Competitiveness is one of our primary values. Competition runs the world. It orients success in business, or sports—and above all in war. Adversaries seek the transient glory of military advantage. Yet none of our four biggest challenges, the climate emergency, nuclear weapons, the rise of AI, and global pandemics are “us and them” problems. They are “us” problems. This may seem more obvious with climate change and disease, but it is just as true for AI and nukes, especially in some fatal combination of AI and nukes under theoretical consideration by the masters of war. The ruins of Gaza show us that even conventional wars can approach a nuclear level of destruction.
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During the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment thinkers realized that human reasoning provided a better understanding of our natural world than the explanations found in ancient religions. The Enlightenment spawned Humanism, a non-religious, democratic, and ethical life stance that emphasized human reason, compassion, and scientific inquiry rather than divine intervention. Humanism sought rational ways of solving human problems, and it has been remarkably successful, advancing society more in the past 250 years than in all the preceding 300,000 years of human history.
Sometimes talking too much and too loudly will backfire on you. Those supporters once taking front seats are now sheepishly taking back seats. Some don’t even bother to show up. Maybe they have lost hope.
I have entirely different reasons than Trump; mine are related to actual peace, not the Trumpian peace-through-domineering-intimidation. My reasons for wishing the US would pull out of NATO are the opposite of Trump’s.
The US may regard economic change without regime change as impossible. But they’re evidently trying. According to interviews with Axios, US officials, in talks with Cuban officials April 10, stressed that “the Cuban economy is in free fall and that the island’s ruling elites have a small window to make key U.S. backed reforms before circumstances irreversibly worsen.”
In 2001, forensic artist Richard Neave and his team reconstructed a face the world thought it knew. What emerged was not the pale, European Christ of Western art, but a Middle Eastern man with dark hair, brown skin, and features shaped by the climate and culture of his time.
Amidst yet another year of startling declines for democracies everywhere, Hungary has seemingly defied the odds. Despite being the poster boy of the far-right populist threat to European democracies, recent elections ousted Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party from 16 years of power, effectively shifting the tide on one of the starkest democratic erosions in the European Union. And yet, Orbán’s defeat does not necessarily guarantee democratic revival for his international friends and cronies, including President Donald Trump. Today, behind this celebration in Hungary lives the looming shadow of Trump’s executive overreach in the United States, with Orban’s friendship and autocratic legacy offering a roadmap to America’s sharp democratic regression.
As another week of Trump’s war begins, it becomes ever more clear that all his presumptions about how the war would go have proven wrong. Iran’s economy has bent but not folded despite a blockade of its ports. Its ability to control the Strait of Hormuz hasn’t been eliminated. Iran still has drones and missiles for retaliatory attacks. The regime’s control of the population remains. Gas prices and the cost of oil remain high. The war goes on.
In the early hours of Thursday, April 15, Virginia’s former lieutenant governor, Justin Fairfax, shot and killed his wife of 19 years, Dr. Cerina Wanzer Fairfax, in their home before turning the gun on himself. By noon, the 47-year-old disgraced politician was being eulogized like a saint by several people who once knew him.
America does not whisper its values to the world—it declares them with thunder. Freedom. Democracy. Justice. Yet beneath those declarations lies a foreign policy record that tells a far more unsettling truth: America often exports instability while branding itself the guardian of order.