The Trump Administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) provides a rare official statement on the main threats facing the United States, as well as lays out strategies to address them. Typically released once per presidential term, this administration’s NSS focuses on how the U.S. can reestablish its military and economic might in a world that’s clearly moved well beyond the post-Cold War era. As stated in its introduction, the document aims to be a “roadmap to ensure that America remains the greatest and most successful nation in human history, and the home of freedom on earth.”
Part of advocating a foreign policy of “principled realism” is pointing out how Europe, an important U.S. partner going back centuries, has been actively rejecting its historic ways of life.
The Trump NSS details several serious challenges the continent faces, including economic stagnation. However, that issue is overshadowed by the impact of mass immigration, which is transforming Europe by “creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.” The NSS forecasts that if current trends persist, Europe may become unrecognizable within two decades, as it is at risk of “civilizational erasure.”
Northwestern University recently struck a deal with the United States Department of Education (ED). The university will pay a $75 million fine and guarantee there will be no more Jew-hating on the quad and no race discrimination in the admissions office or on faculty hiring committees. Then, federal money will start to flow again. But can Northwestern be trusted to honor its end of the bargain?
Reducing energy use is the most common sacrifice Australians are making to afford their rent or mortgage, while many are limiting driving, skipping meals and delaying medical appointments, a new national survey has exposed.
Everybody’s Home’s report ‘Breaking Point’ captures the results of a survey of more than 1,100 Australians. Of those surveyed:
It is honestly amazing to be noticed, even if negatively, by someone of the eminence of Steven Pinker. I respect Pinker because (among other reasons) Steve Sailer, whom I also respect, respects him and has explained in terms I can understand why Pinker’s work is worthy of respect.
Pinker and I have one major disagreement (and I assume many others), which is brought out in his tweet: I have a foreboding sense of apprehension about the future; Pinker by contrast wrote two whole books arguing that now is the greatest time to be alive. What I recall of them is that Pinker’s case centers around, first, a decline in violence. Which I don’t doubt is true in many respects, though as Sailer points out, it can be made easier or harder to argue the world is less violent than it used to be depending on when you start the clock. Second, Pinker enthuses about various advances of science and technology, much of which I would have to concede, especially since I am a beneficiary and consumer of so much of it.
15 December 2025: Free Palestine Melbourne is appalled and deeply saddened by the massacre at Bondi beach. We extend our condolences to the family and friends of the victims.
If you only read social media, you’d think the conservative legal movement is in dire straits. Politicians lash out at judges and at the Federalist Society. Some on the Right grumble that originalism has yielded little more than panel discussions and law‑review symposia. In this very forum, friends suggest that our moment demands a new “constitutional morality,” a more ambitious jurisprudence that will somehow arrest civilizational decline.
Count me unconvinced. The short answer to “What comes after originalism?” is more originalism, plus better policy. The movement’s future lies in consolidating the gains of the last decade, deepening our commitment to the Constitution’s text and original public meaning, and building political and cultural institutions that can address the “crises of belonging, fertility, and meaning.” Courts have an important—but limited—role in that project. Asking judges to save the country is not just unrealistic; it’s a category error.
Chile rarely captures sustained American attention. It is distant, orderly, and often portrayed as a reliable outpost of stability in South America. But this image is vanishing—and the shift matters far more to the United States than many realize.
Chile is a crucial democratic partner in a region where China and Russia are expanding their influence. Its economy is tightly linked to U.S. markets, its copper and lithium reserves are central to American technological and defense supply chains, and its politics influences the balance of the entire Southern Cone.
The country features a two-round system for its presidential elections, the second round of which will be held on December 14. Two candidates are running: one from the Right and the other from the far left-wing. A Communist victory in Chile—or a prolonged period of instability—would affect U.S. geopolitical, economic, and security interests.
But the deeper reason Chile matters to Americans is that its current crisis illustrates a broader lesson: economic success without a strong cultural foundation cannot sustain a free society. The United States faces its own internal cultural fractures. What is happening in Chile is not only a regional concern—it is a cautionary tale.
To understand how Chile arrived at this fragile moment, one must look at its origins and the long-standing tensions that have shaped its national identity.
This is to announce that the Past & Present Reading Group will be meeting to discuss, on a weekly basis and starting in February 2026, our next text which is:
By Andrew Purves Growing up in Hong Kong in the 1970s, I remember the noise and disruption of the Mass Transit Railway (MTR) construction. Cut-and-cover tunnelling tore up roads, while new property developments rose above the stations. These developments would reshape Hong Kong’s urban landscape — little did I know that I would be writing […]
Today, Judge Paula Xinis ordered Kilmar Abrego Garcia released from immigration detention, granting his petition for habeas corpus. This is a signal ruling, though not the end of Abrego Garcia's journey through the looking glass world of a lawless executive branch's treatment of him.
In the first part of my extended reflection on the character of conservatism, I warned that the American Right is confronted by a “pseudo-Rightist culture of repudiation” that in important respects mirrors the intellectual and political Left. The crude white nationalism and vociferous anti-Semitism of the so-called “groypers,” who delight in the nasty, transgressive utterings of the internet chameleon Nick Fuentes, present the most recent example of that phenomenon.
On another front, a spirit of ingratitude dominates in certain precincts of the Right. There is a marked tendency to dismiss even the most admirable conservative wisdom of the past as outdated, irrelevant, or worse. A young critic of mine at The American Conservative, who writes very much in that dismissive spirit, accuses me of making “rote” appeals to the likes of Burke and Churchill, as if deep immersion in the thought and action of these two great conservatives can only be formulaic and irrelevant.
But a conservatism that forgets the most capacious meaning of the social contract, the enduring bond that connects the living to the dead and the yet to be born, and the multiple reasons for gratitude to our noble if imperfect forebears—Burkean themes par excellence—has lost essential bearings, and will rather quickly lose its soul.
Every few years, someone tells us the United States is not really the child of the long tradition of republicanism, English common law, colonial self-government, the natural rights principles enshrined in our Declaration, and the debates involving the framing of a new government that transpired in Philadelphia after the war. No, we’re subtly led to assume that our political father is someone else entirely: this time, it’s the Haudenosaunee—the Iroquois Confederacy.
Ken Burns’s new PBS documentary on the American Revolution leans into that claim, suggesting in the first episode’s preamble that the very idea of our Union was inspired by the Iroquois. By subtly juxtaposing the Iroquois and the Founding Fathers, viewers are invited to believe that if they thought Franklin, Washington, and company fathered America, then they’ve been building the wrong monuments.
Burns tells a vivid story. But it’s also a deeply misleading one—and the very treaty on which his opening narrative depends says almost the opposite of what he needs it to say.
The scene in question is the 1744 Lancaster treaty council. Representatives of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia met with Iroquois leaders to settle land disputes and keep them allied against the French. During the talks, an Iroquois speaker did just as Burns relates—namely, he advised the colonial governors to live at peace with one another and act together as the Iroquois nations did. But the colonial reply—effectively omitted by Burns—matters just as much.
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.
On the final episode of Dollars & Sense for 2025, Greg and Elinor discuss why it’s a time for bravery in our economic policy-making and whether rate hikes are on the way in 2026.
This discussion was recorded on Thursday 11 December.
*All clips used in this interview are from the film, ‘‘The Encampments,” and are credited to Watermelon Pictures and BreakThrough Media*
The ongoing genocide in Gaza has become a litmus test of institutional integrity. When a university denies the reality of Israel’s brutality, it reveals complicity with the genocidal regime’s actions. To then misrepresent campus dissent over institutional investment in the Zionist entity as illegitimate — or even “antisemitic” — makes it clear that that these institutions are invested in the existence of Israeli apartheid and genocide.
A report by the Centre for Future Work at The Australia Institute and Public Services International has also found that when workers get to Australia, many are being deskilled, underpaid and exploited.
Care workers have been added to the Pacific Australia Labor Mobility (PALM) scheme, traditionally aimed at seasonal agriculture workers like fruit pickers. This has led to skilled health workers – like nurses – quitting their jobs to take up better paid but lower skilled jobs in Australia.
The report details the harrowing state of the health systems in Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. Many health services and hospitals have been decimated, operating at 30-40 percent capacity or below.
The research reveals that not only are Pacific workers doing lower-skilled care jobs in Australia, they are vulnerable to poor treatment, due to their visa status.
“Workers have the right to cross borders for a better life for themselves and their families,” said Fiona Macdonald, Director of the Centre for Future Work at The Australia Institute.
“But the current system is broken. It is rich countries taking from poor countries and giving nothing back. Australia and New Zealand are offloading their own care crises to their Pacific neighbours.
“Australia has vowed to invest in the health systems of its Pacific neighbours, not destroy them. It should be helping to build better, safer health facilities and train workers, not lure them away.
I woke to light as harsh as the internet. The screen, I thought, find the screenand kill it. I rose to hunt the offender. It was three a.m., the dark hour of the soul, or as we call it in the 21st century, any hour that ends in “o’clock.”
There was no screen: the glow of fresh snow lit the night. I couldn’t turn it off. 2025 had scrambled and stolen the seasons. Summer lasted until late October, followed by two weeks of fall. Now white light flooded my room like the inverse of a shadow.
Winter was early. I felt stuck and circumscribed, like living inside an app. I avoid apps when I can. The ones I have line my phone like little prisons. “Walled gardens,” they call them, like you can stop to smell the roses and the hills don’t have eyes.
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On this episode of Follow the Money, Hereditary Chief Na’Moks of the Wet’suwet’en Nation, Gwii Lok’im Gibuu Jesse Stoeppler of the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en Nations, and Kai Nagata from not-for-profit Dogwood tell us about their fight to stop gas giants including Woodside on unceded Indigenous lands.
Join Hereditary Chief Na’Moks and Gwii Lok’im Gibuu Jesse Stoeppler at the Stop Woodside in Canada event at Victorian Trades Hall at 6.15pm AEDT on Thursday 11 December.
Governments are a bit like that, too. It’s not that they don’t see the fire before the smoke, it’s just they figure it will be someone else’s problem to deal with it by the time it’s all ablaze.
We can see this with the gas industry – Labor is now looking at a couple of cabinet proposals for an east coast gas reservation policy, which would either take the form of an exporter permit model (where exporters can’t send gas offshore unless the domestic market has been taken care of) or a market-wide model (where all producers would have to contribute to the domestic market, potentially meaning smaller gas projects would have to purchase excess gas from the major ones in order to meet their supply obligations).
Of the two, the first would mean less gas being dug up. Which means, of course, cabinet is leaning towards the second.
But in terms of how we got here, the flames have been lingering for some time.
This is not the first government to have to consider a domestic gas reserve, but it’s the first one to do so under such undeniable pressure. Back in 2009, the Queensland Bligh government raised the need for a gas reservation policy because the future fires were clear.
That warning was repeated in 2010, when the reservation was rejected following a campaign by the same gas giants fighting against one now.
For half a decade, the Right has debated “free market fundamentalism.” This phenomenon is also known as “zombie Reaganism,” “libertarian neoconservatism,” and “neoliberalism.” Whatever you call it, it never happened. That is to say, the reduction in government expenditure and size that Reaganites promised and liberals feared turned out to be a mirage. What happened instead is that, starting in the 1980s, both parties set the country on a course toward Total Boomer Luxury Communism (TBLC).
TBLC is driving every aspect of American decline—from skyrocketing national debt and the erosion of our defense industrial base to the despair of young people. It’s not the only reason for the decline, to be sure, but it’s a major part of the problem. Yet TBLC has been entirely obscured from view.
The essence of TBLC is that it redistributes wealth from younger families and workers to seniors, who are on average much richer. America has achieved the Marxist paradise of hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, rearing cattle in the evening, and criticizing after dinner. Only it looks more like golf in the morning, horseback riding in the afternoon, drinks at the social club in the evening, and a restful night’s sleep in a million-dollar home—all thanks to the largesse of the U.S. government.
Within 48 hours of the United Nations Security Council approving US President Donald Trump’s 20-point peace plan for Gaza on 17th November, Israel launched several airstrikes across Gaza that killed 28 people, mostly women and children, and injured over 70 others. In the same time period, Israel bombed numerous locations in Lebanon, including a Palestinian refugee camp that killed 13 people, and Prime Minister Netanyahu, wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, toured parts of Syria illegally occupied by Israel. In this context, the latest overtures towards peace by Western, Arab, and Israeli leaders at the Security Council are resoundingly hollow.
