This is a republication of an article from February 2024.
Announcement: My dad died two weeks ago. He was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2023. Every article in this newsletter was written while my dad had cancer, including this one, which is full of good memories of my dad. I’m republishing it in remembrance of him.
Over a year ago President Trump began dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). While bemoaned by many in the foreign policy community as a mistake, in reality the agency had long ago strayed from its initial purpose, namely, helping developing nations establish prosperous and growing free market economies. Indeed, its initial purpose as envisioned by President Kennedy was to bring the economic promise of America to the poorest nations in the world. Just as with our opening to China in 1972, we were confident that democracy would follow.
Yet the tragedy of USAID was its failure to bring a single new market-based economy to life. After several decades it could produce no examples of even having brokered an alliance between a Third World country and the United States. USAID’s annual core operating budget of $22 billion and its ineffective record rightly proved too much for the Trump Administration’s DOGE review.
“Does it really make sense to perpetuate a system in which disastrous financial risks are built into the profit-driven provision of basic financial products like pensions and mortgages?… Why do the smoke detectors fail again and again? And why is the house not more fire proof? It is time to ask who benefits and who pays the cost for continuing with this dangerously inflammable system.” – Adam Tooze
In a world of global political and economic instability, my studies at the University of Sydney led me to the Discipline of Political Economy. I have been particularly animated by taking one course, or unit of study, which is ECOP1003: Production, Trade and Finance. This is precisely the type of course that gives students a deeper understanding of the problems we are facing today. The unit introduces a wide range of authors, theories and debates spanning trade, development, inequality, globalisation and international financial systems. It is both intellectually stimulating and deeply relevant to the challenges shaping our world.
On this episode of After America, Allan Behm and Dr Emma Shortis discuss the consequences of failure in US-Iran negotiations, the oxymoron of Trump administration “diplomacy”, the future of NATO, and what this all means for Australia.
This episode was recorded on Friday 10 April.
Guest: Allan Behm, Advisor, International & Security Affairs, the Australia Institute
Host: Emma Shortis, Director, International & Security Affairs, the Australia Institute // @emmashortis
It is fitting that in America’s 250th year of independence, public discourse is centered around the meaning of citizenship.
Last summer brought a debate accompanying the “One Big Beautiful Bill” over whether non-citizens, particularly illegal migrants, should be receiving government welfare benefits. In the winter, new revelations were unearthed regarding the many problems with birthright tourism. Each year, thousands of mainly Chinese nationals visit the U.S. to give birth, obtaining citizenship for their babies under the modern interpretation of the 14th Amendment before returning home. The children are U.S. citizens with the right to receive benefits and vote in American elections, despite being raised in a foreign country and under the indoctrination of the Chinese Communist Party.
On April 1, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on birthright citizenship. Does citizenship extend to any child born in the United States to parents who are in the country illegally? Or does the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment refer only to those who give their full allegiance to the United States?
Annemarie Wolff is a member of the State Parliament of Brandenburg, Germany, where she is the spokesperson for the Governing Social Democratic Party (SPD) parliamentary group on combating right-wing extremism and youth, among other roles. She first joined the SPD through the Young Socialists (Jusos) wing, campaigning for better transit connections in her hometown. Today, she is a member of the Brandenburg state legislature, and one of the youngest current Members of State Parliament (MdL).
The challenges in Brandenburg, a former state of the East German Democratic Republic that surrounds today’s Federal capital of Berlin, are reaching a crisis point. In the three decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of East and West Germany, the SPD have governed this state. However, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, designated by Germany’s federal domestic intelligence agency (Verfassungsschutz) as a right-wing extremist organization, leads against the SPD in current public opinion polling.
The US is supposed to be Australia’s “closest ally, and our principal economic and strategic partner”, but it is clearer than ever that US President Donald Trump represents a direct threat to our security, our economy and our stability, unleashing a global energy crisis. But in politics, you should never waste a crisis – will Anthony Albanese seize the moment?
It is no exaggeration to say the world was preparing itself for the worst last week, up to and including the threat of nuclear war.
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social, threatening the existence of the roughly 90 million people who live in Iran if the country refused to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
Trump did not wipe out civilization in Iran, but it still does not feel beyond the realm of possibility, given his past behaviour and pronouncements. Together, the US and Israel have killed many civilians by targeting civilian infrastructure in Iran and Lebanon, the latter of which is not part of the ceasefire agreement agreed to after Trump threatened to annihilate Iran. First Trump sparked a global energy crisis and then he criticised other countries for not helping to fix the mess he and Netanyahu created.
The whole world is watching as negotiations begin today in Islamabad, Pakistan between Iran and the United States following an agreement to cease military action for two weeks. The negotiations are based on a ten-point plan outlined by Iran and approved by the United States as a basis for the talks.
Israel has not been invited to the negotiations, which are being conducted indirectly and with a great deal of skepticism by the Iranian team. The outcome of these talks will impact the entire global economy and the fate of millions of people in West Asia, six million of whom have already been forcibly displaced by US and Israeli aggression in recent years.
The 2025 Free Trade and Labour Mobility Act and Building Canada Act, also known as Bill C-5, One Canadian Economy Act is the federal government’s economic response to the US Trump Administration’s trade war by “breaking inter-provincial trade barriers, accelerating infrastructure, and unlocking 200 billion dollars in growth.” In these uncertain times, the government’s attractive pitch to voters is an orientation towards economic efficiency now, prosperity later.
Bill C-5 does target real and persistent economic barriers. Restrictions on labour mobility have prevented qualified workers from moving freely across provinces for work, while overlapping federal and provincial environmental reviews extend project approvals up to five years.
When Donald Trump accepted the GOP’s nomination for president in 2024, he boldly stated that “the Republican platform promises to launch the largest deportation operation in the history of the country.” It was music to the ears of tens of millions of Americans who lived through the Biden border invasion and experienced decades of sustained illegal immigration with little interior enforcement. Finally, a political leader had the gumption to say, “Enough is enough,” and proclaim that it is time for millions of illegal aliens to go home. The American people rewarded Trump’s courage when they decisively re-elected him.
Unfortunately, the second Trump Administration has not lived up to the promises made in that July 2024 speech in Milwaukee. It has instead prioritized removing the worst criminal illegal aliens. With that population estimated at between 500,000 and 800,000 individuals, the administration has focused enforcement resources on a small subset of illegals, prioritizing quality over quantity. But this is a misguided attempt to assuage the concerns of a radical—but sizable—segment of Americans who do not believe in borders or in sovereignty.
In 2011, when U.S. Navy Seals blew open the front door of Osama bin Laden’s fortified compound in Pakistan, stormed up the stairs, and shot him dead, they found more than a loaded AK-47 in his room. Bin Laden had been reading the Yale historian Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987), which told the story of military conflict since the 15th century. Kennedy’s argument was as dismaying to his fellow countrymen as it must have been heartening to bin Laden: the American empire, too, was mortal, and “imperial overstretch” was bringing inevitable decline. Kennedy wrote with such brio that his book climbed The New York Times bestseller list, peaking in March 1988 at number two, topped only by a real-estate mogul’s ghost-written memoir called Trump: The Art of the Deal.
This year, just days after President Trump committed the United States to join Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel in bombing Iran into regime change, another Yale historian, Odd Arne Westad, published a book that also warns of relative decline and imperial overstretch. Westad, a Norwegian-born expert on Asia and the author of the highly regarded The Cold War: A World History (2017), focuses on the turn of the 20th century, when Europe’s Great Powers—prosperous, complacent, and at peace—lurched into civilizational catastrophe.
The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.
Martin Empson is a climate activist from the UK and the editor and a contributor to System Change not Climate Change, a book of essays from socialists around the world on the nature of capitalism’s ecological crisis and the radical response that is needed.
Earlier this week, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, flanked by a multi-hued cast of New Yorkers (though with no whites visible), announced the results of NYC’s long-awaited “racial equity” audit that attempts to assess the allegedly dire plight of “people of color” across the five boroughs.
The report itself, running 375 pages, makes it clear that the state of racial disparities in NYC is rooted in “settler colonialism,” noting that “New York City’s history has been one of colonization, exploitation, and racial oppression.” The report asserts, for example, that the Lenape Native American tribe are the “rightful stewards” of New York.
It also has numerous calls to action, including mandating anti-racism training for government staff and a fresh look at “fine and fee based programs” for transportation to seek out “racial and ethnic disparities”—that is, doing even less to enforce against subway fare evaders, who are predominantly black and Hispanic and who disproportionately commit other crimes on the subway. It decries the “punitive policing policies” that further marginalized “Black and Latine communities”—the very policing measures that drove the city’s historic drop in crime under Giuliani and Bloomberg.
And it goes on in this vein for chapter after chapter. But you get the idea.
New York City is racist, and it’s your fault, whitey, so you must pay even more taxes.
From the department of foreign affairs own website the “G20 brings together the world’s major and systemically important economies.
“Its members represent 85 per cent of global GDP, 75 pr cent of international trade and around 80 per cent of the world’s population”.
Australia has the 15th largest economy in the world. We are “the 12th largest contributor to the UN regular and peacekeeping budgets, held the first presidency of the Security Council and sent the first UN peacekeepers to Indonesia in 1947.
All this to say that in the post war period, Australia isn’t – and hasn’t – been powerless.
We are not a small nation with no agency. We’ve proven that time and time again.
So you have to wonder why our government goes to such extraordinary lengths to present Australia as being powerless against the United States, a passive player at the mercy of Donald Trump’s tempests.
Even if you believe, as former DFAT, Defence and ASIO boss Dennis Richardson told theSydney Morning Herald late last week that – “the Australian government is not paid by the taxpayer to let fly and give them five seconds of warm inner glow by saying things that wreck the relationship with the US … The idea they should be calling Trump out is just rubbish”– the idea that Australia has no power is a very strange development in modern times.
It was the right that derailed Australia’s energy transition, that prioritised fossil fuels above the nation, that fought reality and convinced a slew of Australians it was common sense to put their faith in a finite resource that was not only contributing to killing the planet, but causing harm to millions in the fights over who controlled it.
It is a fantasy to think that any nation that does not control its energy supply has security. Australia could have been well on its way to securing its energy, if John Howard and his ilk hadn’t had a tantrum over a changing world, and succumbed to their desires to keep everything the same.
The Morrison government gave instant tax write-offs to encourage the take-up of big dumb utes, while fighting against vehicle emission standards and delaying the take-up of EVs.
The agriculture industry was not encouraged to move away from its reliance on diesel. A general ennui swept middle Australia, lulled by the right into fighting for its own interests.
Nor is Labor blameless. Instead of fighting for science and for the future, it took defeats over the carbon price and emissions trading scheme and assumed the only way to beat them was to join them.
Neither party has seen fit to unhook Australia from US foreign policy, and Anthony Albanese was one of the first leaders in the world to throw his support behind the American and Israeli decision to bomb Iran, despite not knowing of it in advance, its justification, its legality or even its objectives.
After the Australian government shamelessly abandoned morality and international law to back Israel and the United States’ illegal war on Iran, Australia is now experiencing the inevitable consequences, and successive federal governments have failed to plan for those too.
Cowardly abandoning the international rules-based order when our so-called allies wage illegal wars makes all Australians less safe and less secure. But higher petrol prices and higher gas prices will mean a lower standard of living for most Australians, and that is where the federal government is really in trouble.
“This is the biggest threat to energy security in history,” International Energy Agency (IEA) chief Fatih Birol told ABC’s 7.30 this week. It’s no exaggeration. In response to being attacked by Israel and the United States, Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, resulting in an estimated 20 per cent of the world’s gas and oil exports grinding to a halt,sending petrol prices skyrocketing here and around the world.
Iran also retaliated against US-aligned Gulf states like Qatar, bombing its LNG facilities and wiping out almost 20 per cent of global LNG supply. These twin energy crises have major implications for Australia; let’s start with petrol and Australia’s liquid fuel security.
On this episode of Dollars & Sense, Greg and Elinor discuss Trump’s horrific threats against Iran, whether Australians should be concerned about a recession as a result of the global uncertainty the US president is causing, Matt Canavan’s plans for an economic revolution, and why land values have skyrocketed while the value of the dwellings on the land hasn’t changed much at all.
This discussion was recorded on Thursday 9 April 2026.
Visit The Point for research and analysis from experts at the Australia Institute and beyond.
Host: Greg Jericho, Chief Economist, the Australia Institute // @grogsgamut
Host: Elinor Johnston-Leek, Senior Content Producer, the Australia Institute // @elinorjohnstonleek
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is under attack from practically all sides. The Left has been after him since before his confirmation hearing. Some on the Right have likewise been lukewarm since Trump picked him, with interventionists hoping for one of their own such as Senator Tom Cotton, and restrainers wanting a candidate who aligns with their views. Throughout his tenure, the press has placed Hegseth under a magnifying glass, reporting on a long list of supposed controversies, which now includes his daring to fire generals and his willingness to carry out President Donald Trump’s orders in Iran. As the pressure has built, leaks against Hegseth, and even some calls for his firing, have begun to seep into the press.
President Trump should resist these efforts. Not only would firing Secretary Hegseth be a mistake, but doing so would undercut, and potentially even put an end to, his revolution against the uniparty.
Try, Try Again
President Trump faces a still-powerful military-industrial complex, as well as a hardened political establishment that backs it. He should learn from Andrew Jackson, both a former president and a political revolutionary, who came to understand how important it was to have loyal people around him.
On this episode of Follow the Money, we bring you highlights from the recent Australian tour of economist and author Yanis Varoufakis, with contributions from a cast of very special guests. Across live events in Adelaide, Sydney and Melbourne, they discuss misogyny, political power, the erosion of Palestinian rights, and Yanis’ latest book, Raise Your Soul: A Personal History of Resistance.
Tonight’s ceasefire announcement between the Trump administration and Iran has sparked the sort of move that can change the short-term character of this market very quickly. Equities responded exactly how you would expect when a major pocket of uncertainty gets lifted: aggressively, and all at once.
The bigger point, though, is that this rally did not come out of nowhere. The data was already getting very close to a proper turn. Tonight’s news may have simply been the final push that kicked off the move we had been waiting for. In the full update below, I go through the playbook, where the buy signals stood before tonight, what this changes, what still needs to be watched, and why I think this likely marks the beginning of the next leg higher.
No mere politician in modern history has had a wartime general’s capacity for decision-making amid chaos like President Trump. His force of character (“Fight! Fight! Fight!”) and his appeal to the everyman (with the boorishness thereof) reveal an instinctual giant who is at his best while disorder surrounds him.
However, one who thrives in chaos often rejects the peace and order of civilization and tends to gravitate to the home turf of mayhem. Consequently, Trump may still pull a rabbit out of the hat in Iran. But the odds continue to stack against him.
The American people voted for him multiple times on his assurance of peace and promises of foreign adventurism to be a thing of the past. As Trump repeatedly noted on the campaign trail, American blood and treasure had been treated far too cheaply by both Presidents Bush and Obama. He vowed to stop that bipartisan trend.
Recently, United States President Donald Trump has been issuing a series of soft deadlines to pressure Iran to fully open the Strait of Hormuz. On Easter Sunday, in what would be a serious escalation of the conflict, President Trump threatened to target “bridges and power plants” and to “bomb Iran back to the Stone Age” beginning on Tuesday if Iran refuses his demands. To better understand what the ramifications would be if President Trump follows through on his threats, Chris Hedges sits down with Trita Parsi, an expert on US-Iranian relations and the geopolitics of the Middle East.
En 1999, el Servicio Postal Mexicano, que por entonces era de propiedad estatal, emitió un sello conmemorativo para celebrar los sesenta y cinco años del banco de desarrollo ‘Nacional Financiera’ (Nafin) de México.
What is it, according to Francis Fukuyama, “for which we should be willing to struggle and die today,” and how does history—Western civilization—inform our answer to this permanent question?
Fukuyama thinks history has bequeathed us liberal “values” sufficient for the purpose. Spencer Klavan thinks history has quite a bit more to offer. Fukuyama has made a career out of the “end of history.” Klavan points the way to careers for young Americans in the continuation and making of history. He thinks the 250th anniversary of American independence is a good time for Americans to reflect on how Western civilization has always informed our answer to this question and continues to do so.
Nothing could be more edifying for Americans than a true and sufficient answer to the unsettling question of what they should be willing to fight and die for. Klavan thinks that if Americans are to be properly edified, they will “need to recover a sense of their country as an era-defining project, forward-looking but steeped in ancient traditions of faith and law—not just a Western nation, but the Western nation par excellence.” Here, to quote Walter Berns, I will hope to do “nothing but edify.” Berns gave that phrase currency among small circles back in the early 1980s, accusing Harry Jaffa of misunderstanding Leo Strauss when Jaffa claimed Strauss thought philosophy, or even political philosophy, might have some place in saving Western civilization—and America.
When Allen C. Guelzo and James Hankins began writing The Golden Thread, their two-volume History of the Western Tradition, they were both Ivy League professors. By the time it was published, neither of them was. Hankins, whose first volume on The Ancient World and Christendom sweeps from Greco-Roman and Jewish antiquity to the European Renaissance, gave his last lecture as a history professor at Harvard late last year. Guelzo, whose second volume on The Modern and Contemporary West begins with the Protestant Reformation and ends hauntingly with images of the World Trade Center shortly before its destruction, left Princeton last fall. Both authors are now faculty members at the University of Florida’s Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education, established in 2022. The Golden Thread is a momentous achievement. It’s also a landmark event in the history of American letters. Its appearance signals that the country’s most prestigious universities have all but given up on maintaining the intellectual foundations of the West. For the time being, perhaps, the stewards of civilization will have to do their work outside the gates of the old academy. They will have to build something new.
More than one month into the American-Israeli war on Iran, the US military has expended a significant amount of its arsenal and many billions of dollars without making any progress in meeting its illusory and often-changing objectives. As the White House and Pentagon, and the markets, panic, the United States has begun deploying troops and resources to the region in preparation for a possible ground assault. This raises significant questions about what type of campaign the US is capable of waging and whether, as analysts are saying, fighting the Iranian military on its own terrain would be a bloodbath for US troops. Would putting boots on the ground embroil the US in another prolonged quagmire, similar to other recent US wars in the region, that would end in defeat?
Last night, Donald Trump delivered an address to the nation, offering an update on the ongoing conflict with Iran. The takeaway, at least from my perspective, was fairly clear: the message to the rest of the world was essentially, you deal with the Strait of Hormuz, while we may still have more to do with Iran. Markets initially did not like that framing at all.
Futures sold off heavily overnight. But interestingly, by the time the regular session unfolded, we saw a strong recovery. In fact, from the lows we saw on Friday to where things stand now, the S&P 500 has bounced roughly 4%. That raises an important question: are markets beginning to stabilize, even with oil continuing to surge?
Because while equities have started to recover, oil has been having another explosive move higher. As I’m writing this, WTI is sitting around $113 per barrel, and markets are clearly preparing for the possibility that prices could climb further. The issue now is no longer just whether oil is rising, but what that rise actually means for growth, inflation, and the broader market outlook.
In an attempt to justify and garner popular support for the American-Israeli war on Iran, the Trump administration is pressuring its allied nations to join the US in designating Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps as the world’s greatest sponsor of state terrorism. The administration points to Iran’s participation in the Axis of Resistance, which includes Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine and Ansar Allah in Yemen, as evidence for its position. This raises the question of whether Iran, by supporting proxy organizations, is doing anything differently from what US intelligence agencies have done for many decades.
It’s a running joke in the Beltway that defense contractors put up billboards advertising, say F-35s, at the Pentagon City metro station. Your everyday commuter, even in Washington, isn’t picking up fighter jets off the shelf at Costco on Sundays. But a chunk of the people who work on defense contracts will pass through the Pentagon’s metro stop, and Lockheed Martin knows this.
In theory, the same logic fuels D.C.’s media business. In the last two decades, the capital city has become dominated by a constellation of powerful media outlets that deliver niche, social-media-based coverage of the federal government. Think Politico, Semafor, Punchbowl News, and Axios (the latter two evolved directly from the Politico model).
These publications produce insider email newsletters that cover the daily pulse of Capitol Hill, energy policy, foreign affairs, and the White House, and are written specifically for staffers, journalists, and lobbyists. Playbook famously includes a birthday list every morning; that’s how small the audience is relative to other national publications. Web 2.0 made this business model possible, and it’s only grown as mass media flails.
En 1999, el Servicio Postal Mexicano, que por entonces era de propiedad estatal, emitió un sello conmemorativo para celebrar los sesenta y cinco años del banco de desarrollo ‘Nacional Financiera’ (Nafin) de México.
