously contradict the relatively smooth social interaction I just described, so I’m hopeful that human rights principles will come naturally to the inhabitants of celestial environments, given their high degree of interdependence for survival. Humanitarian doctrines always seem to break down under pressure. The way of the world may extend ineluctably into space without rigorous efforts to both refresh and enforce the principle of equality.

Let me briefly set the scene. There is now what could be described as a nascent lunar community situated near the south pole of the moon. This is where China established the first uncrewed permanent base in 2032, years ahead of schedule. Robots were replaced by humans two years later, and now the enlarged facility, called Chung Kuo, is shared with India and Russia. I want to underscore the somewhat surprising fact that the Global South countries have an outsized presence here, with both permanent staff (from India, Brazil, and South Africa) as well as visiting teams from other countries in the BRICS+ group.2 This is owing largely to China’s preeminent and patronizing role in the management of lunar affairs.

The area surrounding Chung Kuo is also the lunar locus of huge amounts of subsurface ice (providing a source of oxygen, liquified hydrogen, and water), networks of massive lava tunnels that can protect habitations from intense radiation, and a variety of other usable mineral resources. Chinese scientists have perfected a method of mixing regolith (crushed lunar rock) with chemical compounds to produce material suitable for 3D printing bricks, beams, vehicle parts, and even entire buildings.

Following the lead of the Americans, who erected robotically a single nuclear reactor in 2028, the Chinese have installed a network of small, modular reactors to provide electricity to their facilities. They are now sharing energy with other clustered sites in close proximity, including the EU’s Metternich (where I am situated), the UAE-Saudi consortium’s Medina center, and the joint U.S.-Canada-Japan Artemis complex.

You will have surmised by now that this settled part of the moon is partitioned into several multinational sectors. It’s reminiscent of Vienna in the early years of the Cold War, with the city divided into four administrative quarters: Russian, British, French, and American. In fact, and somewhat in gest, some of the older folks working here in Metternich refer to the subdivided area writ large as “Little Vienna”. Each party has been thus far respectful of the other’s “territory”, even though operable treaties disallow any sovereign territorial rights on the Moon. There is a well-understood principle of reciprocity in play here—a good neighbor approach--especially with regard to mineral exploration areas. Back on Earth there are concerted efforts to devise a more formally binding regime that would extend property rights into the heavens.

The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 forbids territorial claims on the Moon, but not usufructuary rights to resource development. Working with and through the aforementioned UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, international lawyers have been drafting language to establish property rights applicable to private citizens and companies as well as state enterprises and joint ventures.3 The aim is to prevent conflicts and also to develop mechanisms for the peaceful settlement of disputes over such things as mining claims.4 The effort is fraught, as advocates of the “first in time, first in right” school of thought are up against proponents of the public trust doctrine. (This debate mirrors water law controversies in the American West.) The Chinese and others are clearly predisposed to the public trust concept, since it is more closely aligned with Confucian principles and socialist ideology. Space X and other commercial entities have a more libertarian outlook. They say companies and individuals should be free to land objects, including crewed and robotic spacecraft, when and where they like on the Moon outside the now established Zones. It’s as clear as mud: the territorial imperative has no legitimate place in space, but competition for resources will still be fierce.

Efforts to bring clarity are ongoing. The Artemis Accords, first announced in 2020, are a non-binding framework that affirms the 1967 Outer Space Treaty and asks signatories to enhance collaboration by agreeing on international standards for equipment, pledging to help each other in emergencies, committing to sharing scientific data and protecting landing sites. The original members of this group were the United States, Japan, Italy, the UK, the UAE, Australia, and Luxembourg. The Accords are still in effect and are broadly respected. China and Russia signed on in 2030. The voluntary basis has made them easier to adopt. The Accords leave ample room for extracting and using mined resources, such as the ubiquitous regolith, water from ice, and a panoply of minerals—gold, platinum, titanium, silicon—as well as rare earths and helium 3, a non-radioactive isotope that could be used for nuclear fission.

I spend a lot of time at the centrally located Hammarskold Hut, so named in honor of Dag Hammarskold, the much-revered second Secretary General of the United Nations who epitomized courageously progressive thinking during his term from 1953 to 1961. The Hut is the social hub; I think of it as the first lunar pub. Alcoholic beverages are available, thanks to the ingenuity of the EU team’s resident Belgian brewmaster and the Russian contingent’s almost immediate construction of a sugar-fed vodka-producing still in an adjacent outbuilding. There are no franchised fast-food joints on the Moon, at least not yet. However, an enterprising cadre of Americans have come up with a bar menu offering “Moon Pie” pizzas. They’re not bad.

There are no bar fights; everyone here is a highly disciplined professional scientist, engineer, technician, or officer. Many “moonsters” have combined talents, of course. They are complicated individuals with an understandable need to take a break from complex and often dangerous tasks. Chess—both old school and 3D versions--is the favored contest at the Hub. The digital jukebox is attuned to mainly classical masterpieces, such as Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and excerpts from his magisterial symphonies. (A sucker for nostalgic tunes, I checked on the availability of Sinatra’s Fly Me to the Moon, and Henry Mancini’s Moon River--both not there.) The modest drinking at The Hub fuels convivial sharing of information about what’s going on in space and stories from lives on Earth.

What is most fascinating about these informal gatherings is how they evince a changing mindset, a rapidly developing cultural shift toward an authentic cosmopolitan cast of mind. National identities have not dissolved, but emotional and intellectual attachments to nation states on Earth are becoming increasingly subordinate to a collective consciousness shared by nearly everyone “at home” on the Moon.

A profound and rapid evolution is taking place. Decisions that have for centuries been based on raison d’etat (state interest) are now more couched in consideration of raison de Terre (in the interest of Earth). One can reasonably expect future generations of spacefarers will be less nationalistic and more universalist than their forbears.

You are probably somewhat familiar with governance issues on the Moon, but I find it useful to repeatedly remind myself of the background conditions as well as key milestones in international law that apply directly to the situation here and now. Firstly, back on Earth, the United Nations is still a mess. Multiple efforts to reform and restructure the Security Council and the General Assembly have proceeded in fits and starts. Progress has been hindered by on again, off again funding shortfalls and bureaucratic inertia. Corruption is pandemic in such a large, unwieldy construct, so detractors have a perennial heyday condemning the legitimacy of the organization. Still, the now 198 member states contain almost the whole sum of humanity—peoples and ideologies alike—and universality is still considered essential to the UN’s purposes.

The UN does not have an established physical footprint on the Moon. However, China’s unrelenting campaign to have its representatives occupy leadership positions in key posts within the UN system, including the headquarters Secretariat and the Specialized Agencies such as the World Health Organization and the World Food Program, among others, has led to China’s de facto domination of the UN. The People’s Republic and other national governments are still guided by philosophical precepts and binding obligations that have been more or less sanctified by resolutions and treaties accomplished under UN tutelage. For example, the same principled concepts embedded in the UN Charter and its accessory documents, including the Human Rights covenants, have a firm foothold here because they are essential to collective survival in a harsh environment.

The UN’s presence on the Moon is more symbolic than substantive. But symbolism, especially as it is manifested in language, is just as indispensable in space as it is on terra firma. The concept of “The Common Heritage of Humankind”, lifted from UN treaties and documents regarding the “global commons” of the oceans and seabed mining, is easily translated across national languages. It guides the hard work that is proceeding apace on the Moon—the exploration, experimentation, invention, and innovation that is intended to facilitate humans’ attaining settlements on Mars and beyond.

There is a legal order here that dates back to an earlier time. As I’ve already mentioned, The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 bans territorial claims on and over heavenly bodies. It reads: “Outer Space is not subject to national appropriation by claims of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.” In other words, the papally sanctioned doctrine of discovery that legitimated global imperialism has zero gravity here. The treaty further stipulates that space exploration must be conducted “for the benefit and in the interests of all countries”. It expressly forbids the presence and use of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction on the Moon.

The follow-on Moon Treaty, formally known as the Agreement Governing the Activities of States on the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies, was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1979. It entered into force in 1984, but, prior to 2029, fewer than 20 countries had signed onto it. None of the major space-faring states, most notably the United States, Russia, and China, joined until the fateful Anchorage Incident compelled a change in outlook and policy choices. I’ll get to that momentarily.

Key provisions of the Treaty include its declaration that the Moon and its natural resources are the common heritage of humanity and that these resources should be used for the benefit of all states and peoples. Further, according to the agreement, all activities on the Moon must be conducted for peaceful purposes. Military installations and the testing of weapons are expressly prohibited. The treaty encourages international cooperation in the exploration of and industrial development of the Moon, and it requires states to inform the UN about their activities and the results of their missions. It proposes the establishment of a transnational regime to govern the exploitation of lunar resources and to ensure an equitable sharing of benefits, especially for poorer, less-developed countries on Earth. Finally, to ensure the continued relevance of international law, the treaty aims to provide a legal framework for the activities of states, organizations, companies, and individuals in the further exploration of celestial bodies.

This is all well and good: The intentions are positive, the language is lofty, and the probable outcomes are promising. The Outer Space Treaty and the Moon Treaty together form a bulwark against militarization and overly aggressive and self-aggrandizing commercial activities on the Moon and beyond. It is worth noting that astro-economists regard the Moon, Mars, and reachable asteroids as veritable treasure troves of essential minerals and other materials. Treaties will help ensure that the bounty will be shared.5

I mentioned the Anchorage Incident as a propellant in this evolution in law. I will beg your indulgence for a somewhat lengthy recap of a “near miss” catastrophic confrontation that could have easily led to the annihilation of civilization through all-out nuclear war. In the years leading up to August, 2029, the Russians, the Americans, and the Chinese were all vying to achieve full spectrum dominance; i.e. unsurpassable command and control of the global geopolitical landscape, including the oceans (surface and undersea), continental and offshore land masses, airspace (from ground level to 60,000 feet) and each of the major orbital environments beyond the earth’s atmosphere. This colossally arrogant Great Power competition was pursued with self-righteous verve and accentuated by artificial intelligence and quantum computing power.

Beginning in the early 2020s, fearing a Pearl Harbor-style attack, the Pentagon was in a rush to prepare for war in space, publicly stating that it would be the battleground of the very near future. “Space has emerged as our most essential war-fighting domain,” proclaimed the U.S. Vice Chair of the Joint Chiefs in 2024. Space Force and Space Command were added to the pantheon of military branches, and private contractors were tasked with creating a new ground-based radar surveillance system called the Space Fence.

While The Outer Space Treaty disallows weapons of mass destruction in orbit or on celestial bodies, it does not apply to laser-armed satellites. U.S. military leaders believed that that Russian and Chinese space-based operations constituted a mounting threat to American satellites and to ground-based troops, naval vessels, overseas and domestic bases. China and Russia had already tested and deployed ground-based high energy lasers, anti-satellite missiles, and highly maneuverable surveillance and reconnaissance vessels in space. (In an early show of force, China had destroyed one of its own satellites in 2017.) China was perceived to have established a “kill web” over the entire Pacific Basin, capable of finding, tracking, and targeting U.S. and allied fleets and installations.

In the context of this formidable challenge, much of America’s leadership and investment in space exploration, including a sophisticated combination of space station and landing craft called Gateway (with component parts fabricated by Canada and several European partners) was displaced by a wholesale shift in priority to military concerns and objectives. As it turns out, there was no Pearl Harbor singular event. What actually occurred was more closely akin to the Cuban Missile Crisis. I will elaborate briefly.

A hyper-nationalist cabal within the Russian government, harboring bitter resentment against NATO and the U.S. for forcing Russia to abandon its claims to and occupation of Ukraine in the late 2020s, decided to mount a stunning demonstration of military capability. In simultaneous sequence, the Russians deployed their newest Cosmos 2570 multiple capsule “nesting doll” military satellite to attack U.S. satellites and launched an array of hypersonic missiles from a nuclear submarine to take out a ground-based array of radar installations near Anchorage, Alaska. This Russian blitzkrieg was designed more to punish and intimidate the United States than to provoke a war, but it brought a quick and robust retaliatory response, nonetheless.

The Americans used a combination of kinetic (explosive ramming) devices and particle beam and laser weapons to destroy a large number of Russian space assets. Meanwhile, the so-called Space Fence was bolstered by layers of ballistic missile interceptors to guard against further attacks. With both sides largely blinded by exchanges in space, further escalation to the use of nuclear weapons on the ground was a near certainty.

Then, suddenly, China intervened. It used quantum computing power to intercept and interpret encrypted signals from U.S. and Russian command centers and then used its own directed energy space resources to disable electrical grids and put most of America and Russia in the dark. Then, taking advantage of its Tiangong space station, strategically positioned at L2 (where the gravitational pulls of the Earth and Moon are in balance, allowing for permanent and stationary geopositioning), and a fleet of “Divine Dragon” robotic space planes, the Chinese Space Command units used electronic magnetic pulse technology to temporarily shut down American and Russian communication satellites. This was a brilliantly terrifying demonstration of China’s military resources in space without resorting to the permanent destruction of constellations of satellites and terrestrial infrastructure. China’s action was in keeping with its documented intent to utilize “surprise, plus swift, limited, over-awing strikes in and from space”, as a means of bringing about an enemy’s quick capitulation.

It worked. Russia backed down from further attacks; the U.S. backed away from more punishing retaliation. Humbled by the experience, both countries followed China’s immediate next step to ratify the Moon Treaty. Furthermore, the finesse of the intervention shielded China from the bad optics of a hegemonic power play. World opinion tilted strongly in their favor. Most importantly, an effective truce has lasted now for five years, and there are no signs of a violent relapse.

The Anchorage Incident proved that China could, after taking a decisive lead in the race to establish a permanent base on the Moon and deploying laser and particle beam-equipped satellites in multiple orbits, effectively control cislunar space, that is, the vast area between Moon and Earth, including vitally important transport and re-supply traffic in the cislunar corridors. This astropolitical advantage is analogous to geographic chokepoints on Earth, such as the Turkish-controlled Dardanelles Strait separating the Black Sea from the Mediterranean. In short, China owns the “Bosporus” above Earth’s atmosphere.

All of the above has culminated in a freshly minted doctrine in space: Deterrence by Demonstration. It could be characterized as a multilateral extension of the Peace Through Strength concept that drove American strategies during and after the Cold War. Multiple nuclear-armed states have the capacity to engage in mutually assured destruction on Earth. The logic of mutual restraint to prevent annihilation is holding firm. However, by demonstrating the space-based capability to black out military communication systems and disrupt electrical grids almost anywhere on Earth, China has ushered the world into a new phase of deterrence.

Notwithstanding China’s space-based advantages, full spectrum dominance is beyond the capacity of any existing Earthly power. The scene on the Moon reflects the power balance on the home planet: no one state can claim or maintain hegemony. Through formal and informal alliances, governance on the Moon reflects a “multi-polar” world order. The partitions of lunar territory into Zones with fences are largely, so far, respected by all parties. Remember again the situation in Vienna after the Second World War, where zonal arrangements held for years and did not break down into violent conflict. The Moon isn’t anything like Austria, but its governance structures reflect a successful experiment in power sharing.

In the wake of the Anchorage Incident, the U.S. shifted away from national interest space policy in favor of commercial development. Instead of seeking to command the heights, the focus has become making money. American leaders have decided they can capture much of the business dimension of lunar settlement even if they’ve been forced to relinquish aspirations for military supremacy. U.S. firms dominate lunar mining. More precisely, most of these companies are resident in the United States; that’s where most of their management and operational staffs live, and that’s where most of their operating capital is coming from, even though many of the corporate top brass are immigrants from places like India, China, and South Africa.

Space X, acting on behalf of the United States, operates much like the East India Company did for the British Empire centuries ago, forging commercial and quasi-diplomatic relationships through muscular and nominally legal negotiations. The Musk enterprise is associated with a hodge podge of mostly American private companies building launchers, rovers, and mining robots. They’re all busy on the Moon, but their primary interest and “main chance” is Mars.

I have no direct experience inside the perimeters of any lunar mining operations. Nobody has invited me on a tour. The companies jealously guard their facilities with lights, cameras, and fences. The Americans in particular have a penchant for putting up signs saying No Trespassing, Keep Out, Private Property. I’ve not been allocated the status or station to challenge the legitimacy of these patterns and arrangements. They seem to be working.

I’ll wrap this up. The experience of establishing space colonies cooperatively has profoundly altered national perspectives on world order. Someday soon, perhaps in our lifetime, Mars and other distant bodies may be subdivided in accordance with further restrictions on sovereignty in the lunar environment as well as the condominium principle that has guided the governance of Antarctica back on Earth.6 More immediately, and dramatically—in 2050 if planning and prediction hold steady--the Summit on the Moon will bring Chinese, American, European, Indian, Japanese and Russian diplomats together in a Concert of Powers to resolve the most enduring and dangerous threats to humanity on our home planet. Peace on Earth may be settled by a secular conclave in the Sea of Tranquility.

I’ve paid my bill at The Hammarskold Hub. (By the way, bar tabs and Moon minerals alike are priced and paid in “BRICs”, a digital currency which is convertible into dollars, euros, yen, rubles, and rupees.) I’m submitting a formal recommendation to UNESCO that The Hub be named the first World Heritage Site in space. I’ve enjoyed this mission to a cold and dangerous place that is also uniquely convivial and not at all lonely. For the umpteenth time, the Europeans have punched up Beethoven’s Ode to Joy (from his 9^th Symphony) on the jukebox. Everyone hums along, sometimes loudly. Me too.

My own mind has been changed by the experience. I see the world differently, just as the Apollo astronauts and their successors insisted we all would and should. I recall that Bill Nelson, the NASA Administrator way back in the 2020s, replied to a television interviewer’s query about the significance of his agency’s mission this way: That’s the power of space—to unite nations for the benefit of humanity. Thinking farther ahead, but in the same vein, the author of a book about colonizing Mars wrote that “to prevent space from becoming a theater of war will require a shift in thinking away from state competition and toward peaceful cooperation...The highly precarious nature of life on Mars will inevitably lead to new social mores and codes of behavior. Far from being rugged individualists, Martians will rely on each other for their very lives in a highly interdependent way—and they’ll reflect that, both in their relationships and their laws.”7

I know this is nothing new for you and the legions of other international civil servants working within the UN system, but it’s a paradigm shift for most others. Let’s be straight: There will be no Marlboro Men on Mars. Having lived for only a brief while on the Moon, I know now that hope is not a naïve sentiment, but rather a universally activating source of inspired collective behavior.

Yours truly,

Christopher Breen