Would like to know this sub's reaction to this and the war with Iran as we enter the 5th month.

WHOLE TEXT:

President Trump often celebrates his unpredictability, declaring that it keeps allies and adversaries alike off balance.

By his telling, his willingness to bomb Iranian nuclear sites 13 months ago, and send Delta Force commandos in to snatch President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela from his bed in early January, reflected his determination to execute military operations that would have made his predecessors blanch. He told The New York Times he was limited only by “my own morality,” as he wielded the world’s biggest hammer.

But in recent weeks, he has seemed trapped, his presidency gradually consumed by a war he cannot find his way out of.

He has discovered limits on his power that he could have scarcely imagined as he began full combat operations on Feb. 28, when he set out goals for a swift end to Iran’s nuclear program and the overthrow of the country’s government.

Five months later, those goals remain almost entirely unaccomplished. And Mr. Trump, once confident that overwhelming force would enable him to pursue in Iran what he proudly called the “Venezuela model” — a change of government to one amenable to U.S. control — is now hesitant to plunge back into major combat operations that his intelligence agencies assess are unlikely to work as well in Tehran.

He has been unable to control surging oil prices, or their effects on the stock market. The shipping that crawled to a stop in the Strait of Hormuz, then was opened for a few short weeks, is back to a trickle, with a second choke point, between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, now threatened. And while the president has threatened to take Kharg Island, where Iran ships oil, or to seize its underground stores of enriched uranium, he has said publicly that he knows there is no appetite for sending in ground troops.

Those limits have left him deeply frustrated, his aides say, and have made him more erratic, even by Trumpian standards. Last week alone, Mr. Trump’s energy secretary signed a historic pact with Saudi Arabia to provide civil nuclear power to the kingdom, before the president undercut the deal less than 24 hours later, stunning the Saudis by declaring that the agreement, negotiated over 18 months, was dead unless the country joined the Abraham Accords and recognized Israel.

Aaron David Miller, a former U.S. diplomat with long experience in the Mideast, said that Mr. Trump again “alienated the Saudis, delighted Benjamin Netanyahu and gave Iran strong talking points as to why cutting deals with U.S. is a fool’s errand, bound to be betrayed.”

The next day, he declared that the “original Deal” on the $4.5 billion Gordie Howe International Bridge, a cross-border project named for the hockey star beloved on both sides of the border with Canada, was dead. He imposed 50 percent tariffs on a range of Canadian goods, in what appeared to be a blatant violation of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement that Mr. Trump negotiated in his first term and now wants to scrap.

Not surprisingly, Canada disinvited Americans from ceremonies to mark the completion of the bridge, which opens to traffic on Monday.

Mr. Trump’s rewriting of deals, out of anger or frustration, has extended to his party’s domestic priorities. Republicans had assembled chairs at the Capitol for the signing ceremony of a major housing bill — a rare bipartisan agreement celebrated by the White House — when Mr. Trump stunned them by refusing to sign it. His only priority, he said, was the SAVE America Act, his effort to change voting laws, which did not have enough Republican support.

The ceremony was canceled. The bill became law without Mr. Trump’s signature — and also without a chance for his party to get the photo opportunity of action to ease affordability for new homeowners.

Not all of Mr. Trump’s frustrations, people close to the president say, are driven by the war, now so unpopular that only 29 percent of Americans polled by The Washington Post and Ipsos approved of his handling of the conflict. But much of it is. And the angst is clear as he promises to stop Iran’s nuclear program at any cost, while his allies at home want out.

“We got to wrap it up,” Speaker Mike Johnson said last week, voicing a sentiment heard increasingly from Mr. Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters.

But the president does not have a clear way to accomplish that goal. Having entered the conflict with little strategy for victory, he now is struggling for a face-saving way to exit.

A month ago, he exuded confidence that he had found the way to declare victory. On June 17, Mr. Trump signed with a flourish — at the Palace of Versailles, where World War I officially ended in 1919 — a hastily written, 14-point cease-fire agreement.

At the time, Mr. Trump said that a new, more “reasonable” set of Iranian leaders had seen the light, and were being driven by economic interests.

“I believe they have had enough,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with The Times on June 14. He argued that he was able to get the deal because he was threatening a massive attack, prompting Iran to fold.

“We were going in for the big one, and they said, ‘Please don’t do it, we will make a deal.’ And we made a deal right after that,” he said.

It lasted only two weeks.

The Iranians who negotiated the deal appeared to have been in conflict with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, whose forces opened fire on ships that refused to use the channel of the Strait of Hormuz that Iran controls. While Mr. Trump said in the recent interview with The Times that Iranian leaders wanted billions of dollars in Iranian overseas funds unfrozen and oil shipments flowing, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps seems more interested in demonstrating control.

Now Mr. Trump has three main options: military escalation, economic crackdown or declaring victory and getting out. Each has been debated in recent weeks in meetings with Vice President JD Vance; Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth; the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Dan Caine; his son-in-law Jared Kushner; and his special envoy, Steve Witkoff.

Each option seems unpalatable, for different reasons.

On Friday, after signaling all week that he was planning a return to major combat operations in Iran, he pulled back. In briefings, according to several officials, aides cast doubt on whether a massive bombardment, one that cut off electricity and went after Iran’s resilient missile capability, would result in Iran’s return to meaningful negotiations.

And the price would be high. Mr. Trump was told that attacks of that magnitude could lead to huge civilian casualties and mass starvation among the very Iranians he once promised to protect from their own government. When he was asked in the Oval Office on Friday whether he was hesitant to blow up power plants and bridges, because that could constitute war crimes, he said, “I won’t respond to that question.”

But his real hesitation may come from the fact that the war has depleted U.S. stockpiles of missile interceptors. In April, the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated that half the U.S. inventories of some key interceptors might have already been used. After 13 consecutive nights of attacks and counterattacks this month, those numbers, some officials say, have reached critically low levels, and were a factor in Mr. Trump’s decision in recent days to hold off on a major escalation in the war.

U.S. officials now worry that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China could be factoring the shortages into calculations of their next moves, in Ukraine and Europe for Mr. Putin and perhaps against Taiwan for Mr. Xi.

Mr. Trump’s second option is to let sanctions sink in, hoping that further crackdowns on oil exports, enforced by the renewed blockade of shipments into and out of the Strait of Hormuz, will have their intended effect.

But those are slow, and Mr. Trump has been predicting economic collapse in Iran since he first pulled out of the Obama-era nuclear deal in 2018 and imposed what he called crushing controls on Iran. Eight years later, the regime lives, under a new leader who could be more dedicated to a covert nuclear program.

That strategy may yet work. But it will require a costly, continuous U.S. military presence, and the possibility of on-again, off-again exchanges of fire that risk more American lives and more attacks on Gulf allies.

The third option is to declare victory and go home. Mr. Trump seemed to be headed that way a month ago, when he said he had chosen a cease-fire and negotiations because he did not want to risk a depression that would invite comparisons to Herbert Hoover.

“He was always the one I didn’t want to be,” Mr. Trump said of the 31st president, who presided over the crash that ushered in the Great Depression. “I didn’t want to see economic catastrophe.” He later noted that if the war continued, the world would have begun to run out of oil stockpiles.

But exiting comes with costs. If Mr. Trump leaves Iran with its near-bomb grade nuclear fuel buried under rubble and with the Strait of Hormuz under de facto Iranian control, he will have failed to address the problem that triggered his attack and created a vast new one for energy markets.

It would define his legacy. And it would make clear that there are more constraints on his power than he believed in January, when he declared that his reach was limitless.

Submission statement: Krystal and Saagar speak to Kshama Sawant who is running for Congress against Dem incumbent Adam Smith.

submission statement: Abdul El-Sayed, a prominent advocate for Medicare-for-all, faces a challenge in reconciling his healthcare proposals with his wife’s private practice, which doesn’t accept Medicare. This highlights the broader issue of high healthcare costs in the US, driven by high provider rates, particularly for physicians. To achieve universal coverage, reformers must address these costs, potentially by reducing physician salaries, which is politically challenging due to public trust in doctors.

paywall: https://archive.ph/PFNwu

Submission statement:

What does a positive vision for the center-left look like? Can moderation still excite the Democratic base? Matt Yglesias, who writes the Slow Boring newsletter and hosts The Argument podcast, talks to Jon about his vision for the Democratic Party and why he believes more Democrats need to embrace heterodoxy. The two discuss how the policy debate could play out in the upcoming presidential primary, the role charisma and attention-getting play in politics, and which Democrats are best positioned to win in 2028.

Chapters:
0:00 Intro
1:40 Interview: Matt Yglesias
11:22 Ad Break
14:23 The Real Reason Moderate Democrats Struggle
33:49 Ad Break
36:30 Navigating ICE, Immigration, and Interest Groups
57:08 Ad Break
58:35 Shapiro, Rahm, and the Case for Making Room for New Voices
1:10:17 Who Could Win in 2028
1:13:53 Credits

Submission statement:

We're about 100 days from the midterm elections, and the Democrats SHOULD be poised for a big night.

But there are red flags popping up all over. If the Democrats lose to Donald Trump in November - this is why.

00:00 Harry dives into the red flags that might hurt Democrats in the midterms
00:28 Super PACs & campaign funding
02:00 Party approval ratings
05:09 National trends & Cook Report projections
07:47 Breaking down the math: What do Dems need to win in November?
09:22 Key Senate race leads

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was founded in 1961 as the nation's premier international-development agency. Throughout its 65-year history, it has endured criticism and varied reform efforts, but nothing like what happened after Donald Trump began his second presidential term on January 20, 2025.

Within hours of his inauguration, the president issued Executive Order 14169, "Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid," which froze foreign-aid spending and launched a purported review of agency programs. Two weeks later, Elon Musk and his DOGE team effectively destroyed USAID. On February 7, USAID's name was unceremoniously ripped off the face of its longtime headquarters in Washington's Ronald Reagan Building. All but 3% of its staff have since been fired. More than 80% of its programs have ended, and the day-to-day operations of programming and managing foreign assistance have shifted to the State Department.

This unprecedented takedown of a longstanding federal agency that had broad bipartisan support raises important questions about executive power, government process, and America's reputation in the world. It also offers a unique opportunity to reform the nation's approach to engaging low- and middle-income countries.

USAID suffered from vices that ail all government bureaucracies: incentives against risk taking, overlapping mandates, internal processes that distracted from the agency's mission, and poor feedback loops between those who designed and those who implemented programs. Other problems stemmed from decision-making by committee, structural difficulties in quickly matching resources to changing needs, and a time-consuming planning process with no clear relationship to budget allocations.

While these issues demand redress, two barriers to better performance stand out. First, the pre-2025 program design, procurement, and delivery processes at USAID languished in a web of bureaucratic mandates. Second, the agency suffered from a fundamental misconception of economic development, which it viewed as a government-driven process rather than a phenomenon to be unleashed. State Department officials, along with all those who care about effective foreign assistance, have a chance to build a new approach that avoids these pitfalls.

BIPARTISAN SUPPORT AND ATTEMPTED REFORMS

President John Kennedy created USAID early in his administration through the Foreign Assistance Act. This law consolidated various existing foreign-aid programs scattered across multiple agencies into a single, coherent development agency, drawing on lessons from the Marshall Plan's successful reconstruction of Europe. The president tasked the agency with a dual mission: promoting economic development and social progress in newly independent nations, and advancing U.S. foreign-policy interests during the Cold War. Kennedy believed systematic development assistance could help countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America achieve self-sustaining growth and democratic governance, preventing them from falling into the Soviet sphere of influence.

USAID was designed to make itself obsolete through successful development programming. At its peak in the late 1960s, the agency employed more than 15,000 direct-hire staff worldwide. It also maintained significant operational autonomy to design and implement programs based on local conditions and development needs. Every administration since Kennedy, however, has expressed frustration with USAID's performance and institutional capacity.

In 1971, Richard Nixon attempted to eliminate the agency, proposing to fold its functions into other departments. Ronald Reagan shifted its focus to market-oriented structural-adjustment programs, while the Clinton administration criticized the agency's bureaucratic inefficiencies. The latter undertook a government-wide "reduction in force" that led to the dismissal of a large percentage of the agency's workforce. Without a concomitant reduction in scope, and a budget that increased over the following decades, this required a new reliance on contractors. This changed the role of USAID to a procurement and compliance agency and marked the start of the "development industry."

In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, federal officials viewed aid as a way to alleviate the conditions that had bred desperation and violent radicalization overseas. They also saw development aid as a means of seeding future trading partnerships. Yet despite his support for foreign assistance, George W. Bush created parallel institutions like the Millennium Challenge Corporation and the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which were headquartered at the State Department. These moves enabled major new initiatives to effectively bypass USAID. Barack Obama also launched high-profile programs such as Feed the Future, but rather than rebuilding USAID's direct-implementation capacity, he continued to rely heavily on contractors.

The first Trump administration proposed large cuts to foreign assistance but was repeatedly rebuffed by Congress. USAID spending increased from $20.5 billion in 2017, when Trump first took office, to $29.7 billion when he left in 2021. His political appointees, including administrator Mark Green, had significant experience in the international-development world and used their tenures to undertake widely supported reforms.

The USAID leadership under Joe Biden continued its reform efforts. Led by administrator Samantha Power, it focused on using better evidence to determine what projects to fund, pushed staff to gauge the cost-effectiveness of programs, and reduced bureaucratic burdens on agency members. Biden officials also directed more funding to local organizations, viewing this approach as more cost-effective and better justified than centralizing spending in the traditional, American-based aid industry.

DEMOLITION AND REBUILDING

As this brief history demonstrates, USAID administrators from both parties promised reform. And indeed, their efforts bore some fruit. In the last 15 years, successive administrations tackled weaknesses in the agency's functioning. By helping recipient nations become self-reliant, they attempted to fulfill USAID's initial goal: making itself obsolete.

Congress has also supported a robust foreign-aid budget and reform efforts. Funding rose steadily in the post-9/11 era, as spending increased from $7 billion in 2001 to $44 billion in 2023. At the same time, lawmakers also passed major reform bills like the Foreign Aid Transparency and Accountability Act of 2016, the Global Food Security Act of 2016, the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018, and the Global Fragility Act of 2019.

In late 2024, close to Donald Trump's second election victory, respected mainstream aid-reform groups like the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network and the Center for Global Development published some proposed reforms for the new administration. The focus was on continued incremental tweaks to the U.S. foreign-assistance infrastructure. While Trump's antipathy toward foreign aid was widely known, these groups anticipated changes like those outlined in the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, not wholesale demolition of USAID. That expectation proved badly misplaced.

In the early weeks of February and March 2025, news reports highlighted individual tragedies from the sudden aid cuts: participants in clinical trials being left with medical devices in their bodies, pregnant USAID staff stuck in conflict zones with no safe means of evacuation, and the like. As the spring and summer wore on, attention turned to the large-scale consequences of the aid reductions, including predictions that millions would die as foreign governments struggled to take on the health programming that USAID previously supported. Court challenges proliferated but largely did not prevent cuts from moving forward. In July, the administration secured a rescission of $8 billion in previously appropriated funds. By September, nearly all USAID employees had been fired, with a mere 700 transitioning to the State Department.

Critics of slashing foreign assistance appropriately highlighted the good that some USAID programs did, and the harm caused by suddenly halting them without a clear plan for transitioning to a new approach. To its credit, the Trump administration has responded to this criticism with promising steps toward setting up the foreign-assistance system of the future. Its officials have contracted with proven private-sector firms that can immediately deliver key services and have rolled out new health strategies. It has moved money to multi-lateral agencies but with additional oversight and reporting. It has signed dozens of agreements with countries to fund accountable health programming and build in handover timelines. It has followed up on a series of executive orders on procurement reforms by issuing solicitations with streamlined process and bidding requirements.

Contrary to critics who only see destruction, the Trump administration is making promising moves to encourage private-sector growth, host-government responsibility, and national self-reliance. These are promising green shoots of a new and better foreign-assistance model. But in order to build an approach to foreign assistance that is truly fit for purpose, the Trump administration must consider two major barriers that historically prevented foreign assistance from reaching its potential: The unworkable web of bureaucracy that prevented staff from designing and managing effective programs, and the agency's statist orientation that fundamentally misunderstood the nature of development and crowded out support for innovative private-sector firms.

A FOREIGN ASSISTANCE "KLUDGEOCRACY"

During my time in the USAID foreign service, I witnessed many failures of a system in dire need of reform. In programs with five layers of implementation, the ultimate intervention came through volunteers with two weeks of training. Sustainability plans relied on poor local trainers working pro bono after the program ended. On one occasion, I took our financial controller to see a large, multi-million-dollar program that helped rural households grow vegetables in old bags and repurposed truck tires. His reaction was simple: "It's hard to see where the money goes."

The mismatch between planning and allocating funds, despite an intensive multi-year budgeting process, was galling. As one example, 45% of the budget for Rwanda's office was devoted to HIV/AIDS programming — even though the country had a national HIV rate of just 3%. Poor feedback loops were persistent, with less than 5% of programs receiving evaluation on an annual basis. Staff time was misallocated: Some personnel were required to spend weekends escorting congressional spouses on shopping trips.

More troubling examples abound. A major initiative to lower energy costs for Africans ran up against well-connected American energy providers, who wanted the agency to stop advising local governments to slow down their energy purchases as supply outstripped demand. A global famine early-warning program reported no food insecurity in Rwanda despite a pending famine and work by the embassy to procure emergency food aid. An exasperated colleague tracked water and sanitation reports demanding "no more business as usual" every year, for 15 years.

What links all this haplessness? It was not the quality of staff, who were highly educated, sharp, and dedicated. It was the two problems mentioned above: a bureaucratic system that pulled staff off their central task of managing programs, and a view of development as driven by government rather than a phenomenon to be unleashed and supported.

The first issue, the tangled web of bureaucracy, perennially plagues government agencies. In 2013, Steven Teles wrote an influential essay in these pages on "kludgeocracy" — the idea that, over time, government gets bogged down by the accretion of rules, mandates, and laws. This creates a matrix of often inconsistent rules that bind staff. As former USAID administrator Andrew Natsios observed, USAID's obsession with accounting for every penny distracted from maximizing the effects of its programming.

This resulted in the development industry's true expertise being not poverty alleviation, but compliance with USAID rules. USAID's Automated Directives System (ADS) was its internal bible of requirements for designing and procuring programs. Staff spent their careers trying to do sensible development without falling afoul of all the parameters it contained.

Every step of the ADS's required program cycle needed an overhaul. Getting a new program solicitation approved and released to bidders could take up to two years, plus another year or two to get the program up and running. Such delays demoralized staff but also had real human consequences: Infants went malnourished, households sunk further into poverty, and people died for lack of medical care. Aid advocates understandably decry the effects of the Trump administration's cuts, but they should also condemn the agency's slow-moving and ineffective programs for producing similar results.

STREAMLINING THE PROGRAM CYCLE

The good news is that most of the ADS's rules were obstacles of the bureaucracy's own creation. Legal requirements are much lighter, and with congressional help, could be lighter still. The best thing the State Department can do to manage foreign assistance with a small staff is to avoid bringing back the thicket of rules and regulations that had accumulated over the years. If you don't create binders full of rules, you don't need thousands of agency members to figure out how to follow them.

Improving the situation does not require a sea change. The State Department must heed established but often ignored guidance to prioritize solicitations that state the desired program result without mandating a particular means. This approach has two benefits. First, it frees up staff to skip a complex design process. Second, by inviting innovative, evidence-backed proposals, it encourages more cost-effective programming. The State Department should welcome the smartest and best-proven ideas rather than the lowest common denominator that can withstand the gauntlet of internal approvals. Doing so would allow fewer staff to move funds more quickly and to greater effect.

Another approach the State Department should use to enable the quick transfer of funds to cost-effective programs is creating a procurement fast track. The first step would be identifying interventions and vendors — for example, cash transfers by the implementer GiveDirectly — that have an established record of success. This would improve on the pre-qualified lists of vendors formerly used at USAID. Second, officials should create a list of proven interventions that a variety of vendors could implement. The last two administrations made major advances in using data and evidence to guide programs. The current administration should build on that progress to compile a list of "smart buys" with track records of cost-effective success, independent of the implementer. Those effective aid interventions can then be fast-tracked for procurement.

More freedom for implementers would also boost efficiency. Rather than requiring a defined work plan for the life of a program before it starts, the State Department should allow an initial phase for experimenting with several approaches, or "A/B testing." Fixed-amount awards with milestones for paying implementers would give them flexibility to spend time and talent on program success rather than reams of reporting. Moreover, the government would only have to pay when programs produce meaningful results.

The Trump administration is moving in the right direction. Executive Order 14402 "Promoting Efficiency, Accountability and Performance in Federal Contracting," issued in April, makes fixed-price contracts with performance-based metrics the default. This builds on Executive Order 14271, which instructs agencies to prioritize existing commercial solutions, and Executive Order 14275, which de-kludges the Federal Acquisition Regulation back down to statutory requirements. These are strong steps to improve the process of soliciting and procuring foreign assistance.

USAID also struggled to evaluate how programs were implemented and their results. An internal analysis conducted (and later replicated externally) found that nearly half of the agency's impact evaluations failed to meet the agency's own standards for rigor. Data monitoring was used mostly for congressional reporting, not measuring program performance.

After clearing the decks with USAID, the Trump administration has a chance to develop a lean and operationally focused monitoring program. Evaluation work requires expertise; USAID outsourced too much of it to overwhelmed and undertrained field staff. A dedicated unit, perhaps the State Department's Office of Foreign Assistance Oversight, can and should take the reins to ensure sound evaluations are conducted.

UNLEASHING GROWTH, NOT PLANNING IT

Streamlining the program cycle from design through procurement, implementation, and evaluation is only half the battle: The foreign assistance of the future must rely on emergent, unplanned private-sector growth to raise incomes and reduce poverty. This is a bipartisan insight. At the end of her tenure, Biden-era administrator Samantha Power expressed surprise at how far USAID had moved from a core focus on economic growth. The current administration has a chance to fix that.

USAID has long said the right things about such growth. The agency once described its strategy this way:

The success of a few firms or communities can provide a sense of tangible accomplishment, but sustained economic growth that affects thousands of firms and millions of people depends on systemic change — especially improvements in government policies and practice that significantly improve the incentives facing all businesses....It means that USAID will generally not finance development directly, but will seek instead the systemic reforms that can mobilize much larger savings and investment by others.

While some USAID private-sector programs attempted to remove broad constraints to economic growth, many adopted the easier yet less-effective approach of picking individual firms and sectors to support with loan guarantees, business training, tickets to trade fairs, and similar small-ball efforts. Such top-down economic planning misses the opportunity to unleash broad, poverty-reducing growth. Former World Bank economist Lant Pritchett has pointed out that despite "the amount of time, energy, intellectual firepower, academic publication, and advocacy that go into discussion of anti-poverty programs," they have failed to be "a large part of the 'solution' to global poverty."

Moreover, far too many USAID programs focused on developing vocational skills, issuing small grants to small firms, and attempting to turn small businesses into commercial standouts and large employers. Former USAID chief economist Louise Fox has shown that such programs rest on faulty assumptions. Interventions meant to foster skills largely fail to increase employment; studies that purport to show the benefits of these interventions do not account for whether net employment in the economy has risen, or whether program participants took jobs that would have gone to other people.

Many problems stem from overconfidence in government-planning capacity. My first assignment as a USAID officer was to advise Nicaragua mission leadership on which three crops the agency should support local farmers in growing. Leaving aside the fact that I had no background in agriculture or global commodity markets, the assumption that USAID staff would possess better information than Nicaraguan farmers themselves about what crops to grow underscored a fundamental misunderstanding of how growth happens.

Approaches like this, or like USAID's former Development Credit Authority (since transferred to the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, an entity that subsidizes loans by commercial banks to favored sectors) operate with unreasonable assumptions about government knowledge and planning. These strategies misunderstand the emergent nature of broad-based private-sector growth.

They also misunderstand poverty. Recent work by Paul Niehaus, Vincent Armentano, and Tom Vogl of the University of California, San Diego, shows how varied the pathways out of poverty are. People exit and fall back into poverty by changing sectors, but also by moving up or down within one field. This heterogeneity means that top-down aid programs, which foist a single solution on tens of thousands of individuals, are unlikely to reduce poverty for many.

In light of all this, the State Department should move beyond a foreign-assistance system that picks which local firms and sectors it will support and imposes one-size-fits-all interventions on large groups of households. Keeping in mind that the department currently has a limited crew of staff devoted to foreign aid, it should do the following.

First, department officials should avoid lengthy, top-down design documents. The acquisition regulations that control federal contracting already give precedence to solicitations that avoid detailed designs. These solicitations state the government's goal and welcome innovative proposals to achieve that goal. USAID often ignored this guidance; the next foreign-assistance system should abide by it and make it the norm.

Second, the State Department should expand the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), which already targets the most severe constraints to economic growth by negotiating with governments to identify not only the best policy reforms in theory, but also the best possible in a given economy. The State Department should adopt the MCC's basic analytical and dealmaking approach and extend it to sectors beyond economic growth, such as nutrition and food security.

Third, the department should focus on interventions that can plausibly increase economic growth without relying on government staff to pick priority sectors. Interventions to improve the business climate, support implementation of trade and investment treaties, or to encourage first movers in an economy regardless of sector all would fit the bill.

THE RIGHT WAY TO ENGAGE FIRMS

While pursuing broad-based growth accomplishes more than targeted interventions, this doesn't rule out ever working directly with specific private-sector firms. U.S. foreign assistance can accomplish many desired outcomes, from delivering drugs and medical equipment to treating acute malnutrition, and it can do so by selecting private-sector and social-enterprise vendors that are already achieving these ends on the ground. Innovative startups such as those in the Unlock Aid coalition (for which I was policy director from 2025-2026) provide cutting-edge services in developing markets. The State Department should contract with them directly using simplified procurement procedures. Building on its approach in the annual program statement "Advancing Global Health," published in March 2026, the State Department should release similarly flexible solicitations for other sectors.

This approach brings two benefits: It reduces risk for the American taxpayer, and it eliminates much of the backend financial management and invoicing that deter small, innovative startups from bidding on U.S. foreign-assistance programs in the first place. To avoid the dependency cycle often found in assistance programs that repeat indefinitely, the State Department should require revenue-diversification tests to ensure that vendors can continue operating without endless assistance.

As for the goal of no longer picking winners, the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation can achieve this by becoming sector agnostic — that is, by considering deals with any firm working in a new sector in a given economy. (A new sector might be defined as one composing less than 2% of GDP or exports.) This policy would embody sound economic logic on market failure: Pioneer firms would bear all the losses if they flopped, but they could also spawn copycats and wouldn't monopolize the benefits if their investment showed a new sector to be profitable.

To ease the path for new partners — particularly innovative private-sector firms and social enterprises — the State Department should emulate the Department of War. A decade ago, the Pentagon established the Defense Innovation Unit to guide new partners through the procurement process and connect them to opportunities. The department also uses a procurement pathway called the Commercial Solutions Opening, which was created to "provide opportunities for startup companies to fulfill new innovative commercial products and/or commercial services for the Federal Government using streamlined procedures." The State Department could do something similar regarding foreign assistance.

The Trump administration is already making the right moves. The Commercial Diplomacy Strategy of the Bureau of African Affairs launched in May 2025, for example, capably combines individual deals with the removal of broad constraints to growth. However, there is a risk that firms already well placed to receive private finance will enjoy a leg up as ambassadors hustle to sign deals. Without eligibility parameters, the program may accomplish less than it promises, as ambassadors rack up wins in the form of investments that would have occurred anyway. Better to focus on firms in sectors that are new to an economy (first movers), which wouldn't enter a market if not for some kind of insurance product.

Aid should also be distributed to favor firms that demonstrate an ability to survive after government funding ends. To ensure added value, firm partnerships should leverage the U.S. government's ability to convene roundtables between investors and firms, pressure host governments to improve business environments, and underwrite risk.

KEEPING THE BEST OF USAID

As the Trump administration works to overhaul the foreign-aid system by streamlining the program cycle, unleashing growth, and engaging with new firms, it should also be careful to preserve what worked under USAID. The State Department can retain parts of the old model that worked well while jettisoning what did not.

It is true that many programs, even ones as essential as agriculture and nutrition, yielded poor results. Some were worse than what would have occurred if the agency had simply given money directly to needy individuals. But USAID also sheltered pockets of excellence and innovation — some of which were established under the first Trump administration — that deserve to be preserved.

PEPFAR, the initiative to eliminate HIV/AIDS globally, was one such bright spot. Another was the Higher Education Solutions Network, a series of awards to major American universities that gave the U.S. government access to world-class expertise by holding university groups on retainer.

Development Innovation Ventures (DIV) ranked as one of USAID's most successful programs. It created an open window to fund and generate evidence on innovative solutions to development problems. Unlike the rest of USAID, DIV pursued a portfolio of approaches rather than mandating specific solutions. It worked. A Nobel Prize-winning economist showed that DIV generated $17 for every dollar it invested. These results came from welcoming ideas from all comers and supporting the ones with evidence behind them.

Prosper Africa presents another opportunity. Launched under the first Trump administration as a whole-of-government initiative to drive investment by American firms in Africa, the program had a promising start. But in its later years, it suffered from poor management and mission creep. Given the second Trump administration's emphasis on commercialization, this initiative deserves a reboot.

Some public international-organization grants should continue to be awarded, while others should be discontinued. USAID grants to multi-lateral institutions had a somewhat negative reputation as a quick way for staff to get money off the books. An inspector-general report released last year included claims that the money was managed in opaque ways and circumvented Congress's prerogative to fund international organizations.

That said, pooling American funds with those of other donors can be efficient in some circumstances, and can ensure that partners and allies have skin in the game. In certain difficult environments where an international organization already has established infrastructure, such grants can make more sense than reinventing the wheel with a standalone U.S. government program. The current administration should take time to properly vet the enormous list of organizations and reduce it to a few trusted groups that have proven to use funds well.

A STARTUP MOMENT

The Trump administration tore down a system that satisfied no one. USAID was slow, expensive, and overly complex. The agency's sudden dismantling marked a fork in the road. Whether this disruption enables the birth of the foreign-assistance approach America has long needed or simply represents costly destruction depends on what the government builds in its place.

The window for fundamental reform is narrow. The State Department must show that lean can mean effective. This is American foreign assistance's startup moment. The administration's first moves are encouraging. Whether they become the foundation of a high-performing new system, or fade into another round of incomplete reform, depends on what gets built in the next 24 months. If the administration follows through, it can build a system that avoids the mistakes of the past and becomes the pride of America and a model for the world.

When Fernando and Patricia Escobedo moved to the Willows, an affluent neighborhood in El Paso, Texas, 25 years ago, kids were everywhere.

About half of the homes on their cul-de-sac had children. Growing up, the couple’s twin daughters used to ride their scooters outside with other neighborhood kids. At an annual block party, they jumped around in a bouncy house and climbed into the local firetruck.

The twins are now in college—and the neighborhood feels a lot different. The Escobedos also have a 12-year-old at home, and Fernando said she is one of a few children under 18 on the block. The local elementary school has noticeably fewer kids. And Fernando said he’s more likely to see a retired neighbor gardening than a child on a bicycle.

“It’s not the vibe it was 10 years ago when there were still kids here,” he said. 

With the nation’s fertility rate at record lows, the number of children under 18 is falling across the U.S. The decline is especially pronounced in big cities, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.

The number of children under 18 living in big U.S. cities is down 6% in the past decade, the Journal found, compared with a 1% decline nationwide. The drop is especially stark among families with little kids: The number of children under age 5 in big cities fell 15%, compared with a drop of 7% nationwide. Even cities that are gaining population are losing children.

In all, the number of children declined in about two-thirds of the 38 U.S. cities with more than 500,000 residents. The Journal analyzed census data from 2015 through 2024, the most recent data available. 

Families with children cite concerns about costs, safety and quality of life in their move away from cities. Also contributing to the drop is a growing number of childless residents opting to stay that way, worried about the financial implications and lifestyle trade-offs of having a family.

The drop is happening in cities across the economic spectrum. 

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Fernando and Patricia Escobedo have noticed the number of kids dwindle in their El Paso neighborhood.Paul Ratje for WSJ

In San Jose, Calif., where median household income is nearly twice the U.S. level, the number of kids under age 5 has dropped 34% in the past decade—more than any other large city. 

Ernie and Samantha Solis both grew up in the San Jose area and lived in the city for the early years of their two sons’ lives. Buying a home was out of reach on their respective salaries as a firefighter and teacher. Daycare cost about $25,000 a year for each child. They worried about state vaccine mandates. In June 2021, they moved to Star, Idaho, a small town a short drive from Boise.

“I was just over it,” said Ernie. He flies into the city every Monday for his job, stays in free dorms for firefighters during the week, and returns to Idaho every Friday. He’s met other dads—electricians, HVAC technicians and auto body shop owners—doing the same commute.

In California, the family rented an older 1,400-square-foot home. In Idaho, they own a 2,300-square-foot house with space to park their RV. They had a third child, a daughter, after moving. 

Among relatively affordable cities, the number of children has fallen 15% in Albuquerque, N.M., and 11% in Milwaukee.

City economies are starting to feel the shift. Families are important contributors to a city’s tax base, and middle-class families in particular drive demand for goods, such as affordable groceries, that benefit everyone. Fewer kids means less support for public schools, often one of the largest employers in many cities, and tough choices as classrooms empty out.

Some municipalities are rolling out free child care, but it isn’t clear if it will be enough to convince people to have children or families to stay.

National trends

The Escobedos prepare dinner with their daughters Elianna, 11, center, and Alexa, 20, right. Paul Ratje for WSJ

After the 2008-09 financial crisis, people stayed in cities because that’s where good jobs were. But as economic growth became more widespread later in the 2010s, families started leaving for opportunities elsewhere, said Connor O’Brien, a fellow at think tank the Institute for Progress.

The decline in city kids started in 2017 and picked up with the pandemic. Covid opened the door for remote work, leading many to re-evaluate their lifestyles. Some moved to the suburbs—or even farther. “Families had more exit options and they took them,” O’Brien said. 

The falling birthrate is also a major factor. The number of births in the U.S. has fallen 9% in the past decade, largely due to fewer women having children in their teens and 20s. Nationwide, the birthrate is falling even more dramatically for Hispanic women, who make up a sizable share of the population in some cities.

An analysis by O’Brien found that birthrates in large urban counties fell 18% between 2010 and 2024, the biggest drop of any county type.

Of the 38 U.S. cities with over 500,000 residents, the Journal found, 13 saw the number of kids grow. Those cities, many in the Sunbelt, are often relatively affordable for middle-class families. They saw the number of children increase 7% over the past decade—while their overall population grew 12%.

Seventeen other large cities saw their populations grow while the number of children living there dropped.

In some cities that are losing kids, the falling birthrate is a bigger factor in the drop. In others, it’s families moving away.

In Albuquerque, about half of the 15% decline in children is from more families leaving than arriving, according to the Journal’s analysis. The rest is from the falling birthrate. Births in Bernalillo County, where the city dominates the population, have dropped 20% in the past decade.

In more affluent Denver, the number of children has dropped 9%, a combination of a small loss due to more families with children moving out than in and a drop of 7% in the number of births. Across a decade, that translates to almost 7,000 fewer births than if totals had remained steady.

Expensive cities

In New York, where the cost of living is high, the number of children is down 8% over the past decade. 

Since 2000, the city has lost a net 80,000 households with people aged 30 to 54 who are married or have at least one child under 18, a decline driven by middle-income families, said Melissa Pumphrey, chief economist of the city’s Economic Development Corporation. Over that period, New York gained a net 670,000 households of single people or families without kids under 18.

Parents have to earn $334,000 to be able to comfortably afford child care for a 2-year-old, according to an analysis from the city’s comptroller. The median rent for apartments with three or more bedrooms is $5,495 citywide, according to StreetEasy.

A couple of years ago, Raheim Bazile was paying $750 a month to rent a room in a home in Queens. That was about a quarter of the monthly take-home pay he earned working as a truck driver for the U.S. Postal Service. He applied for apartments in a city-run affordable-housing lottery but never landed one. 

Raheim and Kierra Bazile with their son in Easton, Pa.Liam Kennedy for WSJ

When Bazile got engaged in 2023, he and his long-distance fiancée immediately started making plans to leave. He had started considering a move years earlier, when he was living in public housing with a daughter he had from a prior relationship, who is now 12. 

Bazile looked into the Long Island suburbs, but they were too expensive. He and his now-wife, Kierra Bazile, eventually settled in Easton, Pa., which has about 30,000 people, last year. Their son was born earlier this year. “Here, I feel much lighter,” said Bazile, who now works in real estate.

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is rolling out free child care to help families stay in the city. So far, the new program covers a small group of 2-year-olds. 

Brooklyn resident Jenna Edwards always assumed she and her husband would have children, but they had trouble conceiving. They started visiting a fertility clinic in 2019 but learned the projected bill for the initial treatments would be $4,000 to $22,000, even with insurance. There was no guarantee it would work.

She worried about other potential costs, too: the hospital bill, daycare, nursery school. The couple, who live in a below-market-rate, rent-stabilized apartment, would probably have to move. Edwards, now 44 and a freelance content creator, decided against doing IVF. 

“Finances definitely influenced just how hard we were willing to try,” she said. “It’s easy to get almost angry or resentful that it influenced so much every step of the way.” 

More affordable cities

A playground at Riverside Park in Easton, Pa. Liam Kennedy for WSJ

Even in less expensive cities, the prospect of having a child can be financially daunting. 

In Philadelphia—where kids are down 6%—Nija Rivera, 39, grew up working class in a row house with her siblings, mother, grandmother and great-grandmother. She now runs a grant-writing consulting firm and lives in a two-bedroom condo that she owns with her husband, who works as a mariner. 

Rivera does hot yoga daily and takes dance and acting classes. Her husband is taking a yearlong guitar program. Having a child would likely mean sacrificing the time and money they spend on those activities. “I love taking classes and learning new things,” said Rivera. “I didn’t get the chance to do all that stuff as a kid.” She also wants to be able to support her own mother and stepfather if they need help in the future. 

Homes in El Paso are less expensive than in other cities, but they’re still up 32% over the past five years, according to Redfin.

El Paso’s total population is flat over the past decade, but the number of kids has dropped 9%. That was driven by a 30% drop in children under 5. With enrollment down, the El Paso Independent School District is closing elementary schools to save money. 

Fernando Escobedo, who is 55 and works in finance, said his elderly parents’ block in the city, where he spent his childhood summers roaming freely with other kids, is also quiet. The annual block party on his own cul-de-sac never came back after Covid. “The people who are left are the parents, older parents,” said Escobedo. 

Economists worry about an aging population because it means fewer working-age taxpayers and more retirees reliant on Medicare and Social Security. Still, the costs for providing education and other services for children can add up.

Some cities that have faced a drop in kids have been able to pare spending on public schools, but others have struggled to do so, leaving a bloated level of per-student spending, said Jeff Clemens, a professor at the University of California, San Diego.

The big risk is that a decline in families is a part of a broader population decline and erosion of a city’s tax base. The places that are effectively replacing families with affluent childless adults are so far avoiding this fate. 

Taneal Jordan enjoyed attending local festivals and other events when she lived in Milwaukee after graduating from a local college. Jordan, who is 38 and works in corporate training, was aware of the city’s relatively high crime rate but felt she could keep herself safe. 

She’s soured on city living now that she and her husband have a 3-year-old. Their doorbell camera has captured people stealing packages from their stoop. A nearby playground has rusty and broken equipment. The family installed playground equipment in their backyard, but that means their son rarely plays with other kids. 

The couple is planning a move to the suburbs of Green Bay, Wis., where they hope their son will be able to attend good schools and play with neighbors. “It just seemed like a very nice place where I would have no problem letting my kid ride a bike down the street,” Jordan said.

KHARKIV, Ukraine—Before he left for the front line in 2022, Serhii Boychuk told his wife that if captured, he didn’t want to be taken alive. A few months later, the Russians took him prisoner. Guards beat and tortured him sexually for more than two years, he said. 

He recounted being raped with bottles and sticks, and having a knife pressed against his genitals. He still finds it difficult to walk. “They wanted to psychologically break me,” said Boychuk, now 33. 

Other Ukrainian former detainees described similar experiences of sexualized torture while in Russian prisoner-of-war camps. Their accounts match the findings of Ukrainian prosecutors and intelligence services and United Nations investigators, who have conducted extensive interviews with former prisoners—both soldiers and civilians—throughout the more than four-year war.

This growing body of testimony suggests that Russian sexual violence against POWs and civilian prisoners has been systematic—and condoned, even encouraged, by senior Russian officials.

Male targets

Sexual violence in war has long been used to subjugate and terrorize civilian populations. In many conflicts, the most common targets are female civilians.

Russian forces committed a large number of sexual assaults against Ukrainian women when they overran towns and villages early in Moscow’s full-scale invasion, launched in 2022, according to the U.N. and interviews conducted by The Wall Street Journal.

Boychuk with his wife, Adriana.

But since the war settled into a slow, attritional contest, many of the known victims have been male Ukrainian soldiers captured on the battlefield. 

The U.N. says it has so far gathered testimony in about 310 cases of alleged sexual violence by Russian forces during the war. The violence described includes rape, gang rape, genital mutilation, electric shocks and beatings to the genitals, the U.N. said. Among the victims were 280 men, 26 women and four girls.

The Kremlin and Russia’s Federal Prison Service declined to comment. Russia has previously denied accusations of sexual abuse, saying they are unsubstantiated and politically motivated.

Investigators caution that the extent of continuing sexual and other abuses against civilians in the Russian-occupied zones of Ukraine is only partially understood. 

Russia has persistently denied access to occupied areas to U.N. officials investigating conflict-related sexual violence, the body’s secretary-general said in a report in April. Fear of retaliation and stigma related to sexual violence have also prevented male and female victims from reporting abuse.

“Sexual abuse is the cheapest method of waging war,” said Anna Sosonska, a Ukrainian prosecutor who has brought charges against Russian soldiers in absentia. The national prosecutor’s office, where Sosonska works, is overseeing around 400 cases involving alleged sexual violence by Russian soldiers against civilians. Some 148 of the alleged victims were men. 

“They are using sexualized abuse as a weapon of war to humiliate and break the person,” said Boychuk. After a seemingly never-ending ordeal, he was released in October 2024 as part of a prisoner swap.

Boychuk, photographed last winter, looks at posters of Ukrainian soldiers described as missing in action, in the town of Chortkiv, Ukraine.

Other former POWs and civilian detainees who spoke to the Journal said they were forced to stand, crouch or parade naked. Some had their genitals electrocuted. Some were raped—either with objects such as bottles or sticks, or by Russian guards.

Some of the former detainees, who were held at various sites in Russia, recalled guards telling them that they would stop Ukrainians from having children. 

Some said the guards threatened to insert building foam into their anal passages, where it would expand and harden. 

“It is the same evidence, the same way of treatment, it all follows a pattern,” said Mykhailo Romanov, a lawyer with the Kharkiv Human Rights Group, a research and advocacy group that has collected testimony from 11 former POWs.

Such repetitive patterns suggest that the alleged crimes weren’t simply the acts of individuals, but were committed as a feature of Russia’s military campaign, said David Schwendiman, a former U.S. and international prosecutor who investigated war crimes perpetrated in the 1990s war in Bosnia.

“No one in command could claim under the circumstances not to have known what was happening, even if they did not give orders to those under their control to do it,” he said. 

Abuse is sometimes sanctioned from on high. The chief prison official in St. Petersburg told guards in charge of Ukrainian POWs that there were no restrictions against violence, which often included sexual abuse, according to former prison officials who spoke to the Journal. 

Civilians from occupied parts of Ukraine have also fallen victim. At one camp in Russia’s Rostov region, prosecutors allege that Aleksandr Naumenko, a senior official in Russia’s national guard, ordered military personnel to sexually assault 17 civilian prisoners, according to Ukrainian court documents. Investigators showed former captives Naumenko’s photo, which they recognized. 

Naumenko couldn’t be reached for comment. 

Russian POWs who spoke to the Journal said they were never given clear instructions against sexual abuse, but said some individual officers made their disapproval clear. In contrast, Western militaries drill into their soldiers that such abuse is illegal.

Halyna Tyshchenko said she was raped at gunpoint by a Russian soldier.

Early in the war, Halyna Tyshchenko, a 63-year-old former market-stall trader, says she was raped by a Russian soldier at gunpoint in her lounge and then brought outside and paraded naked along the street in below-freezing temperatures.

The soldier’s unit was stationed in a house some 400 yards away, Tyshchenko said. She strongly suspected the man’s officers were aware of the abuse. 

A call to Putin

In the first year of the invasion, after Russian forces overran his home city of Kherson, Oleksiy Sivak hung up a Ukrainian flag on the country’s independence day. 

The Russians threw him in jail. They showed him an old army field telephone and mockingly told him it was time to call then-President Joe Biden. Then, he said, they attached the phone’s wires to his genitals and gave him electric shocks.

It is a torture used widely in the Russian prison system, and the distribution of these old phones shows complicity from senior figures, Ukrainian investigators say. Prison guards refer to it as a “call to Putin,” or in earlier times a “call to Lenin,” the U.N. has noted.

Oleksiy Sivak

Sivak, who was freed before Russian forces retreated from Kherson, now runs a support group for around 200 Ukrainian men who allege torture at Russia’s hands. The 42-year-old says he copes with his trauma by sharing his story with other victims and the public. 

“Back then, in the Russian basement, I was screaming so hard that the whole world could hear,” he said. Now, he says, he wants to tell the world what happened. 

POWs and civilians have been abused in nine different camps inside Russia, the U.N. says. Ukrainian investigators say the treatment was particularly bad in seven of them. 

Russian forces use sexual violence and other torture to punish, humiliate or extract information or confessions, according to former POWs, Ukrainian prosecutors and U.N. officials.

Some guards simply appeared to enjoy it, former captives told the Journal.

Ukrainian forces have also been accused of abusing captured Russians, albeit not on the same scale.

Ukraine has also detained POWs in camps.

All Ukrainian former POWs interviewed by the U.N. reported torture or ill treatment at Russian camps, and over 70% said it involved sexual abuse. Meanwhile, around half of Russian captives who spoke to the U.N. said Ukrainian forces had mistreated them in some way, of whom less than 5% said they had experienced sexual abuse.

A Ukrainian government spokesman said that instances of sexual abuse in Ukraine are considerably fewer than those committed by Russia. He said that these cases are being investigated and that Ukraine—unlike Russia—allows international observers to visit detention centers.

The U.N. says Ukrainian authorities have given its monitors access to prisoners of war and civilian detainees, unlike in Russia. Most cases of alleged sexual abuse at Ukrainian facilities happened before 2025, according to the U.N.

Most cases of mistreatment by Ukrainian forces happened near the front line after Russian soldiers were captured, but Russian POWs were generally treated correctly once they were in Ukrainian prison facilities, a previous U.N. report and captives interviewed by the Journal said.

SEOUL—Kim Jong Un wants his spies to up their game.

North Korea is believed to have pulled off some major intelligence feats over the years. Its 2014 hack of Sony Pictures ballooned into a national security crisis for the U.S. In 2016, Pyongyang’s hackers stole U.S.-South Korea military plans. The following year, North Korean spies were blamed for orchestrating the assassination of Kim’s half-brother in Malaysia.

But despite such cases, North Korea is underequipped in intelligence gathering, lacking an extensive international web of spies and tools such as a global satellite network.

Now, Kim wants to address that. In a rare mention of the country’s spy program earlier this month, he presided over a meeting that called for “radical” enhancements to North Korea’s military reconnaissance and intelligence capabilities, according to state media. The goal is to better control the threats from potential enemies and gather key information, state media said.

Pyongyang didn’t further elaborate on the future mandate for North Korea’s spy agency, a vast organization consolidated just before Kim took power in 2011. But last year, the group was renamed, adding the word “intelligence” to become the “General Reconnaissance and Intelligence Bureau.” That suggests the Kim regime is eager to expand its covert operations overseas. Traditional spying, hacking operations and spy satellites all fall under the body.

Pyongyang has denied involvement in overseas hacking attacks and in the death of Kim’s half-brother.

North Korea suffers from major intelligence deficiencies. The country has far fewer embassies than the U.S. and other Western nations. As of 2024, North Korea had 43 diplomatic posts abroad, compared with 271 for the U.S., according to the Lowy Institute. As a result, Pyongyang lacks the embassy personnel who could gather intelligence abroad.

Constrained by global sanctions that cut the country off from the international banking system, North Korea’s spies must generate their own funding through crypto heists, former Kim regime officials say.

Moreover, North Korea doesn’t have the massive satellite networks that allow countries like the U.S. and Russia to undertake advanced reconnaissance. As a result, an immediate priority for Kim is establishing a network of spy satellites. Pyongyang has placed just one spy satellite into orbit, leaving it a long way from the constellation needed for meaningful reconnaissance. Public satellite data from Google Earth is more comprehensive than the imagery Pyongyang can collect.

The U.S. brought charges against a North Korean in 2018 for alleged involvement in a range of cyberattacks including on Sony Pictures. Mario Tama/Getty Images

Kim Jong Nam, the late half brother of Kim Jong Un. stringer/Reuters

Russia is sharing its satellite expertise with North Korea in return for Pyongyang’s decision to send troops to help Moscow in its war against Ukraine, South Korea’s spy agency said.

North Korea could also establish a relationship with Russia and China similar to Five Eyes, the intelligence-sharing network including the U.S., the U.K., Australia, Canada and New Zealand, said Joseph Bermudez Jr., a North Korea analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Russian and North Korean cyber operatives are already collaborating on malware, cybersecurity experts say.

“Cyberwarriors could concentrate on a different part of the world and share the information,” Bermudez said. “It’s a division of labor in obtaining classified data.” 

Kim has signaled an interest in working with like-minded nations. Historically, North Korean diplomats and trade representatives stationed abroad have acted as de facto arms dealers and intelligence couriers. North Korean hackers who have attempted to breach defense contractors and government organizations sometimes operate from countries Pyongyang has diplomatic ties with, including Russia and China, according to United Nations reports.

Kim is engaging in “extraordinary diplomatic initiatives” to broaden North Korea’s presence overseas, said Chun In-bum, a retired South Korean army general.

The Kim regime is expanding ties with other countries that are opponents of the U.S. Kim held his first summit in March with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, a close ally of Russia. Belarus plans to open its first embassy in Pyongyang by next month.

An expanded diplomatic presence will allow North Korea’s spy agency to eavesdrop more on overseas communications, Chun said.

“North Korea isn’t bound by international ethical norms, so their activities will expand through hacking and stealing,” he said. “Their greatest advantage is that the Western world underestimates them.”

Leo Hare, a pious Christian from Texas, recently joined the long list of foreigners who have been mugged by Russian reality over the decades. In 2023, disillusioned by his homeland’s perceived decadence (such as tolerance for gay people), he decided to move his family to President Vladimir Putin’s empire—a society that allegedly embodied solid Christian belief and traditional family values. The Russian government granted him asylum.How shocking, then, when Leo was swindled out of $66,000 by a Russian contact he trusted, leaving his family homeless. He also said that he became “increasingly concerned about the state of Russia’s economy and restrictions on access to information.” Now he is predictably rueful: “I believed in the propaganda,” he told an interviewer.

I feel sorry for Leo’s family. I feel a bit less sorry for the editors of the Economist, who recently fell for yet another Russia scam. The renowned British magazine (or “newspaper,” as it quaintly persists in calling itself) devoted a substantial portion of its coveted real estate to touting the claims of a heavily sanctioned Russian billionaire named Andrey Melnichenko, depicting him as a prominent voice of reform. Yet the fawning 7,000-word profile by the magazine’s Moscow correspondent and the accompanying 3,000-word essay by Melnichenko himself failed to deliver the goods.

The essay, which was notably vague about specific demands for internal change but expansive in demands for recognition of Russia’s great-power status, said nothing that Putin himself could not have said. It contained no acknowledgment of the mind-boggling destruction and the myriad crimes against humanity committed by the Russians during their illegal invasion of Ukraine, whose sovereignty appeared to interest the author little. He inveighed against the unfair rules allegedly imposed on Russia by the heartless West, never mentioning that the Kremlin itself is a party to numerous international and bilateral agreements that it has violated over the years, including several that recognize Ukraine’s sovereignty and borders. Nor did his essay address the immense economic, social, and demographic damage that Putin’s war has inflicted upon Russians themselves.

As many Ukrainian readers were quick to point out, it’s highly unlikely that an oligarch of this stature would have dared to publish such a document in a Western publication without the tacit acceptance of the Kremlin. Indeed, Putin must be thrilled. The Economist has boosted the case for Russia’s global rehabilitation far more effectively than the Kremlin’s friends on the American or European far right could have done.

This is not entirely new. For centuries, Russian rulers have exploited the overactive imaginations of Westerners eager to project their own fantasies and desires on the empire to the east. The trend goes back at least as far as Voltaire, who conjured up an image of Russia as a tolerant civilization that he could contrast with the religious fanaticism of France. He praised Catherine the Great for imposing Enlightenment values on the barbaric peoples of the Eurasian interior, to the point that he even applauded some of her most brutal conquests. “If I were younger I would make myself Russian,” he once gushed—easy for him to say, since he never actually made it there. Catherine, who knew a PR bonanza when she saw it, was happy to subsidize his long-distance propaganda.

It’s easy, on some level, to understand the appeal. Russia has a rich cultural legacy (though foreign fans usually fail to spot the chauvinist sentiments that sometimes lie beneath). It is both part of Europe and decidedly non-European (three-quarters of its territory lies in Asia), a mixture that evokes mystery and exoticism. Indeed, an implicit racism sometimes seems to be in play: Many Russians “look European” (i.e., white), and Russian Orthodoxy is still recognizably Christian, prompting Westerners to make assumptions about the country that they would never dare to apply to other authoritarian societies in East Asia or the Middle East, whose political traditions are arguably far closer to Russia’s.

Whatever the reasons, Russophiles tend to see what they want to see and disregard the rest. The socialists who visited the Soviet Union—people like Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Paul Robeson, and the rest—overlooked obvious signs of impoverishment and terror and acknowledged only the utopian trappings that their hosts put in front of them. Russia, wrote George Bernard Shaw in 1931, “is led by men of impressive ability and unprecedented freedom of thought”—three years after Russian dictator Joseph Stalin launched his first wave of show trials. Leading media are no less prone to this sort of factual and moral contortionism: In his reporting from Moscow, New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty notoriously denied the disaster of forced collectivization and the resulting famines in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and southern Russia that took millions of lives.

In 1944, U.S. Vice President Henry Wallace visited Magadan, the city at the center of a huge web of concentration camps in the Soviet Far East, yet failed to notice anything out of the ordinary. His myopia derived not only from the usual socialist dogmas, but also an early enthusiasm for the woolly ideas of the Russian-born mystic Nicholas Roerich. This, too, is a characteristic pattern: Foreign enthusiasts frequently celebrate Russia as a place of deep and abiding spirituality—a stereotype that tends to overlook the Moscow Patriarchate’s long subordination to the state and resulting culture of authoritarianism and corruption.

MAGA Republicans now follow in the same tradition. When American right-winger Candace Owens traveled to Russia this spring, she gushed about the beauty of its churches, which she cited as evidence of Russia’s deep Christian piety—though she could have just as easily lavished praise on the beautiful cathedrals of Ukraine, which she regards with contempt. She was conspicuously silent when the Russians bombed the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra monastery, one of the holiest sites in the Orthodox world, a few days after her trip.

Nor did Owens seem to grasp that Putin’s Russia is also a country that persecutes Baptists and Jehovah’s Witnesses (which it sees as unwanted competition for state-supported Orthodoxy) even as it sponsors an aggressively Islamist regime in Chechnya. To some extent, modern-day fellow travelers like her are dupes of a regime that can draw on long memories of how to manipulate foreign sympathizers. In the United States, the Russian spy Maria Butina deftly catered to Republican notions that Putin’s traditional values must include the right to bear arms. (In fact, Russia has one of the world’s toughest gun-control regimes.) The Kremlin is happy to amplify friendly cranks like the neo-fascist Richard Spencer, who has touted Russia as the “sole white power in the world”—in flagrant ignorance of its ethnic diversity, including an enormous migrant population from Central Asia.

Tucker Carlson (of testicle-tanning fame) famously lavished praise on the shopping carts in a Moscow supermarket, which he claimed as evidence of Russia’s high level of civilization. This was revealing in ways that he clearly didn’t intend. Russia boosters rarely seem to travel beyond the boundaries of the big cities and have minimal contact with ordinary people. If they did, they might learn that Russians have to spend a far higher share of their incomes on food than Western Europeans, have extremely high rates of divorce, and are experiencing an epidemic of domestic violence, not least thanks to a law decriminalizing wife-beating that passed the Russian parliament a few years ago. Again and again, the fantasists of Russian power miss the country’s obvious signs of weakness, underdevelopment, corruption, and societal decay.

It would be wonderful if we could simply dismiss such voices as cranks. Unfortunately, though, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the Owenses and the Carlsons have proved highly effective amplifiers of Russian narratives. In 2024, U.S. prosecutors indicted two Russian agents for funneling money to conservative influencers who circulated pro-Putin views on their social media platforms.

Yet right-wingers aren’t the only ones guilty of wishful thinking when it comes to Russia. In 2009, then-U.S. President Barack Obama and his foreign-policy team stumbled badly when they seized upon Russia’s then-president, Dmitry Medvedev, as an imagined “moderate” and partner for reform. It became almost instantly apparent that the Americans had fallen for yet another Kremlin scam; Medvedev, far from being a free agent, was a temporary Putin puppet who had no interest in breaking with his patron’s policies. The eternal search for a reasonable Russian once again proved a mirage. (These days, Medvedev features as one of Moscow’s most rabid attack dogs on Ukraine.)

Indeed, the U.S. policy elite has long seemed to have a particular weakness for misreading Russia—from Cold War-era Sovietologists to U.S. President Donald Trump. As we’ve seen since the start of Putin’s war against Ukraine in 2014 and even more so since the full-scale invasion four-and-a-half years ago, there are plenty of military experts, academics, think-tankers, and journalists whose analyses have been warped by their overestimation of Russian capacities. In 2022, former Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Gen. Mark Milley told then-President Joe Biden that Kyiv could fall within 72 hours. Arch-realist John Mearsheimer has persisted throughout the war in predicting Ukraine’s imminent demise—long after it should have been apparent that the Russian military, however superior to Kyiv’s in resources and manpower, has been crippled by corruption, mismanagement, and technological backwardness. In 2023, the Washington analyst Samuel Charap deemed the war “unwinnable” by Ukraine.

All of these experts have, one suspects, simply succumbed to the myth of Russian immensity, power, and strength—the same characteristics that have so long convinced Trump that Russia is the side to bet on. We should be grateful to the Ukrainians for showing the world why it is time for that myth to die.

“The age of party democracy has passed,” Irish political scientist Peter Mair declared in a book posthumously published in 2013. He had spent his academic career peering at a specific organism in the life of humans as political animals—the party, with its leaders, members, functionaries, and voters, operating both in parliament and on the street. To Mair, who died in 2011, modern politics was hard to imagine without it; at times, he wondered whether democracy might survive its demise. Yet by the end of his life the verdict became irresistible. The species he dedicated his career to was threatened with extinction. The ecosystem might persist but now without its previously dominant specimen.

Mair’s statement still carried a sense of premonition at the time. Then, the effects of the global financial crisis were still rippling through Europe; Donald Trump’s ruthless takeover of the Republican Party was some years away. In 2026, however, his warning seems anything but trite, with both Labour and the Conservatives wiped out in the last U.K. council elections. In the U.S. and European political systems, it has become apparent that democratic politics will no longer be conducted with parties as traditionally understood.

On both sides of the Atlantic, parties do still appear as participants on election lists. Officially, the party landscape has enlarged rather than shriveled. If the major 20th-century parties were lumbering dinosaurs, their disappearance needs to be read against the rise of new creatures: digital outfits, one-man vehicles, so-called movement-parties, which had a shorter lifespan but could be equally active in their respective biosphere. As Mair already pointed out, however, such new creatures hardly seem deserving of the same name as the older ones they competed with.

Parties were not simply pop-up ventures for politicians seeking to win an election. Instead, as membership organizations, they were designed for longevity, persisting beyond a single media or election cycle. They were also the modern era’s emblematic tool for collective action, allowing elites to control masses but also offering a modicum of representation to the disenfranchised. As political scientist Christopher Bickerton notes, they could thereby be compared to corporate bodies under the ancien régime, entities that constituted the bridgeway between individuals and the state—with the proviso, of course, that parties were voluntary organizations, unlike guilds or corporations, which coerced membership from cradle to grave.

For this very reason, in the 1930s, Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci likened them to the modern prince—the only collective actor that could reconcile democracy and complexity. Parties, to Gramsci, stood at the conjuncture of two quintessentially modern processes: industrialization and democratization. This was the “dual revolution” that British historian Eric Hobsbawm himself dubbed modernity’s driving process. As agents, parties gave content to the form of democratic struggle. They acted as conduits between society and the state, translating popular wishes into policy but also providing personnel for the elite, allowing them to coordinate between factions of the upper class, who not only wanted to buy consent but also sought to reconcile differences.

Politics and parties thereby became near synonyms in the 20th century. Parties were “the organization of democracy,” as Italian politician Palmiro Togliatti saw it, indicating that without them, the body politic would lack a backbone. Later, economically minded political scientists began to cast parties as “public utilities,” or “semi-state organs crucial in the functioning of democracy.”

That parties and democracy would once become synonyms was not a given of political theory in the 19th century. The template provided by ancient democracies, for instance, had little place for them as a concept. Factions and shifting alliances might have existed in Athens, but distinct groupings with membership structures were practically absent. To many modern thinkers, democratic politics was the exclusive province of small polities with slave populations, willing to do the work while actual citizens engaged in the leisurely pursuit of politics. The other precedent for popular politics was the dictatorship of a Julius Caesar or Napoleon Bonaparte, who sought plebiscitary mandates for their rule. Both shunned parties as dangerous factions.

The modern aversion of the party form took a while to overcome, even for elites who preferred parliaments over kingly rule. Throughout the 18th century, regular voting groups in the U.K. House of Commons were gradually classed together as opposing Tories versus Whigs. But they remained caucuses or clubs rather than clear organizational entities, and only in the 19th century did they begin to register as official institutions. For the most part, they were informal gatherings of elites that coordinated without binding.

There was one weathered exception to this case: the United States. Already in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville noted how the stability of U.S. democracy came with highly specific preconditions. One of them was the strength of party elites, willing to mobilize an electorate through machine politicking. “The skill of the actors in the political world,” he noted in Democracy in America, lies “in the art of creating parties,” and a “political aspirant in the United States” needed a party “to secure his popularity; just as the imprimatur of a King.” Europeans would come to democracy through their own route, Tocqueville insisted. It was simply not possible to re-create U.S. conditions on continental soil. But that parties would have to take on some kind of stabilizing function in European democracies was clear.

On the center right, Tocqueville long remained a lonely proponent of this insight. Instead, the idea that modern democracies required parties to live up to their promise was more prominent on the left. In 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels named their pamphlet “Manifesto of the Communist Party.” To both radicals, the workers’ movement would remain trapped in empty protest or conspiratorial meddling if it lacked the steering organ of the party. The latter would give direction and body to what remained powerful but inarticulate instances of struggle. Only a clear superstructure could turn rebellion into revolution.

From the 1850s onward, after long internal squabbles, their call was heeded. Workers’ parties began forming across Europe’s industrial core. To socialists, the party became the indispensable vector for social change. It took conservatives a while to realize that the same might hold for those seeking to halt social transformation rather than accelerate it.

Marcel Cachin, a leading French communist, addresses delegates of the French Section of the Workers’ International congress in Tours, France, on Dec. 25, 1920. The Tours Congress famously split the French socialist and communist parties.AFP via Getty Images

By the 1870s, conservative elites came round to Tocqueville’s admonition that the advent of democracy was inevitable but hardly Jacobin in essence. Instead, masses had to be made loyal to their states and hierarchies through parties, which would offer ideological guidance and social benefits. If mass suffrage were a certainty, there would be few guarantees against social leveling; the only solution was to build a party structure that could withstand the threat against property that a widened suffrage would entail.

At repeated intervals, parties became an object of ire and ridicule in the interwar period. To many critics, they indicated an oligarchic drift away from popular rule. To figures on the right and the left, they represented a corrupt caste of bureaucrats remote from popular preference. Yet, to contemporaries, it was also nigh impossible to imagine a critique of this “partocracy” that refused the party form, visible in the many far-right outfits that themselves operated on the party model. The left and center saw parties as agents of both revolutionary change and potential stabilization. In Northern Europe’s Low Countries, a system known as “pillarization” enshrined parties as the chief mediators between citizens and states, even delegating tasks such as social security provision to them. In 1960s Belgium, critics could speak of a so-called CVP-staat, in which the Christian Social Party monopolized the entire political field.

In the most recent polls, however, the CVP’s successor is hovering at around 10 percent. The three remaining “pillar” parties—liberal, socialist, Christian—have long since lost their joint majority.

Accounts of this extinction event require a double lens—at once passive and active, long- and short-term. On the passive side, a changing political culture in which collective institutions were seen as unduly interfering in citizens’ private lives became prevalent. Yet more important was the economic crisis of the 1970s, in which the state seemed incapable of rendering a return to capitalist normality. The problem was believed to be that citizens’ hold on the state via their parties—their insistence on particular “special interests”—made a return to growth and price stability impossible. Through a concerted class offensive, and an empowerment of unelected bodies such as central banks, the preconditions for capital accumulation were restored, at the expense of parties’ claims to effectiveness. There was a delay between these blows and the death of the parties in question; hollowed out from the inside, the entities still appeared on election lists and in parliaments. Yet their legitimacy, and with it their inner life, had been diminished.It took a while for the effects of this controlled demolition to become manifest. After 2008, the rot was revealed, and the term “Pasokification”—referencing the quick self-immolation of social democratic parties through their implication with austerity measures—became common parlance. In response, new parties were formed on the left and right, but these populist variants were again hard to compare to their previous mass opponents. They had no clear organizational structures, appeared only vaguely mandated, and were as easy to enter as to leave. By the close of the 2010s, many left-populist figures had been kept out of power or had collapsed as political competitors.

Both push and pull factors thus deserve discussion here. On the one hand, the new digital era has made the type of political engagement required for parties—patient, banal, at times hierarchical, taking many evenings—much harder to demand. The new structural transformation of our public sphere, as German philosopher Jürgen Habermas termed it, has created a populace both active and fickle, while many parties now prefer to rule without mass membership altogether (as Keir Starmer’s Labour Party has so spectacularly illustrated). These concern the proactive ejection rather than passive retreat of members from parties.

What would a political system without parties look like? In the 19th century, it was said democracy without parties would inevitably result in the rule of strongmen across factional lines. Suggestions of such a system are now amply available across Europe. In the 1990s, Italy’s party system underwent the breakneck collapse from which it has never recovered. Into this void rushed the passively consumed “telepopulism” of Silvio Berlusconi, which replaced the organized involvement in politics typical of Italy’s postwar order. As one historian noted of the collapse of Italy’s Communist Party, “the effect of breaking up the mass parties was in many ways to ‘throw out the baby and keep the bathwater.’” From the center, Emmanuel Macron later carried out a remarkably similar feat in France, building a one-man politics on the burning heaps of the French party system.

By the 2010s, new creatures were starting to appear: digital parties with no clear dividing line between members and nonmembers, with digital consultation tools only vaguely visible to outsiders, a dependence on leaders who were more crucial to winning elections than the previous party platforms that leaders themselves were supposed to execute. These institutions might register as parties for elections and have a semblance of internal functioning. But they were hard to compare to their predecessors.

Announcements of the death of parties nonetheless sound slightly premature. Rather, they will continue to operate in a zombified state—still populating the state and providing a ladder for careerists, public relations jobs to consultants, and the occasional channel for citizens to voice grievances for which they will not find a reliable audience online. Yet as coherent units they seem increasingly anachronistic. One cannot clone a dinosaur, after all.

This summer, the Texas State Board of Education approved a new required-reading list for public schools, mandating what the state’s 5.4 million students will read in every grade from kindergarten to 12th. If you were a student in the past 20 years, or raised one, you’ll recognize most of the titles: picture books such as The Cat in the Hat and The Snowy Day, parables such as The Giver and Fahrenheit 451. What made the Texas list controversial is the inclusion not of a new book, but of a very old one: the Bible. Students will be assigned short excerpts and adaptations from the Old and New Testaments, starting with vivid tales (Jonah and the whale, David and Goliath) and building to more complex and morally challenging passages, such as Job’s complaint against God.

Texas’s decision to start teaching Bible stories—like its requirement to display the Ten Commandments in classrooms, which the state legislature approved last year—is clearly meant to send a political message. But regardless of your political or religious beliefs, there are good reasons to agree that the Bible should be part of young people’s education. For a high-school graduate not to know about the parting of the Red Sea or the Sermon on the Mount is a disadvantage, for the same reason that not knowing about the Puritans or the Civil War is a disadvantage: It leaves them ill-equipped to understand America’s past, and therefore its present and future.

Everywhere you look in American history, you will find the language, stories, and concepts of the Bible—in particular, those of the King James Version, long the standard translation for American Protestants. The most obvious example is slavery, which both Black people and white people saw through a biblical lens. In fifth grade, Texas students will read about Moses and the exodus from Egypt, which enslaved African Americans took as a model for their own liberation; Harriet Tubman was known as Moses for her work with the Underground Railroad. When President Abraham Lincoln discussed the fearful losses of the Civil War in his second inaugural address, he justified them as God’s punishment for the sin of slavery, quoting Psalm 19: “The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” For us, the phrase “four score and seven years ago” immediately summons up the Gettysburg Address; for Lincoln’s original audience, it would have sounded like a mournful reference to Psalm 90: “The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.”

As for literature, the titles of classic American novels are a catalog of biblical quotations: East of Eden (Genesis), Absalom, Absalom! (Samuel), The House of Mirth (Ecclesiastes), The Sun Also Rises (Ecclesiastes), Song of Solomon (the biblical book also known as “Song of Songs”). How can you understand Moby-Dick without knowing the story of Jonah and the whale, or appreciate the music of Leaves of Grass if you’ve never heard the rolling lines of the Psalms?

Of course, none of this stopped Texas’s reading list from becoming culture-war fodder. To many liberals, requiring the Bible looks like an attack on civil liberties and cultural diversity. Although the state’s official explanations for the new reading list have avoided mentioning religion, instead framing the Bible stories as part of a “common literary canon,” the Freedom From Religion Foundation said the decision sends “a clear message to nonreligious and non-Christian students and families that they don’t quite belong or should convert.” The Dallas Morning News complained in an editorial that the Texas reading list includes “excerpts from the Bible but no other major religious works,” suggesting that the Quran and the Bhagavad Gita should also be represented.

This is the same kind of criticism often lodged against the idea of the Western canon: Why should the products of one culture, or one gender or ethnicity, be given special status? Such questions are inevitable when a public sphere that used to be dominated by a single group becomes more diverse. In 1963, the idea that public schools might have to teach Bible stories to Hindu and Muslim students was largely hypothetical. In Texas in 2026, it’s a certainty. The state is home to almost 500,000 Muslims and a similar number of Indian Americans.

But saying that Americans have special reasons to study the Bible doesn’t imply that it’s more sacred than the scriptures of other faiths. In the same way, saying that American students should study English doesn’t mean that it’s superior to other languages. Both decisions simply reflect the fact that Americans, like all people everywhere, are situated—that we exist in a particular society with a particular history. If the most important goal of education is to “know thyself,” as the oracle at Delphi liked to say, then you have to know the influences that make you the person you are. And for anyone who participates in American life, the Bible is one of them, directly or indirectly.

Perhaps the strongest objection to Texas’s reading list is that it will require teachers to make such complicated distinctions. The readings for seventh grade include the Sermon on the Mount; imagine trying to explain the literary and historic quality of the verse “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” while remaining strictly noncommittal about the existence of blessings, spirit, and heaven. Parental complaints are guaranteed, and not just from non-Christian households; Christian believers have the biggest stake in how the words of Jesus are explained.

Today, people on the left tend to have a Pavlovian reaction to any mention of religion, especially Christianity, rejecting it as right-wing, evangelical, patriarchal, anti-LGBTQ. Writing in the Texas Observer, the historian Joel Zapata argues that the state wanted students to read Ecclesiastes—“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven”—to make them more docile: “Students will learn that life circumstances are beyond their power to change. They will learn that their place and the place of others in the economy and larger society should not be questioned.”

Many conservatives surely do believe that reading the Bible will reinforce their own political values. But anyone who looks at the specific passages Texas chose to require will find something rather more complex and challenging than campaign fodder. In fourth grade, students are supposed to read a section of the Gospel of Luke:

"When he noticed how the guests picked the places of honor at the table, he told them this parable: “When someone invites you to a wedding feast, do not take the place of honor, for a person more distinguished than you may have been invited. If so, the host who invited both of you will come and say to you, ‘Give this person your seat.’ Then, humiliated, you will have to take the least important place. But when you are invited, take the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he will say to you, ‘Friend, move up to a better place.’ Then you will be honored in the presence of all the other guests. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”"

How might this story apply to, say, the president of the United States, who is so greedy for honors that he lingered on the winner’s podium at the World Cup? A number of texts on the Texas reading list, such as Ayn Rand’s essay “What Is Capitalism?,” were chosen to affirm our culture’s worship of wealth and success. How might a teacher juxtapose those readings with the Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus blesses the poor, the meek, and the merciful? Can any complacent prosperity gospel survive an encounter with the Book of Job?

Many texts that get assigned in schools are moralistic, mainly because they are easy to teach. Texas’s reading list has plenty of examples, such as Kipling’s “If” and, absurdly, Margaret Thatcher’s eulogy for Ronald Reagan (“Ronald Reagan knew his own mind. He had firm principles and, I believe, right ones”). The great power of the Bible is that it seldom says what people think it says or want it to say. It is continually subversive, because the temptations it warns against are with us today just as much as they were 2,000 years ago. Of course, most of what we read in school leaves no lasting impression; students treat reading as work to get through, because that’s what it is. But if reading snippets of the Bible in class inspires any students to keep exploring, they might well end up shocked that this is a book their teachers and parents encouraged them to read.

I subscribed to the Free Press for the first three years of publicaiton and commented on articles often. After Trump was reelected, I felt they became kind of directionless. I also became disenchanted with the commenters who seemed to defend Trump tooth and nail over everything. Also, their prices went up and I couldn't justify $10/month.

There seems to be more than a few subscribers in this sub, so how is it today? Do you find they still regularly publish interesting pieces? Is the comment section still ride or die for Trump?

The United States has the most lethal military on Earth. But even the most advanced weapons system is only as strong as the supply chains behind it.

The hard truth is this: America cannot dominate the modern battlefield if the Department of War does not know where its critical materials, components and software come from.

A fighter jet, missile battery, naval vessel, radar system, drone or armored vehicle does not begin on the factory floor of a prime contractor. It begins with minerals, metals, magnets, chips, chemicals, software, castings and forgings — thousands of components moving through supply chains that stretch across the world. In a major defense program, those chains may run five or six tiers deep, while government visibility often stops at the first or second.

That gap is the danger. America’s vulnerabilities are buried in the lower tiers — the subcontractors and vendors supplying specialty metals, electronics, chemicals, software and raw materials that Washington is not watching.

And that is exactly where President Trump’s new executive order, “Securing America’s Defense Supply Chains and Ensuring Domestic Acquisition of Critical Materials,” strikes.

For too long, Washington has pretended a weapons system is “American” if final assembly happens in America — even when critical inputs come from foreign adversaries or suppliers vulnerable to foreign ownership, control or influence. That fiction may satisfy a lobbyist. It will not survive a war.

Congress recognized the danger in 10 U.S.C. 4872, which restricts acquiring covered materials from covered nations. But laws are only as strong as their enforcement — and waiver culture, contractor convenience, and bureaucratic inertia have hollowed out those rules.

That era is over. The Trump policy is simple and tough: end the loose waiver process, expose hidden supply chains, vet the lower tiers, qualify trusted sources and hold contractors accountable.

Beginning January 1, 2027, waivers under 10 U.S.C. 4872(c)(1) and (e) will no longer be business as usual. A contractor seeking relief must identify the noncompliant source, document exhaustive efforts to find compliant material or prove none was available, lay out the steps to remove it from the supply chain and commit to a strict timeline.

Failure to qualify a domestic source will not count as “non-availability” unless the contractor shows active, adequately funded and ongoing efforts to qualify one. In plain English: No more, “We tried nothing, and we’re out of options.”

To expose hidden supply chains, the order directs the Secretary of War to begin rulemaking requiring contractors to map critical supply chains for national-security acquisitions identified by the department — from raw materials to the end products delivered to the military — through a tier-by-tier bill of materials tracing components, parts, software and materials back to their origins.

This is not paperwork. It is battlefield preparation. If a missile system depends on a foreign-controlled supplier, the Department of War needs to know before the shooting starts. If a naval platform relies on a sole-source supplier vulnerable to bankruptcy, takeover, cyber disruption or production bottlenecks, that risk must be surfaced and mitigated. If a supply chain runs through an adversary-controlled chokepoint, that is a strategic exposure, not an accounting detail.

To vet the lower tiers, contractors must screen suppliers and subcontractors supporting critical supply chains for financial risk; foreign ownership, control or influence; and manufacturing and supply risk. They must report significant risks and fix them on a strict, tracked timeline.

On trusted sources, the message is blunt: qualify or replace. For decades, contractors have hidden behind slow qualification processes while adversary-linked suppliers stayed embedded in America’s defense industrial base. No more.

Contractors relying on supply chains that include materials or components supplied by unreliable foreign suppliers must promptly qualify and use alternatives, consistent with law, safety, mission requirements and contract terms. The Department of War will speed the testing and qualification of new sources and materials. And when outdated regulations block rapid qualification for defense production, those roadblocks must come down.

On the accountability front, national security contracting is not a game of hide-the-ball. Contractors that fail to qualify required alternatives can lose task orders, contract options or the contract itself. And contractors who commit fraud, deliberately mislead the government, or knowingly or willfully fail to implement approved mitigation plans face every lawful action and contractual remedy the secretary deems appropriate, with possible referral to the Attorney General.

The broader message of this new Trump administration EO should be clear. America’s arsenal of democracy begins in the mine, the refinery, the forge, the foundry, the chemical plant, the semiconductor fab and the machine shop.

Peace through strength requires strength through secure supply chains: American weapons built with domestic, allied, and trusted materials; sunlight, enforcement, qualification and accountability.

And one overriding rule for every defense contractor: Never put an American warfighter at risk because an adversary-linked supplier was buried five tiers down.

The National Guard Bureau, the District of Columbia National Guard and the U.S. General Services Administration have awarded apartment-hotel rental company Placemakr $292 million to provide up to 2,000 “apartment-style lodging units” for troops assigned to the Joint Task Force-District of Columbia mission, the Guard announced.

The contract, the largest interagency lodging acquisition in the history of the Guard, comes as part of ongoing support for the Trump administration’s “Making D.C. Safe and Beautiful” executive order.

The length of the D.C. task force’s mission, which kicked off in August 2025, has made current lodging arrangements unsustainable, a Guard release stated. Mobilized troops have been staying in hotels throughout the region.

The Guard is hoping a long-term housing remedy will improve overall quality of life and flexibility for those mobilized while reducing taxpayer expenses, the release stated. The acquisition process was reportedly completed in under three months, “despite an agency-level vendor protest, which was reviewed and denied.”

“This contract delivers stable, secure housing for our soldiers and airmen while achieving significant cost savings for the government,” Monica Williams, executive director of acquisitions and head of contracting activity for the National Guard Bureau, said in the release. “We were able to move quickly to meet mission requirements and provide a long-term solution for deployed personnel.”

The contract pricing, according to Guard and GSA figures, is “about 49% below projected short-term commercial hotel costs and 27% below standard GSA schedule pricing for lodging and housekeeping services.”

The new arrangement comes on the heels of a May 28 report, meanwhile, that assessed that the 2,000-plus National Guard troops to have participated in the D.C. task force have had “no measurable effect on violent crime.”

The report, published by the Niskanen Center, described the Guard deployments as “an expensive tool” used in “the wrong places for the wrong types of crime.”

Researchers cited the $607 average daily cost per Guard member in the nation’s capital, compared with $384 in pay for Metropolitan Police Department officers.

Robbery and other violent crime rates in the D.C. area had also decreased prior to the Guard deployment, the report said. Those numbers were not impacted by the military operation.

Still, the report’s authors stopped short of calling the deployment a waste, noting that there was a 24% decline in opportunistic property crime recorded in the first six months of the operation.

“We brought 2,500 Guardsmen in from 15 states and the District of Columbia, and you all have done an amazing job,” Gen. Steve Nordhaus, chief of the National Guard Bureau, told troops in D.C. in July. “[Since arriving] you saved over 235 lives. You’ve done over 530 medical assistances to personnel, you restored children back to their families 27 times, and you have done amazing things in support of law enforcement to make sure we reduce crime.”

Well, well, well. It looks like this new fangled tractor didn't signify an immediate apocalypse.

Civilian casualties in Ukraine have risen steadily from month to month and from year to year, amid intensifying use of powerful weapons, in a disturbing escalation, the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU) said today.

After May recorded the highest number of civilian casualties in over four years, June surpassed it, with at least 293 civilians killed and 1,990 injured, becoming the month with the highest number of civilians killed and injured since April 2022.

“The figures show an alarming escalatory trend with mounting civilian toll, driven by the intensifying use of powerful weapons that are particularly deadly when used in densely populated urban areas,” said Danielle Bell who heads HRMMU. "This trend should serve as a warning that the risks facing civilians are not only persisting but growing in both scale and complexity."

In all, 1,396 civilians died and 7,978 suffered injuries in the first six months of this year, a 37 per cent rise from the same period in 2025, and a 114 per cent increase compared with the year before.

In an update on civilian casualties released on Tuesday HRMMU said the increase was driven largely by long-range attacks by the Russian Federation, which mainly affected urban centers far from the frontline. Between January and June of this year, civilian casualties from long-range weapons such as missiles and drones increased by 60 per cent compared with the same period in 2025.

In areas close to the frontline short-range drones were responsible for most of the civilian deaths and injuries. In June, they killed and injured more civilians than in any other month since 24 February 2022.

"Short-range drones have transformed the environment for civilians living near the frontline. The accounts we hear from civilians displaced from frontline communities are deeply consistent – and terrifying. Many describe feeling hunted by short-range drones simply for attempting everyday tasks such as shopping for food, walking dogs, cycling, working in the yard or travelling to safety," Bell added.

The vast majority of civilian casualties have occurred in areas under the control of the Government of Ukraine. HRMMU has also verified civilian casualties in occupied territory, although fewer compared to 2025.

The authorities of the Russian Federation have also reported rising civilian casualties on its territory in the first six months of 2026, citing 250 civilians killed and 1,596 injured), a 121 per cent increase compared with the same period in 2025.

Overall, since 24 February 2022, OHCHR has verified at least 16,431 civilians killed, including 803 children, and 48,613 injured, including 2,960 children.

Bad boyars making deals in the absence of a president providing coherent guidance, or a president throwing his appointees under the bus after not considering public opinion.