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The movie “The Big Short” — dramatizing the reckless behavior in the banking and mortgage industries that contributed to the 2008 financial crisis — captures much of Wall Street’s misconduct but overlooks a central player in the collapse: the federal government, specifically through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

These two government-created and government-sponsored enterprises encouraged lenders to issue risky home loans by effectively making taxpayers co-sign the mortgages. This setup incentivized dangerous lending practices that inflated the housing bubble, eventually leading to catastrophic economic consequences.

Another critical but overlooked factor in the collapse was the Community Reinvestment Act. This federal law was intended to combat discriminatory lending practices but instead created substantial market distortions by pressuring banks to extend loans to borrowers who might otherwise have been deemed too risky. Under threat of regulatory penalties, banks significantly loosened lending standards — again, inflating the housing bubble.

After the bubble inevitably burst, Fannie and Freddie were placed under conservatorship by the Federal Housing Finance Agency. The conservatorship imposed rules aimed at preventing future taxpayer-funded bailouts and protecting the economy from government-fueled market distortions.

Now, President Trump’s appointee to lead that agency, Bill Pulte, is considering ending this conservatorship without addressing the core structural flaw that fueled the problem in the first place: implicit government guarantees backing all Fannie and Freddie mortgages. If Pulte proceeds without implementing real reform, taxpayers on Main Street are once again likely to be exposed to significant financial risks as they are conscripted into subsidizing lucrative deals for Wall Street.

Without genuine reform, the incentives and practices that led to the crisis remain unchanged, setting the stage for a repeat disaster.

Pulte’s proposal isn’t likely to unleash free-market policies. Instead, it could further rig the market in favor of hedge funds holding substantial stakes in Fannie and Freddie, allowing them to profit enormously from the potential upside, while leaving taxpayers to bear all the downside risks.

A meaningful solution requires Fannie and Freddie to significantly strengthen their capital reserves. The two government-sponsored enterprises still remain dangerously undercapitalized. A report from JP Morgan Chase describes it this way: “Despite steady growth in [their net worth], the GSEs remain well below the minimum regulatory capital framework requirements set by the Federal Housing Finance Agency in 2020.” Imposing robust capital requirements similar to those that govern private banks would oblige the two enterprises to internalize their risks, promoting genuine market discipline and accountability.

Further reforms should address transparency and oversight. Enhanced disclosure standards would allow investors, regulators and the public to better assess risks. Additionally, limiting the types of mortgages these entities can guarantee could reduce exposure to the riskiest loans, further protecting taxpayers. Implementing clear rules that prevent Fannie and Freddie from venturing into speculative financial products would also mitigate potential market distortions.

Critically, the federal government must clearly communicate that future bailouts are not an option. Explicitly removing government guarantees would compel Fannie and Freddie to operate responsibly, knowing that reckless behavior will lead to their insolvency, not to another taxpayer rescue. Clear legal separation from government backing is essential to prevent moral hazard.

The combination of government guarantees, regulatory pressure from policies such as the Community Reinvestment Act and inadequate capital standards created the perfect storm for the 2008 financial crisis. Ignoring these lessons and repeating past mistakes would inevitably lead to a similar disaster.

Proponents of prematurely releasing Fannie and Freddie argue that market conditions have changed and risk management has improved. Yet, history repeatedly demonstrates that without structural changes, financial entities — particularly those shielded by government guarantees — inevitably revert to risky behavior when market pressures and profit incentives align. Markets function best when participants bear the full consequences of their decisions, something impossible under the current structure of these government-sponsored enterprises.

Ultimately, the only responsible approach is removing taxpayers from the equation entirely. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should participate in the mortgage market only as fully private entities, without any implicit government guarantees.

The American public doesn’t need a sequel to “The Big Short.” The painful lessons of the 2008 crisis are too recent and too severe to be ignored or forgotten. Market discipline, fiscal responsibility and genuine reform — not government-backed risk-taking — must guide our approach going forward. We can only hope that the Trump administration chooses fiscal responsibility over risky experiments that history has already shown end in disaster.

Veronique de Rugy is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. This article was produced in collaboration with Creators Syndicate.

American universities have long feared that the Chinese government will restrict its country’s students from attending institutions that cross Beijing’s sensitive political lines.

Universities still fear that consequence today, but the most immediate threat is no longer posed by the Chinese government. Now, as the latest punishment meted out to the Trump administration’s preeminent academic scapegoat shows, it’s our own government posing the threat.

In a May 22 letter, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced she revoked Harvard University’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification, meaning the university’s thousands of international students must transfer immediately or lose their legal status. Harvard can no longer enroll future international students either.

Noem cited Harvard’s failure to hand over international student disciplinary records in response to a prior letter and, disturbingly, the Trump administration’s desire to “root out the evils of anti-Americanism” on campus. Among the most alarming demands in this latest missive was that Harvard supply all video of “any protest activity” by any international student within the last five years.

Harvard immediately sued Noem and her department and other agencies, rightfully calling the revocation “a blatant violation of the First Amendment,” and within hours a judge issued a temporary restraining order against the revocation.

“Let this serve as a warning to all universities and academic institutions across the country,” Noem wrote on X about the punishment. And on Tuesday, the administration halted interviews for all new student visas.

This is not how a free country treats its schools — or the international visitors who attend them.

Noem’s warning will, no doubt, be heard loud and clear. That’s because universities — which depend on international students’ tuition dollars — have already had reason to worry that they will lose access to international students for displeasing censorial government officials.

In 2010, Beijing revoked recognition of the University of Calgary’s accreditation in China, meaning Chinese students at the Canadian school suddenly risked paying for a degree worth little at home. The reason? The university’s granting of an honorary degree to the Dalai Lama the year before. “We have offended our Chinese partners by the very fact of bringing in the Dalai Lama, and we have work to resolve that issue,” a spokesperson said.

Beijing restored recognition over a year later, but many Chinese students had already left. Damage done.

Similarly, when UC San Diego hosted the Dalai Lama as commencement speaker in 2017, punishment followed. The China Scholarship Council suspended funding for academics intending to study at UCSD, and an article in the state media outlet Global Times recommended that Chinese authorities “not recognize diplomas or degree certificates issued by the university.”

This kind of direct punishment doesn’t happen very frequently. But the threat always exists, and it creates fear that administrators take into account when deciding how their universities operate.

American universities now must fear that they will suffer this penalty too, but at an even greater scale: revocation of access not just to students from China, but all international students. That’s a huge potential loss. At Harvard, for example, international students make up a whopping 27% of total enrollment.

Whether they publicly acknowledge it or not, university leaders probably are considering whether they need to adjust their behavior to avoid seeing international student tuition funds dry up.

Will our colleges and universities increase censorship and surveillance of international students? Avoid inviting commencement speakers disfavored by the Trump administration? Pressure academic departments against hiring any professors whose social media comments or areas of research will catch the eye of mercurial government officials?

And, equally disturbing, will they be willing to admit that they are now making these calculations at all? Unlike direct punishments by the Trump administration or Beijing, this chilling effect is likely to be largely invisible.

Harvard might be able to survive without international students’ tuition. But a vast number of other universities could not. The nation as a whole would feel their loss too: In the 2023-24 academic year, international students contributed a record-breaking $43.8 billion to the American economy.

And these students — who have uprooted their lives for the promise of what American education offers — are the ones who will suffer the most, as they experience weeks or months of panic and upheaval while being used as pawns in this campaign to punish higher ed.

If the Trump administration is seeking to root out “anti-Americanism,” it can begin by surveying its own behavior in recent months. Freedom of expression is one of our country’s most cherished values. Censorship, surveillance and punishment of government critics do not belong here.

Sarah McLaughlin is senior scholar on global expression at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and author of the forthcoming book “Authoritarians in the Academy: How the Internationalization of Higher Education and Borderless Censorship Threaten Free Speech.”

Actions, we know, have consequences. And an apparent Marxist’s cold-blooded murder of two Israeli Embassy staffers in Washington on Wednesday night was the natural and inevitable consequence of a conscientious, years-long campaign to dehumanize Jews and otherize all supporters of the world’s only Jewish state.

Seriously, what did you think was going to happen?

Some of President Trump’s more colorful all-caps and exclamation-mark-filled social media posts evince an impending jackboot, we’re sometimes told. (Hold aside, for now, columnist Salena Zito’s apt 2016 quip about taking Trump seriously but not literally.) Words either have meaning or they don’t. And many left-wing Americans have, for a long time now, argued that they have tremendous meaning. How often, as the concept of the “microaggression” and its campus “safe space” corollary took off last decade, were we told that “words are violence”? (I’ll answer: A lot!)

So are we really not supposed to take seriously the clear calls for Jewish genocide that have erupted on American campuses and throughout American streets since the Hamas pogrom of Oct. 7, 2023? Are we really supposed to believe that chants such as “globalize the intifada,” “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and “there is only one solution, intifada revolution” are vague and open to competing interpretations?

That doesn’t even pass the laugh test.

When pro-Israel Jewish American Paul Kessler died after being hit on the head during a clash of protesters in Thousand Oaks on Nov. 5, 2023, that is what “intifada revolution” looks like in practice. When Israeli woman Tzeela Gez was murdered by a jihadist while en route to the hospital to deliver her baby earlier this month, that was what “from the river to the sea” looks like in practice. And when two young Israeli Embassy staffers were executed while leaving an event this week at Washington’s Capital Jewish Museum, that is what “globalize the intifada” looks like in practice.

Really, what did you think was going to happen?

Indeed, it is the easily foreseeable nature of Wednesday night’s slayings that is perhaps the most tragic part of it all. The suspect in the deaths of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim left behind a handy manifesto laying out a clear political motivation. This was not a random drive-by shooting. Hardly. This was a deliberate act — what appears to be an act of domestic terrorism. And the suspect, Elias Rodriguez, has a long history of involvement in far-left activist causes. If the killer intended to target Jews, then the fact that both victims were apparently Christian only underscores the “globalize” part of “globalize the intifada.”

Zito had it right back in 2016: Trump’s social media posts should be taken seriously, not literally. But when it comes to the murderous, genocidal clamoring for Jewish and Israeli blood that has become increasingly ubiquitous ever since the Jews themselves suffered their single bloodiest day since the Third Reich, such anti-Israel and antisemitic words must be taken both seriously and literally.

A previous generation of lawmakers once urged Americans to fight the terrorists “over there” so that they can’t harm us “here.” How quaint! The discomfiting reality in the year 2025 is this: The radicals, both homegrown and foreign-born alike, are already here. There are monsters in our midst.

And those monsters are not limited to jihadists. Domestic terrorists these days come from all backgrounds. The deaths of two Israeli diplomats are yet another reminder (not that we needed it): Politically motivated violence in the contemporary United States is not an equivalent problem on both the left and the right.

In 2012, Floyd Lee Corkins attempted to shoot up the socially conservative Family Research Council because he heard it was “anti-gay.” In 2017, James Hodgkinson shot up the Republican congressional baseball team a few weeks after posting on Facebook that Trump is a “traitor” and threat to “our democracy.” In 2022, Nicholas Roske flew cross-country to try to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and thus prevent Roe vs. Wade from being overturned. Earlier this year, anti-Elon Musk activists burned and looted Teslas — and assaulted Tesla drivers — because of Musk’s Trump administration work with his cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency. And who can forget Luigi Mangione, who is charged in the shooting death of UnitedHealthcare Chief Executive Brian Thompson?

Both “sides” are not culpable here. They just aren’t. Israel supporters in America aren’t out there gunning down people waving the PLO flag. Nor are capitalists out there gunning down socialists.

There is a real darkness out there in certain — increasingly widespread — pockets of the American activist left. Sure, parts of the right are also lost at the moment — but this is not an apples-to-apples comparison.

Regardless, the violence must end. And we must stop treating open calls for murder or genocide as morally acceptable “speech.” Let’s pull ourselves back from the brink before more blood is shed.

Josh Hammer’s latest book is “Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West.” This article was produced in collaboration with Creators Syndicate. @josh_hammer

For weeks now, Americans — left, right and terminally online — have been obsessed with Joe Biden’s fitness as president. The whispers about cognitive decline, once the province of Fox News pundits and dinner table cranks, have gone mainstream. And now, with the release of a couple of high-profile books and a report confirming that Biden has been diagnosed with prostate cancer, the narrative has curdled into something that feels downright scandalous — maybe even conspiratorial. A full-blown cover-up.

Is that an understandable, if predictable, reaction? Sure. But let’s not pretend this was some shocking plot twist. Biden has been aging in public like a banana on a dashboard for a decade — a fact that became undeniable after his infamous June 2024 debate with Donald Trump.

So who’s to blame? Let’s start with Biden’s inner circle. The underlying charge is that Biden was asleep at the wheel, with someone else driving the presidential bus. We’ve seen this narrative before: The figurehead nods, the handlers handle and the country rolls on, more or less. With various degrees of verisimilitude, similar charges have been leveled at the administrations of Woodrow Wilson (hi, Edith) and Ronald Reagan (hi, Nancy).

My take on Biden is pretty much the same as it was with Reagan. Whoever was running the country wasn’t half bad. Sure, maybe, toward the end, Uncle Joe wasn’t gripping the wheel as tightly as he used to. But at least the bus stayed between the lines.

Whether it was Jill Biden, “The Politburo” (a cabal of top aides accused of running the show) or a sentient Microsoft Excel spreadsheet — the government mostly worked. Ukraine got funded, the stock market didn’t implode, and your odds of being sent to prison in El Salvador were virtually nil.

Yes, mistakes were made during Biden’s presidency. Plenty. The Afghanistan withdrawal was a disaster. Illegal border crossings soared. Biden’s COVID relief probably juiced inflation. But these weren’t deranged or asleep-at-the-wheel decisions: They were predictable policy fumbles, consistent with Biden’s worldview (sort of like an NFL coach opting to run a prevent defense in the third quarter — wrongheaded, but understandable).

The more obvious problem was Biden’s inability to communicate. Biden couldn’t explain where he wanted to drive the bus, let alone inspire confidence in his ability to get us there. And that’s not just bad political optics. It’s a real governance issue. If FDR had mumbled through the fireside chats, we might all be speaking German.

Biden insiders squinted and pretended everything was fine. Not because they’re villains, but because even proximity to power is addictive.

Other Biden enablers had more noble reasons to convince themselves the ends justified the means. If Trump is an existential threat to democracy, then keeping Grandpa Joe upright — literally, metaphorically, pharmaceutically — was a moral imperative.

Again, understandable: Trump’s lies about the 2020 election led to an armed mob chanting about hanging the vice president. The exaggerations about Biden’s fitness mostly led to awkward silences and gentle nudges offstage.

But this isn’t just about Biden’s inner circle deluding themselves. The media was complicit, too. Their main contribution wasn’t lying or even spinning (although there are examples of both). The dirty secret of modern media is this: Yes, the news industry leans liberal. But more than that, it leans toward drama, car chases and celebrity trials.

Biden, bless his heart, is boring. And thanks to Trump’s penchant for being the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral, guess who got the attention?

Think I’m making excuses or exaggerating? A mere two days after the report came out in which special counsel Robert Hur described Biden as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Trump went out of his way to change the subject by: 1) attacking Nikki Haley’s husband (who was on a military deployment) and 2) telling NATO allies he wouldn’t honor our treaty and defend them from Russia if they don’t pay their bills.

An old maxim says you should never interfere with your opponent when he’s committing suicide. Well, Biden was in the process of drowning, and Trump threw him a life preserver.

Again, the “media” didn’t ignore Biden’s age. Respected veteran Washington Post columnist David Ignatius wrote a sober plea for him to step aside. David Axelrod — Barack Obama’s own Jedi — sounded the alarm all over mainstream media. Heck, I piled on, too.

The coverage existed. But media bias isn’t just about what gets reported. It’s about what gets repeated. Loudly. Over and over. So, yes, Biden’s decline was reported and discussed. It just wasn’t amplified.

Now, we can pretend this is some devious plot. Or we can admit that real life isn’t “House of Cards” or even “Veep.” It was something much more banal: collective inertia.

In the end, the scandal isn’t that the media and Democratic partisans conspired to keep us in the dark about Joe Biden’s fitness for office. The scandal is that the truth was hidden in plain sight (the American public knew Biden was unfit), yet a lot of elites chose not to see it.

Not because they’re evil, but because of loyalty, proximity to power, exhaustion and yes, desperation. Because they’re human.

And maybe, just maybe, because they were terrified of what (or who) would come next, when the old man finally shuffled offstage.

Matt K. Lewis is the author of “Filthy Rich Politicians” and “Too Dumb to Fail.”

America’s debt-addicted government just lost its triple-A credit rating from Moody’s, as it previously had from fellow rating agencies S&P and Fitch. Many in Washington shrugged the move off as minor or as unfair treatment of the Trump administration. The truth is more sobering: a flashing red signal that the United States is no longer seen as a “perfect” credit risk and that politicians should stop pretending economic growth alone can bail us out.

Yes, the mess is real, and it’s because habitual deficit financing — the very disease fiscally minded founding father Alexander Hamilton warned against — has become business as usual.

The reckoning comes as House Republicans push to extend the 2017 Trump tax cuts with a “big, beautiful bill.” If handled correctly, it’s a good idea. But while the legislation aims to avoid tax hikes, it pairs modestly pro-growth provisions with a smorgasbord of costly special-interest giveaways. Worse, it assumes we can afford yet another $3 trillion to $5 trillion in debt without serious consequences. That’s the kind of magical thinking that spurred the credit downgrade.

Starting with Hamilton, American politicians long understood the importance of fiscal policy guided by the ethos of balanced budgets, low taxes and steady debt reduction. Their vision, combined with a deep respect for contractual repayment and financial responsibility, made America a creditor nation.

Washington abandoned that honorable legacy in recent decades. U.S. national debt held by the public is racing toward $30 trillion, and the cost of servicing it is ballooning. Interest payments are now one of the fastest-growing parts of the budget — $1 trillion in 2026 — crowding out core priorities and leaving us vulnerable to economic shocks. The Congressional Budget Office warns that even modest interest-rate increases could lead to hundreds of billions of dollars in added annual costs. It’s not a theoretical problem; it’s a real, compounding threat.

Which brings us back to the downgrade. Historically, downgrades like those from S&P in 2011 or Fitch in 2023 haven’t caused immediate crises, but they do raise borrowing costs and gradually erode investor confidence. The downgrades are not the problem, but symptoms of a deeper illness: lack of credible fiscal discipline. Market participants aren’t worried because Moody’s wrote a negative report; they’re worried because what Moody’s wrote is true.

If our political class continues to ignore warnings, the market will do what rating agencies only hint at: impose real discipline through higher borrowing costs, weaker currency demand and tighter credit conditions. Already, China and other countries have reduced holdings of U.S. Treasuries from 42% in 2019 to 30% today.

Meanwhile, the tax plan so far embodies Washington’s worst habits. It makes only temporary the most important pro-growth provisions of the 2017 tax cuts — like full expensing for equipment and research and development — while rendering permanent a raft of unrelated policies catering to favored industries and constituencies. That’s not tax reform; it’s pork-barrel politics dressed up as populist economics.

Worse still, the bill’s Republican supporters in the House justify it with the fantastical claim that it’s fiscally responsible based on the notion that it will raise trillions in growth-generated revenue. Even the most optimistic models show the current bill barely moving the growth needle. The administration claims growth will be enormous once it deregulates and sells off assets, but these distinct policies take a long time to bear fruit.

What a missed opportunity. According to Tax Foundation experts, making just four cost-recovery provisions permanent — bonus depreciation, R&D expensing, full expensing for factories and reforming the business-interest limitation — would more than double the tax bill’s long-run growth benefits.

That’s where legislators should be focused. Not on tax breaks for hand-picked industries or energy credits for hand-picked technologies — on structural reforms that maximize American investment, innovation and capital formation. Even such pro-growth tax policy must be paired with real spending restraint, something we haven’t seen in earnest since the 1990s. Otherwise, any gains from better tax policy will have red ink spilled all over them.

The lesson from Moody’s, and from history, is that America cannot borrow its way to prosperity. That was Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon’s view in the 1920s, and it remains true today. Mellon quietly prepared for debt defaults by building budget surpluses, knowing that while international repayments might fail, American citizens still had to be paid. That was back when Treasury secretaries respected taxpayers.

Now, as then, we stand at a crossroads. Will we restore Hamiltonian principles of fiscal prudence or continue down a path where downgrades become defaults and our creditors decide the terms of American fiscal policy? The next move belongs to Congress. Legislators can’t say they weren’t warned. If they fail the fiscal prudence test again, we’ll all pay the price.

Veronique de Rugy is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. This article was produced in collaboration with Creators Syndicate.

I was never a fan of pleasantries because they seemed like a waste of time. Something that two people said to each other before they could say real things to each other. As years go by, more and more of our verbal interaction has taken the form of extended pleasantries. Little, it feels, that people say to each other is real. It’s about how they wish to look, how they can best position themselves, agenda.

That’s one reason I always loved the character of Norm Peterson on the sitcom “Cheers,” played by George Wendt, who has now cashed out his tab at the age of 76 and left this earthly barroom for one where I hope the kegs never run dry.

Norm was universal from the first time he entered the hostelry — as perpetual student and not-very-effective waitress Diane Chambers would have put it.

There was no more artful ingress in the history of American television than any of the many made by Norm, and they were so good, and had so much room for variability, that we got to witness one in every episode of the show.

You know the gag: Norm comes through the door, ready for a cold beer, someone asks him how he’s doing, and he answers.

But there’s more to it than that, isn’t there? I’m hesitant to even call the gag a gag, because it’s replete with a quality increasingly rare in our world: authenticity.

Norm doesn’t treat the inquiry — “How’s the world treating you, Norm?” — as perfunctory pleasantry. Which is what we almost always do.

In one episode, his response is, “It’s a dog-eat-dog world, and I’m wearing Milk-Bone underwear.” A query of “What’s shaking?” prompts a reply of “All four cheeks and a couple of chins.”

But in real life, when someone asks us how we are, we say, “Good, and you?” The truth is, we’ve just answered automatically, without a single thought, and we’re unlikely to be listening to whatever answer the other person gives us.

But what an amazing idea it is to ask someone how they are and care about the answer. To be invested in their well-being from the start. To jettison pretense and formality. And how subversive it is to treat another’s tossed-off query as though they cared. Maybe that shifts us all toward paying attention.

Norm always answered truthfully. He gave his interlocutor — and the patrons of the bar who enjoyed his quips — a tart response peppered with wit. But he was also willing to go there. And where’s that? To a place of being humble. Of admitting to struggle.

Now, Norm’s life might not have seemed arduous. He owned a house, had a wife who stood by him although he spent his evenings with the gang at Cheers — often dodging her phone calls. He didn’t work that much when he worked at all.

In a world that’s now rammed with loneliness, it’s easy to watch Norm and think, “I wish I had what that barfly had.” Norm has people. He’s both liked and loved.

Times change. I don’t think you could have a Cheers-type setup in our current iteration of life, but maybe you never could have one without sitcom magic. Shows idealize. But there’s truth and wisdom in both “Cheers” and Norm, without whom Cheers wouldn’t have been Cheers. And we can still wish. We must.

In “Crime and Punishment,” Dostoevsky wrote that everyone needs a somewhere. A somewhere can be a someone. It’s what helps us to be ourselves. Naked and open. Emotionally. Spiritually.

Norm never felt a need to embellish. He owned his struggles — what may have been his depression. His failings. He dished out the bons mots with each entrance like he was a thirsty Pascal who paid for his drinks in pensées, which made him an inspiration.

The gag never became less efficacious. It was the sitcom analogue to Conan Doyle’s “the trick,” the term for when Sherlock Holmes would dazzle Dr. Watson by telling him everything about someone just by looking at their walking stick.

I remember watching Norm when I was 8 and even then thinking he was cool. This wasn’t a star athlete. He could have lived across the street. He blew me away — as he made me laugh — simply by being brave enough to tell the truth about where he was at.

With Norm, the quotidian was never just the quotidian. It’s like in baseball: Everyone says in May that it’s early in the season, it doesn’t matter, but all the games still count as much as any of the other games.

That’s how Norm lived, and we have George Wendt to thank for Norm’s example, because you can’t imagine anyone else in the part. As to the question of how the world was treating Norm, I think the answer lies somewhere in how Norm understood what was important in the world. That’s worth a round on the house.

Colin Fleming is the author, most recently, of “Sam Cooke: Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963.”

The United States and China are locked in a standoff with no resolution in sight. The U.S. wants to reshore manufacturing, and China wants to sell its manufactured products into the American market. It will take a creative solution to overcome this impasse, but it’s very possible.

President Trump himself has already previewed what a winning formula could look like. During his 2024 campaign, he repeatedly pledged to lure other countries’ factories to the United States. At a rally in Michigan, he said: “China has to build plants here and hire our workers. When I’m back in the White House, the way they will sell their product in America is to build it in America. They have to build it in America, and they have to use you people to build it.”

When China began embracing a market economy in the 1970s, its leaders made a similar demand to American companies. In order to get access to the Chinese market, American firms would have to manufacture in China, hire Chinese workers and teach the Chinese the underlying technology. But times have changed. China is no longer America’s pupil. When it comes to automobile and battery manufacturing, Chinese companies are years ahead of their American competition. It’s time for us to learn from them.

Gotion Inc., an advanced Chinese battery manufacturer, is currently building two plants in the United States. The Gotion plants in Michigan and Illinois together will employ 5,000 American workers and also train American engineers in the latest lithium battery technology. CATL, another Chinese battery company, is looking to build factories in partnership with American automakers. Their proposed factory in Michigan, a joint venture with Ford, would employ 2,500 Americans.

These companies are attempting to build here because they want access to the U.S. market. By building in the U.S., they can avoid tariffs and more easily sell their batteries to American companies. In return, the U.S. gets good-paying jobs, the best batteries in the world and a more advanced manufacturing sector.

But instead of embracing this as a victory, Republicans have brutally attacked both Gotion and CATL because they’re Chinese. For them, every company from China is a national security threat, even if there’s no specific evidence against them. According to the hawks, merely being Chinese-owned means the company is part of a covert operation directed by the Chinese government. Evidence to the contrary is simply ignored.

In Gotion’s case, they’re a global company whose largest shareholder is Volkswagen; the U.S. operations are run by American executives; and the U.S. plants will be staffed by American workers. In CATL’s case, it won’t own the U.S. plant it helps build, but instead will be licensing technology to Ford, which will own the plant. But when it comes to China, such inconvenient facts are thrown out the window because politicians need to score political points.

The China bashing has become so prevalent that Trump has had to clarify his position. At a recent Cabinet meeting, Trump said that he welcomes Chinese investment in the United States, and that he doesn’t understand why some people have the impression that he doesn’t. Of course, people have that impression because his underlings have been working overtime to prevent Chinese companies from investing here. Not only has Trump not slapped them down, but also he contradicted his own position by signing an executive order that makes it harder for the U.S. and China to invest in each other.

If this current trajectory continues, there won’t be more Gotions or CATLs announcing investments in America. Trump needs to make it clear that victory in the trade war includes Chinese manufacturers setting up shop here. If he doesn’t, his staff may continue to sabotage what could be openings to defuse tensions with China.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has wisely called for an economic rebalancing with China. That will require adopting a rational approach, not one based on paranoia. It’s time to turn this standoff into a victory.

James Bacon was a special assistant to the president during the first Trump administration.

Power is the ability to get others to do what you want. That can be accomplished by coercion (“sticks”), payment (“carrots”) or attraction (“honey”). The first two methods are forms of hard power; attraction is soft power. Soft power grows out of a country’s culture, its political values and its foreign policies. In the short term, hard power usually trumps soft power. But over the long term, soft power often prevails. Joseph Stalin once mockingly asked, “How many divisions does the pope have?” But the papacy continues today, while Stalin’s Soviet Union is long gone.

When a nation is attractive, it can economize on carrots and sticks. If allies see the United States as benign and trustworthy, they are more likely to be open to persuasion and to following our lead. If they see us as an unreliable bully, they are more likely to drag their feet and reduce their interdependence when they can. Cold War Europe is a good example. A Norwegian historian described Europe as divided into a Soviet and an American empire. But there was a crucial difference: The American side was “an empire by invitation” rather than coercion. The Soviets had to deploy troops to Budapest in 1956, and to Prague in 1968. In contrast, NATO has voluntarily increased its membership.

Nations need both hard and soft power. Machiavelli said it was better for a prince to be feared than to be loved. But it is best to be both.

Because soft power is rarely sufficient by itself, and because its effects take longer to realize, political leaders are often tempted to resort to the hard power of coercion or payment. When wielded alone, however, hard power is an unnecessarily high-cost proposition. The Berlin Wall did not succumb to an artillery barrage; it was felled by hammers and bulldozers wielded by people who had lost faith in communism and were drawn to Western values.

After World War II, the United States was by far the most powerful country because of its hard and soft power. It attempted to enshrine its values in what became known as the liberal international order — a soft power framework made up of the United Nations, economic and trade institutions, and other multilateral bodies. Of course, the U.S. did not always live up to its liberal values, and Cold War bipolarity limited the order it led to only half the world’s people.

Donald Trump is the first American president to reject the idea that soft power has any value in foreign policy. Among his first actions upon returning to office were withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement and the World Health Organization, despite the obvious threats that global warming and pandemics pose.

The effects of the Trump administration’s surrendering soft power are all too predictable. Trying to coerce democratic allies such as Denmark or Canada weakens trust in the U.S. among all our alliances. Threatening Panama reawakens fears of imperialism throughout Latin America. Crippling the U.S. Agency for International Development — created by President Kennedy in 1961 — undercuts our reputation for benevolence. Silencing Voice of America is a gift to authoritarian rivals. Slapping tariffs on friends makes us appear unreliable. Trying to chill free speech at home undermines our credibility. This list could go on.

China, which Trump defines as America’s great challenge, itself has been investing in soft power since 2007, when then-Chinese President Hu Jintao told the Chinese Communist Party that the country needed to make itself more attractive to others. But China has long faced two major obstacles in this respect. First, it maintains territorial disputes with multiple neighbors. Second, the communists insist on maintaining tight control over civil society. When public opinion polls ask people around the world which countries they find attractive, China doesn’t shine. But one can only wonder what these surveys will show in future years if Trump keeps undercutting American soft power.

Of course American soft power has had its ups and downs. The U.S. was unpopular in many countries during the Vietnam and Iraq wars. But soft power derives from a country’s society and culture as well as from government actions. When crowds marched through streets around the world in freedom protests, they sang the American civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome.” An open society that allows protest can be a soft-power asset.

But will America’s cultural soft power survive a downturn in the government’s soft power over the next four years?

American democracy is likely to survive the next four years of Trump. The country has a resilient political culture and the Constitution encourages checks and balances, whatever their weaknesses. In 2026, there is a reasonable chance that Democrats will regain control of the House of Representatives. Moreover, American civil society remains strong, and the courts independent. Many organizations have launched lawsuits to challenge Trump’s actions, and markets have signaled dissatisfaction with his economic policies.

American soft power recovered after low points during the Vietnam and Iraq wars, as well as during Trump’s first term. But once trust is lost, it is not easily restored. After the invasion of Ukraine, Russia lost most of what soft power it had. Right now, China is striving to fill any soft power gaps that Trump creates. The way Chinese President Xi Jinping tells it, the East is rising over the West.

If Trump thinks he can compete with China while weakening trust among American allies, asserting imperial aspirations, destroying USAID, silencing Voice of America, challenging laws at home and withdrawing from U.N. agencies, he is likely to fail. Restoring what he has destroyed will not be impossible, but it will be costly.

Joseph S. Nye Jr. was dean of the Harvard Kennedy School and a U.S. assistant secretary of Defense. His memoir “A Life in the American Century” was published last year. Nye died earlier this month.

News and social media feeds inundate us with dramatic scenes of immigration policing. Viral videos of immigrant mothers picked up on sidewalks near their homes, news accounts of ICE agents showing up in Los Angeles schools and social media posts of U.S. citizens detained by government agents, all create a frightening spectacle. President Trump fuels the fear by trolling immigrant communities with sinister Valentine cards, dangling self-deportation incentives and implementing a chaotic enforcement strategy that ignores attempts at judicial oversight. Amid all this, many look to state and local leaders for calm, reassurance and support.

In California, there remains a simple and consistent response. No matter who, when, where or how you ask, a commanding majority of registered voters in the Golden State support a path to citizenship for those in the state without proper documents. In other words, across the partisan aisle, and across all kinds of different groups and places, most voters see a path to citizenship as a much-needed policy fix, even now.

In August of 2024, a few months before the presidential election, the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies Poll asked more than 4,000 voters across the state whether they would support or oppose a “path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who come forward, are up to date on their taxes, and pass a background check.”

At that time, the Harris and Trump campaigns were in full swing. Harris’ team had already held a few news conferences at the border, insinuating that increased border security would be top of mind in her administration. Meanwhile, Trump continued his usual discourse about immigrants, once infamously contending that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.” It was difficult to see who, if anyone, felt sympathy toward community members who’d entered the country without authorization or overstayed a visa, despite the fact that many of them had raised new generations of American citizens and contributed to public coffers and local job markets.

But even back in August, 80% of California registered voters who answered the poll supported a path to citizenship. This included close to 60% of polled Republicans, 75% of independents and even 56% of those who intended to vote for Trump. It also included 75% of those who earned a high school degree or less, 80% of those who earned a college degree or more, 80% of women, 78% of men, 75% of homeowners and 84% of those under 40. Among the strongest supporters were Democrats, with 91% support, as well as middle- and high-income earners, and those who lived in the Bay Area. Across most categories, a commanding majority of California voters expressed support for a pathway to citizenship.

But that was then, before the onslaught. Before the viral videos, the renditions to El Salvador, the offer of cash to self-deport. One could argue that in those before-times, perhaps voters were somehow more sympathetic to immigrants because they were distracted by other issues, like the price of eggs and groceries or broader inflation issues. And perhaps some might not have believed that Trump would actually follow through on his attacks on immigrant communities.

So in early May the Berkeley IGS Poll asked survey respondents again about their support for a path to citizenship. This time we polled more than 6,000 registered California voters and we inserted a small survey experiment. We were curious about whether respondents’ support in August had been so strong because the question they were asked included language about a “background check,” an idea that might have primed them to think about “good” and “bad” immigrants and may have inadvertently linked unauthorized status to crime. So for half of all respondents in May, we asked the same question again, but for the second half of respondents, we omitted this language, simply asking if they would support or oppose a “path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who are working or going to school and are up to date on their taxes.”

Our survey found no statistically significant differences between the two groups. The vast majority of California voters think a path to citizenship is simply the right thing to do, background check or not.

Moreover, we found virtually no differences from August to May. Eighty percent of registered voters this month, including close to 60% of Republicans, continued to support a path to citizenship. Somewhere between 70% and 85% of every demographic, including respondents under 40, those over 65, those of different racial groups, those in unions, those that rent their homes, those that own their homes, men, women, those in the Central Valley, Los Angeles County, the Inland Empire and even those on the far North Coast all expressed support for a path to citizenship. The consistency is resounding.

If you’re trying to make sense of the bombast and the whirlwind of executive and law enforcement actions directed at immigrants, remember the one thing that unites a commanding majority of California voters, almost without regard to who we are and where we live, an understanding that good policy is practical policy: Undocumented community members deserve relief.

State and local leaders do not design federal immigration policy, but they should remember this poll data as they make decisions about how to support us all. If it were put to a vote, an overwhelming majority of Californians would support immigration reform, not mass deportation.

G. Cristina Mora and Nicholas Vargas are professors at UC Berkeley affiliated with the Institute of Governmental Studies, where Mora serves as co-director.

The Trump administration’s executive order to limit birthright citizenship is a serious challenge to the 14th Amendment, which enshrined a radical principle of our democratic experiment: that anyone born here is an American. But the order will most affect average Americans — whose own citizenship, until this point, has been presumed and assured — rather than the intended target, illegal immigrants. The irony is hiding in plain sight.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, birthright citizenship is not entirely settled U.S. law. The executive order states, “the Fourteenth Amendment has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States” and it is very narrowly drafted to exploit this uncertainty by rejecting citizenship to children born in the United States to parents who are not citizens or legal permanent residents. Federal law and practice has recognized American citizenship to anyone born here since the Supreme Court’s landmark 1898 decision in U.S. vs. Wong Kim Ark. But that case did not specifically protect the birthright of children born in the United States to noncitizen, nonresident aliens.

This is a massive blind spot that states are sleep-walking into. They are depending on weak legal precedent, federal code, policy and hair-splitting over the meaning of “subject of the jurisdiction thereto.” In a brief, the states argue that the “understanding of birthright citizenship has permeated executive agency guidance for decades — and no prior administration has deviated from it.” But that won’t matter to this Supreme Court, which has demonstrated a certain glee in dismantling precedent. There is a clear risk that the justices could fundamentally restrict the definition of birthright citizenship and overturn the 1898 ruling.

The executive order directs the federal government not to issue or accept documents recognizing U.S. citizenship for children born to parents unlawfully present here — but also to parents who are here legally but temporarily. This second group is a potentially vast population (the State Department issued 14.2 million nonimmigrant visas in fiscal year 2024) that includes students, artists, models, executives, investors, laborers, engineers, academics, tourists, temporary protected status groups, ship and plane crews, engineers, asylees, refugees and humanitarian parolees.

A limited change targeting a specific population — nonresident aliens — will have huge effects on those who will least expect it: American citizen parents giving birth to children in the United States. Until this point, a valid, state-issued birth certificate established prima facie evidence of U.S. citizenship to every child born in the country. That would no longer be the case if citizenship depended on verifying certain facts about every U.S.-born child’s parents. With that presumption removed by executive order, citizenship must be adjudicated by a federal official.

I know what that adjudication involves. I was a U.S. consular officer in Latin America, and both of my children were born overseas to married U.S. citizen parents carrying diplomatic passports. But because they did not have the presumption of citizenship conferred by an American birth certificate, we had to go to the U.S. Consulate for adjudication of transmission to demonstrate to the U.S. government that our children were American citizens.

This was document-intensive and time-consuming. Each time, we filled out forms. We photographed the baby in triplicate. We swore an oath before the consular officer. We brandished our passports. We presented the baby to the consular officer. We surrendered the local birth certificate. We demonstrated our hospital stay. Only then did we receive a Consular Report of Birth Abroad and only with that report could we apply for U.S. passports for our children. Without the report or a passport, our children could neither leave the country of their birth nor enter the United States.

That is an evidentiary and bureaucratic burden that all natural-born American citizens have until now not had to bear. The Trump administration’s change, if allowed by courts, will require those same parents to prove their own citizenship to the federal government. Good luck, because showing your birth certificate wouldn’t be sufficient in the new regime: The government would require proof not only that you were born in the U.S., but also that at least one of your parents was a U.S. citizen at the time. (Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh expressed skepticism over this “practical question” during oral arguments last week.)

Americans several generations removed from their immigrant forebears — even those whose ancestors came to North America 10,000 years ago — will suddenly be treated like the unlawfully present parents they thought this rule was designed to exclude.

This rule will lead to chaos, even danger. The federal bureaucracy will have to expand drastically to adjudicate the 3.5 million children born here every year. (For comparison, 1 million people are issued permanent residency status each year and 800,000 become naturalized citizens. This population is typically much better documented than a newborn.) Fearing immigration enforcement, undocumented parents will avoid hospitals for childbirth, dramatically escalating medical risk for mother and baby. Because hospitals also generate birth certificates — as Justice Sonia Sotomayor also noted last week — those babies will form a large, new and entirely avoidable population of stateless children.

It is a truism in some communities that ancestors and family members came to this country legally. But the administration is prepared to dismantle the presumption of citizenship that has been a literal birthright for 125 years. U.S. citizenship is on the brink of becoming a privilege rather than a right, bestowed on those who can afford protracted bureaucratic struggles. Most of the burden will fall on those who least expected it: American parents themselves.

James Thomas Snyder is a former U.S. consular officer and NATO International Staff member.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Trump vs. CASA Inc. Though the case arises out of President Trump’s January executive order on birthright citizenship and the 14th Amendment, Thursday’s oral argument had very little to do with whether everyone born in the U.S. is automatically a U.S. citizen. Instead, the argument mostly focused on a procedural legal issue that is just as important: whether lower-court federal judges possess the legitimate power to issue nationwide injunctions to bring laws or executive orders to a halt beyond their districts.

There is a very straightforward answer to this question: No, they don’t. And it is imperative for American constitutionalism and republican sef-governance that the justices clearly affirm that.

Let’s start with the text. Article III of the Constitution establishes the “judicial Power” of the United States, which University of Chicago Law School professor Will Baude argued in a 2008 law review article “is the power to issue binding judgments and to settle legal disputes within the court’s jurisdiction.” If the federal courts can bind certain parties, the crucial question is: Who is bound by a federal court issuing an injunction?

In our system of governance, it is only the named parties to a given lawsuit that can truly be bound by a lower court’s judgment. As the brilliant then-Stanford Law School professor Jonathan Mitchell put it in an influential 2018 law review article, an “injunction is nothing more than a judicially imposed non-enforcement policy” that “forbids the named defendants to enforce the statute” — or executive order — “while the court’s order remains in place.” Fundamentally, as Samuel L. Bray observed in another significant 2017 law review article, a federal court’s injunction binds only “the defendant’s conduct … with respect to the plaintiff.” If other courts in other districts face a similar case, those judges might consider their peer’s decision and follow it, but they are not strictly required to do so. (For truly nationwide legal issues, the proper recourse is filing a class-action lawsuit, as authorized by Rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.)

One need not be a legal scholar to understand this commonsense point.

Americans are a self-governing people; it is we the people, according to the Constitution’s Preamble, who are sovereign in the United States. And while the judiciary serves as an important check on congressional or executive overreach in specific cases or controversies that come before it (as Article III puts it), there is no broader ability for lower-court judges to decide the law of the land by striking down a law or order for all of the American people.

As President Lincoln warned in his first inaugural address: “The candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by” the judiciary, “the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions, the people will have ceased to be their own rulers.”

Simply put, the patriots of 1776 did not rebel against the tyranny of King George III only to subject themselves, many generations later, to the black-robed tyranny of today. They fought for the ability to live freely and self-govern, and to thereby control their own fates and destinies. Judicial supremacy and the concomitant misguided practice of nationwide injunctions necessarily deprive a free people of the ability to do exactly that.

It is true that Chief Justice John Marshall’s landmark 1803 ruling in Marbury vs. Madison established that “it is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.” But it is also true, as Marshall noted in the less frequently quoted sentence directly following that assertion: “Those who apply the rule to particular cases, must of necessity expound and interpret that rule.” Note the all-important qualifier of “apply the rule to particular cases.” Marbury is often erroneously invoked to support judicial supremacy, but the modest case- and litigant-specific judicial review that Marshall established has nothing to do with the modern judicial supremacy and nationwide injunctions that proliferate today. It is that fallacious conception of judicial supremacy that was argued Thursday at the Supreme Court.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., one of the swing votes in CASA, is not always known for judicial modesty. On the contrary, in clumsily attempting to defend his institution’s integrity, he has at times indulged in unvarnished judicial supremacist rhetoric and presided over an unjustifiable arrogation of power to what Alexander Hamilton, in the Federalist No. 78, referred to as the “least dangerous” of the three branches.

If Roberts and his fellow centrist justices — namely, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — have any sense of prudence, they must join their more stalwart originalist colleagues in holding that nationwide injunctions offend the very core of our constitutional order. Such a ruling would not merely be a win for Trump; it would be a win for the Constitution and for self-governance itself.

Josh Hammer’s latest book is “Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West.” This article was produced in collaboration with Creators Syndicate. @josh_hammer

If you voted for Donald Trump last November because you believed he’d increase economic freedom, it’s safe to say you were fooled. Following a reckless tariff barrage, the White House and its allies are preparing a new wave of tax-code gimmickry that has more in common with progressive social engineering than pro-growth reform. And don’t forget a fiscal recklessness that mirrors the mistakes of the left.

Defend these policies if you like, but let’s be clear: The administration shows no coherent commitment to free-market principles and is in fact actively undermining them. Its approach is better described as central planning disguised as economic nationalism.

This week’s example is an executive-order attempt at prescription-drug price control, similar to Democrats’ past proposals. If implemented it would inevitably reduce pharmaceutical R&D and innovation.

Tariffs remain the administration’s most visible economic sin after Trump launched the most extreme escalation of protectionism since the infamous Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930. Unlike the 1930s, however, today’s economy is deeply integrated with global supply chains, making the damage extensive and far more immediate. Tariffs are only nominally imposed on imports. Ultimately, they’re taxes on American consumers, workers and businesses.

The president has made it clear that he’s fine with limiting consumer choice, blithely telling parents they might have to “settle” for two dolls instead of 30 for their children. Smug pronouncements about how much we should shop (not much) or which sectors we should work in (manufacturing) are economic authoritarianism.

They’re also indicative of a deeper government rot. Policymaking is now done by executive orders as comatose congressional Republicans, like some Biden-era Democrats, allow the president to rule as if he’s a monarch.

A full-throated, assertive Congress would remind any president that manufacturing jobs were mostly lost to technologies that also create jobs and opportunity in members’ districts. Prosperity increases only through innovation and competition and isn’t restored by dragging people backward into lower-productivity jobs.

Now, even Trump’s tax agenda — once considered a bright spot by many free-market advocates — is being corrupted. Instead of championing the broad-based, pro-growth reforms we’d hoped for, the administration is doubling down on gimmickry: exempting tips and overtime pay, expanding child tax credits and entertaining the idea of raising top marginal tax rates.

These moves might poll well, but they’re unprincipled and unproductive. They undermine the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which aimed (however imperfectly) to simplify the code and incentivize growth, and not to micromanage worker and household behavior through the Internal Revenue Service.

And then there are the administration’s misleading, populist talking points about raising taxes on the rich to reduce taxes on lower- and middle-income workers. The U.S. income-tax system is already one of the most progressive in the developed world. According to the latest IRS data, the top 1% of earners pay more in federal income taxes than the bottom 90% combined. These high earners provide 40% of federal income-tax revenue; the bottom half of earners make up only 3% of that revenue. Thankfully, the House of Representatives steered away from that mistake in its bill.

Meanwhile, some Republican legislators are pushing to extend the 2017 tax cuts without meaningful offsets, setting the stage for a debt-fueled disaster. As noted by Scott Hodge, formerly the longtime president of the Tax Foundation, the GOP’s proposed cuts could add more than $5.8 trillion to the debt over a decade. That’s nearly three times the cost of the 2021 American Rescue Plan, which many Republicans rightly criticized for fueling inflation and fiscal instability.

To be clear: Pro-growth tax reform is essential. But not every tax cut is pro-growth, and no tax cut justifies further fiscal deterioration. Extending the 2017 cuts, which I generally support, shouldn’t be confused with true tax reform.

Some of the provisions being floated — expanded credits, exclusions for tips and overtime, rolling back the state and local tax (SALT) deduction cap — are not growth policies. They are wealth redistribution run through the tax code, indistinguishable in substance from the kind of demand-side, Keynesian stimulus Republicans once decried.

Hodge notes that these measures would do more to mimic the American Rescue Plan than to reverse its pricey mistakes. And with the Federal Reserve still fighting inflation, adding trillions in unfunded liabilities to the national ledger is profoundly irresponsible.

None of this should surprise anyone paying attention. This administration is packed with advisors and surrogates who glorify union power, rail against globalization and scoff at the very idea of limited government. Some sound more like Bernie Sanders than Milton Friedman. Whether it’s directing industrial policy or distorting the tax code to reward their favorite behaviors, they are hostile to the competition and liberty of the free market.

Sadly, that hostility has real consequences: higher prices, greater economic uncertainty, sluggish investment and fewer opportunities for middle- and lower-class families.

Veronique de Rugy is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. This article was produced in collaboration with Creators Syndicate.

As President Trump parades through the Middle East this week, he will encounter a very different region than the one he experienced during his first term. True, the Israeli-Palestinian problem remains unresolved, as do the challenges emanating from Iran’s much-advanced nuclear program and the instability and dysfunction in Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Syria and Yemen.

But this old wine is now packaged in new bottles. Beyond the garish headlines of Trump’s plan to accept a Boeing 747 as a gift from Qatar, new trends are emerging that will redefine the region, posing additional challenges for U.S. policy.

Of all the changes in the Middle East since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, perhaps the most striking is Israel’s emergence as a regional powerhouse. Aided by the administrations of Presidents Biden and Trump, and enabled by Arab regimes that do little to support Palestinians, Israel devastated Hamas and Hezbollah as military organizations, killing much of their senior leadership. With the support of the United States, Europe and friendly Arab states, it effectively countered two direct Iranian missile attacks on its territory.

Israel then delivered its own strike, reportedly destroying much of Iran’s ballistic missile production and air defenses. In short, Israel has achieved escalation dominance: the capacity to escalate (or not) as it sees fit, and to deter its adversaries from doing so. Israel has also redefined its concept of border security in Gaza, Lebanon, the West Bank and Syria by acting unilaterally to preempt and prevent threats to its territory.

Converting Israel’s military power into political arrangements, even peace accords, would seem like a reasonable next step. But the right-wing government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seems uninterested in such options and is unlikely to be induced to change its outlook. Moreover, securing new, lasting agreements also depends on whether there are leaders among the Palestinians and key Arab states ready to take up the challenge, with all the political risks it entails.

But the Arab world remains in serious disarray. At least five Arab states are dealing with profound internal challenges, leaving them in various degrees of dysfunction and state failure. Amid this power vacuum, two alternative power centers have emerged. The first are the states of the Persian Gulf, especially Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. Relatively unscathed by the Arab Spring and blessed with sovereign wealth funds, oil and natural gas, these stable authoritarian powers, particularly Saudi Arabia, have begun to play an outsize role in the region.

The second category comprises non-Arab states. Israel, Turkey and Iran are the only states in the region with the capacity to project significant military power beyond their borders. While each has suffered periods of internal unrest, they currently enjoy domestic stability. Each also boasts tremendous economic potential and significant security, military and intelligence capabilities, including the capability to manufacture weapons domestically.

One (Israel) is America’s closest regional ally, another (Turkey) is a member of NATO and a newfound power broker in Syria, and the third (Iran) retains considerable influence despite Israel’s mauling of its proxies Hamas and Hezbollah. Iran’s nuclear program keeps it relevant, even central, to both Israeli and American policymaking.

All three non-Arab states engender a good deal of suspicion and mistrust among Arab regimes but are nonetheless seen as key players whom no one wants to offend. All three are at odds — with each frustrating the others’ regional objectives — and all three are here to stay. Their influence will most likely only grow in the years to come, given the fractiousness of the Arab world.

In the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, it seemed that the Palestinian issue was once again front and center, not just in the Arab world, but internationally. Those who claimed it had lost its resonance could point to the outpouring of sympathy and support for Gazan civilians as Israel’s war against Hamas led to a humanitarian catastrophe.

Moreover, the United Nations passed resolutions calling for an end to the war, many around the world condemned the war and Israel, the International Court of Justice took up the question of whether Israel is committing genocide, and the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu (as well as for Hamas’ military commander, later found to have been killed).

Nonetheless, it has become stunningly clear that, far from pushing the Palestinian issue to the top of the international agenda, the Oct. 7 attack has actually diminished its salience and left Palestinians isolated and without good options. Continued U.S. support for Israel’s war against Hamas, despite the exponential rise of Palestinian deaths, has protected Israel from negative consequences; key Arab regimes have done next to nothing to impose costs and consequences on Israel and the U.S. as Palestinian civilian deaths mount. The international community appears too fragmented, distracted and self-interested to act in any concerted way in defense of Palestine.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian national movement remains divided and dysfunctional, giving Palestinians an unpalatable choice between Hamas and the aging president of the Palestinian National Authority, Mahmoud Abbas. The prospects for anything resembling a two-state solution have never looked bleaker.

How the Trump administration will process these developments remains to be seen. Clearly, it has adopted a pro-Israel view, with Trump musing about turning Gaza into a Riviera-style resort. He has deployed his special envoy to the Middle East to secure the return of hostages taken by Hamas but has yet to invest in any postwar plan for the beleaguered enclave. Indeed, he has left the strategy for Gaza to Israel, which in turn has resumed its military campaign there. Trump has also acquiesced to Israel’s pursuit of aggressive border defenses against both Lebanon and Syria, while enabling Israel’s annexationist policies in the West Bank.

Yet Trump is nothing if not unpredictable. In April, he announced new U.S. negotiations with Iran in the presence of Netanyahu, who himself has tried to persuade the president that the only solution to Iran’s nuclear program is military action. But if U.S.-Iranian negotiations do advance, or if Trump’s interest in Israeli-Saudi normalization intensifies, he may find himself drawn into the Middle East negotiating bazaar, dealing with the intricacies of day-after planning in Gaza and a political horizon for Palestinians.

These paths are already fomenting tension between Trump, who will not be visiting Israel on his Middle East trip, and a recalcitrant Netanyahu. But given Trump’s absolute control over his party, Netanyahu will have few options to appeal to Republicans if the White House proposes policies that he opposes. As most U.S. allies have already learned, if Trump wants something, he’s not averse to using pressure to get it.

Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, is a former State Department Middle East analyst and negotiator in Republican and Democratic administrations and the author of “The End of Greatness: Why America Can’t Have (and Doesn’t Want) Another Great President.” Lauren Morganbesser is a junior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.