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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.

Genocide or Hyperbole? | The Roundtable Ep. 312

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.

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.

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.

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.

***

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.

Spencer Klavan’s thoughtful reflections on America and its future are measured and understated, reflecting the general mood of ambivalence and uncertainty surrounding the nation’s 250th birthday. Those of us old enough to remember the 1976 Bicentennial have been struck by the dissimilarity in the public mood. Julie Ponzi, writing for Chronicles, noticed this back in 2024: “The hype surrounding both the 1976 Bicentennial and the 1987 Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution was so intense that both events inspired in me an intense interest and curiosity about American history.” Now that the semiquincentennial year is officially upon us, the lack of enthusiasm is even more evident. We don’t seem to know what we should be celebrating, or even whether we should.

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.

Congress Take the Wheel | The Roundtable Ep. 311

As AI continues its explosive growth, data centers are becoming the primary target of backlash. From rural Louisiana to the suburbs of Arlington, Virginia, Americans are showing up at zoning and permitting boards to challenge their construction. Bernie Sanders has called for a nationwide data center moratorium, while Republicans in Florida propose regulating their energy and natural resource use.

The criticisms so far have centered on claims about the data centers’ water consumption, electricity demand, noise pollution, land use, and overall disruption—issues that tech companies like Meta are working to address with new practices and community investments. Yet something more needs to be done on the political front to ameliorate Americans’ growing concerns about data centers.

It is a pleasure to respond to Spencer Klavan’s graceful and inspired reflections on the prospects for America as we move closer to the 250th anniversary of the founding. He admirably eschews polemics and avoids an excessively narrow preoccupation with the most heated issues of the day, concerning himself with broader and deeper matters. At the same time, he writes as a partisan of the American project and the broader civilization—Western civilization—of which it has been a particularly vital and noble expression. Klavan raises big questions without succumbing to fashionable, or once-fashionable, theses such as “The End of History” or the ideological temptation of Year Zero-ism, which distort the past and present, as well as the prospects for the future.

Every couple of years, another hit piece surfaces to explain why the Right supposedly hates women and why women on the Right hate themselves. The Left has trafficked in condescending explanations for the alleged paradox of the right-wing female for quite a long time. The latest in this tired genre, “The Young Women Leaving the New Right” in New York Magazine, is more of the same, dressed up for the digital age.

We are supposed to believe that conservative women are “Pick Mes,” seeking to gain male validation by belittling other women. They are afraid of their right-wing husbands, are too dumb to form their own opinions about politics, have “internalized misogyny,” lack dignity, and so on.

Not even the element of poaching a few disgruntled former conservatives and mining them for embarrassing tidbits is a remotely new tactic. There have always been some willing to take the liberal media up on the chance to open their kimono in exchange for the opportunity to fire a shot at their intra-right nemeses.

With the celebration of America’s 250th birthday in July, it is an opportune moment to examine the traditions and culture of those who set the American experiment in motion. Any good American has a duty to consider the views and aims of the founding generation when contemplating the future direction of the United States. After all, a good employee pays deference to the founder of the company—an individual who took substantial risks to establish the firm—where he works. Citizens should do so to an even greater extent.

In this context, the pillars of American culture must be stressed. In pre-Revolutionary America, an immense web of patronage networks filled the role of the British aristocracy. Very few, if any, of the richest colonial gentry could hold their own against the colossal estates of British aristocrats, with their ornate country seats and vast fortunes. As Gordon Wood noted, the 13 colonies were instead “held together by intricate networks of personal loyalties, obligations, and quasi-dependencies.”

During a dinner at the annual gathering of the Ciceronian Society on March 19, a glance at my phone profoundly changed the rest of the evening. It had been an intellectually stimulating day with fellow Christian thinkers, for which my wife and I were grateful to be part of. Something familiar caught my eye: the photo of a man I instantly recognized, Brandon Shah. We were part of the same staff group section within the larger U.S. Army Command and General Staff College class of 2019. Brandon never used X, so I was immediately curious why he was showing up so prominently on my feed. Immediately, the following words accosted me: “The victim of the terrorist attack at Old Dominion has been identified as Lt. Col. Brandon Shah.”

My pulse raced, followed moments later by sudden rage. My anger over how the political class has betrayed veterans of the so-called Global War on Terrorism rekindled. My wife could tell something was bothering me. “Are you okay?” she asked. I wasn’t. My focus on the planned presentation I was to deliver later broke, my mind hijacked by a kind of mourning I had avoided throughout 20 years in the military due to learning that a man I served with died in combat on home soil.

When the United States Senate actually deliberates, it remains undefeated.

Last Tuesday, mere hours after Senate Republican Leader John Thune finally acquiesced to conservative calls for an open-ended floor debate on national voter ID legislation, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer—who for months condemned the SAVE America Act as “Jim Crow 2.0”—told reporters that, lo and behold, Democrats are fine with requiring voters to show a photo ID. Days earlier, Senator Dick Durbin, the Democratic Whip, also admitted as much.

If you followed the debate over floor strategy for the SAVE Act over the last six weeks, you know that Schumer’s admission was supposed to be impossible. With Olympian certainty, leadership aides and former ones-turned-corporate-lobbyists dismissed conservatives’ proposal for an open floor process. After all, everyone knew that the Democrats’ opposition to voter ID was absolute; that debating the SAVE Act was a waste of time and a threat to the sanctity of the filibuster; and that voter ID was dead on arrival in the Senate.

It turns out that all of the things “everyone knows”…are false.

While many eyes are focused on Iran, the Trump Administration’s policies suggest that reasserting the Monroe Doctrine in the Western Hemisphere could rank among its highest geopolitical priorities. As laid out in the 2025 National Security Strategy, the Trump Corollary “is a common-sense and potent restoration of American power and priorities, consistent with American security interests.” What if America could project its dominance quickly, dramatically, and without firing a single shot? With one bold stroke, President Trump could expand America’s sovereign territory by nearly 20% and recover the largest unclaimed tract of land left on the planet.

Marie Byrd Land is the name for 620,000 square miles of Antarctica, a territory roughly the size of Alaska. It belongs to no nation and is governed by no sovereign power. It is desolate, largely uninhabited, and of enormous strategic importance. Claiming it would be the largest expansion of American sovereign territory since William Henry Seward’s purchase of Alaska in 1867.

The moment is right. The case is overwhelming. And the window is closing.

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.

Trump: A World-Historic Figure? | The Roundtable Ep. 310

After another tense week of Iran-US operations, Trump is reportedly looking to broker a deal and snuff out the Middle East conflict. Meanwhile, amid rumors that the Right is tearing at the seams, polling now reveals that young conservatives are the least divided on the recent intervention—overwhelmingly in its favor. Reports of a deep divide between old and young may, as so often, be more media hype than reality. Those running in 2028: take notes.

At 73 years old, Francis Fukuyama has become a meme. He is the victim of a title too good to be true. “The End of History?” was the name of a landmark essay published in The National Interest and later expanded into his career-making 1992 bestseller, The End of History and the Last Man. So now, when this urbane philosopher posts pictures of himself at conferences on Instagram, his comment section is flooded with plaintive young people saying things like “mr fukuyama please end history again” and “francis history keeps happening what do I do.”

History would appear to be rolling on undeterred, however. It’s far too soon to say how Operation Epic Fury, Donald Trump’s sudden all-out assault on Iran, will affect the course of world events. But it’s safe to say at this point that even his well-wishers sure hope he knows what he’s doing. This dramatic act by the commander-in-chief of America’s titanic army is the latest of several fresh reminders that sometimes things really do happen. Others include the removal of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the calamities in Ukraine and Afghanistan, and Trump’s own election—both times. Cumulatively, these sorts of upsets have created the distinct impression that history might be starting up again. At the very least, it’s been an eventful millennium so far.

The independence of the Federal Reserve System has become a major source of public controversy. As political leaders signal dissatisfaction with monetary policy, officials and commentators rush to defend the central bank’s insulation from democratic pressure. We are told, as if it were self-evident, that central bank independence is a pillar of sound economic governance.

But this confidence is misplaced. The economic case for central bank independence is far weaker than its defenders suggest. And the constitutional case is weaker still.

Opponents of surgically mutilating healthy adolescents are currently relishing a moment of vindication. This month, the Supreme Court delivered a blow to California laws that obligate schools to aid and abet minors’ “gender transitions,” keeping them secret from parents. Back east, a New York court awarded two million dollars in damages to a woman on whom doctors performed a double mastectomy at age 16. Given this turn in the cultural tide, it’s understandable why conservatives would be fighting the urge to spike the football and offer much-deserved “I told you sos.”

And there’s more good news. A few months ago, researcher Erik Kaufmann noted a precipitous decline in the number of young people who identify as “non-binary” after 2023. More recently, Jean Twenge, a scholar who charts generational divides and characteristics, confirmed that Kaufmann’s findings are likely true and can be extended to include transgender identity specifically and LGBTQ identity in general.

Feminism is sometimes presented by its proponents as something with which only an inveterate misogynist could disagree. “It’s just about fairness for women, allowing them the same freedoms to pursue their heart’s desire that we allow men,” it is claimed. “How can you be against that?!”

Some perhaps genuinely believe this. But it is nothing more than a rhetorical strategy to put critics on the defensive and to deflect attention from the radical core of virtually all contemporary feminist thought, at least of the kind one encounters among the cultural elite. The contemporary feminist worldview can be concisely summarized: men as a class oppose women as a class, and the only way to advance the cause of women in the face of collective patriarchal repression is to reduce or ignore the differences between the sexes altogether.

Where did such ideas come from? Some would have it that the basic ideas of feminism consist of the simple liberal principles articulated in the opening claim about freedom, and more radical divagations are of recent origin. Not true. You can find the extremism in the foundational sources of modern feminist thought. A consideration of Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 book, The Second Sex, which is widely acknowledged as an essential early inspiration of what would become modern feminism, proves the point.

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.

Does the Right Have a Woman Problem? | The Roundtable Ep. 309

Frank Meyer’s fusionism combined free-market libertarianism and religion-friendly traditionalism to create the modern conservative movement. As a political alliance against the threat of Communism, the movement served its purpose. But the principles that undergirded Meyer’s synthesis were not an adequate basis for attaining and sustaining national power.

The difference between the defeated Goldwater faction and the victorious Reagan coalition was the vote of white Catholic Democrats alienated from their former party by its anti-anti-Communism and embrace of the three A’s: amnesty (for draft evaders), acid, and abortion. Those former Democrats did not want smaller government, so Reagan preserved, for them and the country, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, along with generating ever-larger deficits.

The Democrats are currently on track to take the House of Representatives in the 2026 midterms. If this happens, they will empower resistance bureaucrats to slow down all Trump Administration initiatives. Of course, they’ll not only impeach Trump, but will also pursue impeachment proceedings against many Trump officials. This will substantially drain momentum from the administration and increase momentum for the Democrats heading into the crucial 2028 presidential election.

The Democrats are already putting together plans, formulating a narrative, and accumulating evidence, which they will use against Republicans should they retake power. We’ve seen this movie before.

The Marxist machine has had time to learn from its mistakes during 2020-2024. The Democrats will likely pursue criminal prosecution against key targets in the MAGA orbit, including big donors like Elon Musk, the DOGE bros, and even junior Trump staffers. We’ve already seen in Arctic Frost an effort to spy on sitting Republican United States senators—they’ll be on the target list, too.

This is power. Force is power. Politics is the management of force. For his tech-oriented publication Pirate Wires, Mike Solana recently published “Theory of Power,” which outlines how the Left will replicate California’s wealth tax to target billionaires on a nationwide scale. He believes that the Left is targeting billionaires because wealth is power. He’s half right.

While there are many political and policy victories Trump supporters can point to after his first year back in office, there are also questions about what might have been. A lingering one is often uttered in the form of a sigh: “What the hell happened to DOGE?”

Elon Musk first suggested the Department of Government Efficiency to Trump during the 2024 campaign. A government agency specifically tasked with downsizing bloated federal agencies and rooting out fraud was politically popular, and signing an executive order establishing the agency was one of Trump’s first actions upon being sworn in.

The much-vaunted Cuban revolutionary model is on the verge of unceremonious collapse: the economy is in shambles, the electric grid is only occasionally functional, and the supposed achievements of the Cuban Revolution have culminated in near-universal penury and misery. As of 2024, 89% of Cubans lived in poverty, sometimes of an abject kind—and things have only gotten worse over the last two years. Revolutionary Cuba is a model only of what is to be avoided.

In Cuba, growing crowds denounce Communism and the dictatorship that has enslaved the island nation since 1959. Anti-regime voices bang pots and pans in public demonstrations, demanding freedom for Cuba for the first time in 66 years. Yet, Western leftists continue to express solidarity with the Cuban people’s oppressors and blame Cuba’s problems on an American embargo that is often flouted. More absurdly, they insist that the oil embargo imposed by the Trump Administration after its defenestration of the Maduro dictatorship at the beginning of this year is the cause of Cuba’s present discontents. Somehow, the administration is responsible for the deep-seated structural problems that confront a Cuba immiserated by decades of unaccountable Communist rule.

Senator John Cornyn is in the fight of his life. In a throwback to the Tea Party primaries of the early 2010s, the senior senator from Texas (first elected in 2002) has been forced into a runoff for the first time in his career by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Paxton, who was impeached by the Texas House of Representatives in 2023, managed to effectively tie Cornyn in the initial primary, with both receiving around 42% of the vote. While Cornyn is favored to win a runoff, particularly if President Donald Trump endorses him, it is by no means a sure thing.

Cornyn and his team may be wondering how they got to this point. They are not alone. Across the Western world, center-right individuals and parties are in deep trouble and seem unable to figure out why.

In Europe, the “respectable” center-right is a political dinosaur on its way to extinction. The German CDU is neck-and-neck (though more often than not, in second place) with the populist-right Alternative for Germany. Austria’s Freedom Party has been leading for the past three years, while Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy has led the country for over four. Poland’s right wing is dominated by two parties: a populist-right party and one that’s even further to the right. France and the United Kingdom have both seen their center-right parties decimated, replaced by the populist-right National Rally and Reform parties, respectively.

Donald Trump has saved the liberal international order—and with it the promise of American global leadership. The bombing of Iran’s regime is the latest sign that a revived order will reassert the fundamental principles of muscular liberalism that defined the post-World War II era. Critics have spent the last decade bewailing Trumpism as a threat to the post-war order. By now, however, it should be plain that they were wrong. The Trump Administration has rebuilt a system of effective deterrence against threats to international peace and security, and a grateful world will someday recognize his achievement.

Unlike Britain, our imperial tradition was born before, not after, our rise to national greatness. That means we never suffered the sclerosis of bureaucratic management in foreign affairs that eventually defeated the British Empire. George Washington helped himself to war-torn Indian lands after the Seven Years’ War. Andrew Jackson violated Spanish sovereignty to march on Florida during the War of 1812 because of Spain’s inability to control Indian and British abuses. John C. Frémont was a key actor when Mexican rule collapsed in California.

Our imperial tradition culminated in the construction of the liberal international order (LIO) after World War II, which was a substantive order, not a procedural one. The aim was to ensure peace and security, and to advance free and democratic societies. Whatever rules and procedures accrued from that order were subordinate to its substantive aims.

For almost half a century, American policymakers have been conditioned to look the other way when Iran has attacked America. The Iranian regime sees the United States as its main enemy—beneath contempt and worthy of death and destruction. President Trump views the threat of future Iranian attacks as existential, and believes that further delay is no longer acceptable. It is therefore a matter of life and death that he has taken military action in Iran.

President Trump has two objectives: to make sure Iran does not use nuclear ballistic missiles to attack the United States and to install a regime in Tehran favorable to U.S. interests. This will only happen when the current Iranian regime is defeated—and when they know they have been defeated.

Last summer’s Operation Desert Hammer did not change the Iranian regime’s mind that destroying America was their birthright. The Iranians must know that their policy of killing Americans has brought death and destruction, and that future killings will bring annihilation. Of this there can be no doubt.

The U.S. did not launch the airstrikes to liberate the Iranian people from the Islamic rule of the mullahs. Although President Trump is sympathetic to the Iranian people’s plight, the liberation of Iran is a job for the Iranian people. As it is, President Trump is trying to liberate the United States from the Deep State and its corrosive grip on our constitutional government.

It has been a little over a week since U.S. military forces, acting pursuant to direct authorization from President Donald Trump as commander-in-chief, began a large attack, coordinated with Israeli military forces, on the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The Islamic Republic’s top leadership, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have been killed, its navy entirely destroyed, its air defense systems decimated, and much of its ability to counterattack severely (though unfortunately not entirely) undermined. Freedom-loving Iranians the world over, both inside and outside the country, have been exuberant at the prospect of restoring their beloved country to the ranks of respected, peaceful, and prosperous nation-states.

One would think that such a potentially transformative action would draw praise from both sides of the political aisle in the United States. Iran, after all, has been the leading state sponsor of terrorism ever since its current ruling junta took control in 1979. That’s 47 years of terrorist attacks against the United States (which it describes as the “Great Satan”), our key ally in the Middle East Israel (“Little Satan”), and others. And the Islamic Republic has made clear, repeatedly, that it intends to acquire nuclear weapons and to use them. A decisive effort to put an end to this ongoing threat is therefore long overdue and should be applauded.

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.

Ayatollah 2: Electric Boogaloo | The Roundtable Ep. 308

The specter of regime change is haunting the Trump coalition.

Enthusiasts and critics of the U.S./Israeli-Iran War are arguing over its justification, desirability, and feasibility (or lack thereof) based in part on whether or not it is a war aimed at regime change. The Trump Administration has thus far phrased its public rationales for the war in terms of degrading Iran’s military capacities, eliminating its nuclear program, and ending its support for proxy terror groups—with a view to encouraging and enabling rather than directly effecting regime change. Trump concluded his February 28 announcement of Operation Epic Fury by addressing the Iranian people: “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take.”

Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been explicit for years, as well as in the opening days of Operation Roaring Lion, that regime change in Tehran is an Israeli goal. The Israeli Air Force seems to have taken the lead in the decapitation strikes against Iranian leadership, beginning with Ayatollah Khamenei, who was killed in the opening salvo of the war.

It is often believed that the common-law rule of birthright citizenship was that mere birth on the sovereign’s soil was sufficient to create such citizenship. That is incorrect. Although that statement is an approximation of the rule that usually gets the correct result, the precise common-law rule was birth on the sovereign’s soil to parents under the sovereign’s protection.

That is how Sir Edward Coke described the rule in Calvin’s Case, the leading common-law decision from 1608. Aliens from friendly countries with permission to be in the realm were under the sovereign’s temporary protection and owed in exchange a temporary allegiance to the sovereign. They were, while in the realm, natural subjects of the king. That is why their children born in the realm were natural-born subjects. In contrast, the children born of invading soldiers were not birthright subjects “although born upon [the king’s] soil,” because they were not born “under the ligeance of a subject” or “under the protection of the king.” That is, a natural-born subject is one born to another subject, a subject who was under the protection of the king. Invaders did not count, but aliens were subjects of the king if they were under his protection and, in exchange, explicitly or implicitly, swore allegiance to him.

What’s often lost amid discussions about America’s reliance on Chinese manufacturing is the vulnerability of our most basic chemical inputs. Pharmaceutical ingredients may not hold the same futuristic mystique as essential computing components, but they are no less vital to our society. In fact, just one vitamin is necessary to make effective supplements, fortified processed food, and nutritionally viable baby formula.

Vitamin B12 (or cobalamin) is one of the most complex compounds human beings have ever attempted to synthesize. Naturally produced by bacteria in a process involving more than 30 genes and many enzymatic steps, B12 required the combined efforts of more than 100 researchers and a Nobel laureate to reproduce in a lab.

Mass production of B12 relies on fermentation. Apart from being the global leader in manufacturing, China is also the leader in that process, holding 70% of the world’s capacity. It is no wonder, then, that the United States has relied on the Chinese to produce its vitamins.

A little more than a week into the U.S.’s campaign against the Iranian regime—which the Pentagon classifies as a below peer level—Central Command is pulling interceptors from the Indo-Pacific to keep the defensive umbrella intact over the Persian Gulf.

How is this possible when every major strategy document of the 21st century promised that the United States military could handle what lay ahead?

The 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review, which replaced the Cold War two-war framework, pledged to “swiftly defeat” aggression in two theaters while winning decisively in one. The 2018 National Defense Strategy shifted the frame to Great Power competition, assuring Congress that the joint force could mount sufficient deterrence in three regions, fight and win one major conflict, and maintain the ability to deter a second. The 2022 National Defense Strategy introduced “integrated deterrence,” which described a force that could simultaneously address the “pacing threat” of China, the “acute threat” of Russia, and persistent challenges in the Middle East.

The American university is broken. The people running the universities know it, which is why they have redoubled their efforts to make sure you can’t do anything about it.

The story has been told so many times in conservative circles that retelling it risks being a bore: William F. Buckley warned us in 1951 about the free fall that had already begun in higher education. Allan Bloom sounded the alarm in 1987. Ross Douthat offered his critique in 2005. A generation of conservatives has poured time, treasure, and talent into reforming higher ed. We’ve funded centers, endowed chairs, launched institutes, filed lawsuits, and written enough op-eds to fill the Library of Alexandria. Yet still—still—the average graduate of an American university is more likely to be able to explain the nuances of “systemic oppression” than to tell you who wrote The Federalist Papers.

That should be a sign that the old approach, whatever its merits, was fundamentally wrong—not because the diagnosis was wrong, but because the strategy was. As Aristotle says, we should deliberate about means, not ends. Conservatives have been trying to reform the university from within a system that is designed, at every level, to resist exactly the kind of reformation we seek. It is time to stop playing a rigged game and build our own system.

The Unassailable Fortress

Wilhelm Röpke once observed, in a sentence that ought to unsettle every free market romanticist in our time, that the market economy “presupposes and requires a moral and social framework which it cannot itself create.” This line is often quoted as a caveat to free enterprise, but it is more properly read as its foundation. Markets are not self-sustaining organisms, nor do they generate the conditions that make them legitimate. They depend upon a prior architecture of norms, institutions, and habits that provide coherence and legitimacy.

In our republic, one of the most concrete expressions of that framework is homeownership.

Röpke’s defense of markets was inseparable from his insistence on the diffusion of property. He did not associate capitalism with mass consumption or asset appreciation. He equated it with rooted ownership, with households that possess something tangible, something inherited and stewarded. Without that diffusion, he feared the slow advance of what he called “proletarianization”: the condition of citizens who participate in markets, yet own nothing substantial.

“The proletarian,” Röpke wrote in The Social Crisis of Our Time, “is the man who has no property…who is without roots.” His concern was the gradual transformation of citizens into rootless wage earners whose livelihoods depend upon systems too vast to influence and too distant to anchor them.

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.

No More No More War | The Roundtable Ep. 307

At first glance, it seems that the Western establishment should welcome Operation Epic Fury. As Joshua Lisec and I document in our upcoming book, Unelected, the entire post-World War II order has been built on the premise that global security depends on the spread of democracy (or the downfall of tyrants at the very least). As United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in a 2001 speech, there is “a need for more democracy on the global level, which is what the United Nations has been about from the very beginning.”

While many of us are currently monitoring the situation in the Iranian fog of war, other pressing questions at home remain. What sort of victory against foreign enemies will we have if we end up losing our country to internal threats?

I am speaking, of course, of the migration crisis, which has thrown the very concept of American citizenship itself into doubt. After decades of treating citizenship like some ethereal idea, theoretically extendable to anyone who wants it, Americans have finally woken up to the fact that citizenship must be more than a piece of paper. New questions, as well as new battle lines, have emerged not only around illegal and legal immigration—but even the idea of birthright citizenship is now up for legal reexamination.

It’s against this larger background, then, that we should view Trump v. Barbara, a case the U.S. Supreme Court will begin hearing on April 1. At stake is whether our laws permit Americans to have a country or not. The Court will hear the government defend the proposition that birthright citizenship does not include children born to parents who are “unlawfully present,” or who have only “temporary” status. Such conditions on citizenship are very common among many nations, including numerous historically Christian nations.

This past weekend, the United States launched Operation Epic Fury, a coordinated campaign with Israel that sent a wave of airstrikes against the Islamic Republic of Iran, targeting its military and infrastructure after decades of refusing to halt its nuclear program. In this effort to break the spine of a regime that has ruled through terror at home and violence abroad for nearly 50 years, a significant number of the regime’s top political and military leaders were killed, including the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

It matters that the ayatollah did not simply expire naturally but was taken out by the United States. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s evil project of repression is well known across the West, along with its killing of Americans and regular chants of “death to America.” For decades, it has brutally crushed its own citizens and wreaked havoc worldwide through its proxies while Western countermeasures were marginally effective at best and enabled these actions at worst.

The Mellon Foundation and its peers have recently come under sustained attack for their role in radicalizing higher education. Headlines like “Mellon Foundation Awards Morgan State University $500,000 Grant to Cultivate the Next Generation of Black, LGBTQ+ Scholar-Activists” are now a dime a dozen. Notable contributors to this wave of critiques include Tao Tan, who put together data-driven analysis for the American Enterprise Institute on the effect of grants from private foundations, and Tyler Austin Harper, who wrote a withering profile of the Mellon Foundation for The Atlantic. These and other writers provide chapter and verse on how the financial incentives provided by Mellon and its lesser brethren have transformed America’s humanities and social science professors into leftist activists.

To revive higher education, tradition-minded philanthropists must play an essential role in reforming what radical philanthropists have tried their best to wreck. They should not attempt to create counter-Mellons, but instead provide professors with financial incentives to move away from radical activism. Mellon’s task was to radicalize a liberal establishment willing to be radicalized. Because it worked with the philosophical grain of the academy, its task was easier than what tradition-minded education reformers currently face.

Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which was published 63 years ago this month, marked the beginning of the modern wave of American feminism. It has contributed perhaps more than any other radical ideology to the dissolution of traditional American culture and social order. This is a good moment to remind ourselves precisely how far out of touch with reality Friedan’s book is, as part of the ongoing effort to reclaim the culture it set out to demolish.

Based on interviews with her former Smith College classmates 15 years after graduating, Friedan’s book describes what she calls “the problem that has no name.” By this she meant a purportedly widespread perception that college-educated women believed their lives were crushingly unfulfilling, a problem that would require a complete re-envisioning of the family and the sexual division of labor to address.

However, among the book’s readers who were eager to accept Friedan’s critical diagnosis, few bothered to look closely enough to see that by her own analysis “the problem that has no name” should have been called “the problem that does not really exist except in the minds of a few discontented radicals like Betty Friedan.” She did not discover a problem—she simply found a way to interpret reality in a way sympathetic to her desires.

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.

Overthrowing Nixon, ft. James Rosen | The Roundtable

On February 20, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 against President Trump’s slate of tariffs that were enacted pursuant to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). The decision cut across partisan lines, with Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Gorsuch and Barrett aligning with Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson over their dissenting colleagues, Justices Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh. The outcome was immediately met with apoplectic reactions from administration supporters and barely contained glee from its critics. Republicans might have appointed a supermajority of the Court’s justices, but those justices will not simply rubber-stamp the president’s agenda.

This ruling represents something of a legal watershed. It is hard to envision a sharper divergence between the priorities of the current administration—and the broader New Right—and the mainstream conservative legal movement, which has shaped American jurisprudence for decades and produced the overwhelming majority of top-flight conservative jurists. The New Right has made a case for using executive power for the common good, a means of instantiating a wide-ranging policy agenda. Tariffs are a key component of that. But meanwhile, the dominant culture of the conservative legal movement remains deeply skeptical of executive branch authority and celebrates decisions that cripple administrative power.

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.

The Trump Tariffs Go to Court | The Roundtable Ep. 306

Earlier this month, the Cato Institute—perhaps the most effective think tank advocating for open borders—published a study claiming that since 1994, immigration has generated a whopping $14.5 trillion surplus in tax revenues over expenditures.

However, it was quickly pointed out that Cato’s study relies on strange notions of what ought to count in making immigration policy. For example, while acknowledging that immigration raises housing prices by increasing demand, the study views the increased property taxes paid by all residential property owners—citizens and noncitizens alike—as a benefit of that increased demand.

But perhaps more fundamental is the study’s notion of what should count as an expenditure on immigrants. It treats the educational and medical expenses of immigrants’ American-born children—all of whom Cato claims are “birthright citizens”—as expenditures on citizens rather than on immigrants. This is the same kind of sleight of hand we saw during COVID, when the rise in illness experienced after the first of two shots was counted as cases among the unvaccinated rather than the half-vaccinated.

On the question of President Trump’s emergency tariffs, the Supreme Court has spoken. In the Court’s view, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) does not authorize the president to impose tariffs during a declared emergency, namely, the massive trade deficits that threaten our economic security.

But the Court’s decision in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump was highly fractured. Only three justices—Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson—held that the law, under normal principles of statutory construction, does not give the president authority to impose tariffs. Justice Kavanaugh’s dissent, joined by Justices Thomas and Alito, quite persuasively demonstrates why that is not the case. As Justice Thomas noted in his separate dissent, the power to “regulate…importation” has throughout American history “been understood to include the authority to impose duties on imports.”

The other three justices who formed the majority holding—Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Gorsuch and Barrett—resorted to the major questions doctrine. This principle of statutory interpretation holds that Congress must speak with super clarity on issues of “economic and political significance” for the Court to approve a delegation to the executive. The turn to the major questions doctrine implies that the statute, under normal principles of statutory construction, authorizes the president’s action, a point that Justice Gorsuch explicitly conceded in his concurring opinion.

Marco Rubio’s speech at the Munich Security Conference may have been enough for Munich 2026 to displace Munich 1938 in the annals of geopolitics. Far more than an effective rehearsal of European and American commonalities, it touched on the very soul of politics.

Running through Rubio’s speech was a metaphor of filiation: “For us Americans, our home may be in the Western Hemisphere, but we will always be a child of Europe.” But sons and fathers do sometimes part ways, and skeptics in Europe have seen Rubio’s words as window dressing on hostility. Just a month ago, President Trump’s push to compel Denmark to cede Greenland climaxed in another, harsher speech from a glamorous podium. The American postures at Davos and at Munich, however, must be seen as reflecting an underlying commitment to forging a frank friendship with Europe.

Evidently, America’s bond with Britain and France is different in kind from her arrangements with Saudi Arabia or Mongolia. Sharing common enemies is not the same as participation in common goods, which the Trump Administration is working to articulate.