By Colleen Shogan

Grace Coolidge, a dedicated educator for the deaf, never envisioned becoming First Lady of the United States. She married Calvin Coolidge, a man characterized by reserved speech, deliberate action, and discreet ambition. Upon Calvin Coolidge’s accession to the presidency following Warren Harding’s unexpected death in 1923, Grace found herself at the heart of American political discourse, a position she had neither sought, anticipated, nor desired. However, it was precisely her unassuming authenticity that endeared her to the nation and provides a lasting lesson regarding the potency of genuine character and sincerity in public service.

Grace Coolidge’s authenticity was rooted in an unwavering commitment to her personal values and religious beliefs. She did not create a persona to meet expectations or generate political support; she simply extended the warmth and cheerfulness that defined her private life to her public duties. Unlike many First Ladies — who shaped policy, influenced decisions, or championed grand initiatives — Grace understood her role as one of sociability and meaningful connection. She resumed public tours of the White House, greeting visitors with an affable charm that contrasted sharply with her husband’s reserved demeanor. In doing so, she provided Americans with an early dose of accessibility to the presidency during a historical period of rapid social and economic change.

The 1920s were also an era of exuberance and excess. Jazz clubs flourished, consumerism surged, and Americans were captivated by new technologies, flashy clothing, materialism, and modern lifestyles. In this environment, cynicism about politics took root; the recent Harding scandals had eroded public trust and contributed to a growing national sentiment of skepticism. Grace’s genuine approach offered an antidote to this burgeoning suspicion of government and political leadership. Her readiness to laugh, her friendliness toward guests, and her spontaneous joy at public events served as a discreet yet potent example that integrity could still reside in the nation’s highest offices. Although she may not have explicitly articulated it in these precise terms, Grace Coolidge undoubtedly comprehended the value of soft power.

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As first lady, she became a celebrity in her own right. This was a remarkable occurrence, since President Coolidge and Grace agreed she would not accept interviews, give speeches, or make waves. Despite shunning a formal media role as first lady, Grace still became famous. Her renown was due to her vivaciousness and dogged authenticity, which naturally drew people to her.

Perhaps the most poignant illustration of her authenticity occurred during the summer of 1924, when the couple’s youngest son, Calvin Jr., tragically passed away unexpectedly from an infected blister. This devastating event profoundly affected both parents. President Coolidge retreated further into his customary silence, while Grace exhibited remarkable openness in bearing her grief, uncommon for that era. Her public appearances, resumed only a few weeks after her son’s demise, were characterized by a palpable and dignified sorrow that resonated deeply with the American people. Instead of concealing herself or fabricating a narrative to safeguard her image, she permitted the public to observe her as a mother in mourning. She wore white during this time, an unusual decision but in keeping with her spiritual nature. This display of vulnerability fostered a shared sense of humanity between Grace Coolidge and the nation.

Grace also demonstrated authenticity in her unshakeable devotion to her husband Calvin. She never shied from his quirks or his reticence; instead, she balanced them with her cordiality and convivial demeanor. She knew her husband better than anyone and subtly guided him through the impersonal demands of politics. When he routinely exhibited curtness at White House receptions, she greeted guests with a noteworthy enthusiasm. Her honest affection helped soften President Coolidge’s public image and humanize a president often caricatured as aloof and indifferent. During an era when the mass media had begun to cover the president as a person as well as a politician, Grace Coolidge’s actions had a real political impact.

Mrs. Coolidge consistently demonstrated unwavering support for individuals with disabilities. Helen Keller visited the White House as her guest, and Grace maintained her lifelong vocation of assisting the deaf community. Her dedication in this field stemmed from a lifelong passion, commencing with her work as a teacher at the Clarke School for the Deaf prior to her marriage to Calvin. As the first First Lady to earn a bachelor’s degree, Grace’s energy and enthusiasm for this population were evident in the purity of her motives, excluding any political concerns associated with her work.

Grace’s genuine spirit manifested in small, endearing moments. A profound affection for animals permeated her life. In 1926, when a live raccoon was dispatched to the White House for Thanksgiving dinner, Grace made a compassionate decision to spare the creature. Instead of considering it a meal, she named the raccoon Rebecca, took her under her care as a pet, and permitted her to roam the White House grounds and even participate in the annual Easter egg roll. Rebecca swiftly became a beloved figure, captivating both visitors and the media. Grace’s choice to embrace the raccoon as an integral part of her family showcased her playful spontaneity and disregard for conventional, formal expectations. Through Rebecca and her canine companion, Rob Roy, the public witnessed Grace’s remarkable capacity for kindness and whimsy, qualities that endeared her to the hearts of many and rendered her approachable and authentic.

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In many ways, Grace Coolidge reminds us that authenticity is not about constant openness or endless self-disclosure; it is about consistency between one’s private values and public actions. Even though she gave no interviews during the White House years, the truthful persona she embodied was so powerful, it simply shone through as journalists observed her behavior and actions as first lady. Her example teaches us that public figures do not need to adopt artificial polish or hide behind carefully constructed facades. Rather, by simply being true to themselves and to those they serve, leaders can inspire trust and loyalty that no manufactured image can ever achieve.

In today’s world and our contemporary political life, authenticity is both elusive and desperately needed. We live in a time when public figures are often scrutinized for every inconsistency, and yet, paradoxically, many strive to maintain carefully managed brands rather than display their genuine selves. The lesson from Grace Coolidge is that authenticity cannot be faked or manufactured. When it is real, it transcends political divides, fosters empathy, and strengthens the bonds of civil society, which, in turn, supports the functions of a republican democracy.

Grace Coolidge’s legacy lies not in her overt political influence or significant legislative achievements, but in her unwavering embodiment of the values she espoused. Her laughter, grief, and unwavering support for her husband exemplified a leadership model that prioritizes sincerity over strategy and personal character over calculated actions. By reflecting on Grace Coolidge’s life, we are reminded that authenticity is not a luxury in public life, but a fundamental requirement. It remains one of the most effective means for leaders to establish meaningful connections and maintain public trust in elected officials and the democratic institutions they serve.

Colleen Shogan is the CEO of In Pursuit, a senior advisor at More Perfect, and a Miller Center senior fellow. She served as the 11th Archivist of the United States. This essay also appears on the In Pursuit Substack channel.

Wikimedia Commons

By Sarada Peri

Recently, Miller Center Professor Barbara Perry wrote about Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s decision to publicly document her egg freezing journey. Perry thoughtfully reflected on the gendered landmine AOC faces, and the reality that women in politics – and everywhere – face a reproductive double standard. While affirming AOC’s right to make that choice, Perry wondered whether speaking so openly about her reproductive health will make the issue fair game for other female politicians and cement the notion that babies are a disqualifying factor for women running for president.

These are all valid concerns that I share. The probability that we could hear a question on the debate stage – AOC told us she was freezing her eggs, how about you? — is no doubt greater than it was last year and, admittedly, chilling.

Unfortunately, there is no way for a female politician to avoid gendered scrutiny and double standards. They are the price of entry into a contest that an American woman has, astonishingly, never won. Given our 24/7 media environment, we no longer live in a world where one can head off attention by simply not talking about the subject. Indeed, for someone like AOC, the fraught questions were baked in from the start. She is unusually young for a woman plausibly considering a presidential run, is approaching the exact age when reproductive questions become an issue, and she is already the personification of clickbait for the rabid right wing. Speculation about her reproductive life will only continue — and no evasion or silence on her part will deter the pursuit of such a rich content vein.

One way to handle the inevitable chatter is to seize your own narrative, which means accepting that, in 2026, a politician’s communication cannot be neatly divided into personal and professional categories. Once upon a time, a member of Congress could share a carefully staged glimpse of family life through a holiday card and then retreat behind press releases and floor speeches. Those days are long gone.

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Part of what makes AOC such a gifted political communicator is that she has developed a familiar, almost intimate relationship with her enormous audience. We can debate whether politicians are performing by definition and whether their jobs allow for genuine authenticity. But whatever the reality, people feel like they know her because she appears in their social media feeds as an unrehearsed version of herself, talking about things they actually care about in language they actually use.

And she’s not just knitting on TikTok. I mean, she is knitting on TikTok. But she also did a livestream where she answered queries about climate change while assembling IKEA furniture. She documented her new member orientation over Instagram stories. She used a Vogue makeup/skincare routine video to talk about the different expectations women face. She shared on TikTok how she asked a Republican colleague why he supported cuts to rural hospitals. All of this helps her do maybe the single most important job of an elected official: Build trust.

That doesn’t mean that someone seeking higher office must reveal their medical procedures or reproductive plans. For plenty of folks — though, importantly, not for AOC — that would be out of character. Nor does anything about this discussion excuse, say, Senator Mitch McConnell from concealing his health status, which has mysteriously kept him away from the Senate. Those are different things. But anybody who runs for office must figure out how they’re going to show up as a real human being and not some airbrushed, over-consulted walking press release.

Voters are used to a particular electoral cadence. Every two or four or six years, candidates emerge, showing up in ads and in grocery stores, shaking hands and kissing babies and performing the work of running for office. It doesn’t exactly make you feel like they are truly invested in you. Politicians like AOC who build a deeper level of support spend time cultivating that relationship every day, so that come Election Day, nobody is confused about who she is, what she believes, and whether she’s spent any time listening to her constituents.

There is always a risk in being so open. Those who genuinely believe that mothers of young children have no business holding political office can twist her story to support their claims. But her willingness to speak honestly about a difficult, deeply personal subject can build a more resilient kind of political trust than any campaign promise ever could.

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One of the most potent lessons from the past few election cycles is that successful political communicators tend to blur the line between politics and culture. Politics is toxic and the average person doesn’t want to live there. To reach ordinary people, you have to meet them in the cultural spaces and conversations they’re already inhabiting. People form their impressions of politicians while watching, reading, listening to, and talking about things that don’t present as political.

AOC is a congresswoman from New York, but she is also a massive cultural figure with a huge online following who has now used that presence to destigmatize egg freezing. She may be sharing her experience in part to help other people enduring fertility treatments, whether egg freezing or IVF, feel a little less alone.

Maybe watching a member of the House of Representatives injecting herself with hormones will alienate some. But the people most likely to be put off by her disclosure are unlikely to be ones she risks losing. And in a sly way, she is teaching. Explaining the egg-freezing process requires explaining the underlying biology, which even some elected officials have misunderstood.

There was a time when people encountered political leaders mostly within the limited context of politics. Now, they see them constantly in their feeds, jumbled with friends, news, celebrity gossip, influencers, and culture writ large. If we are worried about declining trust in government, it is worth paying attention to leaders who communicate in ways that allow them to be less transactional.

None of this is an endorsement of AOC for president. Perry is also right to be frustrated by the confounding burdens female politicians face. I certainly am. But there is a lesson in how AOC has handled those burdens: Even after the initial uproar, she kept going. Her persistence in the face of criticism revealed a degree of conviction. Rather than sidestep an issue people were always going to use to define her, she chose — in a deft act of political communication — to broadcast it on her own terms.

Sarada Peri served as special assistant to the president and senior speechwriter for President Barack Obama. She was a speechwriter at three Democratic National Conventions and, in 2024, she co-managed the convention writers’ room, shepherding 200 speeches from conception to delivery.

DrKontogianniIVF, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

By Barbara A. Perry

When the price of eggs became one of the inflationary issues in the 2024 presidential race, it was the chicken variety, not those from human ovaries. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s recent announcement that she was freezing her eggs (personal, not store-bought) raised a torrent of questions about what we need to know about our public officials’ medical and reproductive information. Moreover, does biology require that these procreation issues remain inevitably gendered? If so, does more information, rather than less, from women empower them or restrict their personal and political choices?

AOC’s decision to preserve her reproductive options is perfectly understandable for a 36-year-old woman who is as aspiring as her male colleagues in Congress and is mentioned as a future Democratic presidential nominee. As she observed in her announcement, men don’t have to worry about that ticking biological clock and aren’t judged in the working world by its advancing time. Republican Senator Strom Thurmond, known on Capitol Hill by the mocking nickname “Sperm Thurmond,” fathered four children well into his 70s, with his second wife, who was 44 years his junior. Voters might have preferred to know the paradox of this segregationist’s fathering a child with his family’s black housekeeper, who was a teenager when young Strom impregnated her. Only after his death, at age 100, did his biracial daughter confirm that the long-time senator was indeed her father.

The procedure to harvest and preserve eggs is onerous (requiring frequent hormone injections and invasive gynecological procedures), but it is not debilitating. So why do “we the people” need to know that an officeholder is pursuing it? A less complicated though delicate procedure undertaken by men for the opposite goal of preventing pregnancy—vasectomies—is also news we don’t need to know about our politicians, despite the fact that these decisions impact the family lives of our leaders. One could even argue that by announcing her egg-freezing decision, AOC has drawn attention to the very concern she is attempting to neutralize: the prospect that pregnancy will detour a woman’s road to higher office or affect her performing its duties.

For many female political leaders, egg harvesting and preservation simply hasn’t been a pertinent issue (even if it had been a normalized procedure, which didn’t occur until 2012). Hillary Clinton, Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, and Indira Gandhi all had adult children when they ran for or became their countries’ leaders. When she sought the presidency in 2024, Vice President Kamala Harris had two older stepchildren, who called her “Momala.” Harris was 50 years old when she first married, so childbearing was moot for her at that time in her political career. Conversely, Queen Elizabeth gave birth to her last two children well into her reign, and her older son, the future King Charles III, and daughter were teenagers. She was not the United Kingdom’s head of government, but, as head of state for a still-global empire, she maintained a full-time position and travelled widely, while nannies cared for her children before they attended boarding schools.

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Japan’s incumbent prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, age 65, has three stepchildren but faced infertility when she tried to conceive children. She has noted that she wants “society to be welcoming to infertile women.” The current prime minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, had a 6-year-old daughter when she took office.

New Zealand’s former prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, faced the issue head-on in 2017. She made headlines in becoming, at age 37, that country’s youngest leader in more than 150 years and in answering a reporter’s question during the campaign about whether she planned to have children. She did, she said, but countered another interviewer’s implication that employers have the right to know whether prospective female employees plan to take time off to have babies.

“I decided to talk about [having a child], it was my choice…,” Ardern asserted, “but for other women it is totally unacceptable in 2017 to say that women should have to answer that question in the workplace. It is the women’s decision about when they choose to have children. It should not predetermine whether or not they are given a job or have job opportunities.” One year into her tenure as PM, she gave birth to her daughter and took a brief six-week maternity leave, during which the deputy PM substituted for her. Ardern then served as head of government for another five years.

If our most recent elderly male political leaders – Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden – are allowed to conceal their severe medical conditions while in office (to the detriment of the country), why should women feel the need to report their private reproductive choices that have little or no impact on their ability to perform public service?

In fact, AOC’s decision to publicize her egg-freezing only draws a bright line delineating a much-needed policy for all public officials — judges, presidents, members of Congress, cabinet members, military leaders, governors, mayors, and state/local law makers, as well as candidates for those jobs. The public they wish to serve has a right to know about any medical condition, physical or mental, that could significantly impact the officeholder’s ability to perform the position they hold or to which they aspire. But egg freezing is not one of them.

If women’s reproductive choices are deemed to fall into that category, then they haven’t reached the gender equity threshold required to hold the nation’s highest office. Even more starkly, can we imagine any male aspirants to the presidency saying they were freezing their sperm because they didn’t want the personal distraction of helping to raise a child while holding the world’s most powerful office?

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It remains to be seen if women office-seekers who publicize their choices to have children (but delay that wish through now-available medical means) will empower themselves both personally and electorally. They might win the support of liberals who support these choices or even conservative, pro-family voters. Yet the Roman Catholic Church opposes IVF because some fertilized eggs might be destroyed. The religious right is unlikely to approve of egg-freezing candidates, but pro-lifers are an unnatural constituency for AOC, in any case.

The final irony for this publicity about women politicians’ child-bearing decisions is that it may return females to a recent time when bosses asked female job candidates if they were planning to have children. If having babies is viewed as a handicap, can only celibate, post-menopausal, infertile women – or women in their prime who have frozen their ovarian products – aim for the Oval Office?

Barbara A. Perry is the J. Wilson Newman Professor of Governance and co-chair of the Miller Center’s Presidential Oral History Program. Her new book is Reconcilable Differences: The Unlikely Political Alliance of John F. Kennedy and Eleanor Roosevelt.

By Astri Kimball Van Dyke

Like all technological transformations, new artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities mean we urgently need smart, assertive public policy that ensures this revolutionary technology is deployed safely and benefits the broad public interest, not just AI insiders. Whether the AI race is currently being driven by scientific passion or profits, the technology is advancing too quickly for us to leave its future to chance with just the AI industry itself in charge. One way we can ensure a positive, safe, and inclusive AI future is to increase the public sector’s role in shaping it.

I write this as someone who spent 12 years at Google on the front lines of AI and technology policy debates and has now returned to the public sector precisely because I believe the government must reclaim a stronger role in AI’s future. Most Americans already think that AI is being shaped by billionaires and large corporations that both drive the technology and heavily influence the rules around it.

Elected officials are the only actors with a democratic mandate to regulate AI in ways that are accountable to the public. AI must remain a tool that advances the priorities citizens set through their elected representatives — not an end in itself that rewrites those priorities behind closed doors.

Right now, federal leadership on AI is genuinely up for grabs. With the 2026 midterms approaching and the race for president in 2028 already starting, it is likely we will see many new people in the position to set the course and steer this ship. The smart ones will seize the moment. Putting one’s head in the sand is not a viable strategy—politically or substantively. Engaging deeply on AI is the right policy choice, and it will increasingly become a political necessity. AI is not a top-five voting issue for most Americans – yet. But it is on track to become one as cybersecurity incidents, data-center fights, and children’s interactions with chatbots move from tech-page stories into daily headlines.

Here are 10 things I believe every public official and every candidate for office needs to understand about AI.

1. The hype is real

AI is the biggest development we will see in our lifetimes. The existential risk part is real but so is the upside. AI offers the opportunity to fundamentally change and improve healthcare, scientific discovery, education, the effects of climate change, how the government works, and other elements of human progress we can’t even imagine yet.

The possibilities became clear to me in personal ways when learning how AI increases early breast cancer detection rates and other early disease screening impacts, hearing from the CEO of an online education B-corp I am involved in how AI saves costs and time for his small business, and in seeing how much more productive I became using AI every day in my job at Google.

If you tried AI when ChatGPT first came out and don’t understand all the hype, you need to try it again – the models have improved in astonishing ways, not just the language models but also image, video, world models, and for use cases far beyond chatbots.

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2. AI is much more than chatbots and data centers

When most people hear “AI” they likely think of a chatbot that has helped them plan a vacation, envision what a new rug would look like in their kitchen, or conduct research or rewrite something. Or they think about complaints that data centers are driving up energy bills, making lots of noise, and hurting the environment.

But AI is already so much more than data centers and chatbots. There are many layers of the so-called AI technology stack, including chips, AI financing, AI talent, model training, the models themselves, post-model training, deployment via chatbots or agents or otherwise, and distribution.

We should think about the many parts of the AI ecosystem with a stake in AI’s future when thinking about AI policy and politics. How AI is deployed in the healthcare system will have very different policy implications than how it’s deployed in transportation or manufacturing, for example.

We don’t have a political language yet to talk about AI in a way that reflects all these different stakeholders. Is it akin to electricity, an underlying technology that is used across all sectors, or more like vaccines or nuclear energy, which have specific regulatory concerns given both their huge upsides and risks?

3. Anti-AI populism is bipartisan but not yet a movement

Most Americans won’t care about the complexity and technical layers of the AI stack. They will develop their views about AI through their own experiences and political, economic, and social belief systems. That is likely why anti-AI populism has been the loudest voice on AI policy to date on both the left and the right, with socialist Senator Bernie Sanders introducing a moratorium on data centers and MAGA leader Steve Bannon calling for a ban on the development of superintelligent systems. The anti-AI populism mirrors anti-capitalist, anti-elite sentiment that is rallying both the left and the right in American politics in 2026.

The strange political bedfellows are playing out in policy already, for example on data centers. New York Governor Kathy Hochul, a perceived centrist Democrat, signed the country’s first data center moratorium in July 2026, an idea originally floated by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican. “Data centers” have become a proxy for public reactions to AI in general.

Coverage of perceived public hostility to data centers has also given the anti-AI populists more visibility, as most people likely equate animosity towards data centers with animosity towards AI in general. It remains to be seen how much Americans prioritize AI in their voting and political preferences.

4. Americans are pessimistic about AI but much of the world isn’t

As of 2026, most polls show that Americans are largely pessimistic about AI. An Economist/YouGOV poll in May showed that 71 percent of respondents feel that AI development is moving too fast while a substantial majority expressed worry over job security, data privacy, and physical AI infrastructure. An Ipsos poll in August found that two-thirds of workers expect AI to make the worker experience worse. Gallup shows that 39 percent of U.S. adults say AI does more harm than good (up from 31 percent the previous year), while only 9 percent say it does more good than harm. Views in much of the West are similar.

In contrast, Southeast Asian countries remain among the world’s most optimistic about AI. In Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and Singapore, more than 80 percent of respondents say AI will profoundly change their lives in the next three to five years.

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5. Despite their pessimism, Americans are using AI, especially businesses

Many Americans are experimenting with AI and small businesses in particular are taking advantage of the current “AI subsidy” era when frontier quality models are available for free or at low prices.

On the consumer side, a YouGov poll in August found that “AI tools are no longer a niche experiment for U.S. consumers. They are part of how people search, write, create, plan, communicate, and interact with the devices around them.”

An annual McKinsey study of businesses showed that almost all survey respondents say their organizations are using AI, and many have begun to use AI agents, even if most are still in the early stages of scaling AI and capturing enterprise-level value. Gallup finds that 52 percent of American workers now use AI on the job. Escalating infrastructure investments from the AI companies and others also reflect continued optimism about the existence of AI demand.

6. Uncertainty reigns

While many Americans are using AI and investors are overall very bullish on AI’s future, it’s unclear if the use of AI is leading to more profits or productivity yet. The AI model capability conversation is different from the topic of how to make AI useful to businesses and people at scale. For example, it’s not known if the subscription model for chatbots was an AI subsidy phase that can’t last forever given how expensive the frontier models are to run and prices on access to frontier models will rise even as non-frontier cheaper models proliferate.

Moreover, businesses may have overspent on AI for their own enterprise use, especially the most expensive frontier models, and some (Walmart, Tesla, Uber) are imposing token usage restrictions on their employees because AI usage is so expensive. And then there’s speculation about the market for more local AI to give businesses and consumers more control, including on devices. These dynamics may adjust as companies access routers to use different models for different use cases so employees utilize cheaper models for tasks that don’t require frontier capabilities.

These dynamics point to a general point that it is important for policymakers to hear: The future of AI technology, AI products, and AI business models is very uncertain. If anyone tells you they know how this technology or market will unfold, let alone what its impact on specific jobs or sectors will be, I would doubt that prediction will be true three months later. Things are literally changing weekly with new models showing more capability than expected and multiple players figuring out how to deliver AI.

Even the technologists don’t know where the technology is going. The only known is the unknown as we look over the last year, from the OpenClaw phenomenon in February with agents seemingly working autonomously to the August news from OpenAI and others that their agents had been sharing cyberhacking tips with each other, without human involvement. Nobel Prize winner Demis Hassabis published a public policy paper in July noting that advances on the frontier are outpacing our understanding of the technology. “Nobody in the world knows for sure what is going to happen from here,” Hassabis wrote, “and even the experts disagree.”

Given this uncertainty, it is important that policymakers don’t overindex for a particular AI moment or product, but rather put in place principles or goals that make the policy future-proof as the technology and business models change.

7. Consensus for regulation

There is tremendous consensus around the need for federal regulation. AI companies, citizens, and even the Pope want governments to lead. This consensus is bipartisan in the U.S. Steve Bannon commented in August: “Why would you allow [the companies] to be in control? You don’t. And I’m the anti-deep state, anti-administrative state guy, but you definitely need at least a rudimentary framework of some sort of regulatory apparatus” to regulate AI.

A recent Stanford study showed that across all 50 states, concern about too little AI regulation outweighs concern about too much.

The policy voices on AI recently have reflected two extremes: the Trump AI czar David Sachs’ “let it cook” approach, i.e. don’t regulate, and, on the opposite side, calls for AI moratoriums or pauses.

The “don’t regulate” approach has lost some momentum in the U.S. after Anthropic paused release of its Mythos model due to safety concerns and the Trump White House intervened in the release of models from Anthropic and OpenAI in what some critics call a de-facto licensing or regulatory regime. The White House is developing a framework with standards for the government’s role in reviewing frontier models instead of one-off interventions, which are vulnerable to political favoritism.

Meanwhile, some aspects of AI regulation already have momentum. These include frontier model review by government, preventing catastrophic risk from the models that have the most capability and pose the greatest dangers; cyber incident reporting; transparency and research into AI’s impact on the workforce; regulations around deep fakes and AI watermarking; protections for children; the use of AI by the military; and data center-related transparency.

Other issues, such as federal preemption, copyright, liability, taxation, interoperability, privacy, information integrity, and content regulation will be much harder to grapple with. But the federal government needs to engage because the states are already off to the races with multiple different bills.

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8. Existing laws apply to AI

In some cases, we don’t need new laws to regulate AI; we can use existing healthcare, consumer protection, and securities laws. Lawsuits over chatbot liability, consumer protection, privacy violations, labor rights, copyright violations, intellectual property theft, environmental impact, political bias, and corporate responsibility are already being filed under existing federal or state statutes. The litigation to date has been a way for consumers and political actors, such as state attorneys general, to try to place checks on AI advances. In addition, some of these lawsuits are commercial disputes, as the AI race continues to be extremely heated and the losers and winners ask courts to interpret existing laws. Legislators and regulators should, in most cases, not perceive some kind of AI exceptionalism that requires its own category of rules.

9. AI is the whole economy but we need tailored sectoral regulation

Every company is or will become an AI company – even small businesses, which are some of the most enthusiastic AI deployers because of the costs and time AI saves. Different aspects of AI will require different legislation; how we regulate chips, for example, may have nothing to do with how we regulate chatbots being used by minors or driverless cars.

Some legislation will be purely “AI legislation,” putting into place a new regulatory approach to fit this new technology: the government developing standards to test AI frontier models for safety risks, for example, or investing R&D in AI development and accompanying safety and workforce transition measures.

But most regulations should be sector by sector. A smart candidate for public office would say, “Every bill going forward should consider an AI element.”

10. Product exposure leads to good policy

In my experience talking about Google’s many products with policymakers, using actual AI products is the best way to develop good policy. Policymakers shouldn’t be expected to be AI experts, but they or their staffs should have used the products for a range of cases as they design guardrails and incentives. Using the products reflects their limits and why humans will still be so important to human progress – and why many people, including me, are so excited about AI.

Conclusion

The fast pace of AI news, including safety risks, is helping drive consensus around the need for smart AI regulation to protect the public, spread the benefits from this technology, and maintain a level playing field and clear rules. Smart candidates and policymakers will seize this window to assure constituents they are fighting to make AI technology safe and not leave anyone behind. We need good policy ideas, from big picture principles to highly technical proposals, from AI enthusiasts, AI skeptics, and traditional policy experts. And we need to test those ideas through our political process so that Americans’ priorities are reflected and advanced.

Astri Kimball Van Dyke, a Miller Center senior fellow, is an expert on the intersection of artificial intelligence and technology with public policy. She ran Google’s global competition policy team after serving as a political appointee for President Barack Obama in the White House and as deputy counsel to Vice President Joe Biden.

In the coming months, we will prioritize these three topics in our research and discussion as part of our new Presidency Project, culminating in our next Conference on the American Presidency to be held in 2027.

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(Photo illustration)

By Guian McKee

Historians often complain that policymakers ignore history and its benefits for guiding their decisions. A report issued recently by Marco Rubio’s State Department, however, suggests that history in the hands of politically motivated government officials can be dangerous. Entitled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism,” the report uses the supposed threat of Cuban subversion to discredit not only critics of administration policy but also most major U.S. left-wing organizations and social protest campaigns more generally.

As such, the State Department report constitutes a return to the tactics of the Red Scare. In combination with President Donald Trump’s recent efforts to brand his opponents as communists, it suggests a frightening and dangerous neo-McCarthyite turn in administration actions.

To be clear, not everything in the report is wrong. Cuba has sponsored and trained terrorists, harbored fugitives from U.S law enforcement, engaged in extensive spying and intelligence activities against the United States and its allies, and provided signal interception posts for Russia, Iran, and China. It has also systematically repressed protests and dissent among its own people, although the report itself focuses less on those actions than on Cuba’s efforts to subvert the United States.

It is also true that many American leftist organizations have expressed solidarity with Cuba and opposed U.S. government policies such as the longstanding economic embargo of the island and the more recent cut-off of energy supplies. Some groups have also participated in cultural and political exchanges with the Cuban government and travelled to Cuba.

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Even granting these factual points, however, the State Department’s Cuba report offers a wildly overstated and thoroughly politicized assessment of Cuba’s influence in the United States. It uses that analysis to attack the legitimacy of the Trump administration’s political opponents across a range of social and policy issues, effectively branding them as un-American and rendering them beyond the bounds of acceptable politics.

These are tactics that directly echo those of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and Senator Joseph McCarthy (R–Wisconsin) during the late 1940s and early 1950s.

The core of the State Department report lies in its claim that unlike the Marxist-Leninism of the Soviet Union and its focus on the inexorability of class conflict, revolutionary Cuba developed an ideological framework that emphasized the effects of U.S. imperialism on the Third World and specifically on the costs imposed on oppressed peoples around the globe – including within the United States. As the report claims, “Cuban communism helped shape a distinct and uniquely dangerous form of revolutionary leftism – built around racial, social and even civilizational grievances rather than economic class conflict – which would go on to instantiate itself as the dominant genre of left-wing radicalism around the globe.” This ideology, the report maintains, represented nothing less than “a revolution against Western civilization itself.”

Again, this is not entirely wrong. Fidel Castro and fellow revolutionaries like Che Guevera did deploy a doctrine of “tercermundismo” or “Third Worldism” that influenced radical thinking in the U.S. and elsewhere. Yet placing these ideological developments completely in a Cuban context, as the State Department report unequivocally does, distorts their actual historical context. The idea of “Third Worldism” emerged from the global struggle against colonialism during the 20th century. Key nexus points and ideas arose not just from Cuba but from conflicts in Asia, Latin American, and Africa. The latter, and specifically the war in Algeria, produced one of the seminal texts of this ideology, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, while another key text, Paolo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, emerged from the author’s experience of right-wing dictatorships in Brazil and Chile. European and American intellectuals such as Michel Foucault and William Appleman Williams contributed (without obvious Cuban influence) as well.

Cuba was a part of this intellectual lineage, but it was far from the sole or most influential source.

A deeper problem with “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism”, though, lies in the way it uses the historical evidence it marshals. Much of the report dives deep into the well-worn history of the leftist revolutionaries of the 1960s and 1970s. Readers engage with the radical civil rights leader Robert F. Williams, as well as Angela Davis, Stokely Carmichael, Huey P. Newton, Assata Shakur, and others. The report explores the increasingly deranged world of the Weather Underground, culminating in the violent robbery of a Brinks armored bank truck in suburban New York in 1981. These are all fascinating stories of a troubled period of American history, but the report manages to turn them into bland, colorless episodes in which the main point is to highlight any support that such actors received from the Castro regime.

But boring historical writing is not the chief issue with this part of the report. Instead, it treats these episodes as if they are compelling, current evidence against both the Cuban regime and the present-day American left. The report’s authors seem to feel a strange, almost visceral connection to these events, treating them as though they happened in the last news cycle, rather than half a century ago.

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More troubling still are the sweeping connections the report seeks to make between past and present. The core of this argument is that any focus on U.S. imperialism is inherently wrong and evidence of anti-Americanism. Directly echoing McCarthyite claims about an internal enemy, the report concludes that Cuba is using “the institutions of the modern American left – in its universities and its nonprofits, its street movements and its media” to attack the U.S. “not from without but from within — to turn Americans into instruments of their own nation’s undoing.”

As with so much of the Trump administration, this position hovers awkwardly around race: Influenced by global Third Worldism, the black radicals of the Sixties and Seventies developed an analysis that saw American blacks as an internal colony within the United States. This has remained a thread of radical analysis ever since. But the persistence of this idea is itself seen by the report as evidence of Cuba’s ongoing influence among American civil rights activists, and it is used to discredit any form of civil rights activism beyond the “integrationist theory of change associated with Martin Luther King, Jr. and the mainstream civil rights movement.” The latter, of course, is a vast oversimplification and deradicalization of King, who offered a searing economic critique of the United States and turned against what he saw as U.S. imperialism in the form of the Vietnam War.

Stokely Carmichael, the leader of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee who coined the term “Black Power,” is a particular obsession for the report’s authors because of his evocation of the internal colony concept at the 1967 Organization of Latin American Solidarity conference in Havana:

The central ideas he popularized — Black Power, the reimagining of blacks as a colonized people inside the United States, and the now-widespread concept of “institutional racism,” which Carmichael is widely credited with inventing — became the operating grammar of black radical (and later, mainstream liberal) politics for the next half-century. What began in the mid-1960s as the language of a militant vanguard has since migrated into the nation’s premier activist organizations, university departments, nonprofit networks, government agencies, public-health bureaucracies, and mainstream political culture.

The report takes this leap right up to recent events, connecting such ideas not only to the administration’s institutional enemies but also to the Black Lives Matter organization and the George Floyd protests. The core idea that emerges from the report’s analysis is that any criticism of racial inequality in the United States that does not adopt a color-blind, integrationist position is Cuban-derived and hence illegitimate.

This simplistic rendering of current leftist analysis of racism reveals much about the Trumpist right’s deep insecurities and painful sensitivities around race. Any structural critique of the role of race in U.S. society or history has become intolerable for Trumpism, reflected in numerous declarations, including the Cuba report; Trump’s executive order of March 2025 on “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History;” or the president’s recent farcical decision to add warning signs outside the Smithsonian Museum of American History.

Similar guilt-by-association arguments are deployed against anti-ICE protestors, Zohran Mamdani, Karen Bass, the Democratic Socialists of America, and even the organizers of the “No Kings” marches. The report asserts that “many of the most significant upheavals in recent American political history – from the George Floyd riots to the rise of Antifa to the explosion of pro-terrorist activism on American college campuses – can be linked, in some way, shape, or form, to Cuban influence.” The specific offenses vary – after all, “some way, shape, or form” can cover a wide expanse of evidential ground – but they are generally linked either to accepting funding from donors who have had some form of positive engagement with the Cuban government or to criticizing the U.S. embargo of Cuba, including engaging in protests against U.S. policy.

Travel to Cuba is one of the worst offenses, as the State Department report tendentiously links the 1970s-era Venceramos Brigade, which brought American radicals such as the Weatherman on visits to Cuba, to contemporary politics: “Over the past half century, programs like the Brigade have helped Cuba infiltrate and establish a foothold in a series of radical American political movements. Increasingly, its reach has also extended to mainstream liberal institutions – elite academia, major nonprofits and NGOs, and even the Democratic Party itself.” The claim about the Democratic Party is based on little more than Barack Obama’s Chicago ties to former Weatherman Bill Ayers and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’s participation in Venceramos activities as a young activist. As with McCarthy and HUAC, any past connection, no matter how tenuous, is evidence of guilt.

There is much about the contemporary U.S. left that can legitimately be criticized. The question can be raised whether defense of the Cuban regime is morally justified, much less politically wise. But it is within the constitutional rights of all these actors to adopt such positions. Broader critiques of American society and its imperfections should also be permissible. But not to the authors of “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism.”

Cuba may be the State Department report’s chief enemy, but Americans who critique or demand reforms are tarred as fellow travelers. As such, the report seeks to preemptively discredit any opposition to a Trump administration attempt at regime change in Cuba. Even more frightening, it portends a midterm campaign of red-baiting, and potentially, a new McCarthyism that will seek to marginalize and blacklist those who oppose administration policy in areas seemingly far removed from Cuba.

Guian McKee is the White Burkett Miller Professor of Public Affairs at the Miller Center and co-director of the Center’s Health Care Policy Project.

By Elizabeth Cameron and J. Stephen Morrison

The United States knows how to defeat Ebola. A dozen years of bipartisan investment — spanning three administrations and billions of dollars — have built a formidable infrastructure of expertise, countermeasures, and rapid-response capability.

That infrastructure is now being tested by a dangerous outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where confirmed cases have surpassed 1,100 and deaths exceed 300, with no end in sight.

After costly early delays, the Trump administration has begun to mobilize at scale, committing more than $700 million and requesting $1.4 billion in supplemental funding from Congress. The muscle memory is flexing. Whether it flexes fast enough — and in the right directions — will determine whether the United States resumes the leadership role it built and whether thousands of lives are saved.

That role was in evidence during the West Africa outbreak in 2014-2016 and the outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2018-2020. Although protracted delays and controversy surrounded the U.S. response to both outbreaks, the overall trajectory of U.S. engagement remained positive, bridging Republican and Democratic administrations.

Over the past 12 years, with bipartisan congressional support, the United States has invested billions of dollars in programs and plans that can stop the disease from spreading globally while keeping Americans at home safe from Ebola and myriad related threats. These measures include assets that did not exist prior to 2014.

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The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and, before the Trump administration dismantled it, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), deployed and fostered a joint global health security fighting force in more than 50 countries around the world. The White House created and exercised rapid response playbooks to practice deploying task forces, supplies, and countermeasures. The U.S. Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority and the Department of Defense have invested in Ebola treatments and vaccines. Thirteen U.S. Regional Emerging Special Pathogen Treatment Centers now exist across the United States that provide world-class care and treatment for Ebola and other special pathogens.

In recent days, following a sluggish start to the ongoing Ebola response in the DRC, the United States has begun to emerge as a major donor with reported commitments of $727 million to established global health and humanitarian emergency partners with proven ability to deliver. That was possible because the State Department has assumed control over some pre-existing funding mechanisms, formerly housed at USAID, that can mobilize UN agencies, international organizations, and operational, international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), in addition to CDC capabilities. The White House also requested that Congress commit $1.4 billion in supplemental funding for the Ebola response, a striking signal of the direction of thinking around the president. CDC is stepping up with international partners to lend substantial expertise to the fight, though the agency remains far below full strength. A few staff have been added to the National Security Council (NSC) Resilience Directorate to support the Ebola response, although that capability falls far short of a reliable NSC directorate dedicated to handling bio threats.

On the countermeasures front, the United States has committed $50 million to the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations to develop candidate vaccines for the Bundibugyo species of Ebola and is working with Mapp Biopharmaceutical to provide doses of a cross-species Ebola treatment for clinical trials. Reportedly the United States is engaging on technical matters with the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (AFCDC).

However, a glaring gap remains, which reveals the high price of the United States’ withdrawal from WHO: CDC’s globally renowned experts are not part of the WHO-AFCDC incident management team deliberations, remotely or in person. Nor is CDC’s exceptional lab capability, critical to advancing scientific knowledge during earlier Ebola outbreaks, part of the current WHO-AFCDC led response.

A long fight has commenced, which could last months or years. We have identified seven critical steps that we believe the administration and Congress can rally behind, on a bipartisan basis, that will strengthen the international response, help hasten the end of the outbreak, and better protect Americans.

Strengthen the White House team. First and foremost, the administration should re-establish a permanent NSC home for bio threats, and the White House, together with the State Department, should name a leader with a record of interagency management success and the gravitas to lead the Ebola response. The focus should be on designating local or national leaders with state, local, and/or national-level credibility. The White House appointed Ron Klain, a senior political and legal operative who had served as chief-of-staff to Vice Presidents Biden and Gore, to coordinate the U.S. response to Ebola in 2014-2016. During the widespread 2022 mpox outbreak, the White House drafted respected Federal Emergency Management Agency and CDC leaders Bob Fenton and Demetre Daskalakis to run the response, building on decades of credibility at the state, local, and global levels.

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Reinstitute U.S. exercises. The administration should rigorously and transparently practice and plan for how it faces biological threats—both for those that are recurrent like Ebola and those that could be even more catastrophic, such as a deliberate biological attack. The White House should reinstate regular use of the Biological Incident Notification and Assessment Protocol and run exercises with its rapid response playbooks.

Stabilize CDC overseas and build its surge capacity at home. CDC experts are a crucial component of America’s biodefense capability. Traditionally, along with USAID global health leaders, they have been the essential eyes and ears overseas for early warning. Globally deployed staff previously operated in sync with a headquarters surge capacity. The costs of maintaining these assets are a fraction of the cost of a late response to a dangerous outbreak, delayed because surveillance and response were weak.

The administration should commit both to stabilize and sustain deployment of CDC overseas global health security officials, as essential members of U.S. embassy teams, at the same time that it commits to guarantee CDC’s surge capacity, based out of CDC headquarters in Atlanta.

The State Department reportedly is instituting, under the America First Global Health Strategy, plans for CDC country offices to transition to a fee-for-service model with partner countries. This approach has not yet begun to be implemented and much discussion lies ahead of how it is to work in practice. That approach will need to be managed carefully and integrated with other critical priorities. Success going forward in guaranteeing a durable CDC overseas presence and reliable and adequate surge capacity will require working closely with Congress to create flexible and enduring budgetary mechanisms.

Increase international markets and stockpiles for critical products. The United States has a rare opportunity to build and contribute to global capacity that can curtail and rapidly end large-scale Ebola outbreaks in the future. This crisis has created an opening to develop strategies for regional and global stockpiling and sustainment of Ebola vaccines, rapid tests, therapeutics, and personal protective equipment. To succeed requires making this goal a diplomatic priority.

Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, in coordination with several partners, supports a 500,000-dose stockpile of the vaccine designed to protect against the more common Ebola Zaire strain. That stockpile has been successfully deployed in recent Zaire outbreaks and could manage a wider suite of Ebola vaccines, with renewed U.S. support for Gavi. The United States is well-positioned to rally development finance institutions across G7 and other nations, alongside AFCDC, the WHO, the World Bank, and other partners, to catalyze the advance market commitments needed to support a stockpile of cross-species Ebola and Marburg products on the African continent—deployable at the first sign of a major outbreak.

Be more transparent. To build its credibility and external support, the United States should transparently share its bilateral global health security agreements. Currently, countries, civil society organizations, and advocates are wary of U.S. motives with respect to the Ebola response and global health. Making the agreements public and conducting listening sessions to answer questions and gather input would go a long way toward clearing the air, building trust and understanding, and lowering conspiratorial thinking.

Integrate U.S. capabilities with the WHO-AFCDC incident management team. The United States can bring substantial capacity to stopping the Ebola epidemic. Effectively doing so, and accelerating the response, will rely on close integration with the WHO-AFCDC-led regional response, funding needs and priorities, and incident management team. The CDC’s special pathogens unit, in particular, brings significant expertise and lab capacity to the fight and would be even more effective if able to put its full weight behind the response as an integral partner.

Guarantee that endangered Americans can come home. The United States should clarify that Americans exposed to or infected with Ebola will be assisted to come home and access the exceptional care that has been created across the United States, including through the network of the National Emerging Special Pathogens Training & Education Center and 13 RESPCTs. The administration should publish protocols for working with states and cities to support monitoring and treatment for exposed Americans, including how they will access these world-class, taxpayer-funded, congressionally-appropriated facilities.

The Ebola outbreak unfolding in eastern DRC is dangerous, harrowing, urgent, and highly uncertain. Security concerns will dominate and require a U.S. diplomatic push for ceasefires and other measures to ensure safe passage of providers. But this moment could also trigger a renewal of U.S. leadership. The administration should take full advantage of this opportunity to fortify U.S. capabilities at home and abroad. Americans, members of Congress, international partners, and the imperiled and vulnerable populations in the DRC and beyond will applaud U.S. ingenuity, commitment, and compassion.

Elizabeth Cameron is professor of the practice of health services and senior advisor at the Brown University Pandemic Center, a nonresident senior advisor to the Global Health Policy Center (GHPC) at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and a Miller Center senior fellow. J. Stephen Morrison is senior vice president and director of the Global Health Policy Center and a Miller Center senior fellow. Michaela Simoneau, a GHPC fellow, contributed to this article.

By Guian McKee

With cage fighting on the White House lawn and a Trump rally on the National Mall, Donald Trump has turned this summer’s 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence into yet another divisive, partisan struggle. It did not have to be this way.

Fifty years ago, President Gerald Ford took a very different approach to the nation’s Bicentennial. Ford oversaw a decentralized and – mostly – shared national celebration that also helped him politically. To do this, Ford did not choose to dominate Bicentennial events or demand that the national gaze fall on him.

The result is that for Americans of a certain age, the 1976 Bicentennial celebration now evokes warm feelings of nostalgia. The nation’s 200th birthday brought with it sprawling local celebrations; an explosion of red, white, and blue everywhere and on every consumer product imaginable; a national embrace of all things colonial (tri-cornered hats!); and an iconic 1970s pop-art aesthetic highlighted by the Bicentennial logo of a star wrapped with red, white, and blue bunting.

I was six, and on the morning of July 4th we watched a parade through our town. That afternoon, my grandmother baked a cake with red, white, and blue frosting for our picnic at the Brandywine Battlefield outside Philadelphia. Yes, we put birthday candles on the cake. It was all wonderful.

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The success of the Bicentennial, and Ford’s role in it, was not the result of a more positive national outlook than we have today. In fact, the United States was in crisis in 1976. The Vietnam War had lurched to its ignominious end a little more than a year earlier, with the last helicopter fleeing the embassy roof in Saigon. Many Americans remained furious at Ford for pardoning former president Richard Nixon for his role in the Watergate scandal. Ford himself had survived two assassination attempts – slightly absurdist but deeply dangerous echoes of the political murders that had rocked American life during the 1960s.

The U.S. economy, meanwhile, had spiraled into stagnation, featuring persistent unemployment paired with high inflation – a condition that the confident macroeconomists of the previous decade had not believed possible. The administration responded with a “Whip Inflation Now!” campaign. This included distributing “W.I.N.!” buttons meant to encourage ordinary Americans to hold the line on wages and businesses on prices, but the effort mostly just demonstrated that policymakers had no practical idea what to do about the problem.

While far from offering a solution to these challenges, the Bicentennial nonetheless brought a respite for the nation. In its naive enthusiasm and its local expression, the Bicentennial provided a moment of unity and a reminder of national ideals that remained broadly shared even in a fractious nation – along with all that glorious red, white, and blue kitsch.

The Ford administration had sought exactly this outcome. The administration’s actions and choices in the years and months leading up to July 4, 1976 helped to create the conditions and the context for the broadly shared sense of celebration that millions of Americans like me experienced. The Bicentennial showed that important national commemorations, when observed with a focus on the needs and ideals of the nation, can serve as reminders of what diverse Americans share. If handled deftly, such commemorations can also advance the political interests of the president.

Early planning for the Bicentennial had not gone well. In 1966, President Lyndon Johnson signed a congressional resolution establishing an American Revolution Bicentennial Commission and charged it not only with planning local and national celebrations but with helping “recall to Americans and to the world the majestic significance of the Revolution.” The commission struggled, however, as its members clashed over differing political interpretations of the revolution and about how much commercialization should be permitted, while Philadelphia and Boston fought bitterly over which city should host the signature national commemoration. Within each city, arguments erupted about how the event should unfold and who it should serve.

In late 1973, President Nixon disbanded the commission and replaced it with a new planning organization, the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration, headed by former Secretary of the Navy and future senator John Warner. The new body, Nixon indicated, would not pursue a central national celebration. Instead, it would “seek to trigger a chain reaction of tens of thousands of individual celebrations – large and small – planned and carried out by citizens in every part of America.” Warner and the Ford team soon took this approach even further, as they rejected the adoption even of a single theme for the Bicentennial.

These decisions proved critical. They shifted the focus of the celebration away from the federal government – and the president – and made the Bicentennial a kind of federated commemoration that allowed every community in America to make it their own. Ironically, the pervasive commercialization of the Bicentennial furthered this aim. In a country with a widely shared national advertising culture, Bicentennial-themed advertising made the event omnipresent and created an aesthetic of celebratory but non-confrontational patriotism (search for “Bicentennial Coca Cola ad” to see an example). The nation’s ideals – that all people are created equal, that anyone could become an American, that all would have the basic rights and freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution, and that Americans would strive to overcome their country’s shortcomings – would be embraced, but neither its history nor its present shortcomings would be closely examined.

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In office, the Ford administration worked closely with Warner and ARBA to stage events that built public anticipation leading up to July 4, 1976. The administration embraced a privately organized “Freedom Train” that toured the country with an on-board exhibit of important historical objects ranging from George Washington’s copy of the Constitution to Martin Luther King Jr.’s pulpit. The locomotive and train cars, of course, were painted red, white, and blue. The Freedom Train began touring the country in 1975 and attracted thousands of visitors everywhere it stopped.

On April 18 and 19, 1975, less than two weeks before the fall of Saigon, Ford officially inaugurated the Bicentennial with a trip to Massachusetts during which he set the tone and direction for the anniversary. At Boston’s Old North Church, Ford marked Paul Revere’s ride by noting the paradoxes of the nation’s history: “It is well to recall this evening that America was born of both promise and protest – the promise of religious and civil liberties, and protest for representation and against repression.” Implicitly noting the nation’s contemporary divisions, Ford called “for patience, for understanding, for tolerance, and work toward unity – unity of purpose, a unity based on reason, a unity based on hope,” even as he acknowledged that “perhaps national unity is an impossible dream.”

The next morning, at the Old North Bridge in Concord, Ford called even more directly for reconciliation: “It is a time to place the hand of healing on the heart of America – not division and not blame.” An hour later, on Lexington Green, Ford turned toward what would be another point of emphasis for the Bicentennial: the nation’s future. “We should be proud of this two centuries of effort and accomplishment,” Ford said. “But what is even more important, in my judgment, is what we can do in the next 100 years.”

The ideas Ford presented in these speeches were neutral and acceptable to all but the most politically extreme Americans. In this conception, the United States had been built by the efforts of its diverse population (Ford repeatedly highlighted the contributions of immigrants) to achieve its founding ideals. Conflict as well as progress were acknowledged, if not deeply explored, but unity could still be found through celebration of that unending struggle. Out of that, a better future could still be realized.

As July 4 drew nearer, Ford’s team worked to develop these themes. Domestic Policy Council Director James M. Cannon noted that the president’s bicentennial oratory should remain simple and suited to the man: “President Ford is not a poet; he is a doer. And while I think what he says should be on a very high level, I think his words should be direct and action-oriented instead of orotund.” Cannon suggested that a series of speeches planned for the July 4th holiday should be organized around a simple, two-part structure of “Where we have been” and “Where we are going.”

The itinerary for Ford’s actual celebration of the holiday weekend itself reflected the decision to decentralize the Bicentennial. Ford’s commemoration began in Washington on July 1 with the dedication of the new Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, where his speech focused on “Reaching for the Unknown”; it would continue on the 3rd at the National Archives, with the theme of “A Reverence for the Past.” On the 4th itself, the president left the capital, traveling first to Valley Forge to honor “the Spirit of Sacrifice”; he then flew to Independence Hall in Philadelphia, focusing on “A Foundation for Liberty”; from there, he went to the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal, anchored in New York Harbor, where he viewed an international flotilla of tall ships sailing up the Hudson River and spoke about “America as a proud family of many people from many lands.” He then returned to Washington, took a swim in the White House pool, and watched the fireworks display from the Lincoln balcony.

Ford’s Bicentennial, though, had not reached its end. The next day, at a naturalization ceremony at Monticello, Ford welcomed the new citizens and invited them “to join fully in the American adventure and to share our common goal and our common glory. Our common goal is freedom – the liberty of each individual to enjoy the equal rights and to pursue the happiness which in this life God gives and self-government secures.”

Nuances of the events drew the decentralized pieces of the Bicentennial celebration together. At Valley Forge, for example, the president greeted a covered wagon train that had journeyed west to east from points around the country. Reflecting the interest in historical crafts that the Bicentennial had sparked, most of the participants had built their own wagons and dressed in period costumes. In his speech, Ford noted that “the sturdy wagon trains that have returned here, the wonderful people who drove them, and those along the way who rededicated themselves to the great principles of the Declaration of Independence offer heartwarming proof that our American adventure has just begun.”

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Interestingly, Ford also highlighted the importance of pioneer women, and pointed out that “in the West, the Declaration’s promise of legal and political equality for women was first broadened” (he said nothing about the consequences of western expansion for American Indians).

Notably, the administration exercised restraint when faced with dissent. In Philadelphia, the “People’s Bicentennial Commission” had planned a large-counter rally, which was joined by marches organized by the American Indian Movement and the Puerto Rican Socialist Party. Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo, who had swept to power on a populist wave of white ethnic backlash, requested the deployment of 15,000 federal troops to keep order. The Ford administration, however, wisely chose to avoid such escalation. The protest marches and rallies took place without incident on July 4th, and despite going mostly unnoticed, they expressed in their way the nation’s most basic principles. Meanwhile, the official Bicentennial remained dispersed and distinctly non-political and nonpartisan.

The words that Ford spoke that weekend were not the most eloquent or important of American presidential speeches. Yet they expressed a consistent set of themes and goals for the nation and allowed Ford to appear, as Cannon hoped, as a dignified and practical leader confident enough to celebrate the occasion while allowing the focus to be on the nation, its people, its communities, and its culture. More broadly, the decentralized framework of the Bicentennial celebration, along with its cultural omnipresence, drew in most Americans. Amid the traumas and divisions of the mid-1970s, this was significant and meaningful.

Not coincidentally, July 4 coincided with the start of a political turnaround for Ford. Trailing presumptive Democratic nominee Jimmy Carter by more than 30 points and facing a serious challenge for the Republican nomination from Ronald Reagan, Ford’s fortunes began to reverse. He soon secured the nomination and drew even with Carter before narrowly losing the election.

Taken as a whole, Ford’s Bicentennial performance remains an example of how a president can, should he or she choose, use a national commemoration to draw the country together, celebrate its diversity, and remind Americans of its best ideals. This can be done in ways that are understated and do not demand that the president be the focus of attention. The result can be not only political gain for that president, but a national event that six-year-olds will remember fondly a half century later.

Guian McKee is the White Burkett Miller Professor of Public Affairs at the Miller Center and co-director of the Center’s Health Care Policy Project

By Allan C. Stam

The skies over the Persian Gulf are quieter than they have been in more than four months. The kinetic phase of the United States’ war with the Islamic Republic of Iran appears to be over. Judging the outcome of this conflict solely by satellite imagery and the smoldering wreckage left in the wake of American ordnance, the verdict would be unambiguous: an overwhelming, spectacular triumph for the United States, as the Trump administration has claimed. Yet as the smoke clears and the geopolitical dust settles, a much darker reality is coming into focus.

America won the firefight. But in doing so, it may have suffered a catastrophic political defeat, providing its greatest global adversaries with a blueprint for dismantling American hegemony in the 21st century.

The material triumph and the bill that followed

From a purely material and tactical standpoint, the United States Armed Forces delivered a master class in modern warfare. The checklist of physical destruction is complete. The Iranian Navy, which for decades harassed international shipping and threatened to choke off the world’s energy supply, has been effectively relocated to the bottom of the sea. Its fast-attack craft, frigates, and submarines were systematically hunted and destroyed.

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Iran’s Air Defense Artillery networks, once hailed as a formidable barrier, were unraveled by American stealth technology, electronic warfare, and precision strikes. The skies over Tehran are now entirely vulnerable. Furthermore, the Islamic Republic’s vaunted ballistic missile stockpiles—the very weapons used to terrorize its neighbors and project power across the Levant—have been degraded by 80 percent, according to the Trump administration. Most critically, the crown jewels of the Iranian regime—its fissile material production facilities at Natanz, Fordow, and elsewhere—have been severely degraded, with their centrifuges buried under tons of collapsed concrete.

However, this tactical master class came at a high cost. The United States and its allies have faced enormous financial and strategic challenges. The conflict consumed a large portion of the West’s precision munitions, with millions spent on intercepting individual drones and tens of millions on destroying underground facilities with bunker-busters. The “arsenal of democracy” has been severely depleted. Restocking Tomahawk missiles, SM-3 interceptors, and JASSMs will take years, diminishing America’s ability to respond to other crises—especially in the Indo-Pacific—in the near future.

The Clausewitzian pivot: Politics by other means

If war were simply a demolition derby, the United States could declare absolute victory and hold a ticker-tape parade. But war is rarely about destruction for its own sake. Destruction is merely a means to a political end, employed when nonviolent diplomacy has failed to produce a desired outcome.

Prussian military thinker Carl von Clausewitz once said, “War is merely the continuation of policy by other means.” This indicates that true victory isn’t about the quantity of explosives used but about accomplishing the political goals set before the war.

When analyzing the Iran war from the perspective of political policy objectives, the American “victory” quickly reveals itself as a series of significant failures.

What were Washington’s implicit and explicit goals? Regime change, the halting of Iranian support for regional proxy militias, the cessation of ballistic missile proliferation, and the permanent dismantling of Tehran’s desire to build a nuclear weapon.

Not a single one of these objectives has been definitively achieved.

At best, through the rosiest of glasses, the United States has engineered a temporary dodge. The ayatollahs remain in power, having successfully utilized the conflict to generate a rally-around-the-flag effect, crushing domestic dissent under the guise of wartime necessity. The regime’s survival, despite facing the full conventional wrath of the United States, has imbued it with a dangerous new legitimacy.

Furthermore, the “Axis of Resistance”—Iran’s network of regional proxies, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and various militias in Iraq and Syria—remains ideologically and physically intact. While their supply lines are temporarily disrupted, their decentralized nature allows them to operate autonomously. They will undoubtedly rebuild.

As for the nuclear question and ballistic missiles, the physical infrastructure may be ruined for now, but the human capital—the scientists, the engineers, the acquired knowledge—persists as it has for the past decade. If anything, the war has confirmed to the Iranian leadership that building a nuclear deterrent is no longer just a geopolitical aspiration; it is an absolute existential requirement. The United States did not cure the disease. By merely treating symptoms without eliminating the cause, the underlying pathology will return more aggressively in the future.

The epiphany in Tehran

Before this war, the leadership in Tehran hypothesized that they possessed the asymmetric capability to strangle the global economy. Now, they know it for a fact. During the conflict, the disruption to the Strait of Hormuz, the spiking insurance premiums for global shipping, and the resulting shockwaves through global energy markets proved Iran’s thesis. They discovered that their nuisance value translates directly into immense strategic leverage. They have learned exactly how much pain the global market can endure, and exactly what levers to pull to maximize economic chaos.

Paradoxically, Tehran could benefit financially and diplomatically from the war’s aftermath. As the global economy seeks to stabilize energy markets and restore supply chains, there will likely be increased pressure on the U.S. and allies to relax harsh sanctions. The international community’s exhaustion with the conflict will probably loosen the economic restrictions tightening on Iran.

Beyond the economic realm, the Islamic Republic has achieved a massive boost in its international stature. In the eyes of the anti-Western world, Iran did the impossible: It stood toe-to-toe with the Great Satan, absorbed its best punches, and survived. For a regime whose foundational myth is built on exporting the Islamic revolution and resisting American imperialism, merely surviving a direct war with the United States is the ultimate propaganda victory. They are battered, yes, but they are unbowed, and their prestige among anti-American factions across the globe has never been higher.

An audience of adversaries: The view from Beijing and Moscow

Perhaps the most catastrophic consequence of the Iran war is the lesson it has taught audiences outside the Middle East. In Beijing and Moscow, military planners and political strategists watched the conflict with intense scrutiny. What they learned will shape global security for the next century.

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Russia and China are now more certain than ever that they do not need to defeat the United States in a symmetrical, kinetic firefight. To defeat America, they simply need to outlast American enthusiasm.

The conflict demonstrated that the United States, particularly under political leadership characterized by the transactional and domestically focused instincts of the Trump era, lacks strategic staying power. The American public and its political class are willing to support a war of high-tech shock and awe, but they have zero appetite for the grueling, bloody, decades-long work of nation-building, occupation, or permanent regional restructuring.

Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin now have empirical proof that the American Achilles’ heel is its attention span. If an adversary can absorb the initial, terrifying wave of American kinetic power and simply wait, the United States will eventually declare victory and go home, driven by domestic political pressures and the staggering financial costs of modern warfare. The adversaries of the West are now utterly certain that they can out-suffer and out-wait the American public.

Unintended consequences and the long-term fallout

The long-term effects of the war reveal a complex and sometimes conflicting landscape. Ironically, the conflict has greatly strengthened the United States military-industrial complex. The war served as a horrific, live-fire advertisement for the material superiority of American weapons systems. Defensive systems—such as advanced Patriot batteries, Aegis combat systems, and warfare architectures built around seamless, AI-driven information integration—proved exceptionally dominant. Global demand for these systems will skyrocket. The defense contractors who build the tools of American hegemony will experience a generational boom as the U.S. and its allies scramble to restock their depleted arsenals. America’s tech dominance is unquestioned.

Yet this material dominance stands in stark contrast to a severe decline in American diplomatic credibility. The decision to end the war without achieving total regime change or complete, irreversible nuclear disarmament has driven a massive wedge between the United States and its closest regional ally, Israel.

For Israel, the Iranian nuclear program and its proxy network are existential threats. From Jerusalem’s perspective, the U.S. came halfway across the world, destroyed the easy targets, and then abandoned the region before finishing the job, leaving Israel to contend with a deeply radicalized Iranian regime that survived. The trust between Washington and Jerusalem has been fundamentally fractured.

Furthermore, the conflict represents an utter failure of the bipartisan, multi-administration desire to pivot away from the Middle East. For over a decade, U.S. grand strategy has sought to disengage from the sands of the Middle East to focus on the rising peer threat in the Indo-Pacific. Instead, this war has inextricably sucked the United States back into the region. The necessity of maintaining a deterrent posture against a surviving, vengeful Iran will require a massive, ongoing forward deployment of naval and air assets, completely derailing the strategic pivot to Asia.

The ultimate loss: The illusion of invincibility

When comparing tactical successes with strategic realities, the United States’ most significant loss isn’t counted in bombs or funds. Instead, it’s the growing global belief that the U.S. can be outlasted.

Deterrence rests on two pillars: capability and resolve. The war proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that American military capability is unmatched in human history. But it critically undermined the perception of American resolve. A superpower that can destroy anything it wants yet lacks the patience to forge the political reality it desires is a superpower that can be defeated by time itself.

Conclusion: Material realities vs. the power of belief

As historians and strategists analyze the aftermath of this war, the key debate boils down to a philosophical divide: whether material realities outweigh human beliefs, or the other way around. Military historians and political scientists have yet to agree on a clear definition of “military effectiveness.” Some analysts concentrate strictly on the military cost-benefit analysis, while others consider the political consequences of military actions. Ultimately, perceptions of the war’s outcomes can vary greatly depending on the perspective taken.

The most optimistic perspective—a “rosy glasses” view favored by Pentagon materialists—is that physical destruction determines political outcomes. According to this view, Iran has been reduced to a pre-technological era through bombing. Its navy has been eliminated, air defenses destroyed, and its nuclear efforts severely set back. With diminished material means to wield influence, Iran’s ideological aims are effectively neutralized. The U.S. achieved a decade of peace by leveraging superior military power, compelling Tehran to focus on recovery for the next 30 years instead of pursuing nuclear weapons or threatening neighbors.

A pessimistic perspective—the one shared by students of history and Clausewitz—suggests that beliefs and ideology can eventually overcome material setbacks. According to this view, America’s impressive tactical win turned out to be a strategic blunder. By not dismantling the regime, the U.S. has created a far more formidable opponent. Iran now has a powerful myth of survival, a proven track record of disrupting the global economy, and a firm belief that obtaining a nuclear weapon is essential at any cost. Even more concerning, America’s rivals in Beijing and Moscow now understand the key to defeating the United States: strategic patience.

The war with Iran is over. America’s weapons worked flawlessly. But on the larger chessboard of global politics, the United States may have just traded its queen to capture a pawn in an unsuccessful gambit, teaching the rest of the world that the American empire can be defeated by the ticking of a clock.

Allan C. Stam is a Miller Center senior fellow and Distinguished University Professor at the University of Virginia. He is the former dean of UVA’s Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy.

By Jeffrey W. Legro and John M. Owen IV

How can a polarized America best address the complex and dynamic “new” world that is taking shape? In mid-April at the Miller Center’s Battle Symposium, we assembled a group of experts spanning the political spectrum to consider the country’s most important interests and challenges in a global arena that has changed in important ways over the last decade. We were surprised to hear substantial agreement in key areas of national strategy. Yet as our moderators and commenters scratched the surface, important differences appeared, differences that will do much to define party positions and debates over America’s future global role.

Readers accustomed to thinking that American policy elites cannot agree on whether the sky is blue might be taken aback at the areas of broad consensus across left, right, and center. U.S. global hegemony as we have known it is over. China is the chief threat to U.S. interests, yet also a country we must work with. Alliances must be renegotiated – starting with Israel. America, long-time exemplar of free-market economics, needs an industrial policy. The national debt is the Achilles Heel of any long-term plan. The United States should be reluctant to use force and – spoiler alert! – must avoid quagmires. And whatever you do, do not mention democratic expansion or a “freedom agenda.”

Clearly, revulsion over the failures of recent U.S. administrations to reshape the world has sunk deeply into our politics and society. The End of History ended years ago. But within this general strategic concurrence there lurk thorny tactical disagreements. It is one thing to agree that America is over-extended and cannot bear global burdens any longer; that multilateral rules and institutions are wanting; that a reset is needed. It is another to agree on the severity of America’s relative decline; whether the remedy lies in pulling back the military from entire areas of the world and, if so, where and how; whether the UN, the WTO, and other institutions need renewal or should be ignored; and whether international leadership boosts or harms American prosperity and self-government.

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The China paradox may be true: that country’s economic and technological prowess make it the most important geopolitical threat since 1812, and yet common interests on pandemics, climate change, nuclear war, AI, terrorism, and economic growth make Sino-American cooperation imperative. But should the containment of China be the fundamental organizing principle of U.S. strategy? Or would that be a sign of panic and a recipe for sacrificing national interests simply because we share those interests with China?

Perhaps we are all transactionalists now: as the British statesman Lord Palmerston said long ago, countries have no permanent friends, only permanent interests. Washington may have forgotten that Israel and the United States are separate countries. NATO allies are finally growing up, paying their fair share of defense costs and facing the Russian threat squarely. But few American analysts want to end these alliances. Key disagreements include the concrete terms going forward – the extent and nature of U.S. support, what it should expect from the allies – and, importantly, what is the adhesive holding these alliances together? Is it the common threat from Russia and China? Threats to energy supplies? Devotion to free markets? Or (careful!) d-e-m-o-c-r-a-c-y?

That China has become the world’s second wealthiest country and a formidable technological rival while hewing to a focused state-directed economy may indeed mean that America should set aside its longstanding commitment to letting markets allocate most resources. Yet, how far to implement industrial policy is contested. How severely should exports of cutting-edge products, such as AI-powering microchips, be controlled? Should priority be given to strategic sectors such as ship building? Are tariffs a legitimate tool? Is the fundamental purpose re-shoring jobs back the United States, or handicapping China? And are some forgetting the risks of inefficiency and corruption that free-market advocates have always highlighted when the state gets involved?

No one likes the national debt, now clocking in at an impressive $39 trillion, exceeding annual GDP for the first time since 1946. The debt is equivalent to a domestic nuclear bomb burrowed within America’s power base, set to a timer of uncertain duration. Debt payments, military spending, entitlements, and the role of the dollar as a reserve currency are all on a downward spiral. Even the most optimistic see little hope that the country can grow its way out of the problem. But where will the bargain come from that reconfigures Medicare, Social Security, and welfare in exchange for tax hikes? Which pro-growth policies will help generate national wealth while also addressing the increasing divide between rich and poor?

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All points of the political spectrum support a strong U.S. military. And not for the sake of global domination, but rather to safeguard national interests and help prevent any other great power from achieving such domination. Does that mean, however, more interventions in the global south to decapitate or change regimes? Or a vow of No Venezuelas or Irans – the latter of which, at least, is proving far more costly than the Trump administration seems to have anticipated? Or do such forcible actions serve to mitigate festering problems, bolster U.S. credibility, and allow America to focus on longer-term challenges such as China?

Finally, it may be that the overwhelming lesson of the first part of this century is that the United States should not try to spread democracy abroad by force, that such efforts always cost far too much in lives, treasure, and credibility and seldom produce democracy in targeted states. More generally, we were struck by the absence of freedom language concerning America’s role in the world. What principles, then, can and should guide America and bond to it others of like mind (whatever that means)? What kind of international environment best serves the United States not just as a great power, but as a market-based, liberal-democratic one that historically has thrived when cooperating with similar states?

That last question brings us back to where we started. What will be the extent and nature of American international leadership in the world ahead? Can the question of freedom at home and abroad be avoided?

If you listen to the thoughtful arguments of the participants, you may be drawn to specific answers to these questions. There is no doubt we all need to address them as the country faces mid-term elections and a two-year campaign for the next president who will lead us in grappling with William James’ “blooming, buzzing confusion” of an unfamiliar emergent world.

Jeffrey W. Legro, a Miller Center non-resident senior fellow, is University Professor at the University of Richmond, where he was also the executive vice president and provost from 2017 to 2023. Before that, he was the Ambassador Henry J. Taylor and Mrs. Marion R. Taylor Professor and vice provost for global affairs at the University of Virginia.

John M. Owen IV, a Miller Center faculty senior fellow, is the Ambassador Henry J. Taylor and Mrs. Marion R. Taylor Professor of Politics. His newest book, The Ecology of Nations: American Democracy in a Fragile World Order (Yale University Press, 2023), received the 2025 Grawemeyer Award for World Order from the University of Louisville.

By Kathryn Dunn Tenpas and Chris Piper

The recent departure of Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, along with the firings of Attorney General Pam Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, mean that three members of President Donald Trump’s cabinet have lost their roles in just 46 days. They also represent three of only five female cabinet secretaries in the second Trump administration. Linda McMahon, secretary of education, and Brooke Rollins, secretary of agriculture, are the last standing female Cabinet secretaries.

With no movement in Trump’s cabinet during the first year, one might have assumed that the president had learned from his first administration that high rates of turnover caused instability and ultimately undermined his first-term agenda. However, the early departures in the second year now saddle Trump with the second-highest level of cabinet instability (going back to Ronald Reagan)—second only to himself (2017-18). At this point in his first administration, Trump had lost four cabinet secretaries.

Data on Trump’s “A” Team, or senior staff within the Executive Office of the President, paint a similar picture. Turnover at the end of 2017 was a record-setting 35 percent and in 2025 the level was 29 percent, the second-highest rate. So, while there is a perception that the second Trump administration is more stable than the first, that is true only on the margins. Turnover remains quite high relative to his predecessors.

The turnover picture is only half the story, and while executive office staff do not require Senate confirmation, roughly 1,300 jobs across the executive branch do. In the past year, the administration’s capacity to fill vacancies has steadily declined. In the roughly 12 months since the end of the president’s first 100 days (April 30, 2025 to April 26, 2026), the pace of nominations has dropped off significantly—the lowest of any president going back to Reagan. Trump’s nominations in the period between the 100^th day and now (201) are less than half the historic average between Reagan and Biden (451).

Typically, the pace of nominations increases over time, but as of April 26, 2026, Trump has made the fewest nominations (507) since Reagan—even fewer than in his first administration (509). Put more starkly, Trump has made more than 100 fewer nominations compared to Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama.

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The impact of declining nominations will likely have ripple effects across the executive branch, as thousands of government employees will be working in departments and agencies with temporary leadership. Such a situation limits long-range planning and cross-agency collaboration and can create unnecessary anxiety and lower job satisfaction.

More importantly, critical roles remain vacant with no nomination in sight. Trump has yet to nominate an administrator for the Federal Emergency Management Administration, a director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an administrator of the Transportation Security Administration, or an undersecretary for food, nutrition, and consumer services to oversee critical agriculture department programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

Additionally, due to Trump’s record level of withdrawn nominations—the highest of any modern president—and the increase in turnover resulting from recent resignations or firings, many other prominent roles lack a nominee: the United States attorney general, labor secretary, the deputy secretaries of education and treasury, and the commissioner of the IRS—all consequential, critical positions in the federal government.

If data going back to President George W. Bush is any predictor, staff turnover is only going to increase—and each departure adds to a vacancy pool that the nomination pipeline is already struggling to fill. Data show that turnover consistently increases in the second and third years of each administration. Given this trend, it is likely that vacancies will proliferate across the federal government. The lack of leadership will eventually limit the government’s capacity, creating opportunities for government failure, missteps, or an inability to provide critical services. In addition, unless Trump’s pace of nominations picks up, many key roles will remain vacant for lengthy periods and will be led by interim officials selected unilaterally by the president, without the Senate’s consent.

This scenario looks similar to the days of the first Trump administration when the president referred to parts of his leadership team as “my actings” and said the use of acting appointees gave him “more flexibility.” If past trends hold, temporary leadership will become the rule rather than the exception across wide swaths of the executive branch.

The White House Office of Presidential Personnel is the government unit best positioned to unclog the nominations pipeline. This office must quickly and capably find successors for key White House positions and, more importantly, identify and vet appointees so that their nominations can be sent to the U.S. Senate. The inability to do so will ultimately undermine the president’s agenda and compromise his performance.

Kathryn Dunn Tenpas is a Miller Center senior fellow. She is the director of the Initiative on Improving Interbranch Relations and Government and a visiting fellow with Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. She is also an advisory board member of the White House Transition Project.

Chris Piper is a manager of public policy and stakeholder engagement at the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to building a more effective federal government. He is also an adjunct professor at George Washington University.

The situation room during the raid on bin Laden’s compound (White House photo by Pete Souza)

By Barbara A. Perry

Just before midnight on May 1, 2011, President Barack Obama announced that Navy SEALs had killed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden (OBL) in a daring nighttime raid on his compound in Pakistan. After a decade, the United States had finally eliminated the mastermind behind 2001’s devastating 9/11 terrorist attacks that used civilian planes as missiles and murdered more than three thousand innocent souls in New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.

As the 15th anniversary of the successful bin Laden raid approaches, the Miller Center’s newly released Barack Obama Oral History Project offers insights about presidential performance gleaned from that 2011 decision.

Process is everything

From military operatives on the battlefield to the White House Situation Room, experience, knowledge, planning, and leadership are keys to success. As Admiral William McRaven recalled, “When I came in as the JSOC [Joint Special Operations Command] commander [in 2008], . . . we had a hell of a great process [for finding and eliminating terrorists]. . . . We had this process down pretty much pat by the time 2010 rolls in, and I get notified about bin Laden.”

The CIA had been trying to locate bin Laden for more than a decade. John Brennan, homeland security adviser in Obama’s first term and a former career CIA analyst, explained, “I had seen the footage of the Pacer [the nickname for the tall, bearded man who walked behind the compound’s high walls and never left it.]. . . . The CIA folks and I had lived this for a long, long time. We saw it developing. We had intellectually challenged, reviewed, interrogated the information. We had a lot of time on target, basically, and so when the president asked me if I thought it was him [OBL], without hesitation I said, ‘Yeah. I am very confident that that’s him.’”

Once the CIA was certain enough that they had traced bin Laden to his secret hideout in Pakistan, President Obama began meeting with Admiral Mike Mullen, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and senior intelligence analysts. They shared with the commander in chief a model of the compound. Mullen noted that Obama approached the discussions of finding and eliminating bin Laden by asking “a thousand questions” because there was still “no smoking gun” to prove conclusively that he resided in the compound.

Therefore, Obama had to provide leadership by assuming the risk of mistakenly identifying bin Laden’s location. Mullen gave “Obama an awful lot of credit for a courageous decision. I really do believe it was a ‘bet the presidency’ decision. If that had gone badly,” Mullen believed, Obama would have lost his 2012 election bid.

Obama’s process for determining whether to move forward with an attack plan relied on questioning each of his senior advisers, whom he gathered around the Situation Room table. Secretary of Defense (and previous CIA Director) Bob Gates was skeptical about the intelligence on bin Laden’s coordinates and remembered the president saying, “‘It’s a 50/50 crapshoot any way you look at it.’”

Obama’s options

Once decided on bin Laden’s elimination, Obama had to determine how to do so. One option was a Navy SEAL raid on the compound, complicated by its location deep inside Pakistan and very near its national military academy. Gates remembered sitting in the same Situation Room with President Jimmy Carter and planning the ill-fated 1980 raid to rescue American hostages in Iran. Gates warned Obama, who had no military experience, that such daring attempts rarely go well. The defense secretary had a bias toward caution, he told the president. Less dangerous missions for the military included dropping bombs on the compound or sending an armed drone. Each had drawbacks.

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Presidential leadership at its best

Mullen asserted that “having dissenting views [like Gates’s] is one of the greatest strengths of any decision-maker.” From the beginning, the admiral supported an in-person raid. “If we didn’t physically get [OBL]—literally if we didn’t have his body, have his DNA—then the enemy could have said forever it was a fake, that you didn’t get the right guy.” Mullen “had tremendous confidence in the team to go in and succeed.”

Gates reported that he shifted toward the raid option after his undersecretaries “made a very compelling case for why we ought to go forward with the raid.” He then “called [National Security Adviser Tom] Donilon and said, ‘You can tell the president I support the raid, so he can say it’s unanimous,’” although Vice President Joe Biden opposed the raid.

After Obama gathered all the opinions of his senior advisers on April 29, he left the Situation Room to weigh his options. Mullen noted that the president “typically would not make a visible decision in the room.” The next day he called Donilon to say, “It’s a go.” Yet the commander in chief couldn’t control the weather. May 2 became the only meteorological choice between two days of unfavorable conditions.

“Geronimo!”

Obama had made the fateful decision via a careful and orderly process that he managed. Now it was up to the Navy SEALs to carry out the mission. As Mullen recalled, “At that point in time, my main goal in life was to not get in the way of McRaven by the White House reaching in with a 10,000-mile screwdriver to somehow change the operation.”

All went according to the plan that had been rehearsed in the western United States—with one exception. There was no way to replicate the exact temperature in bin Laden’s compound, which affected the descent of one of the assault helicopters. Was Gates’s fear of another disaster coming to pass? No, the experienced Army pilot executed a landing that kept the copter upright, despite damage to the tail rotor from hitting the compound’s wall. Mullen noted that the pilot “literally saved the mission” by his masterful maneuver. The admiral also credited Obama with insisting that a third copter be ready as a backup for evacuating the assault team.

Soon the code words for killing bin Laden crackled across the communications channel: “Geronimo EKIA [Enemy Killed in Action]!” A Navy SEAL had killed the terrorist on the home’s third floor. In addition to removing the body and gathering as much intelligence from the house as they could, the commandos had to destroy the damaged copter and escape as quickly as possible before the Pakistani military was alerted to the raid.

The power of prayer?

Mullen noticed that during the raid he and Biden, a fellow Catholic, were fingering their “rosary rings,” a smaller version of the prayer beads used to repeat the “Hail Mary.” With their prayers answered, the admiral saw Biden return the ring to his wallet, but Mullen only half-teasingly told him, “Mr. Vice President, I’ve got 47 troops illegally in a foreign country. They just killed our number one enemy in the world, and I’ve got a 90-minute transit. They’ve got to refuel. I need to get them back into Afghanistan. I then have to transfer them to an [Bell Boeing V-22] Osprey, fly them through contested Pakistani airspace, get them out to the carrier, and get him [bin Laden] buried [at sea] in accordance with Islamic religious customs. Would you please put that rosary ring back on?”

After the president announced the momentous news to the nation in a brief East Room speech, Mullen described the relief among the team: “Biden walks up to me, pulls out his rosary ring, and shows it to me on his finger. I show him mine. Obama sees that. He walks over, and Obama literally reaches in his pocket and he pulls out a crucifix. That story is not known. And then [CIA Director] Leon [Panetta], who’s Catholic, he circles in, pulls out his rosary out of his pocket. He’d been moving the rosary beads during the whole thing as well. That was a pretty neat part of all of that. Buried him [bin Laden] safe.”

Obama impressed his troops with gratitude

McRaven suggested that the president go soon after the raid to Ft. Campbell in Kentucky “and talk to the great soldiers that are the helicopter pilots that flew the SEALs in, because they’re not going to get the kind of pat on the back that the SEALs will.” He thought Obama would make brief remarks on stage in a hanger filled with 600 soldiers, greet the senior leaders of the 101^st Airborne installation, and make a quick departure.

To McRaven’s surprise, the president stepped down from the stage and started shaking hands at the rope line. “I said to him, ‘Mr. President, you’re going to be here for another hour or so. If you want to step aside, it’ll be OK.’ And he looks at me and he goes, ‘Bill, I want to thank ’em.’ This is part of my job. It’s part of my opportunity to thank these soldiers. I don’t care if we’re here for another two hours,’ and I think we were there for another two hours. He shook hands with every single soldier.”

McRaven described young troops as “generally more conservative . . . . But I will tell you, once you got in front of the president, and you had a chance to shake hands, and you had a chance to see him, the soldiers were mesmerized by him. . . . To me, that was a great indication of (1) the soldiers’ appreciation and (2) his appreciation for them.”

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Postmortems

Unfortunately, the elimination of bin Laden, while degrading al-Qaeda, did not result in an American victory over the Taliban in Afghanistan. Another decade would pass before Washington’s chaotic exit from that war-torn country. Yet the successful raid probably helped the president win reelection in 2012.

What are the lessons from Obama’s use of presidential power to decapitate the organization responsible for the deadliest attack ever on the U.S. homeland? The president’s meticulous process included working with knowledgeable and experienced civilian leaders he had appointed at CIA, Defense, and State, as well as to his White House staff, and relying on expert military veterans to plan and practice the raid. He posed informed questions that advanced the discussions, required detailed answers from intelligence advisers and combat-ready officers, welcomed dissent to challenge presumptions and preliminary conclusions, and fostered no pettiness or backstabbing. He trusted the military but insisted on backup plans to meet unpredictable contingencies.

As McRaven concluded about the raid, “I think our government works a heck of a lot better than people think it does. What was extraordinary about this was our ability to keep a secret, for one thing. It was the overall professionalism. . . . I give the president great credit for this because it was just the way he ran these meetings.”

Finally, as the Miller Center learned from its Obama oral histories, the power of prayer and reliance on religious symbols may not be measurable variables in presidential decision-making. But if there are no atheists in foxholes, the same held true for the Obama White House.

Barbara A. Perry is the J. Wilson Newman Professor of Governance and co-chair of the Miller Center’s Presidential Oral History Program. Her forthcoming book is Reconcilable Differences: The Unlikely Political Alliance of John F. Kennedy and Eleanor Roosevelt.

By Chris Lu

Artificial intelligence is reshaping the economy and society at a speed that is accelerating by the day. For policymakers in Washington, Sacramento, Brussels, and Beijing, the question is no longer whether to regulate AI; it is who will set the rules, and whose values those rules will reflect.

That question framed a recent Miller Center panel discussion, “Regulating AI in a Fragmented World: Who Sets the Rules?” The discussion captured the current moment of uncertainty: a fast-moving technology, a fractured governance landscape, and a widening gap between public concern and political action.

The day after the Miller Center event, the Trump administration released a new National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence, which was touted as a comprehensive step toward federal leadership. However, the gap between declaring leadership and exercising it meaningfully remains wide.

The administration’s framework correctly identifies several core issues that need to be addressed: protecting the intellectual property rights of creators, developing an AI-ready workforce, and ensuring that new data centers don’t increase electricity costs for the public. The framework also notes the problem of policy fragmentation, as both red and blue states have moved ahead with their own approaches, creating a patchwork that can be challenging for companies to navigate and uneven in its protections for the public.

The administration aims to replace that patchwork with a “comprehensive national legislative framework” that would be enacted by Congress and would preempt many state regulatory efforts. In reality, the framework offers the appearance of coherence without the substance of accountability. It pairs this centralization of authority with a largely hands-off philosophy, without specifying how that authority will actually be exercised. The result is the facade of coordination over an otherwise unchanged and fragmented landscape.

The Miller Center panel discussion highlighted three tensions confronting policymakers during a moment of rapid technological change: innovation versus regulation, federal authority versus state experimentation, and national competitiveness versus global cooperation. The new Trump framework resolves these tensions by strongly favoring innovation over regulation, federal control over state experimentation, and U.S. dominance over international coordination.

These are not unreasonable choices. But they are not cost-free.

Preempting state action without replacing it eliminates a valuable source of policy experimentation. Leaning on industry-led standards effectively deputizes private actors as regulators. Framing AI governance as a race for geopolitical advantage risks turning it into a zero-sum competition rather than a shared effort to ensure that this technology serves broader global interests.

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This hands-off approach is at odds with poll after poll showing public concerns about AI’s impact on jobs, privacy, social connections, the environment, and democratic institutions. These concerns are being echoed by powerful voices on the left and right. Even many technology companies – whatever their public posture – recognize that sensible and credible guardrails are essential to building the public trust that widespread adoption will require.

At its core, this is a question of whom AI is ultimately meant to serve – and whether the benefits of this technology are widely shared or concentrated among the few. The problem is that the political system has struggled to translate these concerns into any workable safeguards.

The Trump framework is an attempt to fill that vacuum. But without meaningful commitments to transparency, accountability, and public oversight, it is more likely to deepen distrust than resolve it.

Ultimately, any policy initiative that relies on congressional action faces serious headwinds in the current political environment. It’s hard to imagine Congress moving quickly on one of the most complex and fast-evolving policy challenges of our time, particularly when the body struggles with its core legislative responsibilities. Yet history has also shown how Congress has stepped in to shape transformative technologies – from electricity to telecommunications – to support innovation and protect the public.

The window for shaping AI governance is narrow. Once systems are widely deployed and norms take hold, they become extraordinarily difficult to change. Social media offers a cautionary example: The rules and incentives established in its early years have proven stubbornly resistant to reform.

The risk, then, is not simply delay. It’s that in the absence of clear government leadership, the rules of the AI age will be set not by design, but by private companies with a vested financial interest, by foreign governments whose values diverge from our own, or through a patchwork of conflicting local rules, rather than through a thoughtful and accountable democratic process – one aimed at ensuring the benefits of AI are broadly shared across society. By the time the consequences of this leadership failure become visible, whatever takes shape may be too deeply entrenched to reverse.

Chris Lu is the James R. Schlesinger Distinguished Professor at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. As U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations for Management and Reform, he led the successful effort to secure the first-ever UN resolution on artificial intelligence in 2024.

By Elizabeth Rees

In times of true disaster, Americans see government functioning in ways they might otherwise never experience throughout their lives. The response to the havoc wreaked by Hurricane Sandy in 2012 is one example of a natural disaster requiring a huge mobilization of federal resources.

But what happens when the disaster is man-made? What approach should the federal government take to contain such a disaster? The administration of President Barack Obama faced such questions when, on April 20, 2010, a deadly explosion occurred at the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, killing 11 crewmembers and subsequently flooding the Gulf of Mexico with 4.9 million barrels of oil over the course of nearly five months.

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill is often overlooked when reflecting on the key challenges of the Obama years; the Great Recession and the Affordable Care Act at home, and the War on Terror abroad, usually prevail in historical memory. But in newly released transcripts from the Miller Center’s Barack Obama Oral History Project, administration officials shared their reflections on the spill.

As a man-made disaster and the largest oil spill in history, Deepwater Horizon was a generational crisis and unique case of gross corporate negligence with environmental and economic consequences which should not be overlooked as a defining event of the Obama era. The response to Deepwater Horizon illustrates the role of the federal government in crisis management and the value of interagency cooperation in disaster response where leadership from cabinet members is as important as from the president.

Government agencies immediately took steps to respond. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano recalled the major role played by her department in dealing with the disaster:

First of all, the Coast Guard is part of DHS, so the minute the rig blew and there were people to be rescued, that’s the Coast Guard, so we were on point for that. Then, when the wells started to leak, the president designated it as a spill of national significance, and once it’s designated a spill of national significance, then the secretary of DHS is responsible for coordinating the federal response.

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With time being of the essence and the scale of the spill becoming ever apparent, Napolitano took the lead in the response, requiring significant coordination across departments and agencies.

One of the things I did was to set up—at the outset it was twice daily, then it became daily—conference calls, principals only. Not staff, not seconds, principals: me, Ken Salazar, Lisa Jackson, Steve Chu. We would have Thad Allen on, who was the incident commander—he was the commandant of the Coast Guard—and Carol Browner from the White House. We would go through our list—what we had done, what we knew, what was next—and there were some immense challenges.

As oil started to wash up on the shores of Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, and Alabama, regional political issues came to the fore, including criticism of federal action.

We had to get people down there, and then we had to get ships over there to help with getting the oil cleaned up, and to protect the shore. Then we had to lay miles and miles of boom, and in that connection we had to mitigate the fight between Mississippi and Louisiana about who got boom first, and who got this many miles and that many miles.

Napolitano and White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Mona Sutphen both highlighted the crucial role played by Nobel physicist and Secretary of Energy Steven Chu in drawing up a plan to stem the flow of oil, in conjunction with British Petroleum [BP], which was legally responsible for closing the well.

It was a very difficult problem, because if you simply capped the well, you could force all that oil under the ocean floor, and it would spread out and come out in a million different places as opposed to one location. Steve Chu, our Nobel Prize winner, ultimately went to the BP headquarters in Houston to help them work out what could be done to shut the well.

Sutphen recalled: [Chu] singlehandedly figured out this Deepwater Horizon oil spill thing, because he’s the one who designed the valve they needed to go to stop the leak, because none of the hydraulic engineers could figure it out. We sent him down to Houston to meet with all the energy executives; they kept on saying, “Oh, we have a solution,” and then no solution would appear. “Oh, give us 24 hours. The solution will appear.” So we sent him down there, and apparently, he drew something on a napkin. He said, “Well, how about if we did this?” And they said, “Huh. [laughter] That could work.”…He said, “Well, I think if we did it this way,” and they said yes. So he came back and he was like a star. Everybody said, “Seriously? [laughter] You don’t know anything about the oil industry.” He said, “Yes, but it’s pressure. I’m a physicist. This is really just about pressure and water. I figured it out, what can I say?”

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As federal departments coordinated their response, speechwriter Cody Keenan described how President Obama addressed the nation from the Oval Office, with mixed success:

There were plenty of speeches that the press said “missed the moment,” right? Like after the [Deepwater Horizon] oil spill in 2011, he did an Oval Office address, and there really isn’t anything you can say there that’s going to pacify people until the hole in the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico is plugged. But you do those things sometimes for the dreaded “optics” word because you have to look like you’re doing something, or the story is that you’re not doing anything. So we chose an Oval Office address. I think it was our last Oval Office address because the venue is just so awful for a prime-time televised speech.

Within the Department of the Interior, where Tommy Beaudreau served as senior advisor in the Bureau of Ocean and Energy Management, footage of the spill was played as a constant reminder of the ongoing disaster that his team was working to clean up, as Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell recounted.

And thanks to Representative [Edward J.] Markey, who subpoenaed the video from the ROV [remotely operated vehicle], he made sure it was playing 24 hours a day. So we would come in. There was a command center on the third floor of the Interior Department where we would meet at 8:30 [a.m.] every day to talk about the status, what was going on with the response coordination with the unified command. That corridor and room to this day gives me the willies [laughs] when I go by there because, a lot of memories, and we had that image of the gushing well head playing up there.

The expertise of specific cabinet secretaries was crucial in coordinating the immediate response to the spill, as well as in setting out a vision for responsible conduct by corporations going forward. Jewell explained how the lessons learned from the crisis could be applied to drilling in the Arctic, for example.

We said, based on the lessons learned in Deepwater Horizon, based on the fact that this is an extremely sensitive ecosystem under the Arctic and that the ice moves in, and if that well is blowing out during a time when you can’t get another rig in to kill it, you’re talking about probably nine months of flow that potentially could destroy that whole Arctic ecosystem.

After nearly 90 days, the crisis came to an end with the flow of oil finally diminished. While there was no playbook for how to deal with such a disaster, the effective coordination and mobilization of government agencies and departments was crucial in containing disaster where corporations had failed. As such, Deepwater Horizon clearly illustrated the importance of choosing cabinet secretaries with relevant expertise and experience in preparing the federal government to take decisive and appropriate action when disaster strikes.

Elizabeth Rees is a research fellow at the Miller Center. She completed her DPhil at the University of Oxford’s Rothermere American Institute in 2024 and was a postdoctoral fellow at Southern Methodist University’s Center for Presidential History.

[Credit: Sheila Sund]

By Allan C. Stam

Since the war in Iran began on February 28, commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has ground to a halt. The economic shock is global — oil prices spiking, LNG cargoes rerouted, fertilizer and helium supply chains frozen — but the weight of that shock does not fall evenly. The United States, now the world’s largest producer of crude and natural gas, feels the squeeze mainly at the pump. Europe, Japan, South Korea, and China feel it in their factories, their power grids, and their heating bills.

The more contested question is who is keeping the Strait closed. On and off for 40 years, the default answer was Iran — the regime whose mines, fast-attack boats, and proxy drones have periodically turned the waterway into a shooting gallery. That default no longer holds. In a matter of weeks, the Trump administration has moved from insisting that European and Asian consumer nations help secure free passage through the Strait to authorizing what amounts to selective U.S. interception of traffic through it — converting the world’s most critical maritime chokepoint from a shared international asset into an instrument of American leverage. The stated aim in Washington is ambitious: regime change in Tehran, or, failing that, a fundamental rewrite of Iran’s nuclear program and its sponsorship of regional proxies.

European capitals want none of that. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer told reporters he prefers “to keep the straits open, not shut,” adding that “it is vital that we get the strait open and fully open” — though, tellingly, Starmer refused to blame President Donald Trump personally for Britain’s surging energy costs. French President Emmanuel Macron pressed “the need to restore free and unimpeded navigation through the Strait of Hormuz as quickly as possible.” Spain’s defense minister, Margarita Robles, dismissed the premise of a blockade outright—a plan, she said, that “makes no sense.” Notice what none of these statements proposes. None mentions altering Iran’s behavior. None endorses the American price of admission. They want the cargo moving again — full stop.

Why are European and East Asian governments focused on reopening the Strait rather than on confronting the regime that started the interdiction in the first place — or, for that matter, on resisting the administration now escalating it? The answer begins with a less flattering question: How have these same governments historically handled the problem of paying ransom for hostages?

To best anticipate how European and East Asian governments will behave, one must look beyond traditional military analysis and employ a behavioral analogy: a hostage situation. The Strait of Hormuz — and the vital oil, liquified natural gas, helium, and fertilizer that transit through it — is a hostage. Iran, through decades of mining, seizing tankers, and harassing commercial shipping, is the hostage-taker. The consumer nations are the hostages’ families, receiving the ransom demands. The Trump administration, by moving from guaranteeing free passage to selectively interdicting it, has added a second source of pressure on the hostage and its families. But Washington’s leverage is a symptom of the crisis, not its cause. The party whose behavior created the hostage situation — and whose behavior must change for the Strait to be reliably open — is Iran.

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When Iran attacks commercial shipping, seizes tankers, or threatens to mine the Strait, it is engaging in strategic hostage-taking designed to extract maximum concessions without triggering full-scale war. Iran need not seal the Strait entirely — it merely needs to raise insurance premiums, reduce flows, and charge transit fees born of the fear of being targeted. The “ransom” Tehran seeks is multifaceted: relief from economic sanctions, the unfreezing of billions in foreign accounts, diplomatic tolerance of its nuclear enrichment program, and unchallenged regional hegemony.

To understand the potential impact of the US intervention in the Hormuz Strait, one must understand how the United States assumed responsibility for this hostage in the first place. Following the British withdrawal from the region in 1971, the U.S. relied on the Nixon Doctrine’s “Twin Pillars“ policy, providing security through proxies—heavily arming Saudi Arabia and, most crucially, Imperial Iran under the Shah—to act as local enforcers protecting the free flow of oil.

This proxy strategy violently collapsed in 1979 with the Iranian Revolution, transforming the primary Gulf policeman into the primary hostage-taker. The resulting chaos triggered a global energy crisis; Americans waited in miles-long lines for rationed gasoline. Shortly thereafter, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, placing the Red Army within striking distance of the Gulf.

In response, President Jimmy Carter delivered his defining 1980 State of the Union address, establishing the Carter Doctrine: “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” This doctrine fundamentally changed the course of Middle East history. It birthed the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force, which evolved into U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), and led to the permanent stationing of the U.S. 5th Fleet in Bahrain. The U.S. shifted from relying on proxies to becoming the direct, kinetic guarantor of the Strait.

The U.S.-led war against Iran is, in practice, a proposition to kill off the Carter Doctrine. To understand why an American president would suggest abandoning a decades-old security paradigm, one must analyze how drastically U.S. dependence on the Persian Gulf has changed since 1980. Then, the hostage held in the Strait of Hormuz was the United States. Today, the hostage nations are almost exclusively Europe, China, Japan, and South Korea.

This drastic shift in vulnerability exposes a profound asymmetry. In the 1980s, the “insurance premium” the United States paid to keep the Strait open was astronomical: the creation of CENTCOM, the deployment of carrier strike groups, and being drawn into the 1980’s Tanker War. But because America’s economic stability depended on Gulf oil, paying this premium made strategic sense.

Today, the United States is still paying this massive premium, yet the beneficiaries have completely changed. The U.S. 5th Fleet is spending tens of billions to intercept drones and missiles to protect shipping lanes through which much of the oil destined for China—America’s primary strategic rival —is transported. Trump’s frequent statements demanding that U.S. allies participate fully in managing security in the Hormuz Strait highlight this striking asymmetry: Why is the American taxpayer funding the geopolitical insurance for Beijing and Berlin?

For over 40 years, Europe and East Asia have under-contributed to the security of their own energy lifelines. Japan and South Korea host American bases and contribute financially—but hosting is not the same as deploying. Writing checks is not the same as putting your sailors’ lives at risk in the Strait of Hormuz. China contributes nothing at all. If the U.S. unwinds CENTCOM’s maritime mandate, these nations face a binary choice: aggressively build and deploy their own blue-water navies or pay the ransom to Iran.

To predict how consumer nations are more likely to respond, consider their actual behavior in literal hostage situations. The United States and the United Kingdom generally maintain strict no-concession policies rooted in long-term deterrence. But countries such as France, Germany, Italy, and Spain have historically paid tens of millions in ransoms to terrorist organizations—prioritizing the short-term survival of the hostage over the long-term incentive structure. This pattern suggests that when faced with Iranian extortion at the Strait, many consumer nations are far more likely to treat the crisis as a business expense to be managed than as an act of aggression to be defeated.

China is already modeling this approach. Beijing signed a 25-year strategic cooperation agreement with Iran in 2021—though the widely reported $400 billion headline figure remains largely aspirational, with actual Chinese investment in Iran amounting to a small fraction of that sum. Nevertheless, the strategic signal is clear: bilateral deal-making to secure preferential treatment, rather than collective security to confront the extortionist. If other consumer nations follow this template, the result is a balkanized Gulf where each nation negotiates its own protection arrangement with Tehran—enriching the hostage-taker with every transaction.

If consumer nations believe that paying geopolitical ransoms will pacify Iran, they are ignoring a glaring historical warning provided by the United States’ experience. During the Lebanese Civil War, Hezbollah—funded, trained, and directed by Iran’s IRGC—systematically kidnapped American citizens in Beirut. Desperate to secure their release, the Reagan administration engaged in a secret arms-for-hostages deal, covertly facilitating the sale of more than two thousand TOW anti-tank missiles and HAWK anti-aircraft missiles to Iran.

Did this deal pacify Iran? Just the opposite. It made things demonstrably worse. In exchange for the missiles, Hezbollah released three American hostages—Benjamin Weir, Lawrence Jenco, and David Jacobsen. But having learned that kidnapping Americans yielded invaluable military hardware, Iran directed Hezbollah to kidnap three more—Frank Reed, Joseph Cicippio, and Edward Tracy. The net reduction in American hostages was zero. The long-term damage was immense: The Iran-Contra scandal deeply damaged the Reagan presidency, while Iran received advanced weaponry and learned the strategic lesson that Western powers can be extorted. Treating hostage-taking as a transaction did not end the crisis; it established an infinite loop of extortion.

The same dynamic played out at sea. When Somali pirates began hijacking commercial vessels off the Horn of Africa in the late 2000s, the shipping industry responded exactly as one would predict: They paid the ransom. Insurance companies activated kidnap-and-ransom policies, and millions in cash were parachuted onto the decks of hijacked freighters. The result was catastrophic moral hazard.

Ransom money transformed localized piracy into a transnational criminal enterprise—Somali warlords bought faster skiffs, heavier weapons, and even established a pirate “stock exchange” where civilians could buy shares in upcoming expeditions. The crisis only ended when a military coalition—including the EU’s Operation Atalanta and Combined Task Force 151 under CENTCOM—aggressively patrolled the corridors and armed security contractors were placed on commercial decks. It was force and deterrence, not appeasement, that broke the syndicates.

If consumer nations lack the political will to confront Iran and instead opt to pay the ransom, the hidden costs will bleed the global economy dry in ways that dwarf the immediate premium.

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First, the ransom funds the hostage-taker’s empire. When consumer nations enrich Iran to keep the Strait open, that money flows directly to the IRGC. The IRGC uses those funds to build Shahed drones sold to Russia and used to bomb European allies in Ukraine. The ransom money arms Hamas and Hezbollah, ensuring perpetual warfare in the Levant. Consumer nations would literally be funding the weapons used against their own allies.

Second, appeasement breeds geographic expansion. By proving that maritime extortion works in the Strait of Hormuz, Iran has already exported the model to the Red Sea via its Houthi proxies. The Houthis are currently holding the Suez Canal route hostage. Because the international community has hesitated to mount a comprehensively devastating response against Houthi infrastructure, the Houthis continue to dictate global trade flows—a second chokepoint, a second ransom.

Trump’s move is not a retreat from the Carter Doctrine; it is an inversion of it. The American guarantee of free passage through the Strait has become, in a matter of weeks, an American instrument for coercing Tehran as well as our allies in Europe and our allies and adversaries in East Asia. The reckoning this forces on consumer nations is nonetheless the one that has been building for four decades: the United States is no longer the energy-starved nation that drafted the Carter Doctrine, and it is no longer rational for the American taxpayer to act as the sole underwriter for the geopolitical insurance of its economic rivals.

When the Strait—and its invaluable cargo—is viewed as a hostage, the behavioral history of Europe and Asia provides a dark but historically consistent pattern. Plagued by domestic vulnerabilities and an aversion to sustained military risk, countries that historically pay ransoms to terrorists are far more likely to pay ransoms to Tehran. Nevertheless, as the catastrophic failure of Reagan’s arms-for-hostages deal proved, paying the ransom does not pacify the extortionist—it merely replenishes their inventory. If consumer nations adopt the cynical mechanics of hostage insurance and view Iranian extortion as a standard business expense, they will fund their own geopolitical demise—fueling radical proxies from Yemen to Lebanon while the gun remains permanently pointed at the global economy.

Allan C. Stam is a Miller Center senior fellow and Distinguished University Professor at the University of Virginia. He is the former dean of UVA’s Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy.

By Allan C. Stam

Much of the current debate about the Middle East treats the region’s turmoil as a tragic but fundamentally localized geopolitical dispute—a messy, intractable conflict over borders, historical grievances, and religion. But this framing entirely misses the bigger picture. The crisis radiating from Tehran isn’t simply an Israeli issue, nor is it strictly an American one driven by an extraordinarily polarizing president. It is a fundamental threat to the global economy. To understand why the Iranian regime ultimately has to go, we must reevaluate our recent history, correct our strategic myopia, and stop conflating very different movements that merely happen to share a geography, a religion, and a willingness to use violence.

To trace the roots of our current crisis, we need to look back to the political crucible of the 1960s. At that time, the Middle East was desperate to escape the shadows of empires—a long succession of foreign dominance that ranged from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire to the mandates of the French and British, and eventually to the Cold War hegemony of the Americans. In this volatile environment, three distinct revolutionary groups emerged, competing for the region’s future: Military Nationalists, Liberal Nationalists, and Theocratic Revolutionaries.

The Military Nationalists, embodied by figures like Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and the early Ba’athists, sought to build strong, secular, authoritarian states capable of standing up to Western powers. The Liberal Nationalists, though frequently sidelined, fought for constitutional republics, democratic institutions, and civil rights. While authoritarians remain today, aside from Israel, the Middle East’s liberal reformers largely failed.

Despite decades of persistent effort and moments of global hope, the dream of a democratic Middle East blossomed with the Arab Spring in 2011 but had wilted almost entirely by 2013. This collapse was fatally compounded by President Barack Obama’s decision to end large-scale military support, which led to the collapse of the U.S.-led order in Iraq. The removal of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya—where no organized liberal alternative existed to fill the vacuum—offered a grim preview of what happens when regimes fall without viable successors, a lesson directly relevant to any discussion of Iran’s future.

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The third group that emerged from the collapse of imperialism was the Theocratic Revolutionaries. Rooted in the mid-century ideological fervor of organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood—whose charismatic and radical leading ideologue, Sayyid Qutb, was executed by the Egyptian government in 1966—these theocrats completely rejected the modern nation-state model. Unlike the nationalists, their ultimate goal was the erasure of national borders to establish a regional, if not global, Islamic caliphate or imamate. Though Qutb’s vision was born in Sunni Egypt, this radical, anti-system framework would eventually find its most lethal, enduring, and state-sponsored champion in Shia Iran.

In their desperate bid to expel foreign influence and secure power during the latter half of the 20th century, all three of these groups had resorted to strikingly similar tactics: terrorism, guerrilla warfare, and wars of national liberation. Pipelines were bombed, planes were hijacked, and violent insurgencies were launched. This is where the West made a historic and fatal miscalculation. We judged these actors almost entirely by their tactics, paying far less attention to their ultimate goals.

Because the surface behaviors of these groups often looked identical, at least in our eyes, Western policymakers treated them as variations of the same problem. We missed the key, existential distinctions between these factions. As a result, we repeatedly ended up backing the wrong groups, making short-sighted alliances of convenience that, in the long run, significantly empowered the theocrats. We failed to recognize that a nationalist fighting for a border is a problem that can eventually be solved through diplomacy; a theocrat fighting to trigger a holy war is a problem that cannot.

For decades, just as we confused left-wing nationalists with Soviet proxies, we have confused Islamic revolutionaries with Muslim revolutionary nationalists. Look at the historical trajectory of Yasser Arafat. Arafat was undeniably a revolutionary nationalist and a practicing Muslim. His organization utilized terrorism, which rightfully drew the condemnation of the international community. But his ultimate goals were thoroughly conventional and Westphalian: a contested piece of land, a flag, and a recognized state. He wanted an independent nation, albeit at the expense of Israel, that would exist as part of the world as it currently is. He desired a seat at the United Nations, not its destruction.

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, by contrast, was an Islamist revolutionary. His long-run vision wasn’t a conventional nation state; it was a theocracy explicitly designed to lead a broader region of theocracies. Khomeini didn’t want to join the international order; he wanted to overthrow it.

Because we failed to differentiate between these distinct ideologies, our foreign policy has suffered from chronic incoherence. Their end goals are entirely different, a reality most clearly demonstrated by their respective views on Israel. To a secular nationalist, Israel represents a bitter, deeply entrenched dispute over land, resources, and sovereignty. It is a conflict that, theoretically, has a geopolitical solution. To an Islamist like Khomeini and his successors, however, Israel is not a geopolitical rival—it is a religious anathema that must be violently eliminated. There is no middle ground, no compromise, and no two-state solution acceptable to a regime whose core identity is predicated on holy war.

Today, this ideological divergence has resulted in a profound and striking irony. The greatest source of radical Islamist ideology can now often be found incubating among radical imams in the capitals of Europe, rather than in the states of the Arabian Peninsula. While Western nations grapple with imported extremism, the Sunni Gulf states—once the primary exporters of hardline ideology—are rapidly evolving.

Countries like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (most notably in Dubai and Abu Dhabi), and Kuwait are undergoing massive, unprecedented reforms. They are making a highly calculated pivot toward modernity, seeking to become premier hubs for international finance, technology, artificial intelligence, and global trade. They recognize that the era of relying solely on oil is ending, and that their future wealth and domestic stability depend entirely on being reliable, integrated stakeholders in the global economy.

We see the fruits of this modernization clearly in the Abraham Accords. The UAE and Bahrain have signed these historic normalization agreements, while Saudi Arabia and Kuwait—one-time implacable enemies of Israel—continue negotiations towards mutual recognition. These accords represent a triumph of economic pragmatism and forward-looking statecraft over historical grievance. The Gulf states have chosen the future. Conversely, the remaining radical Islamic proxy groups and their chief patron state, Iran, are fiercely dedicated to the 7th century. While Dubai builds the future of global logistics and Saudi Arabia courts international investment, Tehran continues its relentless targeting of Israel and its neighbors, acting as the region’s great spoiler.

Why does the nature of the Iranian regime matter so much to global markets? Because the Iranian regime has built a vast, transnational network of proxies—Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Islamist cousins like the Taliban and Al-Qaeda—that all share this same revolutionary, anti-state system DNA. This ideological extremism is exponentially magnified by an accident of geography. Between Iran’s own borders and the territory controlled by its Yemeni proxies, Tehran effectively holds two of the world’s most critical maritime chokepoints hostage: the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb strait. By commanding these narrow waterways, a regime dedicated to overturning the global order has its hands firmly around the jugular of international commerce.

When we deal with Tehran and its proxies, we are not dealing with actors who want to negotiate trade agreements, boost their Gross Domestic Product, or improve the standard of living for their citizens. The Supreme Leader of Iran does not wake up in the morning worrying about inflation rates, foreign direct investment, or supply chain efficiencies. He wakes up focused on exporting the Islamic Revolution.

Ask yourself a simple question: Would you put the Taliban in charge of the global economy? Would you entrust vital international supply chains to Hamas?

The answer is obviously no. Yet, by allowing Iran to remain the principal architect of Middle Eastern instability—despite decades of sanctions and containment efforts that have failed to alter the regime’s fundamental behavior—the world is effectively accepting an enormous systemic risk. We see this plainly and painfully with the Houthis in Yemen. Armed, funded, and directed by Tehran, the Houthi attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea and the Bab el-Mandeb strait are not merely a show of solidarity with Hamas. They are a direct, calculated assault on the vital arteries of international commerce. By forcing shipping companies to reroute vessels around the Cape of Good Hope, Iran’s proxies are driving up international insurance premiums, severely threatening the delivery of everyday goods, and contributing to global inflation. The toll is paid by consumers in Europe, Asia, and the Americas.

In the face of this reality, some Western foreign-policy “realists” continue to argue that Iran can be managed or accommodated. They point to moments of supposed Iranian pragmatism, often highlighting the fact that Iran actively fought the Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq and Syria. They suggest this proves Tehran is a rational actor with whom we can do business, supposedly united by a common enemy.

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But this interpretation is a dangerous illusion. Iran didn’t fight ISIS because the regime suddenly developed an opposition to religious radicalism, terrorism, or the concept of a caliphate. Iran fought ISIS because ISIS threatened strategic allies who were part of its radical Islamist proxy network. It was a brutal turf war between rival extremists vying for regional hegemony, not a moderation of Iran’s fundamental goals. To view Iran’s battle against ISIS as a sign of moderation is akin to viewing a mafia turf war as a sign that the mob has suddenly embraced the rule of law.

The uncomfortable reality that Western policymakers must finally accept is that the Iranian regime is fundamentally incompatible with a functioning global system. Recognizing this is not about a desire to unilaterally impose Western cultural values on the Middle East, nor is it a call to repeat the kind of large-scale, open-ended nation-building missions that lost domestic and international support after 2011. Rather, it is about cold, hard, economic preservation. It is about protecting the stability of the world economy.

You cannot run a deeply integrated, highly sensitive 21st-century global market when a major regional power, situated at the crossroads of the world’s most critical maritime chokepoints, is dedicated to world revolution rather than world trade. The continued existence of a regime that utilizes state-sponsored terrorism as a primary tool of foreign policy, targets international shipping, and seeks to destabilize modernizing states in its neighborhood is an intolerable systemic risk.

Until the theocracy in Tehran is replaced by a government that actually wants to be a normal, independent nation—a nation that prioritizes the prosperity of the Iranian people over the violent export of an archaic ideology—the entire global economic system will remain held hostage. For the sake of global stability, international commerce, and the future of the Middle East, the Iranian regime must go.

Allan C. Stam is a Miller Center senior fellow and Distinguished University Professor at the University of Virginia. He is the former dean of UVA’s Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy.

By Barbara A. Perry

With the 2026 men’s NCAA championship now in the books, we know one thing for sure about former President Barack Obama. He was half right in his Final Four picks, correctly selecting Arizona and Illinois but failing in his prognostication of Duke and Iowa State. One historical certainty is that basketball provides insight into Obama’s persona and presidential leadership style.

Demonstrating his March Madness fanaticism just two months after his 2009 inauguration, Obama was the first president to release his completed brackets. Yet his love of the game was no surprise to anyone familiar with his biography. Abandoned as a toddler by his father, a Kenyan exchange student, young Barack saw him only once more. At age 10, the youngster visited in Hawaii with his dad, who gave him a basketball for Christmas.

At Hawaii’s Punahou School, Obama played (well, mostly cheered from the bench) on the state championship varsity team, and the school’s blue and gold jersey, with the president’s name emblazoned on the back, is available for purchase online. His high school teammates describe him as confident, relentless, passionate, and positive—all characteristics that helped him win the presidency and shaped his leadership in the White House.

He carried his “gym rat” experience all the way to the Oval Office, as the Miller Center captured in its recently released Barack Obama Presidential Oral History Project. Even before Obama became president, basketball offered him a way to meet like-minded people, not only about sports but public policy. Arne Duncan, a former Harvard and professional player (in Australia) who would become Obama’s secretary of education, first met then-University of Chicago Law School Professor Barack Obama at the campus gym during lunchtime pickup games. Amusingly, Duncan’s mother also joined in playing, brandishing her two-handed set shot, made famous by Boston Celtic star Bob Cousy in the 1950s. Obama teased Arne, “Your mother used to foul me.” The education secretary replied, “I know. She used to foul me, too.”

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Duncan noted that Obama’s hardwood game contained some features of his political persona: “He’s a cerebral player, really smart. And the thing I always loved—he was a good player, he wasn’t a great player, but he played to win. I would say he didn’t have any ego. There’d be a game where he might not shoot the ball, or shoot one time, but he played good defense and moved the ball. It was never about getting a workout. It was super competitive, and that was always true.”

As their friendship on the court developed, Duncan said, “We started to talk more about education policy, started to visit schools together when he was in the Illinois legislature, and then when he became a U.S. senator. That’s when he and I started to move beyond friendship in hoops to doing some work together.”

The two Chicago teammates continued their basketball games once in Washington, with Duncan reporting, “that’s the one place where he could be just Barack. People would say, ‘You take it easy on him.’ It would ruin the game. We never did that. We usually played together, but that was just the one place where he could be a normal human being. I know how much I needed that stress relief, and I can only imagine how much more he needed it than I did.”

Not going “easy” on the commander in chief once resulted in a presidential injury when a player accidentally hit the president’s face and caused a blood-gushing cut. “Big bloody mess. Yes. But that tells you, people do not take it easy on him,” senior advisor David Plouffe recalled.

Plouffe was one of Obama’s closest advisors for the 2008 and 2012 campaigns and served in the White House during each term. Yet, despite his boyhood experience on the court, he didn’t make the president’s roundball roster. Plouffe referred to the president’s playing buddies as “his basketball crew,” consisting of former Duke player Reggie Love, Marvin Nicholson, and Marty Nesbitt, along with Arne Duncan. “These were really good basketball players. They took it very seriously. Occasionally, they’d let [other] people come in. I played basketball through eighth grade, so I can pass OK and I can shoot. But at these guys’ level, they don’t want to pollute their game with charity invitations.”

Basketball also served as an ice breaker in Obama’s meetings with potential Cabinet members. Tom Perez, who would serve as assistant attorney general in the first term and secretary of labor in the second, arrived in Chicago for an interview with the president-elect and saw a basketball on Obama’s desk. “I had coached basketball for 15 years,” Perez remembered. “So our first conversations were about basketball. And he’s a left-handed basketball player, and I’m a left-handed basketball player. He’s, I’m sure, a much better basketball player than I was. So that’s where [the professional partnership] started.”

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Plouffe noted that it wasn’t only basketball that captured the president’s imagination. “He’s just a fanatical sports fan. ESPN would just be on TV around him on the plane, not CNBC or MSNBC or CNN. I felt bad for people, actually, who did not know a lot about sports around him because that was such an orientation. It just was. I mean, he’d want to talk first thing in the morning about the football game or the basketball game or whatever, the baseball game. And that’s an outlet. For me personally, that’s an outlet. It’s how I kind of decompress. I was very fortunate that he was, and [David] Axelrod was as well, just fanatical about it.”

Yet this fanaticism—as an icebreaker, link to advisors, relaxation as a spectator and player—had a gendered component. Deputy Chief of Staff Mona Sutphen explained that “a fair number of my women colleagues [felt] like there was a club of guys around the president who were his guys. And he’s quite sporty, so obviously they talked athletics at the beginning of the meeting. Obama loves sports, so anything that was a sporting—it could be ice fishing and he would want to talk about it.” Moreover, it was usually men in the administration who played basketball or golf with the president, although he invited Domestic Policy Council Director Melody Barnes and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to play golf with him.

Sebelius described Obama as “a boy’s boy, even though he is surrounded by women. And he may be more of a boy’s boy because of that. I mean that his greatest relaxation—he likes to hang out with the jocks. He likes to play golf to get away, but mostly with men. All of that makes sense. He used to say to people, ‘I am married to this very talented, bright, strong woman. I have these two wonderful daughters. I was raised by a mother and a grandmother. And I live with my mother-in-law. What is it about my life that you think is not sensitive to women? I’m anchored to women.’” In his defense, the president, along with Reggie Love, his personal aide, coached the Obamas’ younger daughter Sasha’s fourth-grade basketball team, for a short time, until the parents of opposing teams complained that this arrangement gave unfair advantage to the First Daughter’s squad.

Admiral William McRaven, the Navy SEAL commander who planned the daring 2011 raid that killed Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, viewed Obama’s athletic machismo as a positive presidential trait. “He just had a sense about him that you see, as I used to see, in great military leaders: confident, with a bit of a swagger, but not cocky; good personality. . . . I found he always had a great sense of humor, and he was very personable when he was around you one on one. And frankly, and maybe it was just my sense, but I’m a big basketball guy, and I knew Obama was a big basketball guy, and so he’s a sports guy. . . . This may be a terribly either chauvinistic or myopic approach to this—you think about people that are sports people, if they have been in positions where they’re the quarterback or the point guard, or they’re in a position where they’re leading a sports team. That gives you a level of confidence. . . .When you’re a sports guy, and you played sports, and you’re good at it, it gives you a level of confidence, and that conveyed itself [for Obama] in the Situation Room.”

Barbara A. Perry is the J. Wilson Newman Professor of Governance and co-chair of the Presidential Oral History Program at UVA’s Miller Center. Her forthcoming book is Reconcilable Differences: The Unlikely Political Alliance of John F. Kennedy and Eleanor Roosevelt.

By David Leblang

Ronald Reagan’s 1989 farewell address contains what may be the most succinct statement of American exceptionalism ever delivered from the Oval Office: “You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.” That conviction — that America is a creed, not a bloodline — now faces its most direct constitutional challenge in a century and a half.

On April 1, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Trump v. Barbara — the challenge to President Trump’s January 2025 executive order that sought to end automatic birthright citizenship for children born in the U.S. to undocumented immigrants or parents on temporary visas. The order claims that such children are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States under the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause. Lower courts ruled it unconstitutional. The administration appealed, and a decision is expected by late June or early July. The key question before the Court is clear: Can the executive branch unilaterally rewrite a 156-year-old constitutional guarantee?

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

That language was not accidental. It was a direct constitutional override of Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), in which the Supreme Court ruled that black Americans — born on U.S. soil — could never be citizens. The Reconstruction Congress knew exactly what it was doing: ruling out the idea that birth on American soil could depend on a person’s parents’ background or status. The administration’s “subject to jurisdiction” theory does not restore the original meaning. It departs from the Amendment’s most basic purpose.

The Trump administration and its supporters claim that broad birthright citizenship weakens American sovereignty and misinterprets the 14th Amendment’s intent. They contend that the “subject to the jurisdiction” clause was never intended to grant automatic citizenship to children of undocumented entrants or temporary visitors — only to those who owe complete and exclusive allegiance to the United States. It sounds plausible, but it is fundamentally wrongheaded.

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These arguments have found vocal supporters. George Washington University Law Professor and Fox News commentator Jonathan Turley, appearing on Fox News after the oral arguments, called the current policy “perfectly insane” and warned that the United States had become a target for exploitation by foreign adversaries. CNN commentator Scott Jennings, former deputy director of political affairs to President George W. Bush, has pointed to birth tourism operations — particularly involving China and the Northern Mariana Islands — as evidence of systemic abuse, arguing that “foreign adversaries“ have built entire commercial enterprises to facilitate births on American soil. Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff for policy and a key architect of the administration’s immigration policy, has gone the furthest: Birthright citizenship, he argues, “steals the actual birthright of every American“ and amounts to “the biggest, costliest scam in financial history.” These voices share a common premise — that citizenship is a scarce national resource, to be rationed rather than extended. That premise is the fallacy at the heart of this entire debate.

This zero-sum framing mixes two completely different groups. The administration’s executive order targets children born to undocumented immigrants and those on temporary visas — groups with very different legal status, economic situations, and pathways to the U.S. The “birth tourism” concern involves wealthy foreigners on tourist visas; the undocumented population is an entirely different demographic. Mixing them up serves a rhetorical purpose, but it does not make a fair argument. It’s worth noting: Citizens of Russia, China, and most countries worldwide must get a B-1/B-2 tourist visa to enter the U.S. If the concern is foreign exploitation, the current consular screening already offers strong tools. There’s no need to rewrite the Constitution to use them.

The deeper flaw in this worldview isn’t empirical, but philosophical: It confuses a creed-based nation for a fortress. Reagan understood this difference. His vision of a “shining city upon a hill” was explicitly non-zero-sum — America’s doors remained open “to anyone with the will and the heart to get here” because national strength came from allegiance to shared principles, not from limiting the number of those who could claim them. To Reagan, being born on American soil symbolized the nation’s fundamental wager: that environment and allegiance could surpass origin, that anyone could earn their place by embracing the ideals that define the Republic. The current administration has abandoned that wager. The question is whether the Supreme Court will do the same.

That vision has deep roots — deeper than Reagan’s. James Madison, in 1790, argued before Congress that the new nation should “hold out as many inducements as possible, for the worthy part of mankind to come and settle amongst us, and throw their fortunes into a common lot with ours” — not merely to increase population, but to “increase the wealth and strength of the community.” Thomas Jefferson, in his first message to Congress in 1801, asked: “Shall oppressed humanity find no asylum on this globe?” He advocated making citizenship more accessible to those who intended to live permanently and wished the country well, seeing immigrants not as threats but as contributors to the multiplication of free, self-governing people.

Frederick Douglass pushed the logic further and more powerfully than any of the Founders. In his 1869 address “Composite Nation“—delivered just three years after the 14th Amendment was ratified—Douglass argued that America was meant to include “all the varieties of the human family,” not despite its founding ideals but because of them. A nation based on universal principles of liberty and self-government could not, without contradiction, base its membership on ancestry or origin. The Amendment that ended the Dred Scott logic was, for Douglass, the constitutional fulfillment of that argument. It was not a loophole. It was the point.

Alexis de Tocqueville, observing American democracy in the 1830s, marveled at how the United States built a common identity not through ancient bloodlines but through habits of association, self-government, and a shared dedication to liberty and equality. Americans from diverse backgrounds united in pursuit of common goals, forging a dynamic, growing society — one whose unity came from participating in democratic life rather than from ethnic sameness.

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These voices — from Madison and Jefferson to Douglass, Tocqueville, and Reagan — agree on one point: American citizenship isn’t a finite resource to be divided by heritage. Instead, it is a value-based membership that strengthens the nation when genuinely embraced. The administration’s approach turns this idea upside down, viewing inclusion as a loss.

The data confirm what the Founders suspected and challenge the administration’s core claims. Birth tourism—the narrow phenomenon of short-term visitors deliberately traveling to give birth—remains vanishingly small. (The CDC User Guide to the 2024 Natality Public Use File shows 9,502 births to foreign residents by occurrence in 2024, with roughly 9,500 births reported to mothers with a non-U.S. address as their residence—less than 0.3% of the approximately 3.63 million total U.S. births). In contrast, births to undocumented mothers who are already residing in the United States are estimated at about 7% of annual births (roughly 225,000–250,000), yet these U.S.-born children grow up as Americans who contribute taxes, labor, military service, and innovation.

The National Academy of Sciences’ 2016 report on immigrant integration documents the considerable positive financial contributions of the second generation — birthright citizens, by definition — over their working years, contributions that far exceed the costs associated with their parents’ arrival.

Demographically, the stakes are even higher. With native-born fertility below replacement levels at about 1.73 children per woman, the second generation from immigrant families is the main driver of working-age population growth — helping to prevent the aging crises already affecting Japan, South Korea, and much of southern Europe. The Migration Policy Institute has noted that second-generation Americans, who benefit directly from birthright citizenship, demonstrate higher rates of educational achievement, civic involvement, and upward mobility than either the immigrant first generation or, in many cases, the broader native-born population. Far from depleting a scarce resource, birthright citizenship has expanded the American enterprise — economically, demographically, and culturally — by transforming potential outsiders into engaged participants in the national project. This is not a liability. It is a competitive advantage.

The zero-sum framing not only misinterprets the data but also reflects the exclusionary logic that the 14th Amendment was designed to eliminate. Telling millions of native-born Americans that their citizenship has always been provisional — dependent on their parents’ circumstances — does not safeguard American identity. Instead, it erodes it from within.

The way the administration’s theory describes “illegitimate” birthright citizenship is almost always associated with a brown-skinned child — a baby born near the southern border, to parents who crossed without documents. But that image is a biased and historically misleading portrayal. Consider Rosaria Baldizzi, an Italian immigrant who lived at 97 Orchard Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the 1930s and is believed to have entered the United States without authorization. Her American-born daughter Josephine — a birthright citizen by the same constitutional rule now being challenged — grew up, worked, paid taxes, and became part of the fabric of New York City. No one has ever suggested that Josephine Baldizzi’s citizenship undermined the Republic. The Baldizzis are now part of the Tenement Museum’s permanent record of American immigrant life — a story told with pride, not shame. That is how America is supposed to work.

Then consider Marco Rubio. The current U.S. secretary of state — and a prominent voice in the administration urging the Supreme Court to restrict birthright citizenship — was born in Miami in 1971 to Cuban parents who entered on visas but didn’t become naturalized citizens until 1975, four years after his birth. According to the executive order’s own logic, Rubio’s citizenship at birth was precisely the type the administration now aims to eliminate — conferred by soil, not by his parents’ citizenship. He is, in the administration’s preferred language, an “anchor baby.” He is also the nation’s top diplomat, now carrying out the policy that would have made him stateless at birth. The constitutional irony is not only clear but also disqualifying.

The Baldizzi family and Marco Rubio have no similarities in origin, background, or time period. What they do share is the 14th Amendment — the same clause, applied regardless of ancestry or parental status, that made both Americans. That is not a flaw in the constitutional design. It is the design. And it has been effective.

The Supreme Court now has the power to decide the future of American identity. Whatever the justices choose, this debate has clarified a fundamental choice that goes beyond any single case: whether the United States continues to be the nation envisioned by Madison, Jefferson, Douglass, Tocqueville, and Reagan — a country where anyone can become American by embracing its ideals — or whether it shifts toward a narrower, blood-and-soil view of membership that sees citizenship as a guarded inheritance rather than a shared and expandable commitment. The Court can decide either way. History will record which America it chose.

The zero-sum fallacy provides easy applause but fails to give a clear picture of what America truly is or why the nation’s experiment has succeeded over two and a half centuries. American greatness has never stemmed from closing doors; instead, it has come from the belief — tested, challenged, and reaffirmed — that the principles are inclusive enough for everyone who genuinely embraces them, and that doing so makes the entire country stronger. Rosaria Baldizzi’s daughter understood that. Whether he admits it or not, Marco Rubio does too. And the Constitution does as well.

David Leblang is the Miller Center’s Randolph P. Compton Professor and director of policy research. He is also the Ambassador Henry J. Taylor and Mrs. Marion R. Taylor Endowed Professor of Politics and professor of public policy at the University’s Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy.

By Alfred Reaves IV and Elizabeth Rees

Moments of national tragedy can reveal what presidential leadership truly means. Americans look to the president for reassurance and healing during times of crisis. Yet when responding to instances of racially motivated violence during his tenure in office, President Barack Obama faced an even more complex task as a national unifier, as interviews for the Miller Center’s Obama Oral History Project make clear.

As the first black president, Barack Obama faced heightened scrutiny when addressing incidents involving race. His words carried additional weight, as he was expected to acknowledge the realities of racial injustice while still fulfilling the presidential role of unifying a divided and troubled nation.

Although race was obviously a complex issue brought to the forefront by the president’s own racial identity, speechwriter Cody Keenan remembered that it was not a focus for Obama.

“You know who talked about his race the least? It was him,” Keenan said. “He never ran as the first black president. He never said anything about it, ever, in contrast to Hillary, who talked about “shattering the glass ceiling” [being the first woman president] all the time. He never talked about being the first black president.”

Obama’s responses to the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012 and the 2015 massacre at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, illustrated how he adapted his communication and delivery to meet the moment, always offering compassion and encouraging national reflection.

“I wanted him to govern as the President of the United States, for all of the people who live here,” recalled Melody Barnes, Obama’s director of domestic policy, “and at the same time, as best he could, articulate a set of experiences that he knows as an African American man, and to bring that lens and that empathy to the table so that it can help move the nation forward.”

In the case of Trayvon Martin, a black teenager who was shot and killed in Sanford, Florida, while returning from a neighborhood convenience store, the country was already polarized over years of racial profiling and injustice bubbling to the surface. Rather than speaking only in official, political terms, recalled Press Secretary Jay Carney, Obama chose to make his comments on the tragedy more personal.

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“That was one of the moments when it was particularly clear, when I worked for him, about how this was a different presidency and just how thoughtful he was about these issues,” Carney said. “I remember going in to brief him. I think Valerie [Jarrett] was there and others. We told him whatever it was we thought he should say, and he’s like, ‘Yes, thanks, but I know what I’m going to say.’ He may have said something like, ‘You may not think it’s the right thing,’ but whatever. And he went out and said what he said.”

Obama’s statement that “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon” immediately connected to black families across America, who experience these types of tragedies all too often. The president did not shy away from the hurt and anger black Americans felt while acknowledging their experience and lived reality of racial bias.

Several years later, after a white supremacist killed nine black worshippers at Mother Emanuel AME Church, Obama’s response took on a different spirit. Speaking at the memorial service, he adopted a role many presidents before him had to take: the consoler-in-chief, offering spiritual language and highlighting grace, forgiveness, and community. Obama’s eulogy peaked as he sang “Amazing Grace,” a moment that symbolized the president’s shared mourning and resilience.

Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes remembered the president’s frustration at having to deliver yet another eulogy.

“He didn’t want to give the speech where he sang ‘Amazing Grace’ at first,” Rhodes said. “He was like, ‘What else is there for me to say about a shooting like this?’ But not only does he give it, he sings ‘Amazing Grace. I think even though he was reluctant sometimes, because he wanted to be seen as not just a charismatic speaker, he always showed up and did the thing. Even if that wasn’t necessarily his self-conception, it is the role he played.”

Obama’s decision to sing “Amazing Grace” was organic and personal, recalled speechwriter Kyle O’Connor.

“As he was getting off the helicopter or off a plane in Charleston, he turned to the people there and said, ‘I think I might sing it if it feels right,’ ” O’Connor said. “So maybe six people knew that he might be about to sing it at the end of that speech. He paused for 11 seconds or something and then sang.”

Particularly in the later years of Obama’s administration, Barnes recalled, “after Trayvon Martin, after the shooting in South Carolina, that was, I think, a very transparent and open and honest articulation of what he felt and what he saw, and he was trying to connect with the American public and be true to himself. I think that’s absolutely what we saw. But it’s impossibly hard.”

Alfred Reaves IV is the faculty and program coordinator at the Miller Center, where he manages programming logistics, supports faculty and fellows, and coordinates policy research initiatives. Previously, he served in the University of Virginia’s Office of Sponsored Programs, where he supported proposal submissions and award processing. He earned a BA degree in political science from James Madison University.

Elizabeth Rees is a research fellow at the Miller Center. She completed her DPhil at the University of Oxford’s Rothermere American Institute in 2024 and was a postdoctoral fellow at Southern Methodist University’s Center for Presidential History.

Garbage piled up on the streets of Centro Havana (ProSportFoto-Tony Lewis)

By Cristina Lopez-Gottardi Chao

Over the last few weeks, tensions both domestically in Cuba and in its relations with the United States have intensified significantly. What had previously been a slow-burning crisis defined by empty store shelves, recurrent power outages, and deteriorating public services is now unfolding visibly in the streets.

Since early March, nightly protests have emerged across the island as frustration over food shortages, economic stagnation, chronic electricity disruptions, and restrictions on civil liberties appears to be reaching a breaking point. In the town of Morón, demonstrators reportedly entered a local Communist Party office and set fire to confiscated items. Elsewhere, citizens banged pots in protest of worsening living conditions, and students at the University of Havana staged a peaceful sit-in. Additionally, the prominent Havana journalist Yoani Sanchez reported being confined to her home by state security officials. Together, these are extraordinary acts of resistance in a system defined by its intolerance of dissent.

The situation compounded further when Cuba’s national electrical grid fully collapsed for a third time this month, plunging the island into darkness. Days later, some areas remain without power, heightening an already dire humanitarian situation. For most Cubans, the message is no longer ambiguous: The current trajectory is unsustainable.

Against this backdrop, harsh rhetoric between Washington and Havana has escalated. While both sides have acknowledged talks are underway, last week Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel warned that any U.S. attempt to “take control” of Cuba would be met with “impregnable resistance.” This was a response to vague statements from President Donald Trump about “freeing” or “taking” Cuba.

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Yet beyond the propaganda and politics, the underlying reality is clear: Cuba’s crisis is systemic and meaningful change is both urgent and necessary.

At the center of Cuba’s financial problem lies a centrally planned socialist economy dominated by the military conglomerate GAESA (Grupo de Administración Empresarial S.A.), whose control over key sectors has entrenched systemic inefficiencies, opacity, and corruption. Nowhere is this more evident than in the country’s deepening energy crisis, which reflects not only recent external shocks but decades of underinvestment, mismanagement, and institutional rigidity.

The broader economy tells a similar story. The once-dominant sugar industry collapsed long ago for similar reasons, including mismanagement and the loss of Soviet support. Tourism, more recently a critical lifeline, has yet to recover from pre-pandemic levels. Meanwhile, the decline of subsidized oil shipments from Venezuela has fully exposed the island’s structural vulnerabilities, accelerating both the fiscal and energy crisis. Taken together, these trends underscore a central reality that the Cuban economic model has simply never been capable of sustaining itself without external support.

What, then, comes next?

Thus far, two potential pathways for change have emerged: one originating in Havana and the other Washington. But neither appears promising without significant additional changes from Cuba. Reports indicate that the Trump Administration favors the removal of President Díaz-Canel as a precondition for deeper engagement. While any leadership change would be a step in the right direction, such a move by itself risks misunderstanding how power operates in Cuba.

Unlike Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, Díaz-Canel is not widely regarded as a central power broker. Rather, real authority remains embedded within the enduring networks tied to Raul Castro, now 94, and the military-economic elite surrounding him, which continue to exert decisive influence over the state’s core institutions. A part of that elite circle is Raul Guillermo Rodriguez Castro, grandson of the elder Castro, who is believed to be participating in conversations with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and is now making more frequent public appearances.

Replacing Díaz-Canel, therefore, may carry symbolic weight, but it would not address the root causes of Cuba’s crisis—a fact Rubio no doubt is acutely aware of. Díaz-Canel presides as the public face of a deeply entrenched system that has formally declared the socialist model “irrevocable” and whose underlying structures have remained largely intact for nearly seven decades, outlasting 13 U.S. presidents. By comparison, Venezuela’s experiment has been both shorter (roughly 26 years) and more personalized. In Cuba, power is both entrenched in the Castro brothers’ legacy and also successfully diffused amongst a small circle, institutionalized and resilient. Absent the fundamental transformation of the island’s political and economic framework, removing a single figure would do little more than transfer stewardship of the same unsustainable model.

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Cuba’s proposal offers even less reassurance. Recent statements by Cuba’s Minister for Foreign Trade and Investment, Oscar Perez Olivia-Fraga, suggest openness to investments by U.S. companies and, in particular, the Cuban diaspora. On its face, this may seem to signal a degree of pragmatism. In practice, however, it amounts to little more than a rhetorical gesture and is unlikely to gain traction without meaningful reforms to strengthen the rule of law, protect property rights, ensure transparency, and address human rights concerns.

For many Cuban exiles, the proposal also carries an additional layer of political and historical sensitivity. It effectively asks individuals and families, many of whom lost homes, businesses, and assets through uncompensated expropriations following the Cuban Revolution, to reinvest under the authority of the same state structures, without any guarantees of legal protection or restitution. At best, this reflects a profound misreading of the political and historical grievances that continue to shape exile attitudes towards the Cuban state.

Even then, significant obstacles remain. The U.S. embargo, codified into law during the Clinton Administration, cannot be fully lifted without congressional action. At the same time, the central role of GAESA in managing foreign investment presents a major deterrent given that any inflow of capital would therefore require partnering, directly or indirectly, with military-linked entities, an arrangement fraught with legal and compliance risks for U.S. firms.

Going forward, any recalibration of United States policy towards Cuba should be anchored in explicit and verifiable benchmarks in the domain of human and civil rights, beginning with the unconditional and irrevocable release of political prisoners. Such measures would serve not merely as symbolic gestures but as foundational indicators of the Cuban government’s willingness to undertake substantive political reform.

Future economic engagement should likewise be structured around clearly defined conditions. These should include the liberalization of key economic sectors, the disentanglement of the military from commercial activities, and the implementation of rule of law reforms, most notably the establishment of an independent judiciary not subject to the whims of Cuba’s communist party. Absent these internal structural changes, meaningful economic engagement is unlikely, and Cuba’s devastating crisis will continue to harm its people.

Cristina Lopez-Gottardi Chao is an assistant professor and chair of public programming at the Miller Center.