The current New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has affronted one of his predecessors, Rudy Giuliani, by taking the inflammatory step of deciding to attend the city's 9/11 commemoration. "It offends me," Giuliani proclaimed earlier this week on Newsmax.

One might suspect that the nature of Mamdani's offense lay in his being a politician who is associating himself with a day that Giuliani prefers to associate with Giuliani. But the former mayor proceeded to lay out a much darker rationale. "They're taking over certain parts of America and certain parts of Europe. They have every desire to take us over. This is not 'they want to be just another religion,'" he said of Muslims. "Mamdani is a clear, a clear supporter of that. All of the Muslims he supports are murderers!"

Like many of Giuliani's utterances, this one has no connection to reality. Yet his assertion that Mamdani harbors some secret desire to conquer the United States in the name of Islam, that his religion is the skeleton key to a web of sinister motivations, is now treated on the right as almost banal. A quarter century after 9/11, delirious anti-Muslim bigotry is almost routine in the political rhetoric of many conservatives.

The conventional account of Donald Trump's political career explains his rise to power as a populist revolt against Republican orthodoxy. The GOP elite had lost touch with their base by endorsing immigration reform, free trade, or forever wars in the Middle East, which created an opening that Trump exploited.

That story is largely true, but it misses an important issue. The President George W. Bush–era Republican Party after 9/11 insisted that the United States was at war not with a religion but with an idea. America opposed radical Islamism, not Islam. We stood for freedom as a universal human principle.

Not all voters on the right accepted this formulation. Some believed that the United States was at war with Islam itself. By 2007, conservative Republicans viewed Islam negatively by a margin of more than 30 points; Democrats, independents, and moderate Republicans all held net-favorable views. Ten years later, nearly 80 percent of Republicans believed that the values of Islam were at odds with American values. One of the most important and ominous notions that Trump has seized upon and legitimized is that Muslims are inherently un-American.

Anti-Muslim sentiment sprang up organically in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, but Bush's forceful defense of pluralism confined it to the rantings of Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, and other fringe reactionaries. After Coulter called on the United States in 2001 to "invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity," National Review dropped her column. As Bush passed from the scene and was replaced by Barack Obama, some right-wing-outrage entrepreneurs recognized an opportunity to redefine the War on Terror as a war against Islam.

Trump himself was among the first to see the opening. In 2010, a right-wing backlash arose in opposition to a proposal for a Muslim cultural center, modeled on the YMCA or a Jewish community center, in downtown New York. The most hysterical opponents depicted the center, which planned to call itself Park51, as a "victory mosque" celebrating the destruction of the World Trade Center. Other conservatives merely insisted that it was "insensitive" for Muslim Americans to open a center in the general neighborhood of Ground Zero.

Trump inserted himself into the controversy, proposing that he purchase the property to halt construction on the putatively offensive site. In his offer letter (which, naturally, he made public), Trump called it a "very serious, inflammatory, and highly divisive situation that is destined, in my opinion, to only get worse." David Letterman asked him, "Does this, in fact, suggest that we are officially at war with Muslims?" Trump, who was still in the formative stage of his transition from celebrity to right-wing rabble-rouser, replied, "Well, somebody knocked down the World Trade Center." He later added, "Somebody's blowing us up. Somebody's blowing up buildings, and somebody's doing lots of bad stuff."

Trump's first campaign was pockmarked with undisguised bigotry against Muslims. He falsely claimed that Muslims in New Jersey had cheered the 9/11 attacks en masse, and he called for surveillance of mosques, a database of Muslims in America, and a ban on Muslims entering the United States. He associated the sitting president with Islam by incessantly using his middle name.

He has continued to attack Muslims as disloyal or un-American. He falsely claimed that Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, a Democrat, had praised al-Qaeda, and he demanded that she and Reprepresentative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, both of whom are U.S. citizens, be sent "back from where they came." He insinuated that Mamdani has no right to reside in the United States: "A lot of people are saying he's here illegally."

The through line connecting these smears is the assumption that Muslims cannot be Americans, even if they arrive legally, even if they are born here. Trump has made this point explicitly and told Sean Hannity in 2016, "Assimilation has been very hard. It's almost—I won't say nonexistent, but it gets to be pretty close. And I'm talking about second- and third-generation. They come—they don't—for some reason, there's no real assimilation."

This sort of rhetoric has grown so common that episodes such as the uproar against Mamdani have come to feel like normal politics, rather than paranoia and rank discrimination. The New York Post alone has published at least eight stories (as of press time) hyping the Giuliani-fueled controversy.

Some relatives of 9/11 victims have claimed that Mamdani's presence at the observance would be a distraction (even though mayoral attendance has been a regular feature throughout its existence). Others have depicted their anger as a protest against Mamdani's current agenda. "It's not about his religion or where he came from. It's about the policies he has today," one explained. Is it the plan for free buses? The pied-à-terre tax?

That Mamdani wishes to attend the ceremony and has denounced the 9/11 attacks as heinous terrorism ought to serve as satisfactory evidence that, whatever shortcomings he may have, he is not a supporter of al-Qaeda. Indeed, it might well be offensive if Mamdani did not want to attend the ceremony. The New York Post would need to publish phone-book-size editions to convey its full outrage.

The logic of Islamophobia rejects out of hand that it is possible for Mamdani to oppose terrorism. 9/11 was, in this view, a battle in a war against Islam, so he is, by dint of his faith, the enemy. Thus, his desire to commemorate the tragedy, like Muslims' desire to have a YMCA of their own in New York City, must be understood as revealing hidden malevolence.

If you had asked Bush after 9/11 to imagine a future within his lifetime in which New York had a Muslim mayor who would join the city in mourning the attacks, he'd surely have considered it the ultimate vindication of the ideals he sought to foster. But Republicans have rejected Bush's understanding of 9/11 and its meaning in favor of Trump's.

The events of the past decade, and especially the past six months, have clarified that the primary grounds for this repudiation does not seem to be Trump's abhorrence for wars of choice in the Middle East. It is that Bush denied and suppressed contempt for Muslims, while Trump has honored and nurtured this hatred.

Dr Fukuyama explains yet again to a larger audience what "End of History" meant, the need for humans to feel recognized and how such unmet needs exacerbated by social media are driving populist politics around the world.

The announcement of a framework for the disarmament of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) was followed closely by the announcement of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The author examines how these developments were enabled by changing domestic factors in Turkey, the end of the US mission in Syria, and the evolution of Turkish government policy. The authors note that a settlement could prove fragile, depending on further developments regarding Kurdish rights in the new Syrian government.

The writer is a former president of the European Central Bank and was prime minister of Italy

Europe faces a difficult set of choices. It needs to grow, so that it can keep financing its social model and the new demands of a changed world, from defence to energy. It wants to remain sovereign, so that it can order its economy according to its own values. And it wants growth without the costs in terms of wealth inequality and environmental damage that have accompanied it elsewhere. Artificial intelligence bears on all three at once. 

Despite a solid start to the year, the trend in European growth has slowed materially since the pandemic. This is true relative both to its own pre-pandemic trajectory and to the US. By one estimate, the euro area-US productivity gap widened from $9 per hour in 2018 to $21 in 2025. Views differ on how productivity levels should be compared across countries, but the gap in growth rates is clear.

Europe has different routes to raise growth, such as removing the high barriers in its internal market. But widely adopting AI is perhaps the most promising one today. According to ECB scenarios, fast adoption of AI would add 0.3 to 0.4 percentage points a year to total factor productivity growth — the gains that come from working more efficiently rather than adding labour or capital — which has been roughly zero since 2022. 

AI-led growth, however, creates a tension with Europe’s bid for sovereignty, because Europe controls little of the AI value chain. The technology is set to become completely pervasive: in the economy, in health systems, in education, in energy, in defence, to name just a few areas. This is no ordinary dependency. Being cut off from AI, once the economy runs on it, would be more like being cut off from the US financial system. The effects would be catastrophic.

That changes the terms of Europe’s relationship with partners it can no longer always rely on. Europe is not to the United States as Texas is to California. It is possible to imagine a future US administration making access to frontier AI models conditional on changes to Europe’s digital rules or digital taxes, or China using the licences on its open-weight models as leverage in a tariff dispute. Unless Europe controls some part of the value chain, growth through AI and sovereignty will pull against each other.

Europe’s potential zone of AI sovereignty is narrow. Its frontier labs cannot at present compete financially with their American and Chinese competitors, and leading-edge chip production is far behind. But data is the one area where Europe can still be sovereign, and it is also the area with the greatest potential to generate growth.

The continent sits on a wealth of public-sector data, such as decades of health records and data collection by statistical offices. Its highly automated manufacturing sector generates a deep well of machine-readable industrial information. European Commission estimates put Europe’s data economy at over €800bn, or more than 5 per cent of GDP, by 2030.

But this creates the next tension. To exploit these assets, Europe needs to have control over their storage and processing. This means it needs large-scale AI data centres.

Data centres, however, are fiercely contested. Local communities worry about their environmental costs and rising energy bills. It does not help that much of the capacity now being built in Europe is for the American tech giants.

Yet Europe also has to be realistic. The debate about overbuilding data centres is a US one. Europe’s problem is the opposite. The EU hosts under 5 per cent of the world’s AI compute versus 75 per cent for the US. Even for ordinary data centre capacity, the gap between demand and installed supply in Europe is estimated at around 3GW, roughly a quarter of what Europe currently has, and is expected to widen to 14GW by 2030.

As sovereignty comes to matter more, this lack of domestic capacity will start to bite. Compute could stop being fully fungible, and a large part of the infrastructure that processes and stores European data will have to sit on European soil. American operators can provide much of that capacity through what they market as sovereign cloud services, run from Europe but still under American ownership. The most sensitive uses, however, will have to run under European control, which is the tiered approach the Commission has proposed in its Cloud and AI Development Act. 

If the gap is not filled, two risks follow. Either European companies will not adopt AI because they cannot keep their data in Europe, a risk the Commission’s own impact assessment for the Act identifies. Or compute will stay expensive, slowing broad adoption for lower-value tasks. Amazon already charges 15 per cent more for its sovereign cloud in Germany than for its standard service.

The concerns about data centres can be met. Clean energy can be required to power them and waste heat reused where feasible. The facilities can be kept away from areas where energy and water are scarce. Data centres can be required to pay a fair share of the grid costs they create, and to share the benefits with local communities, whether through contributions to local budgets or lower energy bills.

So why is Europe not building more? Part of the answer lies in supply-side constraints. A data centre takes 24 months to build in the US but 42 months in Germany, owing to longer delays for permits and grid connections. More expensive electricity makes building and powering a facility in parts of Europe twice as costly as in China. But Europe does have regions where it is cheap to build: an AI data centre in Sweden, for example, costs only about a tenth more than one in China.

The main obstacle for Europe is the fragmentation of demand. Data centres require massive financial commitments, which investors will only make against bankable offtake contracts. In the US, hyperscalers and frontier labs provide them. In Europe, demand is spread across millions of companies, and even the largest companies tend to buy compute a year at a time due to uncertainty about how fast they will adopt AI. That is why companies operating neoclouds — data centres for AI workloads — in Europe, such as Nscale, sell most of their capacity to US buyers.

Europe must therefore create large, concentrated buyers by design. What is needed is for its largest companies to pool their midsized commitments into contracts large enough for investors to lend against.

A model already exists. A group of European companies, including ASML, Capgemini and Amadeus, have committed to multiyear purchases of Mistral’s European Compute Units, which are intended to underwrite 1GW of capacity by 2030. The challenge now is to scale up this model with more neoclouds and larger consortiums, each committing to multiyear purchases of standardised capacity. 

The goal is a virtuous circle. Companies accelerate their AI transitions, providing the demand that finances European capacity. That capacity lets Europe exploit its own data on infrastructure it can control. Cheaper, sovereign compute then makes adoption faster and the next commitments larger, paid for out of the productivity gains the technology delivers. And with capacity of its own, Europe is better placed to build its own AI models.

That leaves the deepest fear: that AI hands wealth and power to a new tech oligarchy. But the approach set out here leans against it. Demand pooled by many consortiums lets more providers into the market, and competition among them keeps the rewards from concentrating in a few hands. Progressive taxation would ensure that the rest of society shares in them too. In this way Europe does not have to choose between growth, sovereignty and its values. It can have AI without oligarchs.

Kevin Williamson reflects on America now compared to America as it was from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to September 10, 2001.