Why Japan’s Sanae Takaichi Should Stick to Her Pro-Growth Guns

August 10, 2026

By: Christian Whiton

Apparently, there is some distance between the US and Japanese governments. Such was the implication of a recent Nikkei Asia headline: “Takaichi’s tax cut plan exposes fault line with US over fiscal policy.”

Except it doesn’t. There is no disagreement at the senior levels of the Trump administration and Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, who is pursuing a uniquely Japanese attempt to accelerate the Japanese economy through real growth. In fact, there is tight collaboration and agreement between the two governments.

The immediate matter at hand was a coordinated action on July 31 by the Treasury Department and the Japanese Ministry of Finance to halt the accelerating decline of the yen against the US dollar. That drop risked widening the US-Japan trade deficit and Japanese inflation, which has flared in part due to high oil prices.

Since the Iran War began on February 28, the yen’s exchange rate has fallen to a 40-year low of 164 per dollar before Washington and Tokyo intervened.

The public is rightly wary of politicians blaming market “speculators” for moves they dislike. However, in this instance, the yen became less a verdict on Japan’s economic prospects than a reflection of herd behavior. A falling yen spurred more yen selling, which in turn spurred even more selling. Washington and Tokyo’s coordinated intervention to buy yen broke the cycle and stabilized the currency, enjoyably burning traders who had been betting against Japan in the process.

But the real story is an allergy among establishment voices on both sides of the Pacific to pro-growth policies intended to help consumers and the supply side of the economy (aka the private sector). The pursuit of such policies puts Takaichi and President Donald Trump in a similar boat that is all too rare across advanced economies.

In effect, Takaichi is fulfilling the legacy of her mentor, Shinzo Abe, the transformative Japanese prime minister whose second premiership ran from 2012 to 2020 and who was assassinated after leaving office. Abe’s economic reforms were grouped into three “arrows”—monetary easing, fiscal stimulus, and structural reform. The first two, which Abe successfully implemented, were short-term efforts to spur Japan’s economy out of a long-term coma. But structural reform, which was intended to include liberalization of Japan’s stodgy economy and business culture, remained elusive.

Takaichi’s program finally goes well beyond fiscal and monetary stimulus. Her government created Japan’s largest-ever tax incentive for capital investment. A new corporate governance code pressures companies to shift capital from cash to investment, research, and labor.

Separately, her growth strategy uses tax incentives, public financing, procurement, and regulatory changes to encourage public and private investment in favored sectors, especially tech, with cumulative investment projected to exceed $2.3 trillion by the end of the decade. Her government abolished longstanding gasoline and diesel tax surcharges and raised the income-tax threshold to about $11,000, reducing the tax penalty on additional work, including for housewives.

This amounts to a broad private-sector-led growth strategy that combines governance reform, tax relief, investment in favored sectors, and supply-side measures. It is complicated and not on the scale of the pro-market reforms pursued by President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, which modernized their economies but sharply increased short-term unemployment.

Such a painful strategy would not fly in Japan, even with the unprecedented political mandate Takaichi won in February. But Takaichi’s reforms represent a real watershed for Japan and the realization of Abe’s missing third arrow. US Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN), who was Trump’s first-term ambassador to Japan, remarked earlier this year: “Takaichi is actually a protege of Abe, and she’s carried the ball even further.”

More controversially, Takaichi’s government is cutting the consumption tax on food from 8 percent to 1 percent for two years. Economic scolds in the business media have criticized these moves, citing Japan’s large national debt, which exceeds 200 percent of GDP.

That debt is worrisome, but it is held mostly by Japanese corporations and individuals unlikely to invest elsewhere, denominated in yen and therefore not subject to a currency-induced crisis like the debt of poorer nations, and has a healthy average maturity of nine years and an average interest rate of just 1 percent. The tax cut is in response to food inflation that frustrates Japanese voters no less than it frustrates Americans—and that can be attributed significantly to the effects of the Iran War on oil prices. Like most tax cuts, its net effect is to move money from the unproductive public sector to the productive private sector.

That concept is inimical to many establishment voices, especially those that love big government. But it is a genuine, democratic response to a real problem for voters.

Why does this matter for the United States? A strong, growing Japan is good for American economic and military security. Japan is America’s most crucial ally in the Pacific and has doubled defense spending in recent years. It and the Philippines are the only countries certain to fight alongside the United States if, God forbid, there should ever be a general war with China. Japan is one of America’s most important export markets. Like Abe, Takaichi is Trump’s best foreign leader friend of consequence and will likely be so for his successor.

Further rebutting the claims of naysayers and those who argue there is distance between Tokyo and Washington, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has been unusually explicit in his support, saying Japan’s economy “continues to perform well under Prime Minister Takaichi” and praising the “strong policies” she is pursuing to improve the country’s economic fundamentals.

Investors, who unlike pundits have actual money on the line, agree. The Nikkei 225 is up roughly 33 percent this year, and the broader TOPIX is up about 13 percent. Americans who support private-sector growth on both sides of the Pacific and recognize that a strong Japan is good for America should hope Takaichi sticks to her guns.

Original URL in the National Interest: https://nationalinterest.org/feature/why-japans-sanae-takaichi-should-stick-to-her-pro-growth-guns

In Other News

Who will control Congress after midterm elections? Republican insiders generally believe the Senate is safe but Democrats will probably gain control of the House. The opposition party almost always wins significant seats in midterm elections and the current House margin is thin.

However, some Republicans are more optimistic. They point out bright spots including a strong fundraising advantage, favorable gerrymandering of House districts, the Democrats’ nomination of radicals, and a would-be Democrat Speaker of the House, Hakeem Jeffries, who is unlikely to be mistaken for one of the top scientists in the space program. Republicans just may hold the House, goes the prayer.

Yet another twist is that Republican control of the Senate and Democrat control of the House would not be so bad. After all, Republicans cannot control everything forever and having Dem nutjobs reveal their nuttiness by running the House would be helpful to Republicans in the far more important 2028 elections.

While it’s ancient history, I heard that same argument in the Bush administration in 2006. It didn’t quite work out: instead of a small House majority overseen by crazy Nancy Pelosi that was checked by a Republican Senate, all setting up for a Republican sweep in 2008, Republicans lost both houses of Congress in 2006 and matters would only get worse.

Unfortunately such an outcome is not beyond the realm of possibility in 2026. Prediction markets currently project highly likely Democrat pickup of the House but more of a tossup in the Senate. But the race-by-race picture is worse. The markets have Republicans failing to unseat Democrat Jon Ossoff in ought-to-be Republican Georgia (leaving a 53-47 Republican margin absent other changes), certain loss of a Republican seat in North Carolina (52-48), likely loss of the last Republican seat in New England in Maine (51-49), a slight Democrat edge to pick up a seat in Ohio (50-50, JD Vance tilts power to Republicans but only barely; committees are evenly divided), and even a narrow probability that Democrats pick off a Republican in Alaska with its confusing ranked-choice voting rules (49-51, hello Majority Leader Chuck Schumer). That path is thankfully narrow and fraught for Dems, but not impossible.

But matters may be worse for Republicans than polls and prediction markets imply. Dan Schnur, a former aide to a California Republican governor (yes, they had them), USC professor and political analyst, hypothesized in 2014 that “In politics, a smaller group of citizens with an intense commitment to a cause will almost always prevail over a larger group who lack that same fervor.” He then proved his theory by running for California Secretary of State that year as an independent and coming in fourth place.

The Democrats seem to have energy. They are convinced democracy itself is at stake and they must act. Many Republicans also believe the fate of the Republic is at risk but they have a bodyguard in the White House for at least two more years. Trump’s vacillation over the Iran War, related food and energy price inflation, and sideshow weirdness like Trump’s involvement with Reflecting Poolgate also decrease Republican energy. Republican senators’ love for the unconstitutional filibuster and inability to pass wildly popular election-integrity requirements also have many activists asking “why?”

Much can happen between now and when voting begins in October, but the red lights at the end of the runway are coming up awfully fast.

Subscribe now

Share

“This was supposed to be the Summer of George!”

So declared the Seinfeld character George Costanza about an ambitious summer that began with his hope that he would “taste the fruits” of the good life but ended in wasted time and squalor.

Will it be so with President Donald Trump, who could have expected a sunny respite in the latter half of his sixth year in the White House, the one before likely setbacks in his final midterm elections and the point when talk about decreased stamina, succession, and lame-duck status grows inexorably louder?

As July commences, the prospect of a successful season is peeling away.

Egged on by Vice President JD Vance, who is cultivating anti-Israel ideologues as a potential activist pillar of a presidential run, Trump agreed to a framework for Iran that ultimately will leave Tehran as the perceived victor of the Iran War that Trump himself commanded.

As part of the Vance capitulation, the Trump administration has now allowed Iran to sell oil in U.S. dollars for the first time in 17 years, and for U.S. companies to buy Iranian oil for the first time in 31 years.

While the Treasury Department waiver that allows Tehran to do so is limited to a 60-day negotiating period, many analysts expect the waiver, and the talks themselves, to lurch on indefinitely. Regardless, the Iranians and the rest of the world know the heat is off.

The administration has already all but overlooked Iranian violations of the ceasefire meant to test Washington’s resolve. More broadly, since the war began, Tehran has demonstrated a long-suspected ability and newfound willingness to disrupt global energy markets by manipulating the Strait of Hormuz. These events now overshadow Trump’s significant accomplishments in increasing U.S. oil and gas production.

Proceeds from Iranian oil sales, as well as unfrozen funds, will eventually get Americans killed. If there are reformers in Iran--and Vance assures the public, “They’re certainly talking differently than they have in the past”--one can bet those liberal reformers who still hang people for being gay or having the wrong opinion won’t get the newly flowing money. It will instead go to its current beneficiaries: the hardline IRGC, Hezbollah, and others who live to export terrorism and kill Americans.

Subscribe now

“H-1B JD”

Once thought to be an asset and natural successor to Trump, Vance has transitioned into a liability and has harmed Trump politically, especially among congressional Republicans.

Unkind wags who previously labeled the vice president “H-1B JD” for his deference to Silicon Valley immigration practices and his Indian-American wife have now added “Jihad JD,” “Neville Vance,” “JCPOA JD,” and “Vichy Vance” to the mix.

Furthermore, there is now a real question whether Trump can freely handpick his successor in office, a standard measure of a truly successful president after two terms. Examples include Theodore Roosevelt, who chose William Taft; Ronald Reagan, who chose George H. W. Bush; and Franklin Roosevelt, who chose himself.

Publicly, all Democrats oppose the Iran deal. Privately, congressional Republicans are also in disbelief. Not just some: effectively all.

So too are the Gulf Arab allies of America who stuck their necks out to support U.S military operations and must now deal with an enraged and eventually enriched Iran.

China

The Iran debacle comes on the heels of a lackluster summit between Trump and Chinese dictator Xi Jinping in Beijing. Critics contend that Trump conceded an unprecedented willingness to consult China over arms sales to Taiwan in exchange for some pageantry and a gift box of mysterious oriental virility powders.

A more coherent explanation of the trip, that Trump was tactically easing rhetoric on China while his administration finds alternative sources of critical minerals and rebuilds America’s military posture in the Pacific, was never made and might not be true.

No one really seems to know.

Xi was confident enough after the summit to ignore even Trump’s request for the humanitarian release of two dissidents, an easy personal favor to warm relations that Xi has rudely declined so far. Xi will come to Washington for a state visit in late September, which creates hope for more tangible outcomes.

Subscribe now

Supreme Setback

Deepening Trump’s summer of malaise, yesterday the Supreme Court dealt the president a blow by rejecting his executive order restricting the birthright citizenship that is guaranteed by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. The vote among the justices was 6-3 to uphold a lower court’s injunction.

It should have been 9-0 and the staffers who had Trump sign the order should have known they were setting him up for predictable failure.

The Amendment’s language is simple: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

The tinfoil hat crowd contends that the “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” phrase means the Amendment does not apply to children of illegal immigrants, even though such children are plainly subject to U.S. criminal jurisdiction. The contemporaneous understanding of the Amendment’s authors in 1866 was that the clause was meant to exclude Indians whose allegiance at the time was legally tied to their tribal nations, as well as the offspring of foreign diplomats and enemy soldiers occupying U.S. territory, whose primary allegiance remained with another nation.

Conservatives, including the three justices who dissented, used to believe that the Constitution meant what it said. For example:

Second Amendment: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

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

Historically, lefty judges and lawyers thought that such enumerated rights had unwritten “penumbras, formed by emanations,” as Justice William Douglas wrote in 1965. They asserted that the Constitution was a “living document” subject to their reimagination.

How convenient.

Conservatives thought the Constitution meant what it said. (We’ll come back another time to the collapse of 10th Amendment federalism even among some on the right.)

The same special people who have misled Trump on Iran misled him on birthright citizenship. The tinfoil hat crowd doesn’t seem to care about the consequences for the nation of a multigenerational stateless class that would have emerged if the 14th Amendment had been curtailed. Put simply, if you like the way Gaza functions, you’ll love a future USA without birthright citizenship.

Opponents of the Amendment as written also ignore the risk to other individual rights if Republicans further adopt the left’s mystical ability to reimagine the Constitution via penumbras and emanations they can read between the lines of the written Constitution and law.

As Mark Simon and I discussed in video linked above last year with John Yoo, the former U.S. official and legal scholar, the remedies to abuse of birthright citizenship can be accomplished by deportation and immigration control, including steps Trump has already implemented—as well as legislation restricting travel by women late in their pregnancies or forfeiture of an expensive bond if they do not agree to renounce their child’s citizenship if they give birth during travel.

Conservatives have fared relatively well in the Court’s recent spate of decisions, including victories on gun rights and presidential power. But Trump attended arguments in person for the birthright citizenship case he has now lost, an unprecedented act that marked it as his top judicial agenda item.

Vance and the tinfoil hat crowd have accentuated the negative for Trump.

The Legacy Thing

Despite these setbacks, Trump’s administration remains intact and the president’s legacy is secure.

Two references come to mind.

The first is from the late, irrepressible Jesse Helms, longtime senator from North Carolina. In May 2000, as Bill Clinton’s pointless administration slouched to its end, and as his aides and the media tried to spruce up his reputation before losing the 2000 elections to Republicans, Helms remarked on the Senate floor: “So, Mr. Clinton is in search of a legacy. La-di-da. He already has one.”

The point, of course, was that late-game PR shinola was not going to change history’s eventual verdict on Bubba’s presidency.

The other comes from the Evans-Novak Political Report, a paid newsletter that had its heyday in the 1980s and spoke from the insider right.

As an intern on Wall Street at Oppenheimer in the summer of 1995, I stumbled on old copies filed away and gave them a look, since the bank had not only subscribed but retained the copies for nearly a decade.

Expecting ardent support for Reagan, I instead found dissent. This struck me as odd because by the mid-1990s, when I read the reports, conservatives had begun to succeed in defining Reagan’s success accurately, despite the best efforts of the liberal media, squish Republicans, and that cadre of lefty academic losers known as presidential historians.

And yet here were some of the demurs from those newsletters and other articles they wrote in the later Reagan years:

One headline from 1987 declared “A President Dealing From Weakness,” especially after the stock market crash that year.

“A Sad Week for Old Reaganites” was the intonation after Reagan hosted Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev for a state visit in Washington.

In 1986, ironically the peak year of Reagan buildup defense spending, they worried that allies saw Reagan “presiding over the dissolution of American influence.”

Today, conservatives and others familiar with history see Reagan as the greatest president since Franklin Roosevelt. Reagan reversed American decline, transformed the economy, and defeated European communism. The point is that on-side grumbling is common, does not reverse past achievements, but still should not be ignored.

Trump too already has a legacy of greatness. He has transformed the economy, ended globalism, secured America’s borders, ushered the New Right into power, and mortally wounded the left’s deadly and impoverishing civic religion of climate change alarmism.

But he could do better. When the summer of malaise ends and is followed by elections likely shaped by an energetic left, Trump will face fundamental decisions on policy and personnel if he wants the final two years of his administration to matter much.

Subscribe now

Share Capitalist Notes by Christian Whiton

Vice President JD Vance took President Donald Trump back to the future with a nuclear deal based on the flawed assumption that incipient moderation will occur in Iran with a little payola and love.

The fiction restores a make-believe assumption about the Islamic Republic that has contributed to decades of bad U.S. policy, and that Trump himself previously discarded.

In an interview with Megyn Kelly yesterday, Vance said:

So the way that I think about it is there’s sort of a fork in the road in this entire relationship with Iran. For 47 years, we’ve obviously had basically a terrible relationship with Iran. They funded a lot of terrorist organizations. There’s obviously the nuclear issue that’s been in the background, going back well before Donald Trump even got on the political scene. And here’s where we are right now... they are in a position where what they’re saying is that they want to make long-term commitments to the United States and to the Gulf Arab countries to change their relationship.

In an interview with Fox News, Vance said of the Iranian leadership, “I think that they see there’s a real opportunity here to turn over a new leaf so long as they do the right thing.”

Vance added further about his journey of discovery:

You talk about hardliners and moderates. What’s fascinating to me about their system is that we’re seeing even people that I would have assumed are hardliners who are kind of saying, ‘Maybe it was a mistake for us to do the things that we’ve done over the last 40 years. Maybe we should turn over a new leaf in the relationship with the United States of America.’

Vance then boasted of a “strategic opening to Iran” and celebrated the emergence of “more moderate elements” in the Islamist regime. He spoke of moderates interested in “a political discourse with the United States.”

Actually, he didn’t. Those last references come from criticism of flawed official thinking cited in the Tower Report, which was commissioned after the Reagan administration was caught scandalously trading arms for hostages with Iran in the 1980s. The trade only encouraged Iranian misconduct.

Since that time, across both Republican and Democrat administrations, there have been experts who perceived moderates in the Iranian regime who just needed a little support and coaxing to swing Tehran into a friendlier disposition toward the United States.

President George H. W. Bush saw a pragmatist in Iranian President Akbar Rafsanjani, winked at Iran in his inaugural address by suggesting “Good will begets good will,” and later observed that “the Iranians were trying to be helpful.”

That was the same year that Iranian proxy Hezbollah executed U.S. Marine Lt. Col. William Higgins. Also that year, Iranian actors conducted assassinations in Austria, Cyprus, and the U.A.E., and set off a bomb in Saudi Arabia.

Next, the Clinton administration saw a big opening with the election of Mohammad Khatami in Iran, who professed on CNN to want a “dialogue among civilizations.” President Bill Clinton was “captivated” by the “apparently like-minded” Khatami. Clinton wrote to Khatami assuring him that the United States had “no hostile intentions” toward the Islamic Republic.

During those breezy post-Cold War 1990s, Iranian operatives conducted assassinations in Argentina, Italy, Pakistan, Sweden, and Turkey. They bombed the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 U.S. servicemen and wounding hundreds of others.

The habit of seeing moderates where none existed took a hiatus of sorts after 9/11. But the mirage made a big comeback when President Barack Obama took office.

When Hassan Rouhani became Iran’s president in 2013, an Obama official forecast “a more moderate foreign policy.” Two years later, Obama approved the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which began with paying Iran $1.7 billion in physical cash and ended with Iran using advanced centrifuges allowed under the deal to enrich uranium.

That agreement came in the wake of years in which Iranian operatives had killed or wounded thousands of Americans in the Middle East and planned a mass-casualty assassination of an ambassador in Washington--an attack luckily thwarted by the Drug Enforcement Administration.

A year after taking office, Trump withdrew from the Iran deal in 2018, remarking that the agreement was “defective at its core.” He then ordered a “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran and dispensed with the long-held mirage of moderates in the Iranian regime forever on the cusp of power.

In his second term, Trump resumed pressure on Iran and ultimately ordered military action. The “reformist” mirage was suppressed, helped into remission by the regime’s decision to kill thousands of its own citizens who were engaged in peaceful protest.

But now Vance has brought it back and made it a key assumption and single point of failure in U.S. policy toward Iran--effectively forcing Trump’s hand.

Vance has also misled the public and members of Congress, which in turn has forced Trump’s hand to restate false claims.

For example, Vance told Fox News that “Iran doesn’t get a dime from anyone if they don’t change their behavior.” In fact, Iran reasonably expects at least $14 billion in prompt payola from Qatar. Tehran later expects $300 billion from U.S. allies.

Today, Reuters reported that a “senior U.S. official” who was “speaking on the condition of anonymity” briefed the media about the plan Vance will sign with Iran as early as Friday. The official on the call was in fact Vance. He confirmed the worst of what has been suspected about the agreement with Iran, which is still officially concealed from the American public, including:

• Paragraph 1: Forcing Israel and Lebanon to cease action against Hezbollah, effectively providing a lifeline to the American-killing Iranian proxy.

• Paragraph 5: Recognizing new Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz, a worse situation than existed at the beginning of the war. Text: “The Islamic Republic of Iran will conduct dialogue with the Sultanate of Oman to define the future administration and maritime services in the Strait of Hormuz.”

• Paragraph 11: Immediate payola for Iran, absent any action, in an amount far greater than the $1.7 billion Obama flew to Tehran. Text: “The United States of America undertakes to make fully available for use the frozen or restricted funds and assets of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

The Vance deal will kick off a 60-day period (likely indefinite) to negotiate unresolved issues. Trump himself has ensured that Iran will have the upper hand in these talks through his characterization of the cost of failure. On Wednesday, in a meeting with Egypt’s president, Trump complained to a reporter about skeptics of the deal:

You know, the stupid people want to have a worldwide depression, and they’re stupid people. So you can only go so far. You drive somebody into the ground, and a lot of bad things happen… the Strait would never open, because they don’t like floating billion-dollar ships up and down a strait when there are rockets flying over them and mines all over the place… It wouldn’t be open for a long time.

Being a stupid person, I am left wondering why Trump authorized a war on Iran with no plan to keep open the Strait of Hormuz. The U.S. military has expected and prepared for such a contingency since at least 1979, when the Islamist regime came to power.

Usually reliable sources on Capitol Hill report that the administration believed it had “really good” intelligence that Iran would not close the Strait. Hopefully Vance or another administration official can explain to us stupid people why they were caught off guard and tanked confidence in Trump’s otherwise strong economy when what everyone else expected to happen actually happened.

Until then, we the stupid can only gawk slack-jawed at the 3D diplomacy taking place, lacking the capacity to understand genius.

Subscribe now

Share Capitalist Notes by Christian Whiton

President Donald Trump drew his second administration further into political crisis in accepting a flawed Iran deal crafted by Vice President JD Vance.

In the weeks after Trump authorized the Iran war, with Tehran’s nuclear weapons program in tatters, he could have declared victory, militarily secured the Strait of Hormuz for oil and gas exports, and moved on.

He could have said that it does not matter if Iran has “uranium dust” because the means of enriching that uranium—highly complex and delicate centrifuge cascades—was wrecked. To borrow a quote from Henry Kissinger, such a statement “would have had the added advantage of being true.”

Instead, his administration ceased to speak the one language the Iranian regime understands—military force—and pursued diplomacy overseen by Vance and facilitated by Pakistan and Qatar.

That would be the same Pakistan that harbored Osama bin Laden and the same Qatar that hosts Hamas and runs a 24/7 anti-American cable network that colluded with and incited insurgents to kill Americans.

Excellence in diplomacy did not ensue.

Subscribe now

According to sources who have visibility on the still-unpublished framework, the deal will provide Iran with “upfront relief” (i.e., payola), a nod to tacit Iranian dominance of the Strait of Hormuz, a lifeline for Hezbollah that limits Israel’s ability to fight its foes, and whopping additional payola in the form of “international investment” of more than a quarter of a trillion dollars.

How did such a bad agreement emerge?

Back on May 23, Vance presented Trump a framework agreement with Iran that he had worked out with Trump envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. Despite public accounts that it was down to “fine-tuning,” it left out key details about Iran committing to end its nuclear program and excavate and hand over existing uranium stock, the condition of which is inexplicably unknown to America’s $100 billion-per-year intelligence bureaucracy.

The extraction would require the sustained presence of U.S. or U.N. instrumentalities in Iran, an unlikely concession for a government that has yet even to engage in face-to-face talks with the United States. Also kept vague was prospective payola to the Iranian regime for agreeing to end hostilities.

Trump declined to endorse the deal and continued military action against Iran.

Iran’s most dangerous proxy army, Hezbollah, waged war on Israel. Steps by Israel to defend itself at times brought support from Trump and other times brought harsh, expletive-laden condemnation, especially of late.

Thus did Trump stall and likely upend one of the brightest features of the war: the possible destruction of Hezbollah who through its predecessor, Islamic Jihad, first became famous in America when it killed 241 U.S. servicemembers in Beirut.

Separate from Vance’s diplomacy via Doha and Islamabad, Secretary of State Marco Rubio engaged the governments of Israel and Lebanon and moved toward an agreement that could push Hezbollah (and therefore Iran) out of Lebanon’s government for the first time in memory. That historic effort now languishes with Trump having made clear to Israel that he effectively wants Hezbollah left in place since Tehran has made that a condition of a deal.

The United States continued to strike Iran until April 8, when the White House announced Operation Epic Fury had met all of its goals after 38 days of combat.

In the ensuing ten weeks, Iran managed to keep the Strait of Hormuz highly constrained if not fully closed. Oil prices topped $100 per barrel and gasoline and diesel prices came close to their all-time highs seen during peak Biden-era inflation in 2022.

Now a deal is set to be signed on Friday in Geneva. Neither side has released the text, which calls into question if there is really a meeting of the minds for what officials describe as merely a framework.

Based on leaks and what has been briefed to members of Congress, that framework differs only from the flawed product Vance placed before Trump two months ago in that it makes more concessions to Iran and would place more restrictions on Israel.

The White House is eager not to be seen paying Iran directly just for making vague promises. In 2016, candidate Trump called a decision by then-President Barack Obama to send $1.7 billion in physical cash to Tehran “a disgrace.” This week Trump again distanced himself from the idea of payments for promises:

Our relationship with Iran is a much different and better one than previous Administrations have had. Unlike Obama’s Hundreds of Billions of Dollars in payments to them, including 1.7 Billion Dollars in green, cold cash, no money will exchange hands.

Unfortunately, money will “exchange hands” due to the Vance deal, and it may dwarf Obama’s sweetener. It just won’t come directly from the United States. Iranian negotiators have made it clear they expect $12 billion held in Qatar to be released as part of the initial agreement. That is just the beginning. Iran also expects a $300 billion “investment package” for all of the exciting investment opportunities in the theocratic tyranny.

The White House is preemptively retorting that “Iran’s rewards come from its own unfrozen money, not from American taxpayers, and only after it performs.” For the terrorists and theocrats on the receiving end of these funds, that is a distinction without a difference.

And what of those terrorists and theocrats? Trump began the war by intoning to the Iranian people: “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take… The hour of your freedom is at hand… Now is the time to seize control of your destiny…”

This outcome was always a tall order with a regime that reportedly killed tens of thousands of its own people in the last year to sustain its tyranny. And Trump deserves some credit for being the first president to at least call for the overthrow of the regime. But doing more than nothing to help Iranians achieve this would have been nice.

There were moronic plans to have the CIA arm Kurdish Iranian dissidents in Iraq to invade Iran. Six days into the war Trump said, “I think it’s wonderful that they want to do that, I’d be all for it.” Two days later, Trump said, “We are not looking to the Kurds going in. I’ve ruled that out.”

Better ideas, such as sending Starlink terminals into Iran so dissidents and average Iranians can get factual news and communicate—the basics of any dissent movement—never seem to have been explored. The Air Force’s EC-130J “Commando Solo” planes, which bristled with communications equipment to overcome enemy jamming and could pump information into a contested area, were retired from service in 2024. Apparently the country brought to life by political warfare, propaganda, and agitation—think the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Paine’s pamphleteering, and Samuel Adams’s agitprop—is clueless and helpless in applying these tools to our enemies.

In lieu of actually doing things, the administration’s most undaunted surrogates have resorted to fantasy. Some have suggested Iran’s terrorism-exporting IRGC will be magically pushed aside and that Iran may now see fit to join the Abraham Accords, which would involve recognizing Israel’s government and establishing diplomatic relations.

In fact, the deal will strengthen the IRGC. As for a new affinity for Israel, an Iranian government-aligned broadcaster said last week: “If the US cannot leash its rabid dog in the region, Iran will exceptionally assist it in this matter! And that will be through force.”

This would be an atypical preface to a diplomatic entente cordiale.

So off to Geneva to sign the agreement goes Vance, at least according to the current plan. One would think an ambitious young vice president would want to avoid such close association with a dubious framework negotiated and countersigned by governments that hate our guts.

But therein lies another odd wrinkle of this whole matter: according to speculation on Capitol Hill, Vance actually sees this as part of his ticket to the presidency. While Trump has distanced himself and his movement from strident anti-Israel voices like those of Tucker Carlson (a.k.a. “Tucker Qatarlson”), Vance has not. Sources see this as quite intentional, and believe Vance does not want to deprecate or minimize anti-Israel and antisemitic sentiment in some quarters of the right, but in fact wants to harness them.

In that world, apparently this deal makes a lot of sense.

For Trump, the deal, if it holds, will provide relief in the form of lower gasoline and diesel prices. But it comes at the cost of overexposure and puffery that drifted into outright mendacity that has reduced his credibility. The satire site Babylon Bee joked in a headline: “Trump Sets New World Record By Winning War With Iran 27 Times In One Year.”

The setback comes on the heels of a lackluster summit with Xi Jinping in Beijing, at which Trump appeared to make a concession on Taiwan in exchange for little. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth then made a speech about security in Singapore that was too confusing to be offensive. Trump heads into summer facing certain loss at the Supreme Court over the issue of birthright citizenship—possibly by a unanimous vote although a 2-7 loss is more likely.

Recently, Trump has upset his base by defending warrantless spying on the communications of U.S. citizens. As with birthright citizenship, the administration would not have gone astray had it done what conservatives have argued forever: reading the Constitution.

Trump’s other recent forays into naming the Kennedy Center for himself and having it de-named by a court, and the irrelevant condition of the reflecting pool in Washington convey a distracted, rudderless administration.

A wise man once told me that every administration leaves town as a parody of itself. Is Trump advancing this condition to the sixth year of his presidency? No one has ever seen anything like it.

President Donald Trump appeared to call time on the Iran War on Saturday, reporting to the American public a likely agreement with Iran, backed by Gulf Arabs, Pakistan, and Turkey.

The tentative agreement, which Trump said would reopen the Strait of Hormuz to the flow of beautiful oil and gas, isn’t the unconditional victory about which Trump once mused in passing, but it is a win for the United States and the new Middle East that Trump has helped bring into existence.

Before the war, the theocratic, cousin-marrying, terrorism-exporting deviants who run Iran were on the march. Their proxies dominated Iraq through violence and spread terrorism throughout the region, most notably of late with the gruesome invasion of Israel and murder spree against unarmed civilians in October 2023.

They had the blood of thousands of Americans on their hands and wanted a lot more.

Iran was enriching uranium for crude nuclear bombs that would have put it in a position to dominate the energy-rich region. This was the same regime that came to power by taking American diplomats hostage and killing Americans throughout the decades—even planning a mass-casualty attack in Washington that was foiled by the FBI.

Thanks to former President Barack Obama, Iran had a nuclear deal that availed it of the means to produce nuclear weapons—plus literal pallets of cash to fund the program. The regime also got a big assist from Obama’s third term, nominally overseen by dotard Joe Biden but in fact run by Obama staffers and their trusty autopen.

While Trump had sought to undermine Iran with “maximum pressure” in his first term, his far-reaching sanctions were undermined by European “allies” Britain, France, and Germany—along with China, which was the primary consumer of Iranian oil.

The situation was grim.

Now, thanks to Trump and a U.S.-Israeli military offensive aided by Gulf Arab allies, especially the United Arab Emirates, Iran is on the defensive. Its military is decimated. Its proxies Hamas, the Houthis, and Hezbollah are in retreat. The latter group, often considered the most serious, has been on the receiving end of persistent Israeli counterattacks and may finally be pushed out of Lebanese politics.

Early reports indicate Iran may also give up the enriched uranium it may still have. That would be ideal. But even short of that, the U.S.-led coalition has destroyed Iran’s centrifuge cascades—the means by which it can enrich uranium to weapons grade. Any attempt to reconstitute this capability will be observable. At that point, the United States and its allies can always return to “mow the lawn.” They can do so with more pinpoint strikes or, as I have advocated, overwhelming force.

Hopefully Iran is smart enough to allow removal of the uranium—likely buried in possibly ruptured canisters of uranium hexafluoride used to feed centrifuge cascades—in exchange for a persistent ceasefire and sanctions relief.

This achievement is more than just the proverbial “half a loaf” of bread. It is most of the loaf.

Those who opposed the war—almost every single Democrat and much of the Washington uniparty blob—will now say that Trump got too little.

The neocons and Capitol Hill hawks are particularly upset.

Neocon Robert Kagan, the Earl of Sandwich, called a prospective negotiated peace a “surrender” and added: “Most likely, the new normal in the Persian Gulf will be chronic instability and frequent disruptions in shipping. That’s what happens when the hegemon cedes hegemony.”

But Trump, like the American people, never wanted “hegemony.” He just wanted Iran not to have a nuclear weapon, kill Americans, or disrupt global energy markets.

The neocons are upset that Trump’s limited bombing did not effect regime change in Iran, which they presume would lead to liberal democracy and alliance with the United States. But this was never a likely outcome absent a full U.S. invasion. Furthermore, Iran has no democratic tradition, and Persia has been a problem for the West more often than not since about the fifth century BC.

Speaking for the hawks on Capitol Hill, Mississippi Republican Senator Roger Wicker, the pointless chairman of the Armed Services Committee, moaned that Trump “is being ill advised to pursue a deal that would not be worth the paper it is written on.”

Yet these same pointless senators have been screaming at Trump to resolve gasoline and diesel prices that have spiked since the war began. Wicker’s proposed solution: “I also believe we can diversify our future energy supply through the use of alternative and renewable energy.” He added the perpetual Republican Lucy-with-the-football, promise-but-never-deliver solution (thanks in part to an undemocratic filibuster that renders the Senate useless): “I support exploring for oil and gas in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.”

Even if these solutions were approved tomorrow, they would take years to affect prices.

Go back to face your disappointed constituents who mistakenly thought they elected a conservative fighter, Roger.

Some other key points:

• Reopening the Strait of Hormuz to all traffic will not just alleviate high gas prices for Americans; it will also stave off crisis for allies in East Asia. While it has been enjoyable watching China squirm as its source of below-market-cost Iranian oil has been crimped, the impact has also hurt our friends. Japan, which is further expanding its massive increase in defense spending, dipped into emergency oil supplies and paid poorer countries. The Philippines, which has a pro-U.S. government and is already fighting back low-intensity conflict from China at sea, was rationing gas.

• Unlike the arrogant moochers of Europe, who ostentatiously refused to help the U.S. military in our moment of need, these Asian allies quietly shouldered the burden of the energy crisis, understanding the goal Trump was seeking.

• The Strait of Hormuz will never again be as important as it was during this crisis. The U.A.E. is halfway done with an expanded pipeline to the Gulf of Oman that skips the Strait of Hormuz. The Saudis are expanding efforts to pipe product directly to the Red Sea. No one serious cares if the duplicitous Qataris can’t get gas to market; they deserve whatever ill comes their way. The War Department, which was inexplicably unprepared for the closure despite multiple warnings, now understands that a future operation must come with a “blue carpet” of allied air and naval assets to dominate the Strait.

• Easing sanctions on Iran in return for nuclear compliance is a low cost for an excellent prospective outcome. It is unfortunate that the Trump administration does not appear willing to contemplate the step that will immediately cut gasoline prices further: dropping sanctions on Russia.

• As my colleague Mark Simon has written, not all of Iran’s leadership is ideologically driven. Some are just crooks and crooks with whom we can deal, just as we must do around the globe: “We must face the hardest truth of international affairs: we rarely get exactly what we want; we simply choose the least-bad alternative.”

• Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu was cut out of the final deal, but Israel’s position has been dramatically improved. Its partnership with the U.S. and U.A.E. will continue to reshape the Middle East, the Horn of Africa, and beyond. Bibi may be out of power and off to jail with the war over, but the alliances that matter are strengthened and will live on.

• The Iranians are the biggest losers, but they are followed closely by the Europeans. NATO is on life support. It now competes with the United Nations as a venue for preening diplomats who hate America but indignantly demand and expect to mooch off us. Trump may unfortunately not pull the plug formally on NATO, but hopefully he will “quiet quit” the organization. He should expand alternatives to NATO, like annexing American Greenland and seeking bases in Morocco, America’s oldest ally. Europeans can thank America for securing their energy supply again and go back to memorizing the Koran.

Then there are the Democrats. They will say that Trump fought an expensive war that raised prices for Americans and got nothing in return. The public, which instinctively grasps the threat of Iran better than the palace eunuchs of Washington ever did, won’t buy this. Nor will they care much as the price of gas recedes and the economy, currently growing faster than 4%, roars ahead. The end of the war gives Trump a free hand to begin campaigning in earnest.

Trump appears to have achieved a major national security breakthrough. He has helped create a new Middle East as part of a broader new world order—based on a revived United States, a reforming Latin America, and an arc of prosperity that runs from America through Northeast Asia to the Middle East. His opponents can whine as they watch history being made from the sidelines.

Subscribe now

Share Capitalist Notes by Christian Whiton

Assisted suicide for the mentally challenged is controversial. But when it is conducted by President Donald Trump on his opponents at their urging, the benefits are hard to dispute.

On Saturday, Louisiana Republicans fired Senator Bill Cassidy for sucking in general and voting with deranged and hysterical Democrats to impeach Trump for make-believe offenses. Two different Republicans are now vying to fill the Senate seat, Cassidy having come in third in his own primary. Another squish Republican goes down in flames.

Then on Tuesday, Kentucky Republicans effectively unseated Rep. Thomas Massie by defeating him in his primary in the heavily Republican district. Massie cast himself as a principled libertarian but voted against Trump’s signature One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which enshrined tax cuts and supply-side economic growth on a scale unseen since the Reagan era. Massie also voted against Trump and the Constitution through legislation that purports to limit the President’s authority to command the military to defend us against the theocratic tyrants in Iran. So much for the self-styled freedom fighter.

In a fitting spasm of antisemitism upon losing, Massie said his concession speech was delayed because he had to reach his opponent “in Tel Aviv.” As the satirical Babylon Bee joked in a headline, “Massie Blames Defeat On Jews Of Rural Kentucky.” The article deadpanned that Massie “could not overcome the losses in heavily-Jewish areas of backwoods Kentucky.”

Oy vey, Billy Bob.

Others who have charted the same course are not only gone but forgotten. Do leftwing political tabloids like CNN and PMS Now even have losers like Liz Cheney and crybaby Adam Kinzinger on their air anymore? No one knows.

Other recent volunteers whom Trump has accepted for assisted suicide include pundits Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and Candace Owens.

During the Biden administration, Carlson was second only to Trump in importance to the New Right and the information war with the left. More recently, he has popularized the once-obscure term “Christian Zionist,” called it a “brain virus,” and suggested those who support the Iran War are doing the bidding of Israel—presumably used as a stand-in for “the Jews.” He joins a long list of politicians and pundits whom Trump seems to have broken.

Megyn Kelly has always been a charlatan, drifting from establishmentarian to iconoclast depending on how it suited her. It takes unique flexibility to work for Fox News, then leftwing NBC News, and now fashion oneself as a keeper of the flame of true MAGA.

Then there is Candace Owens. The less said about her, the better.

Usually, there would come a point in a political cycle when the powers that be would be called upon to distance themselves from the loonies on their side. For example, any Republican candidate this year failing to demand that his Democrat opponent condemn biological males in women’s sports, drag queens in kindergartens, and systematic Somali clan theft of taxpayer funds would be missing a great opportunity.

Such a ritualistic distancing used to be called the “Sister Souljah moment.” That was the instance in the 1992 presidential race when candidate Bill Clinton, busy cultivating a since-concealed image as “Bubba” and moving toward the political center, denounced the performer Sister Souljah for advocating black-on-white violence. (In today’s Democrat Party, Sister Souljah would be the nominee on stage denouncing Bubba for moderation.)

Subscribe now

But no such gesture is necessary thanks to the departing members of Congress who sought death-by-Trump and the intellectual excursions of Carlson and his peers. Trump already un-personed Carlson and Kelly in a single social media post calling them stupid. Since they speak for no mass of contributors, campaign management, voter registration, or get-out-the-vote work, they have no other political power to their name. Done and done.

This gives Trump and Republicans an advantage going into the 2028 presidential race. This year’s midterms will likely deprive Republicans of control of the House of Representatives, not because of any Democrat breakthrough on talking points about affordability. Rather, it will come from a lack of enthusiasm by Republican-inclined voters who don’t have a clear bogeyman like Hillary Clinton or Kamala Harris to motivate them.

But the real fight will be in 2028 for the White House and control of Congress—with the Supreme Court again hanging in the balance unless Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito decide they want Trump to choose their successors. For that race, Trump and his assisted-suicide service have already begun to lay the groundwork for success.

No one in the media will report it, but the economy is on sound footing and getting stronger. The Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank informally estimates GDP growth at a raging 4.3% annualized rate this quarter. Inflation is a little hot at 3.8%, but if one excludes energy and food prices driven up temporarily by the Iran War, the rate is a normal 2.8%. Despite forecasts of job-loss doom due to AI, total employment has never been higher, and businesses created 115,000 net jobs last month.

Forward-looking measures like the stock market, which at an all-time high reflects record business profitability, and business-capital formation being driven by strong long-term capital expenditures, foretell strong economic growth. The media has successfully cast the economy as poor—consumer sentiment surveys demonstrate this—and each passing week makes it harder for Trump to reverse this belief. But the truth will prevail in 2028 as the economy accelerates steadily and unmistakably.

And it’s not just the economy driving matters. Foreign policy and Trump’s dismissal of loonies will help too. The New York Times and the rest of the Democrat-media storytellers are gleefully reporting a rift on the right over foreign policy. The cause is Trump’s decision to decapitate the Venezuelan government, threaten Cuba’s communist government, and recognize the state of war that Iran has had in place against the United States since 1979.

The 2028 Republican campaign will have a huge debate over foreign policy but, barring disaster in Iran, the outcome is already decided. The reason is that the future of the party only gets settled when there is a presidential nominee. Given his recent display of power, Trump has removed any doubt that the 2028 nominee will be whomever he chooses. And don’t expect Trump to choose anyone who is not an enthusiastic supporter of the aggressive and assured foreign policy that he and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have orchestrated. Thanks to their antisemitic dalliances and subsequent banishment, the noninterventionists have already all but removed their arguments and candidates from contention.

Parting Shot

President Trump had a successful summit with Chinese supreme leader Xi Jinping in Beijing. Reagan-era Secretary of State George Shultz characterized such high-level interaction as necessary “tending the diplomatic garden,” and garden Trump did.

While the media pretended Trump was weak and Xi was strong, it was Trump who brought with him a group of the world’s most powerful CEOs—all Americans, of course. It is Trump who has crimped China’s Iranian energy supply. The economy Trump leads is accelerating and vindicating capitalism; Xi’s communist economy has been floundering since the pandemic. It is Trump who can wage war around the world from the cabin of his 747, while Xi, the leader of a nation of one billion people, can’t even invade puny Taiwan.

Beijing’s obsession with Taiwan is a weakness, not a strength; Xi’s buddy, Russian President Vladimir Putin, wouldn’t even notice if a geography as small as Taiwan came or went from Russia’s 11 time zones.

As a result of the summit, more U.S. soybeans will apparently be heading to China. That is good because it’s better for everyone if Chicoms eat more tofu and fewer bats, pangolins, and dogs.

Trump again bucked simplistic descriptions that he is transactional and soft on authoritarians when he pressed Xi to release dissident Jimmy Lai. This was at least the second time Trump has done so directly, even though mention of Jimmy, a Hong Kong publishing tycoon who peacefully stood for freedom in China during protests, causes noticeable anxiety in Xi. Trump is also doing the work for the Vatican: Jimmy is the world’s most famous Catholic layman and a symbol of Christian self-sacrifice that the pinko papal politician, Pope Leo, chooses to ignore.

Perhaps Xi will expel Jimmy to a retirement of reclusion rather than irreversibly make him the Chinese martyr of the century, and dress it up as a present to Trump before their next summit later this year. The record already shows that Trump has pressed the Chinese harder on a real human-rights issue than any president in U.S. history. Trump has also tried hard to find areas to tone down confrontation with China--something Xi should not ignore or take for granted.

Meanwhile, reporters, pundits, and politicians who facilitated China’s rise before Trump changed America’s course are suddenly concerned that Trump is going soft because he had a plain-language conversation about Taiwan with Xi and was gracious about the dictator’s tenure.

Truth be told, I’m not 100% sure what our China policy is today. We’re not back to Bush-Obama “responsible stakeholder” nonsense that wishcasts China will be friendly once it steals enough of our manufacturing. But also missing is a simple plan like that espoused by Trump’s first-term U.S. Trade Representative, Bob Lighthizer, who calls for “strategic decoupling.”

Hopefully strategic decoupling is still the tacit plan, and Trump is just playing it a little nice while he wields military force in the Middle East and the Americas, fights trade wars with Europe and Canuckistan, and sources rare earth elements and processed rare earth compounds from anywhere but China.

However, as I noted to Le Figaro this week, Trump’s impatience with Taiwan’s dazzling sideshow and woke left-leaning government is probably genuine and deserved:

… They have someone over there who wants independence,” [Trump] said, even though Taiwan’s government has never said it wants to declare independence. But the message is clear: “The reality is that the White House considers Taiwan a source of instability,” says Christian Whiton, a former State Department adviser during the first Trump administration.

The setback is severe for Lai Ching-te, who had nevertheless worked to strengthen relations with the United States and the Trump administration. To meet its expectations, the government pledged to increase the defense budget and supported investments in the United States by its most strategic companies — especially TSMC, Taiwan’s industrial jewel, which produces the world’s most advanced semiconductors. But that was not enough, nor were the interviews given to conservative American media to appeal to the MAGA sphere. “The Lai administration’s plan to influence Trump has failed. Taipei chose the wrong intermediaries, the wrong allies, and the wrong lobbying firms because it does not really understand Trump,” Christian Whiton concludes.

Subscribe now

Share Capitalist Notes by Christian Whiton

Earlier on Fox News, I discussed the latest on Iran and argued that President Trump should order a resumption of general war against Iran. Talking points below.

Intransigent Iran

• Trump has bent over backward to give Iran’s rulers a chance to remain in power by recognizing freedom of navigation and giving up their nuclear weapons program.

• They have not acceded. Now it is time for the pain train.

• It is hard to assert that the ceasefire is still intact. They are shooting at our naval vessels. We are shooting back. They are also attacking our allies like the UAE—second only to Israel in standing with us against Iran—with ballistic missiles. We appear to be in a state of low-intensity conflict.

• Two of my rules for PR: When in doubt, tell the truth; and if you must lie, tell plausible lies. Statements from the War Department about the ceasefire and other recent developments break these rules.

• Explanations for the on-and-off-and-on “Project Freedom” to reopen the Strait (P.S. we need better operation names like the ones from WWII) are starting to sound like the “Five O’Clock Follies” from Saigon. It seems like the War Department has botched this and was generally unprepared for the closure of the Strait. Did they mislead the President?

• There is a long history of adversaries failing to understand the determination of the USA. Even after Nixon took office in 1969, he had to escalate severely against North Vietnam in order to get a peace agreement. Hanoi then, like Tehran today—and Europe and the mainstream media—was hoping for political change in the USA that would give it respite.

• Only after Operations Linebacker I and Linebacker II in 1972 did the North Vietnamese get serious about negotiating. A year later, Nixon fulfilled his promise to end our participation in the war and get our POWs out.

• It is likely that Trump will have to resume hostilities. He should target the Iranian energy industry, which will weaken the regime and help U.S. and allied energy industries, especially with OPEC on life support and a potential glut after the war.

• However, the top immediate U.S. tactical goal should be a “blue carpet” of allied aviation and naval forces that reopen the Strait by negating any threat, or potential threat, in Iran that can affect the Strait.

• The President should be blunt in addressing the American people, saying we had hoped for a quick resolution, but this will take time and we have the upper hand. Wars almost always last longer than projected. Two years and $2 trillion might be a good guess to bring the regime to heel or create a failed state that cannot act externally. Of course, it is impossible to put a price on the U.S. and allied casualties that resumed combat will incur.

• Rhetorically, Trump’s method of using optimism and the perception of momentum to push an agreement across the finish line has served both him and the USA well. But now is the time for reality. Trump should now under-promise and over-deliver. Let Iran see the consequences, not just hear about them.

• If we are short on resources, now is the time to hand European security over to the arrogant moochers of Europe and relocate U.S. forces and materiel from there to the Gulf for the war.

Regime Change in Iran?

• We cannot predicate policy on an uprising in Iran—nor has Trump done so, although he has expressed hope for a revolution. Maybe it will happen, maybe it won’t. It’s in the nice-to-see category, but cannot be a requirement for victory.

• Believing that any people can be made democratic, and that they will then be our chums, is a cherished and admirable view held by many Americans. Sometimes it has worked, as in Japan, and sometimes it has not, as in Iraq.

• Iran has no democratic tradition. There is a first time for everything, but democracy is hard. It is also difficult to predict. Even those who were certain European communism would collapse did not predict the timing of revolutionary events there in 1989 and 1991.

• This concept of a “democratic peace,” especially when espoused by neoconservatives, often rhymes with Marxist theory of historical inevitability, albeit with a different outcome. But in reality, events don’t just happen. People make them happen.

• A coherent plan to help the Iranian people free themselves from their despotic regime is long overdue. But we should realize our limitations.

• For Senator Lindsey Graham, who is great at bumper-sticker slogans, suggesting that we arm dissidents is a long way from designing and implementing a serious plan.

• Flooding Iran with Starlink terminals might be a better start. Dissent movements, like any political campaign, thrive on information.

• The CIA is pretty much out of the business of political warfare, except against Republican presidents, so I have no confidence it would choose the right group to arm in Iran.

• Previous arguments to arm Kurdish groups demonstrate the knee-jerk nature of some of these proposals. The regime can only be overthrown by the Persian majority in Iran.

• We can hope that Iranians overthrow their regime and take steps that, over the long term, will make that more likely. But it cannot be an assumption of near-term war policy.

The State of Nukes

• Iran’s enriched uranium probably exists in the form of uranium hexafluoride, or UF6. When UF6 is not being run through centrifuge cascades for further enrichment, it is typically stored in sealed cylinders. At room temperature and ordinary pressure, UF6 is a solid, not a gas.

• Either these cylinders have been ruptured, in which case some or all of their contents may be dispersed, contaminated, or chemically degraded, or they have not. Either the material is recoverable, or it is not.

• Trump should demand that our $100-billion-per-year intelligence bureaucracy give him a straight answer on the state of this UF6.

• If the UF6 is still usable, the U.S. and our allies need a plan to render it unusable.

• Trump should also seek an agreement with Israel and the Gulf states that any attempt by Iran to acquire, assemble, or start centrifuges—or any other part of the nuclear fuel cycle at any site or any time—will lead to the use of military force.

Subscribe now

(Honolulu) Seeing a chicken run around after it has been beheaded is striking. The animal is effectively dead, but its headless body, while somehow aware that something is awry, has not conceded the fact.

So it may be with Iran as the United States once again bends over backward to offer a peaceful exit for a regime whose adherents would have been burnt at the stake by any decent church or mosque.

Iran’s navy and air force no longer exist as organized military forces. Their remnants may be able to get off a lucky shot here and there—similar to the Imperial Japanese Navy after its final general defeat at the Battle of Leyte Gulf in 1944—but such attacks are militarily negligible, even if they cheer America’s enemies in the liberal media and Europe and seem anything but negligible to those directly affected.

Iran agreed to a ceasefire but has broken it at times. President Donald Trump has responded in turn by blockading the export of Iranian oil and other goods. The clerical deviants who run Iran got an education over the weekend in Trump’s seriousness.

After six hours of repeatedly warning an Iranian blockade-running ship to turn back, the U.S. Navy disabled it with 5-inch cannon fire—the first surface-to-surface gunnery engagement by our sailors since 1988. Marines then boarded the ship, and now it is ours. Finders keepers.

The act itself was merciful. In World War II, the ship would have been sunk and its survivors left adrift. The Pentagon should consider more aggressive handling lest Iran place booby traps or its own commandos on its ships. Better for them all to go to the bottom than risk a single American serviceman.

Hopefully Iran realizes its sole economic and strategic lifeline—its ability to export about 1.6 million barrels per day before the war—no longer exists unless and until it accedes to every one of the demands Trump has articulated with the full support of U.S. allies in the Arabian Gulf like the United Arab Emirates.

But the Iranians, running around like a headless chicken, seem intransigent. At least some do. Depending on whom one consults, either the Iranians have decided not to negotiate with the United States or are set to meet a high-level American delegation in Pakistan on Tuesday. It is not entirely clear who is in charge of Iran. I guess we’ll see.

Trump has again threatened to strike Iran’s energy infrastructure. He would prefer not to do so, but such an act would produce military, political, and economic benefits. With Iran’s energy business eliminated and the Strait of Hormuz reopened, the oil-producing nations of the Gulf and the United States would benefit. U.S. oil production is near its all-time high at 13.6 million barrels per day. Prices consistently closer to an average of $70-75 per barrel—a bit above the $64 average price of West Texas Intermediate for the year prior to the war—would entice more U.S. investment in energy production and therefore more output.

Dropping sanctions on Russia would allow Moscow to return oil exports to prewar levels of 7.8 million barrels per day—about 0.7 million more than today. Removing all sanctions on Russia would allow this number to grow and help expand trade in Alaskan and Russian energy products through the Arctic, avoiding notorious chokepoints like the Strait of Hormuz (Arabian Gulf), the Suez Canal (Egypt), and the Strait of Malacca (Singapore).

The rest of the oil deficit, until it could be resolved by expanded U.S. production, could be made up by asking Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and the other Gulfies—all governments with which Trump has great relationships—to go to maximum output.

U.S.-enforced tolls on the export of gas to China from Qatar—a mediocre ally that has sought to play both sides of any conflict involving the United States—could alleviate the higher cost of gasoline and diesel in America through transfer payments.

However, such an arrangement would still leave the remnants of an intransigent regime and nuclear-weapons related sites whose level of destruction is unclear.

Some hope the Iranian people will overthrow the regime and become chums of America, Israel, and the Gulfies—alleviating long-term worry about what is left of Iran’s nuclear program. That would be super, but it simply cannot be an assumption of U.S. national security policy. Recall that the Clinton administration declined to bomb North Korea’s plutonium-producing reactor in part because its officials incorrectly presumed the Pyongyang government would collapse amid famine in the 1990s.

The U.S. government today is also terrible at the political warfare we once employed to shape foreign political developments to the benefit of U.S. national interests. Subverting Iran’s government in particular was part of my 2013 book, “Smart Power: Between Diplomacy and War.”

At the time, I thought America and its allies could rediscover past achievements in upending adversarial regimes through nonviolent political warfare, in part by reforming institutions like the Central Intelligence Agency or reviving shuttered ones like the U.S. Information Agency, the Pentagon’s wartime Office of Strategic Services, or the British Political Warfare Executive.

I no longer do: twenty-five years after 9/11, Washington and other Western governments are clueless about identifying political Islam as the hostile upstream political force that animates our Middle East enemies and then adjusting policy accordingly. America’s taxpayer-funded democracy-industrial complex, including organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy, worries more about Trump than the mullahs who run Iran.

If we had the capacity to figure out this policy question, we would have by now. And if we cannot count on political means to control Iran, we must rely on military ones. Put simply, hoping for democratic transformations sometimes pays off in the future. But military force always pays off right now.

Unless Iran relents, Trump should consider the use of low-yield nuclear weapons in highly controlled circumstances to render Iranian nuclear sites inaccessible for a decade or two. He should also consider low-yield strikes on Iranian cities like Qom—the capital of Islamist ferment—if the alternative is indefinite warfare that puts Americans and our allies at risk.

A digression on nuclear-weapons design and its relevance to dealing with Iran:

The United States used two bombs against Japan to end the Pacific War, the lessons of which are relevant today.

The bomb we dropped on Hiroshima was based on the fissile isotope uranium-235. Manhattan Project scientists were confident enough that it would work—and concerned enough about the scarcity of uranium-235—that they did not test the design in advance. Its first use was on Hiroshima, and it yielded about 15 kilotons—the equivalent of 15,000 short tons of TNT. The device used a gun-type design that fired one subcritical piece of uranium-235 into another, creating a supercritical assembly and the ensuing explosion.

The bomb we dropped on Nagasaki was a more complex and efficient design based on the fissile isotope plutonium-239, which today exists in nature on Earth only in trace amounts. It must be bred in a reactor when uranium-238 captures a neutron and then decays through uranium-239 and neptunium-239 into plutonium-239. Construction of the Nagasaki bomb required the invention of implosion, since firing two plutonium pieces together, as with the Hiroshima bomb, would cause them to pre-initiate or fly apart instead of producing the intended nuclear explosion. The complexity of the design led Manhattan Project officials to order a test of the implosion design in New Mexico in July 1945 before it was used in combat the following month on Nagasaki.

Those two isotopes—uranium-235 and plutonium-239—are two of the few isotopes that can sustain a fission chain reaction because they can absorb a low-energy, or thermal, neutron and then split. Each fission event releases energy and additional fast neutrons, which can trigger more fissions under the right conditions. In a weapon, this can produce an extremely rapid, self-amplifying chain reaction that releases a large amount of energy from the atomic nucleus. (Two other fissile isotopes, uranium-233 and plutonium-241, are generally less practical for weapons production and long-term maintenance.)

This physics recap is relevant here because of the nature of the Iranian nuclear program. Iran said it needed the ability to enrich uranium for fuel for electricity-producing nuclear reactors—one that is in operation at Bushehr and others under construction there. This was an obvious lie. Iran already had a deal with Russia’s Rosatom to provide fuel assemblies and take spent fuel off its hands.

But Tehran said it needed its own ability to enrich uranium for nuclear fuel and all too many people played along with this fiction.

Enrichment means increasing the concentration of uranium-235 in uranium, which is otherwise mostly uranium-238. Today, this is done most commonly through centrifuge cascades. After milling and conversion, uranium is turned into uranium hexafluoride gas (UF6) and fed through a cascade, or series, of centrifuges. Because uranium-235 and uranium-238 differ slightly in mass, the gas streams separate incrementally, allowing enrichment to build gradually from stage to stage.

The big problem with Iran doing this goes back to the Hiroshima bomb: once a military has a sufficient quantity of uranium-235, it does not need much additional technical knowledge to make a crude nuclear weapon. Mastering implosion, neutron initiation, and extremely accurate timing and design required for an efficient plutonium bomb are not necessary for a crude uranium bomb that could level Dubai, Riyadh, Tel Aviv, or Washington.

Iran’s claim that it needed enrichment for energy or medical uses was always mendacious. As noted, Russia was willing to provide the nuclear fuel assemblies and take them back, which would have meant Iran could forgo sanctions that have cost it billions of dollars per year. Furthermore, commercial electricity-producing reactors typically use low-enriched uranium containing about 3-5% uranium-235, with most of the balance being uranium-238. Iran’s decision to enrich uranium to 60% or more has no realistic civilian electricity-producing purpose—it was meant to bring Iran to the brink of being a nuclear-weapons power.

Trump hates the idea of nuclear war and more nuclear-armed U.S. adversaries. His recent comments show his disappointment with the refusal of then-president Bill Clinton to use military means to prevent North Korea from becoming a nuclear-weapons power. Bubba should have bombed North Korea’s plutonium-producing reactor at Yongbyon but didn’t.

Trump is also very much a product of the 1980s, when he achieved wealth, power, notoriety, and a sense of civic responsibility. He demonstrates this in the importance he places on well-managed relations with Russia and China, and in leader-to-leader summits that allow leaders to cut through red tape. One such example was the breakthrough by then-president Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in eliminating an entire class of deployed nuclear weapons in Europe. These were hallmarks of the 1980s.

You may also recall the 1980s as the decade in which the American public was regaled with media like “The Day After,” a horrific movie about the consequences of nuclear war with the Soviets that aired on ABC in 1983. I was nine years old at the time and, in accordance with the “anything goes” standard for what Gen X was allowed to watch (I’m grateful, if bemused), saw the whole horrifying product in its network debut. Reagan watched—he noted in his diary that it made him “greatly depressed”—and Trump probably did too, given its high ratings.

Would a president who hates nuclear weapons, and who authorized force against Iran to prevent Iranian nuclear terrorism, be willing paradoxically to use nukes against the deviants who run Iran should they persist in their intransigence?

He should consider it seriously.

The United States and Israel have acted repeatedly to degrade Iran’s nuclear-weapons capabilities. They did so last year in June 2025 and have done so again in the current war. But unless Iran is forced to allow the United States to seize what Trump correctly calls “nuclear dust,” something must be done.

That dust is probably still in the form of uranium hexafluoride gas (UF6). The centrifuges, which are sensitive pieces of hardware, are probably destroyed, but UF6 is usually withdrawn from them when not undergoing enrichment and stored in cylinders. UF6 is heavier than air and is solid at room temperature under ordinary conditions. There may be cylinders of this nuclear “dust” buried beneath U.S.-Israeli bombing sites in Iran. While difficult, it may be possible for Iran to excavate and reconstitute the UF6 and resume enrichment and bomb assembly. Maybe.

How can these locations be rendered inaccessible to humans so the material remains entombed? The answer is low-yield nuclear weapons whose radiological effects, when properly employed, are intense and localized.

Rendering a site inaccessible through calibrated contamination is harder than one might imagine. It is illustrative to again return to America’s own nuclear weapons history.

In our second postwar nuclear test, “Crossroads Baker,” fired underwater in the lagoon at Bikini Atoll, a shot based on the same plutonium implosion design as the 21-kiloton Nagasaki weapon produced, through neutron activation, the isotope sodium-24, which was intensely radiologically dangerous. So far, so good, if one wants to render a local geography inaccessible. But the isotope’s half-life is a mere 15 hours—hardly enough to render a location off-limits for long.

More instructive was “Castle Bravo,” fired at poor Bikini in 1954. While the distinction was lost on its victims, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were relatively “clean” shots in that they detonated about 1,900 and 1,650 feet above ground, respectively. Their fireballs never reached the ground and therefore limited contamination. The primary destruction and death were products of the bombs’ intense light, heat, and shock waves. For radiation victims, whether they suffered acute radiation sickness immediately or developed cancer years later, the culprits were prompt gamma rays and neutrons at the instant the bombs exploded, along with some residual fallout—not long-term exposure to massive local fallout of the sort seen after near-surface shots.

Castle Bravo illustrated the other end of the spectrum. In a lesson that shows why the United States should resume underground testing of novel nuclear-weapons designs today to ensure safety and reliability, the bomb’s yield was much larger than expected. Atomic Energy Commission scientists designed the bomb as one of the earlier thermonuclear designs that used the intense x-rays from a fission primary to compress and ignite the bomb’s secondary stage. They planned for the isotope lithium-6 to absorb a neutron and produce tritium, an isotope of hydrogen, to provide the main fusion fuel (hence the name “hydrogen bomb”). It did.

However, lithium-7, the more abundant isotope and one expected to be largely irrelevant on the millisecond timeline of the reaction, turned out to be quite relevant. At the high neutron energies produced in the initial reaction, lithium-7 also contributed to tritium production. As a result, a shot that scientists expected to yield about 6 megatons actually yielded 15 megatons. That was about 1,000 times the energy yield of the Hiroshima bomb.

The large yield was not the only significant factor. Unlike Hiroshima or Nagasaki, Castle Bravo was not an airburst whose fireball never touched the ground. It was fired just above ground level and entrained an enormous amount of pulverized coral and other matter into its fireball, which reached temperatures of tens of millions of degrees and produced a cloud that rose to about 130,000 feet. As a result, the cloud carried a great deal of radiologically dangerous weapon debris and fallout, including fission products such as isotopes of strontium and cesium. Additional fallout was created when prompt neutrons from the shot were captured by otherwise nonradioactive elements and made them radioactive.

The smaller Bikini Baker test produced radiation that was localized and intense but didn’t last long enough to deny an area to an enemy. Castle Bravo produced enormous and lethal fallout that spread over a wide area. Rendering Iran’s nuclear weapons sites off limits would require something that draws lessons from both.

Trump, like any president, ought to have a solution at hand. Unfortunately he does not, thanks to the anti-nuclear arms-control priesthood that prevailed for much of the late Cold War and the sissy Congress. During the Cold War, scientists like Edward Teller—father of the hydrogen bomb—conceived of “salted weapons” that would use radiological contamination to render select locations difficult for an enemy to access.

The most practical concept was to jacket a thermonuclear weapon with cobalt-59, which would absorb a neutron in the explosion to become cobalt-60, a strong gamma emitter with a half-life of just over five years—ideal for rendering a site off-limits for 10-20 years. (After one half-life, half of the original quantity of the isotope remains undecayed, and half has decayed).

Trump’s friend Elon Musk might be about to engineer a quick fix, given his acumen in applied physics. A cobalt jacket added to an existing bomb would have to receive ample neutron bombardment before the bomb disassembles—close enough to be activated, but not so close that it interferes with the bomb’s existing physics package.

Otherwise, given how long it takes the federal government to acquire novel weapons—and given that the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense are already failing to field new nuclear systems for an era in which U.S. ICBMs are no longer invulnerable and hypersonic weapons are changing the reality of war—something more immediate would be required.

An interim solution would be for Trump to order a series of low-yield bombings of Iran’s primary nuclear-weapons sites. America’s venerable B61 nuclear bomb is suitable, as some variants have supported ground-burst or limited earth-penetrating detonation—preferable because they would entrain and contaminate as much local soil as possible while maximizing local dispersal and minimizing spread beyond the nuclear sites. Furthermore, the bomb family includes variable-yield options (“dial-a-yield”) that, depending on the variant, range from less than one kiloton up to about 50 kilotons for the B61-12 (recall that Hiroshima was about 15 kilotons). Several dozen set to the lower end of that range, perhaps around one kiloton, could be used in shotgun patterns on Iranian nuclear sites. They can be delivered by U.S. stealth B-2 and F-35A aircraft, against which Iran has no defenses.

While not producing the ideal medium-term radiological poisoning of a cobalt bomb, the fission products from a set of regular thermonuclear weapons configured to maximize local contamination should render the sites difficult to access for some time. The most important Iranian nuclear sites associated with uranium enrichment—Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan—are conveniently located in central Iran, far from neighboring countries.

One does not consider using nuclear weapons lightly, even at low yield. As the B-52 pilot character played by Slim Pickens in the 1964 dark comedy doomsday film “Dr. Strangelove” said, “I reckon you wouldn’t even be human beings if you didn’t have some pretty strong personal feelings about nuclear combat.”

This is true. The use of nuclear weapons for the first time since 1945 would make previous freakouts about Trump seem small. Financial markets would plummet and energy markets would spike—but only temporarily.

Eventually, new and welcome realities would become apparent: that Iran will never have the bomb, that Iran will no longer threaten anyone, that seeking nuclear weapons actually decreases a nation’s safety, and that the nuclear club is permanently closed to new entrants. Furthermore, such an action would demonstrate U.S. will and likely bring an end to combat and an end to U.S. and allied casualties.

Trump should consider this option and begin test-bombing Iranian nuclear sites with conventional bombs to convince Tehran that he is thinking it over.

Share Capitalist Notes by Christian Whiton

Subscribe now

Earlier today on Newsmax and N2, I summed up promising developments related to the Iran war. Behind the hysteria from Democrats, the media, and the Pinko Pope, real-world events look fine. Talking points:

IRAN

• Last week, the mainstream media and the Democrats were wailing that Trump hadn’t reopened the Strait of Hormuz, or included that objective in his war requirements.

• This week, the mainstream media and the Democrats are wailing that Trump is reopening the Strait of Hormuz and including it in his war requirements.

• That is the bottom line of Trump’s order to close the Strait and begin the de-mining process. The transit of two U.S. destroyers through the Strait for the first time since the war started indicates that the Navy is confident some channels are free of mines and resilient to Iranian attack.

• Oil futures markets reflect this reality even if the deranged and hysterical political class on both sides of the Atlantic does not. Current West Texas Intermediate futures markets show clear backwardation:

May 2026: $104.92
June 2026: $95.93
July 2026: $89.40

• The same is true for Dubai benchmark futures, which are more directly influenced by the Strait of Hormuz:

April 2026: $100.75
May 2026: $90.77
June 2026: $87.51
July 2026: $85.34

• In other words, people with real money and oil on the line know that the oil will flow and my nearly 7,000-pound, 510-hp living-room-on-wheels will be cruising around this summer, producing harmless carbon that is great for trees.

• Politicians lie. Money does not.

• In the course of a year, Iran has gone from the strongest regional power in the Middle East to the weakest. Meanwhile, the Great Satan and our allies are looking quite strong.

• The inability of Iranian negotiators to reach a reasonable agreement with the United States is a lost opportunity for Iran, not the USA. Iran often breaks agreements and there would be pressure to overlook Iranian violations and not resume military operations.

• Absent a deal, allied militaries can strike Iran as necessary. Iran should also expect a toll or embargo on its exports through the Strait. To make up for lost oil on the world market, Trump should drop all sanctions on Russian oil exports and investment in Russia.

• Sad Factoid: According to ChatGPT, the Strait of Hormuz is named for the island of Hormuz, which is named for Hormazd, a form of Ahura Mazda, the supreme deity in Zoroastrianism. As with anything but Shia Islam, Zoroastrianism, despite having originated in Iran as one of oldest monotheistic religions that may have influenced Judaism in late antiquity and therefore Christianity and Islam, is severely persecuted by Iran’s clerical regime. There are certainly way more Zoroastrians in Los Angeles than that part of Iran. Should the waterway be renamed the Arabian Strait or the Strait of Trump?

PINKO POPE

• The Pinko Pope typifies the growing problem of the religious left. They pervert long-established institutions to advance contemporary leftwing political goals that harm their parishioners.

• Helping church members with their lives and questions about how to relate to God and the infinite are less interesting to these politicians than playing to the cheers of an adoring globalist elite and the mainstream media.

• On one hand, it is nice that the Pinko Pope has seemingly taken a break from appeasing Chinese communist authorities, which he and the Vatican bureaucracy do really well. They allow China to veto Vatican personnel decisions and ignore imprisoned Jimmy Lai, the world’s most famous Catholic layman and dissident. On the other hand, the Pinko Pope has said Trump has “hands full of blood.” In so doing, he gives a pass to the Islamist terrorists who run Iran and were hoping to dominate or kill millions of Christians and Jews and Muslims when they got a nuclear weapon. Beyond wrong, this is moral degeneracy.

• The same goes for the Pinko Pope’s public campaign against the USA for enforcing immigration laws the same way every other country does. How many million Somali and Haitian immigrants is the Vatican prepared to accept or pay for?

• The Pinko Pope says his “peace appeals are rooted in the Gospel, not party politics.” LOL—we weren’t baptized yesterday liberal Leo.

• If the Pinko Pope wants to see how this all works out, he should take a look at the Episcopal Church. Once a fundamentally important American institution, it is now basically a Real Estate Investment Trust with a choir. Nice buildings, empty pews.

• Following this path…

Sermons that matter to people’s lives ==> Sermons about boring annual vacations to Scotland ==> Sermons advocating leftism

…leads to churches emptying or splitting off.

• American taxpayers should not be required to subsidize leftwing foreign political interference in U.S. politics. As with any political donations, those made to political churches—those engaged in pressure campaigns related to public policy—should not be tax deductible. Leftwing churches should not be allowed to raise everyone else’s property taxes by getting a pass on these either.

• Since the USA does not have ambassadors to foreign political parties, there should be no U.S. ambassador to the Vatican until there is a normal pope.

Subscribe now

Iran has blinked. How hard and for how long, we do not know. But a blink is a blink.

Sifting through the mainstream media’s emissions over the past day has been almost as fun as an election night after a Trump victory. The tears of progressives and those rooting against the USA are the sweetest of all.

The usual suspects were caught in one of two modes. Some were trying desperately to claim that an obvious victory was something other than it was. Others, like Helen Keller during her first trip to the water pump with the Miracle Worker, were flailing in an attempt to grasp something near the limit of their ability to comprehend.

With the usual caveats that Iran’s theocratic tyrants excel at lying and breaking agreements, that Iran has already said and done things inconsistent with what it agreed, and that a ceasefire is a de facto peace instead of a de jure one, the past six weeks can only be seen fairly as a victory. Normal people will see it as such.

While the mainstream media and their Democrat handmaidens sneered and called it “Trump’s war,” it was in fact a war fought by the United States, Israel, and Gulf Arabs plus Jordan against the chief global purveyor of terrorism and Islamist tyranny.

It wasn’t just a big victory for Trump. It was a big victory for the United States of America.

On March 30, Secretary of State Marco Rubio laid out the war’s objectives:

This is about very specific objectives. The President laid them out on the first night of the operation… Here they are — you should write them down. Number one, the destruction of their air force. Number two, the destruction of their navy. Number three, the severe diminishing of their missile launching capability. And number four, the destruction of their factories so they can’t make more missiles and more drones to threaten us in the future. All of this so that they can never hide behind it to acquire a nuclear weapon.

As it became clear the U.S.-led coalition was accomplishing each of these goals, the media sought to move the goalposts. “Trump’s war” would be a failure unless oil and gas resumed their unhindered flow through the Strait of Hormuz, even though the United States gets little of its oil and gas through that waterway. Journalist-advocates who never before cared about middle America took a break from running stories about climate justice and women trapped in men’s bodies to report on the supposedly crushing cost of energy.

True, gasoline prices rose from just over $3 per gallon when the war started to $4.16 yesterday. Lost amid the reporting was that gasoline was much higher during the middle of dotard Joe Biden’s administration, reaching $5.02 in mid-2022, which would be $5.53 in today’s dollars. Biden and his fellow “mentally retarded person,” Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, achieved this despite no supply disruption, largely by debasing the dollar, in which oil is traded globally, in order to pay people not to work long after the pandemic’s critical phase.

But then Trump also got a deal to reopen the Strait—backed, of course, by the application and continued threat of overwhelming U.S. military force. By Wednesday morning, the price of oil had plummeted 15 percent.

The mainstream media simply cannot handle this. Take the New York Times, which has rooted for every American enemy since the Vietcong. After the ceasefire, Pravda on the Hudson published an “analysis” piece lamenting Trump’s brinkmanship and willingness to communicate directly with the American people instead of through the lying media: “a warning of mass destruction and what international law would define as war crimes, blithely delivered on Truth Social, posted alongside ads for bullet-shaped pens, patriotic hats and a gala dinner at Mar-a-Lago.”

Boo-hoo. I heard Trump also jaywalked once.

Furthermore, according to the Times’s pretend psychologist, Trump’s “…latest comments bear the mark of an impulsive leader who is used to getting his way through coercion and unpredictability, but who is not getting his way now.”

Except he is.

The piece was written by Katie Rogers, who, according to her bio, wrote “American Woman: The Transformation of the Modern First Lady, from Hillary Clinton to Jill Biden.” Quite the page-turner, I’m sure. She has a graduate degree in journalism (i.e., a fake degree) from Northwestern University. How perfect to represent the America-haters. They have expensive degrees, sterling credentials, and have worked for companies with what used to be marquee brands. And yet they seemingly have shit for brains and lack the self-awareness to conceal this trait.

And then there are the elected Democrats. The record will show that every Democrat senator except Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman opposed Trump, with some even seeking Trump’s removal from office for confronting a threat that even many Democrats used to recognize as critical. After all, not only did Trump oppose then-president Barack Obama’s 2015 flawed nuclear deal with Iran, so too did current top Democrat Chuck Schumer, who runs the Senate despite a Republican majority. Never have the Democrats been less qualified to hold executive or legislative power. Go put some more tampons in boys’ rooms to please your political base and let the adults govern.

Turning back to the real world, there is the matter that Iran typically violates at least part of every international agreement it enters. But there is some history of the regime complying more or less: a ceasefire ended the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War and largely stuck, although compliance with down-list obligations of the agreement was mixed.

Whether in two weeks, two months, or two years, it is likely that the United States and its allies will have to “mow the lawn” on occasion in Iran. Doing so would not be a failure, but a matter of course in dealing with a country that has been a problem on and off for the West since the First Persian Invasion of Greece in 492 BC (“BCE” for those of you in Rio Linda).

Luckily, the allies will be contending with an Iran whose military capabilities and progress toward a nuclear capability have been severely diminished. And while not the most probable outcome, perhaps Iran’s new leaders will come to realize that the nations that matter don’t buy the lie that Iran needs uranium-enrichment capabilities for its sole electricity-generating reactor (the fuel for which Russia has agreed to supply and remove once used) or medical purposes. Accepting the end of its nuclear weapons project, ballistic missile program, and export of terrorism would lead to an end of sanctions on Iran and the benefits of greatly expanded oil production and export.

Short of that, strong allied conventional military power will be indispensable. The United States should also field “salted” nuclear weapons once considered during the Cold War. These very-low-yield weapons, fired at or just below ground level, entrain and contaminate or irradiate significant amounts of earth and onboard cobalt to create contained, localized conditions that are radiologically dangerous enough to discourage human access for a number of years—a harder task than one might imagine. Tehran must understand that it will cease activity at its nuclear sites one way or another, and that previously enriched uranium will remain entombed. It and other rogue regimes should also understand that the nuclear club is closed to new entrants—even if low-yield nuclear weapons are ironically necessary to enforce this rule.

The success of enforcement and deterrence will rely on the continued determined political leadership in the United States, Israel, and among the Gulfies. Which is to say the countries that matter most to the emerging new world order. Here we see that war accelerates and clarifies trends that have been a long time in the making.

NATO is useless for the United States, and has been for some time. Actually, it would have to improve to be useless; it is a costly distraction and collection of pointless moochers. Its pathetic and disingenuous offer to help in the Strait of Hormuz only after hostilities end is absurd. What will they do then? Repaint buoys? Host tea on dated ships that barely function?

This sad reality is obvious not only to Trump, who has correctly called NATO a “paper tiger,” but also to those who previously held the alliance in high esteem, such as Rubio.

Trump can and should quit NATO. Not only was it unhelpful in confronting Iran, its members sought actively to undermine the United States and deny America use of its military bases. In 2023, Congress slipped a provision into the annual defense authorization act that purports to require the president to get a two-thirds vote in the Senate or an act of Congress through both houses to withdraw from NATO. This is constitutionally ridiculous: the Framers of the Constitution established a two-thirds Senate supermajority to enter into treaties, but no such requirement exists for withdrawal.

Per the Constitution, the hurdle to get into an international agreement is high, but not to get out. Presidents have often exercised this power to exit treaties, including President George W. Bush’s withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 when it clearly no longer served U.S. interests. That move made possible many of the anti-missile systems that have defended U.S. troops and allies during this war.

Trump should withdraw from NATO just to prove he can, citing his constitutional authority as commander in chief. Congress has no mechanism to enforce its pretension: to have standing before a court, it would likely take both houses voting in favor of litigation. Furthermore, the Supreme Court frequently declines to arbitrate disputes between the executive and legislative branches, especially in areas like national defense where the president’s powers are greatest.

Short of that, Trump can “quiet quit” NATO. Start cancelling new deployments when units rotate home. Move advanced weapons elsewhere, especially missile-defense systems and nuclear weapons. Trim military and diplomatic missions. Declare that particularly hostile governments, such as those of Spain, France, and Denmark, are no longer part of the U.S. defense picture. End U.S. involvement in the globalist enterprise that is Ukraine, whose adherents tried to impeach and assassinate Trump, and drop sanctions on Russia to reduce the price of oil and gas.

In venting his frustration with NATO, Trump also faulted allies Australia, South Korea, and Japan for not getting involved. Australia deserves ridicule: it is run by woke Karens who just arrested their greatest living war hero for make-believe offenses allegedly committed decades ago. South Korea is a one-way alliance.

The criticism of Japan is less fair: the country has a constitution written by American postwar occupation officials that allows only for self-defense. In recent years, it has expanded the definition of self-defense as it has doubled its defense spending. Its new prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, is pushing for more reform and more defense spending. However, a military expedition around the world would be pushing it. Perhaps Japan can eventually help with areas like logistics, surveillance, freedom of navigation, and search and rescue closer to the Gulf. But a more critical role for America is if Japan helps to hold down the Northwestern Pacific against China when the USA has to mow the lawn in the Middle East—something Japan is doing more and more. The reality is, if the United States must fight China, only Japan and the Philippines will fight for real on our side.

Where does this leave the new world order? American military and economic power are paramount. The United States is the most attractive place to invest. The AI revolution, with America and its real allies at the forefront, will expand human potential to a degree people are only just beginning to imagine. The only cloud on the horizon—and it is not a small one—is the U.S. government’s unsustainable spending and national debt. But even that can be resolved with government reform and rapid economic growth.

An arc of prosperity and power is emerging that runs from the United States through Northeast Asia to the Arabian Gulf. Europe is for vacations and second-rate wine (or worse in the case of Spanish wine, which tastes like potpourri fermented in cat urine). South America may come along too: so far Argentina is the first heavyweight in the region to jump on the capitalist train, but there is hope that Mexico and Venezuela, and maybe even Brazil and Colombia, might eventually follow the path of smaller countries in the Americas that have chosen capitalism. Maybe, maybe not.

The Arabian Gulf, already a growing center of capital, culture, and technology, will become an even greater asset with the specter of a nuclear-armed Iran diminished. Among America’s Gulf allies, the United Arab Emirates is a standout for supporting the United States and opposing Iran during the war more publicly and aggressively than any Middle Eastern country other than Israel.

Finally, there is the intangible but indispensable. I wrote above about economic and military strength, which can be measured. Cultural strength is harder to quantify. Iran’s leaders understandably doubted the will of the United States and its allies to fight. After all, America’s media and half of Congress were rooting for America to fail. In the last election, Kama-lama-ding-don and Tampon Tim Walz got 48% of the popular vote. Every part of the Anglosphere aside from the United States has thrown in the towel on Western Civilization and should probably not wait until the last minute to start memorizing the Koran.

But the Iranians were wrong about Americans and American culture. What better proof of this than the quality and determination of the American fighting man and woman who have served faithfully in this war, and in every war since the nation was founded 250 years ago. They are not conflicted about America. They know America is great. They know America is worth defending. They know America will prevail.

And they are not squeamish, as our political class seems very much to be, about references to God and beseeching His support in the struggle for civilization. They are symbols of the health of our society and what the silent majority of Americans believe. And neither they nor their families would cringe to hear the message General Douglas MacArthur broadcast home after the surrender ceremony that finally ended World War II when he declared, “The holy mission has been completed.” He added:

… I thank a merciful God that he has given us the faith, the courage, and the power from which to mold victory. We have known the bitterness of defeat and the exultation of triumph, and from both we have learned there can be no turning back. We must go forward to preserve in peace what we won in war.

Later, in words that could easily apply to the struggle against Iran’s theocracy, MacArthur concluded:

And so, my fellow countrymen, today I report to you that your sons and daughters have served you well and faithfully with the calm, deliberate, determined fighting spirit of the American soldier and sailor, based upon a tradition of historical truth as against the fanaticism of an enemy supported only by mythological fiction.

Their spiritual strength and power have brought us through to victory.

They are homeward bound.

Take care of them.

Subscribe now

Share Capitalist Notes by Christian Whiton

(Tokyo) An oddity of being abroad while the United States is at war is detachment from the political logrolling in Washington and fact-free emoting that dominate the anti-American media.

Most notably, at least here in Japan, is the relative absence of people who have been turned deranged and hysterical by President Donald Trump and who are rooting for the United States to lose to Iran’s terrorist-run government because of their self-hating and wrong politics. I speak of course of the Democrats and their elite soulmates in Europe, Canada, and Australia.

That is not to say that the Japanese public supports the Iran war. Japanese and their government have the characteristic of putting their country first—a concept still shocking to America’s elite. Japan imports 97.9% of its crude oil and 99.7% of its natural gas. Some 90% of that oil comes from the Middle East and is immediately vulnerable to supply disruption and price hikes that arise from the Strait of Hormuz near Iran (and the Strait of Malacca near Singapore).

This supply chain risk will ring a bell to history buffs of the Pacific War just a few days after Trump got through nearly all of his joint appearance with Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi without humorously bringing up Pearl Harbor. Energy shortages or even just prolonged high prices can lead to political crisis here, undermining pro-U.S. politicians.

Yet, despite these risks, just as Takaichi and Japan’s central bank tame other inflation, the Japanese don’t seem to be wailing about “illegal war” and the end of days. Nor is there alarm as the U.S.-led coalition ponders returning Iran to the Stone Age if necessary.

And it is a coalition, despite media efforts to deprecate it as a scheme limited to Israel and the United States. The U.S. military is operating short-range Apache helicopters and A-10 attack jets, which obviously are operating from Gulf states. Yousef Otaiba, the ambassador from the United Arab Emirates to the United States, wrote yesterday:

The past 3½ weeks of war have confirmed what we have known for nearly 50 years—Iran’s revolution is a threat to global security and economic stability. We can’t let Iran hold the U.S., the United Arab Emirates and the global economy hostage. A simple cease-fire isn’t enough. We need a conclusive outcome that addresses Iran’s full range of threats: nuclear capabilities, missiles, drones, terror proxies and blockades of international sea lanes.

Trump has assembled a formidable political and military coalition of the countries that matter—a reality not lost on our friends and foes in Asia, even if it is lost on lefty politicians and the media.

Beyond energy prices, Japanese officials do worry that America will be distracted by prolonged Middle East conflict. Such a situation previously contributed to China’s military and economic rise from the 2003 invasion of Iraq through the 2016 election after which Trump reversed globalism and the misguided accommodation of China.

Japan has effectively completed a process begun in 2022 of doubling its defense budget, broadly defined, and is considering further increases. A decade ago, it expanded the definition of “self-defense” in its pacifist postwar constitution to include “collective self-defense”—a euphemism for fighting with America in a critical struggle against China. Now Takaichi, fresh from the most resounding electoral victory in Japanese history, is pursuing further reform that would normalize Japan’s ability to fight with America and other key allies like the Philippines if China seeks war in the Western Pacific.

Japan has finally acquired conventional missiles from the United States and developed missiles of its own with the range to hit China—critical for deterrence. It is about to deploy its Hyper Velocity Gliding Projectile, which, at a speed of Mach five, is faster and more survivable than U.S. cruise missiles and ahead of comparable U.S. hypersonic systems under development. (Russia got ahead of everyone when dotard Joe Biden’s staff prioritized DEI and losing.)

Japan has spent the last fifteen years—the blink of an eye for a peacetime army—reorienting its ground forces from those poised to repel a Soviet invasion to forces more expeditionary and relevant to a fight with China.

But the bigger questions regarding whether Japan will help America deter China pertain to Japan’s economic and cultural health. Will it remain rich enough to field the hella expensive networked military needed to prevail today? And will it fight?

Takaichi’s mentor, the assassinated former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, pursued three “arrows” of reform, the last of which was supposed to be economic liberalization to spur a stagnant economy. It never quite materialized. Japan has long been pro-business and capitalist but also stuck on government-centric Keynesian spending that racks up debt and crowds out innovation. Keynesianism is based on the wrong assumption that government whiz kids allocate capital more efficiently than private investors and individual consumers—which is why the elitists at the Federal Reserve and among the Davos crowd love it.

Japanese culture and politics preclude the type of radical shift toward full economic liberalization carried out by Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, but Takaichi has the mandate to attempt a Japanese version. Her plan is to browbeat industry into higher-growth sectors like technology, push corporations to spend stockpiles of cash on research, development, and labor, and reduce disincentives for wives to work while also undertaking other workforce liberalizations.

Takaichi is unabashedly pro-nuclear energy and realizes this is Japan’s best path to cheaper electricity—which means cheaper everything—and less foreign vulnerability. Even advocating cheap and abundant electricity rather than scarcity is a big step for a country that hosted the signing of the disastrous, prosperity-killing Kyoto Protocol in 1997—a sort of Council of Nicaea for the elite’s pagan religion of climate change alarmism.

While this program may not sound radical, it just might mark a turning point. Any move away from Japan’s high-tax and heavy-spending state would be welcome. Only time will tell. Early indications of success will be hysterical opposition from the financial elite and media, which is already underway. Both hoped in vain that Takaichi would face the same fate as Liz Truss, who was ousted as prime minister of Britain after just 49 days for attempting economic reform. Instead, Takaichi has prevailed. (English-language commentary and Japanese-dubbed appearances by American “experts” in Japanese media invariably are biased toward left-wing, establishment voices.)

The second big unknown is culture. The Japanese population is shrinking. People not having kids can be an economic and cultural vote of no confidence in a nation’s future. Japan has a population of 123 million, which decreases by about 600,000 annually. However, Japan is hardly alone in Northeast Asia in contending with population decline. Furthermore, the nativism that helped drive Takaichi’s victory is an indication of Japanese confidence in their own culture and a rejection of the woke self-hatred that prevails in the English-speaking world aside from the Trump-run United States. Will Japan fight if necessary to prevent Chinese domination of Asia and the Western Pacific despite the pacifism that has been driven into their culture since 1945?

I’ll bet they would.

Which brings us back to patience with the Iran war and what Trump is seeking to bring about despite the risks of near-term economic disruption and distraction from the China threat.

The Europeans are busy doing what they do best: attending pointless conferences, saying pointless things, and accomplishing nothing. Recently the president of Germany—of all places—remarked that “this war is contrary to international law,” and “a dangerous mistake.”

Apparently, the German president doesn’t lose much sleep over the idea of a nuclear-armed Iran recreating the Holocaust in the twinkling of an eye, but gets worked up over violations of make-believe law.

Non-American members of NATO—ludicrously billed as “the most successful alliance in history,” and “the most important alliance in history,” are completely irrelevant to the current struggle. It is simply impossible to call its members “allies” of the United States using any definition of that word that most normal people would understand. Today with Iran, tomorrow with China, when the crisis comes, they are worse than irrelevant: they are intentionally unhelpful.

Which is just another reason why the crucial operation against Iran—the feared sideshow “war of choice”—must for a little while longer be the main show that produces a safer world and an ability to focus on what matters.

When it ends, the Middle East will be much more secure and poised for its next stage of evolution as an economic and cultural center. Iran may end up as a secular democracy, but a kleptocracy or a failed state will do just as well. The key is that the malignant role it has played throughout the Middle East since 1979 will be curtailed. America will hope that Israel and Arab states mow the lawn as necessary to prevent regional threats, but can return in force at any time if necessary.

NATO and the broader European project will continue to exist in name only. There is no special relationship with Britain. NATO is a paper tiger. Europe is for vacations and second-rate wine. Its economy is as stagnant as its culture and the AI revolution will only leave it farther behind.

Armed with this realization, and with the Iran sideshow finally controlled, America can turn its military deterrence more fully toward China, while benefiting economically from a Middle East that is an asset, not a liability.

Trump is set to have two summits with Chinese leader Xi Jinping this year, the first of which is scheduled for May. Some fear that Trump will be too accommodating of Xi in his quest for good relations. But having knocked off Chinese friends in Iran and Venezuela and restored America’s cultural and economic might as China falters, this outcome seems unlikely.

More than any recent president, Trump will arrive in Beijing prepared for peace.

Subscribe now

Share Capitalist Notes by Christian Whiton

“In war there can be no substitute for victory.” So said General Douglas MacArthur in 1951, just as the United States was unfortunately getting into the business of tying or losing wars, instead of winning them.

On Friday, President Donald Trump updated the objectives of the Iran War, announcing that he will accept only unconditional victory:

“There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER! After that, and the selection of a GREAT & ACCEPTABLE Leader(s), we, and many of our wonderful and very brave allies and partners, will work tirelessly to bring Iran back from the brink of destruction, making it economically bigger, better, and stronger than ever before. IRAN WILL HAVE A GREAT FUTURE. “MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN (MIGA!).” Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

Some will say the decision is reckless, but “bold” and “daring” are better descriptions.

Some will say Trump is using his trademark maximalist language and will just as easily declare victory and leave in a few weeks, saying he did his best for the Iranian people but their best just wasn’t good enough. But I doubt it.

Trump’s move will have the immediate benefit of driving political opponents even more bananas. That applies not only to the disloyal Democrats and the liberal media, most of whom are rooting desperately for failure, but the non-interventionists on the social media right who exist in a parallel universe where perhaps their lamentations have political consequences unlike here.

More importantly, even as he is accused of repeating the mistakes of past U.S. interventions in the Middle East and forever wars, he is in fact doing the opposite. At long last, Trump is aligning U.S. military strategy with the political outcome that is necessary for long-term security in the Arabian Gulf.

The ultimate fault of U.S. policy in the War on Terror was failing to trace terrorism back to its root political-cultural causes. Had that been done, President George W. Bush would not have offered the public the irrelevancy of Islam being a “religion of peace.” He would have said that in addition to neutralizing jihadists like al Qaeda, we would suppress the Islamist political ideology that animates both violent jihadists and non-violent Islamist subversives. This suppression would have included both Sunni and Shia branches of political Islam, represented most prominently by the Muslim Brotherhood (a.k.a. Hamas) and the Iranian regime, respectively. (Greasing Saddam and Iraqi Ba’athism would have still been on the checklist.)

It was not to be.

But Trump is, to borrow a phrase from his 2024 opponent Kama-lama-ding-dong, “unburdened by what has been.” From Gaza to Tehran, Trump is seeking a durable political outcome that backfoots or deposes those who love killing Americans. As ever, Trump is the alternative to decades of failed policy crafted by highly credentialed boobs.

Subscribe now

Total victory is an uncommon objective or outcome in war. Aside from the destruction of ISIS as an organized force in Trump’s first term, the last time it was achieved by a U.S.-led coalition was during the 1991 Gulf War, if one accepts the coalition’s stated objective of ejecting Iraqi forces from Kuwait.

Before that, there was of course World War II. Germany started the war in Europe in 1939. The United States and Britain did not agree to seek Germany’s unconditional surrender until President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill met at Casablanca in January 1943. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was concerned that the announcement would only embolden German resistance. But he accepted the plan when the Big Three met in Tehran at the end of that year.

While the unconditional surrender requirement extended to U.S. policy toward Imperial Japan, it was not formalized until the May 1945 Potsdam Declaration. Nor was it completely clear that the Soviets shared this objective until Moscow honored a secret agreement made at Yalta in February 1945 to join the Pacific War three months after victory in Europe.

In other words, ruling out a settlement to war that achieves only some objectives historically has not been taken lightly and should not be taken lightly today.

One presumes Trump understands the risks he is taking and has judged it a good gamble. In recent weeks, the administration shifted from emphasizing the imminent threat of Iran’s nuclear weapons project to spotlighting Iran’s ballistic missiles and drones that could allow the country to resume a nuclear weapons program with impunity. Stopping the regime’s malign activity outside of Iran and the parallel requirement of deposing the regime were in the “nice-to-do” category but not essential.

Now, the United States is not merely encouraging Iranians to take control of their destiny but placing that as the criteria for success. The decision has changed the nature and likely cost of the war, but also increased the upside for America. A future Iran with a secular, non-violent government would contribute to a dramatically safer world and an arc of prosperity and accountable government that runs from the United States through Northeast Asia to the Middle East.

My belief is that the President would not have taken this step without very positive military news. On Friday, Iran’s deputy foreign minister, Saeed Khatibzadeh, said his government had not closed the Strait of Hormuz but could. However, considering that Iran has attacked all of its neighbors, unifying the majority of Arab nations and even Turkey against it, one can presume the regime in unbounded and is not closing the Strait only because it cannot close the Strait.

To put it another way, the Iranian regime seems to have decided to go down in a blaze of glory. We are witnessing its end game as an organized military force.

Subscribe now

As Iran’s defenses are reduced along with its offensive drones and ballistic missiles, allied air and naval power can likely shift from hitting major military targets to targeting small units of Iranian Revolutionary Guards—the political terror army that Iran has similar to the German SS. This could boost any opposition to the regime that emerges, because allied forces could try to protect them or at least make regime stalwarts nervous to step outside or use telecommunications.

What Trump’s new objective means in practical terms is that the United States and allies will have to remain at least somewhat engaged in Iran for months or years. Were the United States to cease military activity with the regime still in charge or able to regain control, the success of severely impeding Iran’s military will be eclipsed by failure at what is now the primary mission.

There is already a debate over U.S. ground forces in Iran. You could make a drinking game over how often you hear “boots on the ground” in any given newscast, but you would be drunk all day. But some U.S. ground liaison with opposition forces may be inevitable given the President’s new objective. Better that ground presence be military—especially given the wealth of experience with counterinsurgency in Iraq—than CIA, State Department, or other intelligence operatives who have an unblemished record of being wrong about governance in the Middle East. (It would be interesting to read CIA assessments of what is occurring on the ground in Iran since the opposite is probably true, and to know of CIA advice, since one could then just do the opposite.)

“Beware of an old man in a hurry” goes the aphorism and warning. However, it does not just warn of impetuous decisions, but also foretells brash, determined resolve. Trump has almost three years left of his presidency. However, talk of midterms and his eventual successor undoubtedly drive him to resolve unfinished business and undertake big tasks now. If this were the Reagan administration, it would be 1986—pretty much peak Reagan.

Some speculate that Trump is making decisions to help Republicans win midterm elections, which also foretells a hasty exit from the Iran War, but I doubt that. While Trump obviously hopes Republicans keep both houses, the reality is that Congress is a failure today and will be a failure after elections—at least as long as the filibuster lasts in the Senate. Trump is free to decide what it best for the country in the long term, and his actions from the economy to trade to national security consistently show long-term planning irrespective of a desire for easy wins or daily logrolling in the swamp.

Trump has seemingly decided he will not leave behind an America threatened by Iran’s bloodthirsty, hated, theocratic, murderous tyrants.

Subscribe now

Share Capitalist Notes by Christian Whiton

Big Picture

Once again it is the United States and allied militaries that will salvage the future from the brink of disaster. Not the UN, a make-believe “rules-based” order, hippies, or the preening European conference-attenders, but an American president who sees threats clearly and our faithful military.

We fight an evil regime that has the blood of thousands of Americans on its hands, that sought to impose murderous Islamist tyranny on the Middle East, and which has corrupted the worship of God to advance its most rancid human ambitions.

With the Iranian regime destabilized or replaced, the better world Trump envisions will take a giant leap toward reality. The most consequential part of the world will be an arc of innovation, accountable government, and prosperity that runs from America through Northeast Asia to the Middle East.

Trump has created a crucible in which vulnerable political-cultural models falter and stronger ones endure. Sorry Europe!

He has accelerated trends long in motion and foreseen by the New Right. It is an inflection point in the true sense: the trajectory itself has changed. We are witnessing a phase transition in the world, not a momentary disruption.

Political Warfare Boosts Military

Trump’s speech at the onset of war was remarkable and may be his most consequential.

Never has a president led so clearly with a political outcome (Iranians toppling the regime) at the beginning of a conflict. As far as instruments of political warfare, one would have to go back to the Emancipation Proclamation and Declaration of Independence in our history to find similar examples of using stated political goals to motivate a military outcome. (In World War II, the U.S.-U.K. demand for unconditional surrender was not declared until the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, and not really accepted by the U.S.S.R. until a conference later that year held in Tehran, ironically enough.)

Trump’s approach is daring but reasonable. Vice President Vance deprecated the possibility of an invasion or prolonged ground conflict. It is difficult (not impossible) to win wars or effect political revolution with air and naval power alone. Trump is leading a hybrid method of conflict in which the people of Iran, who hate the unelected Islamist regime that represses them, can complete the mission.

This strategy is particularly cunning, especially given the United States has a Secretary of War with delusions of adequacy and an intelligence bureaucracy that only does political warfare against Republican presidents. It is a testament to Trump and likely Secretary of State Marco Rubio as well.

Trump is right to prepare the American public for additional casualties among those who defend us. They do so not for an abstract principle but to defend us from an evil, American-killing cabal of deviants who have made it crystal clear that war is the only choice.

Allies That Count

The nations that matter most to the future are with us.

Israel is fighting with us. Our Arab Gulf allies, especially the UAE and Saudi Arabia are unified and with us, although understandably worried about their own people. They are fighting Iranian attacks themselves, and deserve our energetic support—including shifting all U.S. military resources wasted on the Ukraine sideshow. Japan will forego the mealy-mouthed nonsense coming out of Europe and has condemned Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons. Of course, China and Russia will condemn us, but they will take note of American capabilities and determination. Quietly, they also know that the world will be better off without the Islamic Republic.

The Disloyal Opposition

Rep. Ilhan Mullah Omar (D-Minnesota) decried the “illegal and unjustified war.” Her brother-husband was apparently unavailable for comment.

Democrat leader and spirit animal Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (R-New Yorkistan) criticized the President’s decision as “unlawful,” “unnecessary,” and likely to be “catastrophic.”

Among other Democrat organizations, back at the New York Times, “reporter” David Sanger bemoaned “Trump’s War of Choice With Iran.” He should consider the political future of those who called World War II “Mr. Roosevelt’s war.” They didn’t have one.

The hermaphroditical Tim Kaine, senator for Fairfax County and Hillary Clinton’s former running mate, called allied actions a “colossal mistake.” Channeling the blame-America-first expert class, he added: “Has President Trump learned nothing from decades of U.S. meddling in Iran and forever wars in the Middle East?”

Answer: Clearly Trump has. There is no pretense of a prolonged ground invasion of Iran. There is no expectation of nation-building unless the Iranian people or others wish to undertake it. And unlike both presidents Bush, who sought “authorization” from Congress to take military action, Trump knows that such a move is a pointless exercise of indulging fools who invariably cover their butts and oppose the U.S. military just as soon as they believe it is politically opportune to do so.

War Powers

The failed Congress is debating a so-called war powers resolution that purports to limit the President’s constitutional power to command the armed forces and obligation to defend the United States.

The War Powers Act of 1973 that purports to give Congress this power is unconstitutional. It was passed over the veto of President Richard Nixon after he was weakened by Watergate. It directly contravenes the obvious text of the Constitution and the explanations of the Founding Fathers, including Alexander Hamilton, who wrote in Federal No. 74 that: “Of all the cares or concerns of government, the direction of war most peculiarly demands those qualities which distinguish the exercise of power by a single hand.”

The Founders knew that war cannot be run by a committee of pointless lemmings whom everyone hates. The public knows it. Everybody but the failed Congress knows it.

Congress has two roles in war, one of which is obsolete. When requested by a president, it can declare a state of war. This has not been done since 1941, and hasn’t been truly relevant since the 19th century. President George Washington didn’t bother with a congressional permission slip to order military action during the Whiskey Rebellion. President Harry Truman didn’t bother in 1950 when communists started the Korean War. Congress’s other role is to appropriate funds, which they will do and like it.

Democrats should shut up and root for our men and women in uniform. There should be no doubt that today’s woke Democrats are unfit to govern. Iran grew dramatically stronger under Barack Obama and dotard Joe Biden. Democrat presidents like Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, and John Kennedy would be ashamed of today’s Democrats.

Trump should use Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution to prorogue Congress. It allows him to do so if the houses disagree on adjournment. The Senate has brought exactly such a situation about with its use of “pro forma” sessions to never recess in order to deny the President his constitutional power to make recess appointments. If Congress is going to do nothing—something the Senate uniparty has ensured with its love of the unconstitutional filibuster—it should be sent home until after elections.

Europe is Also Useless

Referencing the Oompa Loompas who govern Europe for a little while longer, The New York Post headline said it all: “Leaders Call for More Talks.”

Have at it “leaders”!

More enjoyable news came from the lesser paper of New Yorkistan. Providing “analysis” (i.e., not news) from Gay Paree, the capital of America’s only permanent enemy, a New York Times writer opined that “…America’s [European] allies are discovering, to their chagrin, that it’s Mr. Trump’s world and they’re just living in it.” This will come as a surprise to White House staff and U.S. diplomats who arrange foreign leader visits with the President at perhaps the highest frequency in U.S. history.

Also in that story, the prick former British ambassador (but I repeat myself), said: “I don’t suppose it ever crossed [Trump’s] mind that he should consult the Europeans. It shows that America First mainly means America Alone.”

Yes, “mainly,” especially if one is a former employee of a British government that would have to improve its performance significantly just to be useless to America. Britain’s outgoing prime minister opened European commentary on the war in its early hours by assuring the public that Britain was not involved. Britain has refused U.S. access to our bases for the purpose of taking the fight to Iran, including the Indian Ocean base of Diego Garcia, which Trump should annex to the United States.

The British government can then focus on what it does best, such as pleasing Muslim extremists by extolling the virtues of marrying one’s first cousin, stopping legislation to prevent cousin marriage, and censoring American companies and those with normal views.

Turning to those other Europeans, the U.K. Karens of the southern hemisphere in Australia, Penny Wong, the foreign minister, stressed that Australia “didn’t participate in these strikes and… wouldn’t anticipate participating in the future.”

Penny Wong is wong, but doing nothing is their prerogative. Why not also go back to masking up and closing down for another three-year stretch? We can hopefully start to drop the pretense that Karen-run Australia is relevant to U.S. security.

In Conclusion

War is always a gamble, no matter how well one is prepared. But Trump—effectively our first third-term president since Roosevelt—has more experience and wisdom with the application of force than any modern president except Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower. He is ushering in a new world that is better for everyone and safer for America.

Upcoming Media

• Monday, 2:00 pm ET, Newsmax N2 “National Desk” with Kelly Sadler.
  Monday, 3:40 pm ET, Newsmax “American Agenda.”
  Monday, 5:20 pm ET, Fox Business “Evening Edit.”

Subscribe now

Share Capitalist Notes by Christian Whiton

Tonight, in his address to the failed Congress, President Donald Trump dominated his political opposition and rallied his fellow patriots like no president since Franklin Roosevelt.

There has never been a State of the Union address like it.

Declining the usual temptation to pretend at a unity in government that does not exist, Trump walked through a series of “70–30” and “80–20” issues—representing the portion of Americans who agree with him versus the portion who agree with the unpatriotic, woke Democrat opposition.

Trump repeatedly called on Democrats to stand in support of his common-sense and highly popular initiatives. When, invariably, they did not, he observed that “they’re crazy.”

Of course they are.

Trump touted:

• An American government that benefits American citizens, not violent illegal aliens.

• The deportation of illegals.

• Stopping woke mutilation of minors to advance the transvestite agenda.

• Requiring photo ID and proof of citizenship to vote.

• The gold medal-winning American hockey team, which Democrats hate because its players are mostly white men, and because they were rooting for Canada.

• Policies to reduce prices, including health care costs.

• Reversing Biden’s hyperinflation, which eliminated 25% of people’s purchasing power and savings in four short years.

• Protecting American manufacturing despite the wrong decisions of the six unpatriotic Supreme Court politician-justices.

• Trump’s most successful foreign policy since the Reagan–Bush era (1981–1993).

Democrats sat on their hands for almost all of the speech. This included a group of Democratic women who wore all white. This was very appropriate: it evoked the Ku Klux Klan, the terror wing of the Democrat Party, and highlighted the 20th-century racism that Democrats have brought into the 21st century as part of their anti-white, anti-Asian, anti-male, anti-normal campaign—which also includes the Klan’s penchant for political violence, including murder.

Trump dominated his opposition unlike any president since the great Franklin Roosevelt—the New Yorker before Trump to rise to the presidency. The most obvious comparison is Roosevelt’s “Fala Speech,” included below.

If you’re interested in history or politics, it’s worth watching the portion of the speech below as Roosevelt delivered it. The text is also fun, but one benefits from FDR’s delivery:

These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or my wife, or on my sons. No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala. Well, of course, I don’t resent attacks, and my family doesn’t resent attacks.

But Fala does resent them.

You know, Fala is Scotch, and being a Scottie, as soon as he learned that the Republican fiction writers in Congress and out had concocted a story that I had left him behind on the Aleutian Islands and had sent a destroyer back to find him—at a cost to the taxpayers of two or three, or eight or twenty million dollars—his Scotch soul was furious.

He has not been the same dog since.

It was a moment of levity, but it was devastating, and it reminded Americans, as Roosevelt sought an unprecedented fourth presidential term (now unconstitutional) in 1944, that the old man still had it. He was a ruthless political street fighter covered with a thin gentleman’s veneer. The campaign kick-off helped propel Roosevelt to another victory and aided Democrats in preserving their nearly unprecedented margin of power in Congress.

Tonight’s performance raises the big question: Was this first salvo in the 2026 midterm elections decisive, or even just a preview of decisive action to come from Trump?

By all historical measures, Democrats should take control of the Republican-run House of Representatives this fall. It is the final midterm of a two-term president, Republicans have only a minuscule margin, prediction markets put Democrats far ahead, Trump’s economic surge is real but often not fully felt by voters for 1–2 years after it begins, and Republicans in Congress generally suck.

On the other hand, Republicans did not make big gains in 2024 in Democratic strongholds that would easily be reversed. Trump has expanded the Republican base in manner to Roosevelt’s expansion of the Democrat base. Democrats are clearly the party of political violence, illegals, transvestites, and wokeness. Bill Clinton bucked the midterm trend of losing seats in 1998, and George W. Bush followed suit in 2002.

Trump showed fellow Republicans tonight how to cream the Dems. If he—and they—continue to do so, Republicans may just run the board in November.

Subscribe now

Share Capitalist Notes by Christian Whiton

I’ve included the video above from an appearance this morning on Mornings with Maria on Fox Business, which included some fun at AOC’s expense. Talking points below on tariffs, conflict with Iran, the Board of Peace, and China—plus a snippet on clueless British decisions about Diego Garcia.

TRADE

• The New York Times gleefully reported on today’s political-judicial edict that, “The Supreme Court dealt a major blow to President Trump’s economic policy….”

• In fact, the sheer stupidity of the ruling, the reality of the politics of trade (Americans now hate globalism), and numerous other legal and constitutional authorities give Trump the upper hand.

• Trump responded decisively by enacting a new 10% levy on all imports using his authority under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. This gives the administration 150 days to implement higher tariffs under previously used Sections 232 and 301 of the Trade Expansion Act and the aforementioned 1974 act, respectively. As Trump noted, he also has numerous other authorities (Sections 201, 232, 338, etc.).

• A potential Section 338 action would be profound and excellent. It is part of the Tariff Act of 1930—the much-maligned Smoot-Hawley tariffs—by which the President could levy 50% tariffs on a country that discriminates against U.S. commerce (and most do).

• Trump observed in his press conference that this intrusion into national defense, which the Court should have never undertaken, may result in “potentially higher” tariffs than existed before.

• One should not forget the politics of trade amid the legal mumbo-jumbo. Polls about trade are consistently phonied up with loaded questions. In reality, American voters figured out that NAFTA and the World Trade Organization killed manufacturing in the USA and fueled China’s economic and military rise.

• To put America first and teach the D.C. palace eunuchs a lesson about trying to undermine the presidency, Trump should consider further steps to equalize trade, including withdrawal from the USMCA (NAFTA replacement) and the WTO.

• Smoot-Hawley tariffs are wrongly blamed for accentuating the Great Depression, which Milton Friedman proved was caused and extended by a series of monetary contractions. U.S. exports were only 4.8% of GDP when Smoot-Hawley passed in 1930 compared to 11% of GDP today. Among the major economies, the U.S. is the least reliant on foreign trade given its huge internal market. Reforming this internal market through Trump’s lower taxes and deregulation is how we get big-time economic growth, not through trade.

• Tariffs are awesome. The first piece of legislation George Washington signed was a tariff act.

  

IRAN

• Seems like an expanded conflict is coming.

• Oil markets are not yet pricing in a serious disruption that Iran could cause—and routinely threatens to cause—if attacked. About 20% of world petroleum liquids go through the Strait of Hormuz.

• Getting Iran to forgo enrichment and allow removal of its (currently buried) HEU would be a huge win for U.S. interests. That alone would be worth a deal and effectively end Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

• Iran doesn’t need ANY uranium-enrichment capability. It has a longstanding agreement with the Russians to provide fuel for its sole electricity-producing reactor and take back spent fuel.

BOARD OF PEACE

• The Board is not a replacement for the UN, but it is potentially much more. It could surpass failed ideas/ideals (the UN) and gatherings of countries that are a snapshot of the past, not the future (G7, UN Security Council).

• It is actually close to the reason for creating what would become the G7 in the wake of the collapse of Bretton Woods in the ’70s: a gathering of governments with the will and money to actually get things done.

• The UN is focused on process. The Board of Peace looks to be focused on accomplishments, including $7 billion conditionally pledged for Gaza, and the Board is moving closer to a security force to disarm Hamas. That will do more for non-jihadist Palestinians than all of the antisemitic kiddos on campus screaming about “genocide” or preening European governments have ever done.

• There are many members, but the real power is with those who have pledged money: the USA, UAE, Saudi, Qatar, Morocco, Kuwait, Bahrain, and some of the Stans.

CHINA SUMMIT

• Trump is being criticized by people like Obama-Biden official Kurt Campbell for backing down on Taiwan, which he has not done. In his first term and the first year of his second term, Trump has done more for Taiwan’s security than any president since Eisenhower, not the least of which was approving the sale of new F-16 fighter jets, M-1 tanks, Harpoon missiles, and HIMARS and ATACMS, and SLAM-ER missiles.

• Last month, Trump approved the BIGGEST-EVER arms sale to Taiwan, $11 billion. But those complaining about Trump and Taiwan are basically the same people who facilitated China’s rise. Where were these supposed Taiwan-defenders when they actually held power?

• Punting additional arms sales a few months won’t make a difference given the lengthy time (years) from authorization to delivery. Taiwan has also made it pretty clear that it will not do what it takes to deter an invasion from China on its own. The U.S.-led alliance system (Japan, Philippines) is more important to the overall security of the Western Pacific.

• Trump has sought to meet Xi halfway on issues of contention. It’s time for Xi to reciprocate.

DIEGO GARCIA

• There are media reports that our British “allies” are preventing the United States from using our major air base on the small island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean as Trump ratchets up military pressure on Iran.

• Unacceptable, but par for course. In Trump’s first term, the Brits colluded with the French and Germans to undermine U.S. nuclear-related sanctions on Iran.

• Britain and the rest of Europe would have to up their games substantially merely to be useless.

• Britain just effectively gave away otherwise-uninhabited Diego Garcia to a country named Mauritius that no one has ever heard of. If effect, they are giving away our air base, which we pay for by sharing Trident nuclear missile technology with the Brits.

• Trump should annex Diego Garcia to the United States without congressional action using a revamped interpretation of the Guano Islands Act. Britain has effectively made the small island a disputed zone, meaning it is not under “the lawful jurisdiction of any other government” as required by the act.

• Speaking of annexation, Trump should split off the small number of populated towns in Greenland into a disputed territory and annex the rest of American Greenland. He should also order covert and overt encouragement of independence for French Polynesia from Paris as a thank-you to the useless French government for being ever so helpful the the USA over the last century.

Subscribe now

Share Capitalist Notes by Christian Whiton

Treason season kicked off strongly last week in the German city of Munich, birthplace of the Nazi Party.

European globalists piled on the United States and President Donald Trump, joined by a parade of lefty and squish American poohbahs complaining about their country at the Munich Security Conference.

It fell to Secretary of State Marco Rubio to defend America—and defend it he did.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, a contender for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028, bemoaned U.S. actions that supposedly “enabled a genocide in Gaza.” She asserted America is “very much in a compromised position compared to where we were five years ago.”

Huh?

Five years ago, under the Democrats, U.S. power took its biggest blow since the Fall of Saigon when Joe Biden’s staff oversaw a panicked defeat at the hands of the Taliban.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut), who is known as “Da Nang Dick” because he boasted that he served in Vietnam but never actually went there—an act of stolen valor after which he inexplicably is allowed to remain in the Senate and on the Armed Services Committee—said, “The fundamental, core source of European anxiety is Donald Trump’s whiplash, vacillating on Ukraine and Putin and other threats like China.”

Anxiety?

Why doesn’t Da Nang Dick pretend to be a doctor and prescribe something for that? Or maybe he could try being a patriotic American and suggest that Europeans might be less anxious if they stopped blaming America for their problems, stopped mooching off us, stopped screwing us on trade, and took care of their own neighborhood so we could focus elsewhere—on parts of the world that matter to the future.

California Governor Gavin Newsom, another contender to be the Democrat who loses to a Republican in the 2028 presidential race, and whom Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent perfectly described as “Patrick Bateman meets Sparkle Beach Ken,” told the crowd that “Donald Trump is temporary—he’ll be gone in three years.”

Democrats weren’t the only ones apologizing for America and hoping to undermine Trump and the first successful U.S. foreign policy since the Reagan-Bush era (1981–1993).

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said that the potential annexation of American Greenland upset her pointless meetings and “distracted in ways that I don’t think that any of us could have anticipated.” She added, “This is not the way the United States should lead.”

Better idea: Europeans should try leading Europe. Americans should lead America.

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina) took on a “prominent role” among the apologizers, at least according to the New York Times—a shocking prospect since he has spent 20 years in elective office without anyone noticing. Treasonously, Tillis said:

I’m here in Munich to basically remind everybody that we have three coequal branches of government. The president is trying to get our NATO allies to perform more strongly and have some level of independence, but the Congress has their back.

One is reminded of Ted Kennedy’s urging of Soviet leadership to ignore President Ronald Reagan. At age 250, America does still have three separate branches of government. But they are most certainly not “coequal” in matters of national defense, where a president’s supervisory authority stemming from his power as commander in chief is near plenary.

Presidents command; congressmen attend things.

Better advice to Europeans would be to listen to Trump, recognize the New Right is here to stay, and spend less time indulging diplo-tourists from the failed legislative branch.

Defending the United States fell to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Trump’s top diplomat was actually more detailed than Vice President JD Vance was last year, who shocked the audience with some basic realities about their rapid decay and growing irrelevance. Vance gave some examples of systematic European censorship of citizens and other elite schemes to undermine democracy, and stated the truism: “If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you. Nor, for that matter, is there anything that you can do for the American people…”

Rubio’s focus and tone were a little different. He bookended his speech with soothing and accurate language about past U.S.-European cooperation.

But the heart of Rubio’s speech was as bold as Vance’s and covered even more of Trump’s agenda. Rubio specifically rejected globalism and deindustrialization (i.e., echoed the fundamental basis of Trump trade policy), ridiculed those who “appease a climate cult”—basically Europe’s mandatory state religion—called out failed international organizations, criticized European underspending on defense and overspending on welfare, condemned mass migration, advocated “cohesion of our societies, the continuity of our culture,” and observed that “Armies fight for a way of life”—presumably not make-believe constructs like a “rules-based international order” that never actually existed in the real world, but lives on in the minds of globalists.

Despite this reality, even the globalists seemed comforted at first. Nancy Pelosi, the Democrat former Speaker of the House and stock picker par excellence, complimented: “Secretary Rubio’s speech was well received… Compare this to Vice President Vance’s speech last year… This was much better.”

It took a weekend, but the pinkos at the UK Guardian, which rivals the UK state broadcaster BBC for spreading anti-American propaganda overseas and promoting leftism within the United States, realized Trump policy had not shifted. An anti-American reporter there had discovered by Monday:

But beneath the surface, Rubio’s speech this year and Vance’s in 2025 were two sides of the same coin… Rubio’s speech was more subtle and coherent, but he in essence sang from the same hymn sheet: the message from Washington remains that Europe and the United States should be defined by ethno-political values of culture, tradition and religion. The fact that such history has also bred nationalism, racism, fascism and colonialism is apparently nothing to be ashamed of.

The fact that the audience this year was leaping with joy that Rubio built in some comforting language shows how pathetic they are. Their highest aspiration is not listening to warnings across U.S. administrations and correcting failed economic, energy, cultural, and military policy, but just hoping their failings aren’t spotlighted too bluntly when they are in their safe spaces.

Beyond being pathetic, there is the question of whether European leaders are actually stupid.

French president and domestic-abuse victim Emmanuel Macron said that Europe is a model.

It isn’t.

He said that “Everyone should take their cue from us…”

They shouldn’t.

Macron, who is litigating in Delaware Superior Court against someone who asserted that his wife was a man, condemned a tendency “to overlook Europe, and sometimes, to criticize it outright,” to dismiss it “as an aging, slow, fragmented construct,” “a society prey to barbaric migrations,” and even “as a repressive continent where speech would not be free.”

That pretty much nails it.

European Union President Ursula Von Lederhosen, who would like to be the unelected Empress of Europe, made a thinly veiled attack on Trump over his plans to secure American Greenland, saying: “Some lines have been crossed that cannot be uncrossed anymore.”

What exactly are you going to do about that, madam? Hold a conference?

The Polish foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, belittled Trump’s efforts to end the Ukraine War—which are quite substantial and magnanimous considering that Ukraine’s fanboys in America tried to assassinate Trump and helped precipitate the Russia hoax and phony first impeachment of Trump.

Sikorski told Polish Radio that “I believe that the position of the Trump administration toward Ukraine is shameful,” and added that Trump officials have broken an unwritten rule of noninterference in allies’ internal affairs by criticizing Europe’s growing Orwellian censorship.

That’s a pretty rich claim considering that America’s European “allies” from London to Kiev devote extraordinary effort to tampering in U.S. internal affairs and helping to elect globalist Democrats. (Sikorski is married to Anne Applebaum, who likened Trump to “Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini” while serving on the board of the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy, to which congressional Republicans just inexplicably helped Democrats restore taxpayer funding.)

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said, “We do not believe in tariffs and protectionism, but in free trade.”

Total lie: Germany has long relied on higher tariffs on America than America had on it.

Germany previously said it would plus up its spending by 100 billion euros and then 500 billion euros to get serious about defense against the Russian bogeyman.

It hasn’t.

Outlining an alternative vision for a world order that would last a thousand years, the German leader added, “We have to understand that in the era of big powers, our freedom is no longer a given. It is at stake. We will need to show firmness and determination to assert this freedom.”

They won’t.

Ripping on Trump and seeking some political lebensraum for his wildly unpopular government, Merz said, “The culture wars of MAGA in the U.S. are not ours.”

But they are.

And they will probably topple every major European government within years. If free and fair elections were held today in Britain, France, and Germany, all three governments would be replaced by “populist” alternatives—also known as accountable government.

At the supranational level, which is even less accountable to voters, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte plainly lied to the gullible crowd in Munich. Referring to the Ukraine War, he imagined:

What I will also be doing today and tomorrow is make clear that the Russians are not winning this, as some are thinking. This so-called Russian bear is not there. It is basically the stilted speed of a garden snail what we are seeing in Ukraine, this is how the Russians are moving inside Ukraine, very slow.

This is an infamous lie—on par with the military lies out of the Iraq War or Pollyannish “Five O’clock Follies” press conferences in Saigon before communist forces overran the country.

Russia is winning the Ukraine War. While Moscow’s gains are slow, they are accelerating. In the medium term, the pace may slow, be reversed, continue as is, or even accelerate and precipitate a collapse of Ukraine’s defenses similar to the sudden collapse of German defenses in 1918 after years of stalemate in World War I.

I don’t know which outcome will occur, but neither apparently does the head paper shuffler at NATO. But his mendacity does say a lot about the state of NATO. And that state is one of failure.

Germany’s defense minister, Boris Pistorius, criticized the United States and talked up NATO, “which has been the most successful alliance in the history of mankind.” This is a widely used talking point. For example, the aforementioned Sen. Tillis called NATO “the most important alliance in the history of mankind.”

Lie.

The “Big Three” alliance of World War II, which consisted of the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union, successfully put an end to the biggest and deadliest war in history—a war Pistorius’s country started. That was obviously the most successful alliance in history, not NATO. Furthermore, beginning in the 6th century BC with the Peloponnesian League, historians could easily list a dozen more consequential alliances than NATO that deterred war or prevailed in war.

The frequency and ferocity with which NATO’s supposed awesomeness is espoused is a tell as to just how much of an obsolete paper tiger it is—not to mention the broader European political project.

NATO failed at its most important post-Cold War mission, which was stabilizing Afghanistan while the United States was busy in Iraq. In 2009, amid obvious NATO failure, the United States had to send 30,000 troops to Afghanistan. NATO’s “International Security Assistance Force” didn’t officially die until 2014—coincidentally the year Russia knew enough about the paper tiger of preening conference-attenders to invade Ukraine with impunity.

Moscow also presumably was not impressed by another NATO failure, which was the 2011 intervention in Libya—which led to the long-term failed state that still exists today. The action was started by France and Britain, with the United States supposedly in a supporting role. However, the French and Brits ran out of precision-guided munitions within weeks and required a bailout from the United States.

Outside of NATO, our European allies also have a similarly ignominious legacy. Britain sent troops to help the United States in Iraq. Their job was to secure relatively calm Basra while U.S. forces fought the heart of the insurgency in Iraq’s Sunni Triangle. But British officers paid off the insurgent Mahdi Army, allowing it to expand its insurgency so long as it minimized attacks on British troops. American forces eventually had to replace the Brits, who might as well have stayed home.

That period also saw the French government led by Jacques Chirac attempt to lead an international political coalition to undermine the United States. His successors would continue in this manner during the first Trump administration, when France, Britain, and Germany colluded to undermine U.S. “secondary” sanctions on Iran over its nuclear weapons program. The Europeans also attempted to undermine the role of the U.S. dollar in international trade.

This simply does not fit what normal people would describe as the conduct of allies.

Europe also has a rendezvous with economic irrelevance. As U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Andy Puzder wrote in the Financial Times in December:

The evidence of the European Union’s economic decline is compelling. As recently as 2011, the bloc’s nominal gross domestic product was slightly above that of the United States. For 2025, the International Monetary Fund projects that it will be 18 per cent lower including the UK, and 31 per cent lower excluding it.

Puzder has also noted that the per capita gross domestic product for Germany—once a global model for economic power—is now similar to that of West Virginia. And John Denver didn’t sing “Take Me Home—Country Roads” about West Virginia because the place was like Beverly Hills.

For Munich to turn into an anti-American hatefest where Trump Derangement Syndrome goes global was probably always baked in the cake. The conference is funded by the left-wing German government, and there is also reporting that the government of Qatar has provided multimillion-dollar contributions since 2020.

This year, the organizers made the conference’s theme “Under Destruction” and prefaced the event with a report that bemoaned “…the far-reaching consequences of the rise of political forces that favor destruction over reform.” In case anyone wondered who the culprit of the report would be, the authors helpfully declared: “The most powerful of those who take the axe to existing rules and institutions is U.S. President Donald Trump.”

There is no helping this political class. A year has gone by after Vance’s stark assessment and warning, and nothing significant has changed. Nothing will change a year from now.

The United States should accept that Europe, barring major political change that can come only from a populist revolution, is a fading has-been. It is a place for second-rate wine and third-rate vacations. It will be minimally relevant to the events and places of the world that matter most.

Japan, not Britain, is now America’s most important and best ally. China is America’s greatest foreign challenge—one with which Europe cannot and will not help. The Middle East is undergoing radical change and becoming a hub of finance, energy, and technology. The U.S. economy and military, not a make-believe “rules-based international order,” are what counterbalance malicious threats. The United States is the most attractive place to work and invest in the world. The future of the next decades runs from America through Northeast Asia to the Middle East.

Trump has made it clear he wants to save NATO rather than withdraw formally from the organization. However, the United States ought to “quiet quit” the organization, beginning with gradually shifting the 80,000 Americans stationed in Europe to the Western Pacific, where they can be relevant and therefore help deter a China-related conflict. Intelligence-gathering and targeting tools should also be repurposed for the Western Pacific.

It seems pretty clear that neither Russia nor Ukraine really wants to stop fighting, despite the tireless effort of Trump and his negotiators. Washington should shift to a policy of neutrality, which would position the United States better to mediate if and when both sides really want to stop fighting. In the meantime, top U.S. national interests are to avoid a war with Russia and seek areas of cooperation or at least nonconfrontation with Russia to minimize Chinese-Russian cooperation.

Members of the European political class can watch and attend all the conferences they want. But it would be nice if they stopped bothering us about a future that does not concern them.

Subscribe now

Share

The ball is in Beijing’s court.

On Wednesday, the President held a “long and thorough” session with Chinese leader Xi Jinping as the two governments contemplate deeper diplomatic engagement ahead of a planned summit in April.

Trump characterized the call as “all very positive.”

Writing in The National Interest, I argue that Xi should make concessions given Trump’s moves toward détente.

Such steps could include an exchange involving dissidents—such as Jimmy Lai, whom Trump wants released—in parallel with Washington conditionally lifting sanctions on certain Chinese officials. That would help ensure the summit succeeds and bring this stage of diplomatic intercourse to completion.

Please take a look at the idea below. Feedback welcome.

A US-China Sanctions Trade?
February 4, 2026
By: Christian Whiton

Few would argue that President Donald Trump has not been reasonable with the Chinese government and its leader, Xi Jinping. Ahead of an expected summit between Trump and Xi this spring, it is in Beijing’s interest to reciprocate. Counterintuitively, it should do so on the human rights front, setting up a measurable achievement for both governments.

At the beginning of Trump’s second presidential term, just over a year ago, the US-China relationship seemed destined for a prolonged crisis. During the campaign, Trump suggested a 60 percent tariff increase on top of elevated levels from his first term.

In April 2024, Trump lamented that the Chinese “…they steal our jobs, and they steal our wealth, they steal our country.”

During their confirmation proceedings, incoming Trump officials pulled no punches. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said China had “lied, cheated, hacked, and stolen” its way to superpower status. US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer centered his testimony around the “China shock” to the US economy and condemned as a “disastrous decision” the move that allowed Beijing nearly unfettered access to the US economy beginning in 2000. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick called China a central “strategic adversary.”

Yet from this aggressive posture—and partly because of it—Trump and Xi have found areas of cooperation and détente. Trump imposed a relatively modest additional 10 percent tariff on China because of the flow of illegal fentanyl into the United States.

Recent policy statements from the Trump administration, including its National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy, have not ignored the serious military threat China poses. However, the administration has refrained from singling out China and has given equal emphasis to threats in the Americas.

Trump has also sought a middle ground on export controls for US technology, especially integrated circuits that form the heart of AI hardware. In August 2025, his administration licensed the export of Nvidia’s H20 AI processors designed specifically for the Chinese market. Then, in January 2026, it went a step further by allowing the limited export of Nvidia H200 and similar chips to China.

Throughout this process, China backed away from threats to stop exporting rare earth elements to the United States, which are crucial to much high-tech and military manufacturing. The Chinese government also agreed to increase its purchases of American soybeans.

Notwithstanding these Chinese actions, Beijing ought to make a strong gesture of goodwill if it wants Trump’s moderate path to continue.

After all, China faces critical risks. Its economy, once projected to inevitably overtake the US economy, remains in crisis amid the aftermath of a deflated real estate bubble and the end of manufacturing growth that depended in part on ever-increasing exports to the United States. China is at the precipice of a demographic cliff. Its population peaked in 2021, and some demographers believe it may lose one-third of its population by 2100.

Xi recently purged the last of his top generals, Zhang Youxia. Opinions abound as to what precipitated the purge and what it foretells. Yet, no analyst believes it indicates happy circumstances.

Amid these challenges, how can Xi make the upcoming summit with Trump a success and maintain the more stable state of affairs that has prevailed in recent months? He can surprise everyone and do something out of character: fulfill US requests for clemency for dissidents and allow their departure to the West.

For example, Trump specifically raised the fate of imprisoned pro-democracy media tycoon Jimmy Lai when he met Xi during a trip in October 2025. In Trump’s first term, US officials and members of Congress hoped Beijing would allow the free media and protests that had existed in Hong Kong to continue. The city had been a relatively free British colony and was to retain its freedoms until at least 2047, 50 years after its 1997 handover.

Xi’s government disabused the world of that hope. In December, a Hong Kong court convicted Lai of national security and subversion violations after years-long proceedings. Others involved in protests that peaked and were crushed in 2019 face lengthy prison sentences. These include those who worked for Lai’s since-abolished Apple Daily newspaper and pro-democracy political leaders like Albert Ho, Leung Kwok-hung, and Joshua Wong.

A decision by Xi to expel Lai and other prisoners, his point having been made, would be an unmistakable sign that he values the better relations with the United States that Trump has supported so far.

To make this option more palatable, the Trump administration could offer a trade. The US government has sanctioned dozens of Chinese officials in Beijing and Hong Kong in relation to the 2019 crackdown. For example, among the sanctioned, Zhang Xiaoming was the director of China’s Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office in Beijing in 2019, but was demoted and later removed from any position with authority over Hong Kong. Xia Baolong became Beijing’s senior policymaker for Hong Kong only after most protests had been suppressed. Luo Huining was the director of the central government’s Hong Kong Liaison Office, but the seventy-one-year-old left the position in 2023 for a minor, semi-retired Party role.

All of these men supported the repression of protests and Beijing’s 2020 decision to impose the draconian National Security Law that curtailed many of Hong Kong’s political freedoms. However, removing them and other similar Chinese officials from the list of persons sanctioned by the Treasury Department and its Office of Foreign Assets Control would pose no risk to US national security or the financial system. As with the sentences handed down in Hong Kong—actions that are obviously not morally equivalent to US sanctions—the point has nonetheless similarly been made. It is not a defeat to turn the page.

Is such a trade possible? Such bargaining between the United States and China used to occur. Washington used to refrain from sponsoring condemnatory resolutions against China at the U.N. in exchange for dissidents—something I saw firsthand in the George W. Bush administration. China also expelled dissidents like Chen Guangcheng and Liu Xia during the 2010s—in part to avoid creating martyrs should they die in prison.

Some will argue that issues touching on governance and human rights—regarded by China as purely “internal affairs”—are the hardest of all to negotiate with Beijing. However, such a gesture would cost Xi little. It would clearly be appreciated by Trump, given his often-stated concern for Lai, who has become the world’s most famous Catholic layman for his struggle. A trade would advance the stable relations that both leaders appear to desire and make the summit a historic success.

Subscribe now

Share

In this 250th anniversary year of the USA’s existence since our Declaration of Independence from the British Empire, President Donald Trump has recognized the importance of liberating another land from corrupt, imperialist, and incompetent European rule: what will soon be American Greenland.

On Monday, Trump remarked, “I’d love to make a deal with them. It would make things easier. But one way or the other, we’re going to have Greenland.”

There are many reasons Trump is right and should move expeditiously to conclude this act. Here are seven:

1. A glance at the globe shows Greenland’s geostrategic importance in defending against prospective Chinese and Russian threats to North America. As the world benefits from natural climate change, which currently exhibits a warming trend, the Arctic will be less of a wasteland, more economically productive, and an important route for trading energy products.

   

2. Europeans don’t know how to handle China or Russia. They line up to kiss China’s ring: Britain’s and Canada’s leaders are set imminently to supplicate to Xi Jinping in Beijing. Britain is set to allow a Chinese “mega-embassy” in London that will be a center for Chinese espionage.

3. It is America’s manifest destiny to alleviate squalor and misuse in our near-abroad strategic areas. America’s GDP per capita is $85,000. Denmark’s is $71,000. Greenland’s is only $58,000. This is a sad state of affairs for a land rich in natural resources. American capital and engineering know-how—and the free access to the U.S. market that would accompany union—would elevate the people of Greenland dramatically.

4. Greenland can be secured with minimal military damage. It would be best for Greenland to become a U.S. territory or commonwealth through amicable agreement, but European agitation against the United States has now made this harder. If voluntary union is not immediately possible, then the colonial capital of Nuuk and other towns—with most of Greenland’s small population of 57,000—can be isolated rather than occupied.

5. The administration is sharpening its case to the people of Greenland. Tom Dans, Trump’s Arctic commissioner, recently remarked, “We need to get the people of Greenland on board.” Trump officials have considered lump-sum payments to Greenlanders, disintermediating Danish leeches. This idea should be developed further into Alaska-style trust funds for Greenland families to benefit from royalties from oil and gas production and mining—backstopped by a generous guaranteed minimum amount within five years of becoming a U.S. territory or commonwealth. Additional sweeteners could include Puerto Rico–style exemption from U.S. income taxes and Indian-reservation-style control of local affairs, with limitations on immigration into traditional Greenland communities.

6. The Danes and their European friends keep telling us what great allies they are. They even say they helped in Iraq and Afghanistan. Oddly, when I was at the State Department during crises in both locations, I never heard anyone say, “Thank God the Danes are with us!” If Denmark and other members of NATO are ever going to graduate beyond a collection of mooching, arrogant losers, they must recognize reality. Annexing Greenland will help with this realignment of self-perception.

7. Europe must be made to atone for its insolence toward Trump and the United States and its disgusting imperialist past, a responsibility it is shirking as it irrationally advocates for continued Danish imperial control. France, Britain, Germany, and Italy recently criticized Trump in a formal letter—sheer hypocrisy and nonsense. French imperialism bequeathed the United States the Vietnam War and genocide in Cambodia; it also produced the perpetually failed nation of Haiti. Britain just gave away the territory of Diego Garcia, which hosts an important U.S. air base. During World War II, Britain connived to delay D-Day so it could misdirect U.S. men and materiel—diverted from the Pacific War—to preserve London’s Mediterranean path to India and other imperial possessions while the Soviets lost millions fighting Hitler alone. Speaking of which, Germany started two world wars, or three if one counts the Franco-Prussian War, which I do. Italy colonized Somalia, which is even worse than Haiti. Accepting shame for this legacy and ceasing criticism of the United States, which has defended Europe for decades, would be a start.

As Albert Beveridge asked in his 1898 speech, “March of the Flag”:

Shall the American people continue their resistless march toward the commercial supremacy of the world? Shall free institutions broaden their blessed reign as the children of liberty wax in strength, until the empire of our principles is established over the hearts of all mankind? Have we no mission to perform, no duty to discharge to our fellow man?

The American Greenland project is primarily about national security and economic advancement. But it is also symbolic that, on America’s 250th birthday, our ambitions and gallant striving for greatness will again be unconfined. Adding Greenland to America would make the United States the second-largest country in the world, behind only Russia, and would be an important symbol of America’s great restoration. It could presage the expansion or restoration of American sovereignty elsewhere, such as the Panama Canal, Alberta, and an eventual American colony on the Moon before China gets there. Trump understands this. Now is the time to operationalize his vision.

From the Archive

“WHITON: What If Greenland Wants Trump More Than It Wants Denmark?”
The Daily Caller, August 22, 2019

Subscribe now

Share Capitalist Notes by Christian Whiton

Geez, Donald, when we sang “Auld Lang Syne” on New Year’s Eve—a sentimental Scottish salute to “times long past”—we didn’t necessarily mean it that literally. But five days into the new year, it feels like the old days of seeking to forcibly dispense with dictators who were troublesome for America.

Anno Domini 2026 is off to a retro-feeling, but excellent start.

There is some craziness and some brilliance in Trump’s recent actions and statements regarding Venezuela and Iran, as well as his hints about what might be coming for Colombia and other places run by unpleasant people.

On Saturday night, the U.S. military ousted Nicolás Maduro, the socialist thug who ran Venezuela. He now faces a federal trial in New York on drug and terrorism charges.

Maduro’s patron and predecessor was the late Hugo Chávez, who ushered in the current Venezuelan regime in 1999. Since then, Chávez–Maduro socialism has run Venezuela into the ground. Nominal GDP last year was just one-third of what it was in 2012. It’s as if Harvard and ABC News were running a country.

Venezuela also colluded with the worst imperialist actors in the region and overseas—Cuba, China, Denmark, Russia—to spread chaos, corruption, and socialist misery. It contributed to a surge of illegal migrants to America—basically a hybrid invasion.

So far, so good, then, with Trump’s decisive action. Top officials discussed snatching Maduro during Trump’s first term but considered the operation too risky. In this term, Trump decided to roll the dice, and the U.S. military achieved a remarkable success without any U.S. casualties.

On the other side of the world, Trump also made it clear that he supports the Iranians who are currently braving imprisonment or death to peacefully protest for an end to the Islamist regime that has run that country since 1979, when it came to power and promptly took American diplomats hostage.

Over the years, Tehran has been responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans. If this country has an ounce left of the “sacred Honor” that the Founding Fathers mutually pledged in the Declaration of Independence—and it does—then all Americans should wish the Iranian regime gone.

On Friday, Trump wrote, “If Iran shoots and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue. We are locked and loaded and ready to go.”

This statement also falls into the dual categories of brilliance and craziness. Trump valiantly and correctly decided against repeating what clearly does not work in Iran.

Subscribe now

When protesters took to the streets against the clerical dictatorship during the presidencies of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, both men basically sat on their hands. Trump has decided it serves U.S. national interests to do more than nothing. He is right: increasing our adversaries’ domestic political pain is smart statecraft, especially with a terrorism-exporting, expansionist, Islamist theocracy like Iran.

But with both Venezuela and Iran, there is a question of whether Trump has gone a step too far, perhaps even doing what American presidents should never really do: bluff.

Specifically, Trump said on Friday of Venezuela: “We’re going to be running it with a group, and we’re going to make sure it’s run properly.” He added: “We’re not afraid of boots on the ground.”

This is a fine sentiment, but it puts a president famous for not getting locked into anything in the position of being committed to an outcome that is difficult to force. He has done so without any actual U.S. military presence in Venezuela—just the threat of more military action.

In an appearance with the fake journalist and former Clinton White House staffer George “Stephy” Stephanopoulos on fake news ABC, which should be de-licensed, Secretary of State Marco Rubio outlined a far more plausible blockade (“quarantine”) of Venezuelan oil exports and described the overall U.S. strategy. The indispensable cabinet member said:

We will no longer have, in our hemisphere, a Venezuela that’s the crossroads for many of our adversaries around the world, including Iran and Hezbollah; that’s no longer sending us drug gangs and drug boats; and that’s no longer a narcotrafficking paradise for drugs coming out of Colombia to go through the Caribbean toward the United States. And obviously we want a better future for the people of Venezuela. Ultimately, legitimacy for their system of government will come about through a period of transition and real elections, which they have not had.

This approach is impressive and correct. It does not guarantee a favorable outcome (or gamble Trump’s foreign policy legacy on one), but it matches the desired outcome with the means the United States can reasonably apply through military and diplomatic methods.

Some Rubio magic could also build off Trump’s statement on Iran about helping protesters. By saying that we “are locked and loaded,” Trump is implying a willingness to use military force. If that is necessary and helpful, so be it. Trump ordered the U.S. military to join Israel in striking Iran’s nuclear-weapons program last June. Foreign policy poohbahs and non-interventionists had long predicted regional war if the United States attacked Iran. Instead, the world saw that the Iranian regime knuckles under when faced with strong resolve from the U.S.-led Free World.

But military force may not be what Iranian protesters need. What was the difference between when Soviet forces brutally suppressed uprisings in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968, and when authorities allowed the Eastern Bloc to disintegrate into freedom in 1989? Conceptually, a repressive regime usually gives way when it loses confidence in itself to shoot its own people.

The threat of U.S. military force against Iranian police and military who move against the people could be useful. Also important are other elements of political warfare against the regime. These might include steady and aggressive hectoring that echoes the protesters’ message: the regime is illegitimate, the regime is a disaster, political Islam doesn’t work, the regime has made Iran an economic basket case by funding the export of terrorism and clerical oppression, etc.

Any dissent movement also relies on the dissemination of information and ideas. The Declaration of Independence was the most effective singular act of political warfare in history because it motivated patriots at home and potential allies abroad. Pamphlets like Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and the propaganda and organizing efforts of Samuel Adams—as well as underground newspapers—were also important during the American Revolution.

Subscribe now

More recently, during the Soviet era, illicit typewriters and other tools of the samizdat underground press were important. Solidarity, the outlawed union that was at the center of Polish dissent to communist rule, benefited from copy and fax machines smuggled in from the West. External sources of information like Radio Free Europe—a globalist joke today, but a force for freedom from its founding in 1950 as a CIA front through the end of the Cold War—were later described by dissidents as helpful.

Today, people access information and ideas differently. Perhaps Elon Musk could arrange for X—especially Farsi posts not controlled by the regime—to be available on hundreds or thousands of domains to make censorship by the regime harder. When the terrestrial internet goes down altogether, U.S.-backed dissident groups could smuggle Starlink receivers into the country.

Also, Iranians still consume plenty of old-fashioned radio and TV. The U.S. military operates a handful of EC-130J “Commando Solo” aircraft based on the venerable C-130 cargo plane. These bristle with antennas and can propagate radio and TV signals from airspace outside of Iran on a broad range of frequencies to overcome jamming. Handing dissidents a tool to reach their people can be decisive. Government legal eagles will come up with a slew of reasons not to use this tool—a silly and useless UN agency (but I repeat myself) named the International Telecommunication Union and its broadcast guidelines could stand in the way—but the president can roll the lawyers.

Also important is bolstering the opposition. In the case of Iran, there is one that is well organized: the MEK. The group has long been demonized in Washington for vague reasons by progressives and the Deep State, which makes it all the more appealing. It answers the question of “What comes next?” if the Iranian regime is toppled. The MEK can manage a transition to modern, secular democracy. It is anti-Islamist, in favor of modernity and accountable government, and pro-American.

This program, combined with external economic pressure and Trump’s threat of military force, would constitute a coherent utilization of political warfare—which, not coincidentally, is a Marco Rubio specialty.

History will hopefully show that the man who grew up steeped in the Cuban exile experience—shaped by his parents’ story of Cuba’s descent into communism and the repression that followed, and who championed freedom as a senator, grafted this form of advancing the Free World’s interests onto Trump’s America First foreign policy as secretary of state, and benefited America’s security while freeing millions around the globe.

Speaking of the CIA, a digression: Don’t for a moment think the CIA is useful in regard to Iran or Venezuela. CIA Director John Ratcliffe showed up in the Venezuela matter when the CIA’s covert drone force attacked a dock in Venezuela instead of using the U.S. military. This was bizarre: the point of using the CIA for matters outside of stealing information is to achieve deniability for a U.S. president. But it was obvious who blew up the dock, and Trump boasted of the act shortly after its execution. Since the U.S. military was already engaged against Venezuela, the use of the CIA’s air force was a bizarre excursion from the military chain of command and needless muddying of legality by using unprivileged civilian combatants.

Most likely, the show pony Ratcliffe, in offering the attack, was clutching at relevance and wanted to have his picture taken. The chances that Ratcliffe is actually reforming the CIA are zero, since there is not a steady stream of leaks and antipathy coming from Deep State lickspittles at the New York Times and Washington Post. Any real attempt at reform would ignite these channels. At best, Ratcliffe is the Queen Elizabeth of the CIA: present and useful for show, while others make the decisions.

This is also relevant because many wrongly assume the CIA is good at influencing political outcomes (a.k.a. political warfare). This assumption is actually true if the target is a Republican presidential administration. The CIA played an important role in the anti-Trump Russia hoax, and played politics with phony-baloney “national intelligence estimates” that misleadingly downplayed Iranian nuclear advances, which intelligence bureaucrats spoon-fed to a complicit media. But the CIA is out of the business of political warfare against our biggest adversaries. The agency was good at influencing watershed Italian elections in 1948 and deposing an Iranian government in 1953 that wanted to snuggle up to Moscow. However, aside from a brief comeback in the 1980s, it has lost the thread on this part of its original mission.

Today, it’s more likely the Bolshoi would hire a three-legged ballerina than Ratcliffe would whip the agency into shape or be useful in contemporary crises. Where, for example, is the CIA in helping Trump entice Greenland to join the United States? It should be easy to engage in a range of covert and overt acts to entice Greenlanders. Where is the CIA-funded Greenland freedom committee? Where is the offer of Alaska-style trust funds for every Greenland family to profit from future oil and mineral royalties, backed by a federal promise that each family’s account will hold no less than $1 million within five years of becoming a U.S. territory or commonwealth? Are our spooks too busy writing “assessments” that no one important cares about? (I have no idea if the CIA’s recent claim that Ukraine didn’t attack Russian President Vladimir Putin’s home is true, but I am 100% certain the CIA doesn’t actually know.)

Luckily, Trump can rely on his own good instincts and a good secretary of state. He also benefits from good opponents.

After Maduro was snatched, Ilhan Omar, the Minnesota congresswoman and alleged perpetrator of immigration fraud with her brother-husband, said, “Trump’s invasion of Venezuela is blatantly illegal and unconstitutional... Trump is putting our service members in harm’s way as he boasts about taking Venezuela’s oil and resources.”

Top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer remarked on TV: “And it’s a violation of the law to do what they did without getting the authorization of Congress... we have the War Powers Act... It’s going to come to the floor this week. And if it’s voted for, if it’s voted positively in both houses, then the president can’t do another thing in Venezuela without the okay of Congress.”

Schumer and Mullah Omar are wrong on the law, and more importantly, wrong on the politics.

Subscribe now

Regardless of what they tell pollsters, the American people love decisive, successful action by their president.

As for the law, the War Powers Act is make-believe. It was passed in 1973 over the veto of Richard Nixon, then weakened politically by Watergate. But it is the Constitution that makes the president the commander in chief of the military, and no mere law can abridge that.

Ever since President George Washington took command of the military and suppressed the Whiskey Rebellion—without seeking a permission slip from the finger-in-the-wind, sissy Congress—the die has been cast: the president can order military action.

Congress’s power is limited to declaring war (a diplomatic and legal gesture that has been obsolete since 1945) and appropriating or withholding funds from the military. There endeth the role of Congress in military operations—something the Founders understood, including when Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers that “the direction of war most peculiarly demands those qualities which distinguish the exercise of power by a single hand.”

Go home and kiss some babies, Chuck, before AOC takes your seat.

Trump also has useful and deranged opponents on the right. Tucker Carlson is apparently convinced that Trump struck Venezuela in order to advance gay marriage. It is unclear if he believes Zionists are also to blame, but I suspect he will get there. (I knew it was too soon as part of our plan to advance the gay agenda to unleash “West Side Story en Español” and other musicals for Latin American consumption. Because of Tucker’s watchful eye, we’ll delay our plan to make everyone both gay and Jewish, which is of course how control of Hollywood and Zionism generally were brought about. Nevertheless, our plan to eventually gay-marry Tucker to Ben Shapiro still stands.)

Where does this all leave the United States and Trump’s presidency? Operating through instinct, Trump has undertaken two valiant and correct acts. However, both still entail considerable risk. His chances of success are increased greatly by a secretary of state who knows the game, and a military refocused on threats to U.S. security rather than sideshows and abstractions.

And for those who parrot “peace through strength” ad nauseam to explain and defend Trump, there should be a realization that this description is simple and simplistic. It puts too much emphasis on peace. Trump is a Jacksonian. Like Andrew Jackson, who preemptively invaded Spanish Florida and waged successful brinkmanship with America’s perpetual adversary, France, Trump has a national security policy that is conceptually reserved and defines vital national interests narrowly, but which uses the military and other tools of national power energetically once a threat is identified.

Strength, yes. Peace, maybe. Success, probably.

Subscribe now

Share Capitalist Notes by Christian Whiton

Trump’s National Security Strategy ditches diplomatic niceties, calling out Europe’s ruling class for decline, cowardice, and surrender—while Washington shows more backbone than Europe’s own leaders.

By Christian Whiton

December 15, 2025

“We’re going up to the bluffs to paint ‘Springfield Sucks’ in huge letters. That way, whenever they look into Shelbyville, they will realize that they suck!”

Thus reasoned the preteen antagonists from neighboring Shelbyville in “Lemon of Troy,” a 1995 episode of The Simpsons, when the series was in its prime. This glimpse inside the minds of young would-be vandals revealed a way of thinking that was simple—even simplistic.

But might it not also be elegant? Are there not instances when people who suck should be made aware of this reality, for their sake and for ours?

The question is topical because of the National Security Strategy that the Trump administration released on December 4. As with most such documents in an administration’s first year, it covers what went wrong, what the current administration is doing to fix matters in broad terms, and then delves into more specific remedies by region or topic.

This document is unique, however, for the region it singles out for unvarnished criticism: Europe. One might even conclude that the White House believes Europe’s current political class sucks.

After assessing regions more important to the United States, including the Western Hemisphere, Asia, and the Middle East, the document arrives on page 25 at “Promoting European Greatness.”

The document declares that Europe’s “economic decline is eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure. The larger issues facing Europe include activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.”

Perhaps most galling to the wealthy moochers who populate the continent’s political class, the document faults Europe for hysteria over Russia that has delayed an end to the killing in Ukraine, calls it the “Ukraine War” instead of “Putin’s invasion of Ukraine™,” and defines U.S. policy as “ending the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance.” So much for celebrating Transgender Pride and NATO accession together in Kiev in 2026.

In what can only be interpreted as support for Europe’s surging opposition parties of the New Right, such as Alternative for Germany, National Rally (France), and Reform UK—as well as ruling New Right parties Brothers of Italy and Fidesz (Hungary)—the document notes, “America encourages its political allies in Europe to promote this revival of spirit, and the growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism.”

Experts on both sides of the Atlantic have panned the document. However, the Trump administration is on solid factual footing, and clarity about our national security strategy is something the American people and U.S. allies deserve.

Take the United Kingdom, for example. Its leader, Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and his left-wing Labour Party have support below 20 percent, according to recent polls. If the British public voted today, both Labour and the nominal opposition Tories (who have sucked for decades) would trail the upstart Reform UK party.

Factors driving this reality include uncontrolled and unwanted immigration, crime, economic contraction, inflation, and tax hikes. The police seem more concerned with arresting Brits for tweets that the government deems offensive than with apprehending perpetrators of actual violence.

Beyond the numbers, Britain’s political class demonstrates a complete lack of pride and confidence. Of particular interest to the United States, London appears to be in full suck-up mode with China.

Britain counts among its subjects a man of great faith and ingenuity, Jimmy Lai, a UK citizen who started life with little more than the shirt on his back and rose to become a wildly successful pro-democracy media tycoon. Lai embodied the quest for freedom in Hong Kong that Britain promised when ceding the colony to China in 1997. By Christmas 2020, China had completed the destruction of that freedom, had obliterated Lai’s media company, and had begun what has now become a five-year stint in solitary confinement. On Monday, December 15, he was finally found guilty after a show trial for bogus national security offenses. He faces de facto life in prison.

Instead of expressing outrage at this treatment of one of its subjects—and insisting that the agreement it reached with China to preserve freedom be honored—the British leader is hoping to meet Chinese leader Xi Jinping in January on friendly terms. He will go as a supplicant, seeking an ill-defined and wishful Chinese solution to Britain’s economic woes. Along the way, he will likely concede Beijing a new giant embassy in London that everyone knows will be a grand center for Chinese espionage.

Who will stand up for Jimmy Lai and the principles of freedom and faith he embodies, locked away as they are by the Chinese in Stanley Prison? President Donald Trump is who. In fact, Trump raised Lai’s case with Xi during their October meeting and has repeatedly advocated for his release.

Let that sink in. A supposedly transactional president whose foreign policy is the polar opposite of the preachiness associated with the foreign policies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama is the one standing up for right over wrong and for the sovereign individual over the lawless mob. He does so for a European subject whose government is too weak—and too lost—to do so itself.

Perhaps the National Security Strategy went too easy on the European political class.

***

Christian Whiton was a State Department senior advisor in the second Bush and first Trump administrations.

This article was published by American Greatness on December 15, 2025. URL: https://amgreatness.com/2025/12/15/trump-is-right-to-lambaste-europe/

Check out American Greatness each day: https://amgreatness.com/

Subscribe now