Novelist of global political thrillers Frederick Forsyth died recently. He was best known for The Day of the Jackal and The Odessa File, which became popular films in the 1970s. (The Day of the Jackal is also a current television series more loosely based on the book.) As a boy, I read his novels voraciously. They were set in the Cold War, in the aftermath of World War II, a genre that has not to my knowledge been replicated in the post-Cold War world. Why not? Forsyth was himself a swashbuckling international reporter who lived dramatically just as he wrote about dramatic events. He was a 1950s Royal Air Force pilot drawn to journalism in the 1960s, covering assassination attempts on Charles de Gaulle and the Nigerian civil war. His most popular book, and my favorite, is The Day of the Jackal of 1971 about an assassination attempt on de Gaulle by exiled French Algerians, through their Secret Army Organization (OAS), angry over the French president’s betrayal of their cause. It’s based on an actual 1962 attempt, which is the 1973 film’s opening scene, with gunmen firing directly into De Gaulle’s car on a Paris street. The bullets barely missed the president and his wife, who were largely unflustered and continued with their country weekend. The OAS then resolves to hire an untraceable non-Frenchman for the next try on de Gaulle, while French intelligence brutally unravels the OAS. Forsyth’s novel, drawing upon his journalistic experiences, forensically tracks the search for the mysterious and cold blooded if charming English assassin known as The Jackal. The hero is a shrewd but unassuming French police investigator who thoroughly follows the fragmentary clues, with help from various international intelligence and law enforcement agencies. When the police inspector has finally identified The Jackal, wider French law enforcement takes the investigation away from him, confident of their manhunt skills. Of course, they fail and must again seek his help. De Gaulle himself is aloof from the investigation, deeming its details beneath his dignity. And he refuses to amend his schedule. The Jackal, realizing he is hunted, seduces a married French countess, spending the night in her chateau, leaving her dead. Later, when in Paris, he seduces a homosexual man for access to his apartment, also murdering him. French police now realize that The Jackal is targeting de Gaulle on Paris Liberation Day, when he will be vulnerable during multiple public ceremonies. Crafty as ever, The Jackal disguises himself as a crippled and bemedaled French Resistance veteran, tricking his way into a woman’s apartment, killing her, and aiming his gun at the French president. The police inspector finds and kills him only after he has already fired several shots from his silencer. The final scene is gripping and wonderful. But in the end, it turns out that The Jackal’s identity is unknown. The mystery continues. But the stability of France, a key Cold War Western ally, if a difficult one, was preserved against terrorist plots. De Gaulle, of course, was a key figure of both WWII and the Cold War. Forsyth’s The Odessa File of 1973, which became a film in 1974, like The Day of the Jackal, is set in the early 1960s. It portrays a young German reporter who in 1963 finds the diary of a Holocaust survivor who has committed suicide. The diary recalls the horrors of a senior SS sadist, loosely based on the real-life Butcher of Riga, who has since become, under a pseudonym, a munitions factory director, protected by the secretive Organization of Former Members of the SS (ODESSA). The factory is covertly providing missile guidance systems to Gamal Nasser’s Egypt. The reporter, with help from Israel’s Mossad, infiltrates ODESSA and tracks down the Butcher, who he knows, from the diary, murdered his father, a German army officer. The movie diverges from the film, with the reporter killing the Butcher in self-defense during their confrontation. In the book, the Butcher escapes to Argentina, as did the real Butcher. The film focused public attention on the real Butcher, forcing his escape from Argentina to Paraguay, where he died in 1977. The book and film portray a post-war Germany still uneasily in denial about its Nazi crimes, with many law enforcement officers as ODESSA members.   A third novel by Forsyth, but not turned into a film, more directly involved the Cold War, The Devil’s Alternative, published in 1979 and set in 1982. The Soviet Union has suffered a serious famine, and Kremlin hawks want to invade Western Europe as the solution, which the Communist Party chairman, an aging Leonid Brezhnev-like figure, opposes as far too dangerous. The plan is leaked to a British intelligence officer by his former Russian lover. Ukrainian nationalists have hijacked a giant oil tanker in the North Sea, threatening ecological catastrophe if their brethren, imprisoned in West Germany for having hijacked an airliner (and also secretly having assassinated the KGB chief), are not released. The Soviets threaten to end negotiations for concessions in return for famine relief, which means pro-war hardliners will prevail. Through terrifying events, the Ukrainian nationalists and the Kremlin hawks both self-destruct, with a “moderate” anointed as the new Soviet party chairman. And it turns out that the British spy’s lover was in fact working for the aging outgoing party chairman, who wanted the West to counter the Kremlin hawks. The status quo returns. Characters in The Devil’s Alternative are loosely based, besides Brezhnev, on Margaret Thatcher, Jimmy Carter, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. Sadly, The Devil’s Alternative never became a film. Oddly, during the Cold War, films rarely directly addressed the Soviet Union, preferring safer villains, typically Nazis, or the fantasy monsters of James Bond films. It’s notable that The Devil’s Alternative’s “happy” ending entails the death of Ukrainian nationalists and the victory of Kremlin “doves” over hawks as the best possible scenario. Few in 1979 could imagine a plausible happier scenario. The Cold War and the Soviet Union, nearly everybody assumed, were permanent. Forsyth wrote more novels after the Cold War ended addressing post-Soviet Russia, Afghan-originated terrorism, and international narcotics trafficking. To my mind these and other post-Cold War international thrillers lacked the cosmic drama of Cold War stories, when the world was still under the shadow of WWII, having defeated Nazi totalitarianism, and struggling to avert WWIII while constraining Soviet totalitarianism. The stakes were higher; the villains and heroes were clearer; the personalities were larger. The competing spiritualities were more distinctly Christian-related versus demonic/godless. The current television version of The Day of the Jackal maybe evinces nostalgia for the old paradigm. In Cold War literature, Forsyth was a sort of Homer of popular but sophisticated thrillers that demonstrated what made and sustained the West as it struggled against its enemies and dealt with the demons of its past. May there be future Forsyths who can demonstrate the West’s even more complex struggles for survival and identity today.

By all accounts, the past twelve months have been a breakthrough moment for Kneecap. Since the release of its second studio album, Fine Art, and its self-titled biographical film in summer 2024, the Belfast hip-hop trio have made waves. Through their mix of an Irish conscience and hard-hitting lines that take a jab at everyone

The ongoing saga of the unreleased Jeffrey Epstein files has focused on the materials the federal government has under lock and key: the trove of evidence and redacted documents collected and produced in the process of multiple criminal investigations of the billionaire child sex trafficker. What’s received less notice are the documents that remain under

Republicans’ ideological attack on higher education seemed limited to elite Ivy League institutions at first, briefly dressing up an authoritarian crackdown on left-wing ideas like Palestinian solidarity and racial equality in the drag of anti-elitism. That’s changing. Now they’re coming for public universities all over the country. On Wednesday, the US Department of Education announced

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deported 545,252 people from the US between 2021 and 2024, according to its data, including 271,484 last year. The Trump administration wants to deport one million people per year. To that end, there’s $75 billion for ICE in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which was signed into law earlier this month. This includes:

More than twenty months into the genocide, Israel has rendered Gaza a hellscape on earth. This hellscape is not an act of God, or a natural disaster, or some force majeure — it’s human-made, orchestrated by Israel, funded and armed by the United States, and cheered on by Western political elites. For five hellish months,

Victims accuse military of ‘cover-up’ after it closed investigation without checking archives or interviewing suspect

If asked to give a sketch of the ideal Victorian politician, most of us would describe someone like Rory Stewart. A former high-ranking Middle East diplomat turned public intellectual and non-profit executive, fond of soaring grandiloquent rhetoric, classical allusions, and the scion of a family with a long tradition of public service. This uniquely antiquated personage very nearly made Stewart Prime Minister, but ultimately British conservatives chose to elevate Boris Johnson, who later brutally ended Stewart’s time in the Conservative Party. In his recently published memoirs, Politics on the Edge, Rory Stewart tells the saga of this political rise and fall. Amid the swirl of history and amusing political anecdotes, there is a curious reflection on the various ailments plaguing British politics. In the course of recounting his many fascinating experiences, Stewart gives readers an idea of how moral purpose can be restored to a political world defined by selfish technocracy and dangerous populism. Though not a household name in the United States, Rory Stewart is undoubtedly a leading figure in Britain. The son of a high-ranking intelligence official, he served for many years as a diplomat and nonprofit leader in the Middle East before entering politics as a member of the Conservative Party. Very soon after entering the arena, Stewart began to fear that his conception of conservatism fundamentally clashed with the predominant view of those in power. In meetings with local officials, he often encountered a narrow parochialism. In conversations with politicians, he discovered that few concerned themselves with the glories of the British political tradition but instead with polling data and performance metrics. Both of these attributes—that of reactionary parochialism and professionalized, technocratic politics—flew in the face of Stewart’s most deeply held beliefs: “limited government and individual rights; prudence at home and strength abroad; respect for tradition” and love of country. As Stewart goes on to battle a broken prison system, inefficient bureaucracies, and international terrorism, it becomes clear that the professional political class stood in the way of any hope of institutional reform. The complete incompetence Stewart encounters in the upper reaches of the British government is truly astounding: A Prime Minister who believes the push for Brexit is a manageable burst of economic discontent; a foreign minister more concerned with giving bold Periclean speeches than understanding the nuances of foreign policy; an environment minister who seems only to understand sound bites. The unifying theme across these many failures is that almost every public official Stewart mentions is entirely sure of their own rightness. Both David Cameron and Boris Johnson believe they have correct answers to most questions. Even when found to be bewilderingly, earth-shatteringly wrong, most politicians refuse to admit failure of any kind. This is actually an attribute voters are initially inclined to respect but inevitably find frustrating as the failures of such leaders began to pile up. Stewart spends a great deal of time on the human tragedy that such hubristic characters reveal. However, latent within his descriptions of such individuals and their political struggles is a larger battle between the forces of tribalistic populism and corporatized neoliberalism. The neoliberals—best captured by Prime Minister David Cameron and his key supporters—are sleek, professional, and meticulous. They are also entirely removed from the lives of everyday voters. Cameron neither seemed to know nor care about what goes on in the lives of the average British citizens, unless those views could be expressed through a polling spreadsheet. By the end of the book, this detachment from the public catches up to the neoliberals. Brexit completely destroyed their grip on the Conservative Party and (until the recent election of Sir Kier Starmer) banished their carefully sanitized liberalism to the rump of British politics. Though Stewart’s story focuses on the case of the United Kingdom, this exact series of events has played out in Western democracies across the world.  The populists are, as the name implies, not as distant from the minds of the people as their neoliberal opponents. Despite this, they prove themselves throughout the course of the book to be every bit as vapid and self-interested. Though Stewart certainly meets principled advocates of Brexit and supporters of Boris Johnson, many more seem to be grifters—mining the anger and resentments of their fellow citizens for personal benefit. Stewart rightly wagered both as a candidate for the leadership of his party and later as a citizen on the sidelines that this vapidness would catch up to the Johnson government. In contrast to the political divides of the 20th century, what was once a battle between conservatism and liberalism is now essentially a battle between neoliberals and populists. In theory, this need not be a tragedy; political divisions reset with each new age and the parties eventually catch up to such changes. However, neither neoliberalism nor populism represents viable political solutions. After all, who in a moment of crisis wishes to turn to a hollowed-out liberal ethos or a politics of resentment? This, then, is the crisis of our age. In a time of social and technological upheaval, there is no viable political alternative to solve the manifold crises we confront. Yet at the heart of Stewart’s depressing narrative lay the broad contours of a political disposition that could save us from ourselves. Nowhere is Stewart’s approach better exemplified than in a speech he delivered to officially launch his campaign for leader of the Conservative Party. In his exordium, Stewart declared that: “We have to make a choice between two different paths for our country. A choice between fairy stories and the politics of reality.” At first blush, this may sound like the sort of trite nonsense neoliberals say to discredit their opponents. Yet, as the speech continued, it becomes clear that Stewart is offering a bold alternative to all of modern politics. He talked about “love, and loving the reality of place,” and how we need institutions that permit greater input from the people themselves. His speech ends on a poetic note, quoting a line from T.S. Eliot: “the only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.” Realism, love, localism, democracy, and humility—these may not seem like the typical foundations for a political movement. Yet that is precisely their strength. Over the course of his memoirs, Rory Stewart lays bare the fatal weaknesses of the political establishment, but he closes by granting hope to the reader. For in his dynamic and unusual approach to politics, one can start to detect the sort of moderate politics that could one day replace neoliberalism and stand on its own against nationalism—a politics grounded in place, conviction, and the honest humility that government can never provide all the answers to all of humanity’s problems.

Though you may have heard reports that men are in decline, rest assured that American men are not losing a battle of the sexes. But a majority of men are losing a class war, and losing a class war hurts. A majority of women are losing the class war too, but there are systematic gender

My view, shared by very few, is that the Cold War was distinctly a US project that began in 1946–47 and ended in 1963. Its original impetus was to make internationalism — a euphemism for a worldwide scope of potential intervention — an unshakeable shibboleth of bipartisan foreign policy. Thus it denied the legitimacy of

Earlier this month, Politico leaked an internal strategy document from Germany’s anti-immigration Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). In a closed meeting, the AfD parliamentary group was shown a PowerPoint presentation titled “Introduction to the Strategy Process” that provided insight into the 3D chess the party is playing to outwit all its opponents. The AfD wants to

Since October 7, 2023, Mohsen Mahdawi has been central to the Columbia University protest movement against Israel’s bombardment, calling for a ceasefire, and advocating for nonviolent resistance. On April 14, he was kidnapped by ICE at an appointment to apply for US citizenship in Vermont. He was released on April 30, with Judge Geoffrey Crawford

Like many Jewish American families, mine donated to its local chapter of the Jewish Federation for many years — no questions asked. These funds enabled us to support Jewish life and culture within our community and abroad, promoting initiatives and institutions that uphold Jewish tradition and values. However, this year, when my family received the

Hulk Hogan, an absolute trainwreck of a human being and the most important professional wrestler who ever lived, has died at seventy-one. Let’s get that second part out of the way, because while most of the world knows that it’s true, actual wrestling fans are often in complete denial about it. And Hogan, of course,

The Labour Party’s flagship Employment Rights Bill is currently in the final stage of its legislative journey in the House of Lords. Peers are making a final round of amendments to the bill — hailed by the government as the “biggest improvement in workers’ rights for a generation” — in the wake of a sweltering

United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 700 members across Indiana voted on July 10 and 11 to reject a tentative agreement (TA) covering eight thousand Kroger retail workers. This is the second contract Kroger workers have rejected, after 74 percent voted down the first offer in May. Local 700 has not announced the vote

Concern about the ongoing decline in birth rates around the world has recently transformed from an arcane demographic preoccupation into a marquee political controversy. Many were indignant when it was revealed that the Trump administration was considering a variety of dubious measures to increase birth rates, from national medals for motherhood to barring Fulbright scholarships

Starving children to death won’t win Binyamin Netanyahu the war. It will ensure it lasts for decades

At night, the city of Ayodhya in northern India glows. Revered in Hindu mythology as the birthplace of Rama, Ayodhya has long been central to the country’s religious and political imagination. In 1992, the demolition of the centuries-old Babri Masjid by Hindu nationalist mobs triggered nationwide riots and deeply altered India’s secular foundations. Today Ayodhya

One of the last nationwide bastions of union jobs is getting jackhammered by the Trump administration. Members are languishing in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) prisons without trial. Programs that protect members from racism and sexism are getting the axe. In response, building trades officers are split: some are pleading, some are protesting, and others

openDemocracy readers discuss whether voters would back a socialist government, and Starmer’s ever-rightwards shift

Something is stirring on the European Union’s eastern flank. Hungary is increasingly throwing its lot in with China and receiving billions in investment in return. Slovakia under Prime Minister Robert Fico keeps breaking with Brussels on Ukraine and edging closer to Moscow. Even in countries still aligned with Brussels — like Poland and Romania —

If we were to ask the proverbial man on the street what Thomas Jefferson meant when he appealed to the authority of “Nature and Nature’s God” in the Declaration of Independence, chances are he might shrug. A Christian might think Jefferson was referring to the God of the Bible; a cynic would think the phrase is empty rhetoric void of meaning; and anyone else might dismiss it as a vague, mystical notion of an earth-god named Nature. If we were to ask someone in 1790, we would get a very different answer. Jesse Covington, Bryan McGraw, and Micah Watson’s new book, Hopeful Realism, is not about the history of Jefferson’s God of Nature, but it is their effort to reacquaint us with him, his moral law, and its implications for our politics. In doing so, McGraw, Covington, and Watson advance no new ideas, as they would be the first to attest. Instead, the authors (and Jefferson) are invoking a concept that is very old: natural law. Their subtitle—Evangelical Natural Law and Democratic Politics—summarizes the book well. Natural law was a universally accepted teaching from antiquity through the early church, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, clear through to the Reformation and the Enlightenment. It was such a basic concept in Christendom as to pass almost unnoticed, the way we do not notice the air we breathe, or fish the water in which they swim. It fell out of use for a few centuries but has enjoyed new life since World War II. As such, Covington, McGraw, and Watson’s book is a needful part of a generational renaissance of natural law thinking, particularly among Protestants, that continues to gather steam. Other recent works by Protestants in this vein include Andrew Walker’s Faithful Reason; J. Daryl Charles’ two books, Retrieving the Natural Law, and The Idea and Importance of Natural Law; S.J. Grabill, Rediscovering the Natural Law; and most everything David van Drunen has written, especially Politics After Christendom, Divine Covenants and Moral Order, and his recent short introduction, Natural Law. The authors’ volume joins a growing chorus calling on the church to heed the historic Christian teaching on natural law. What is natural law? Though first articulated by Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and the Stoics, when the early church fathers observed Scripture’s teaching about the moral order of creation, they borrowed from the Greco-Roman language of natural law to describe it. Doing so enabled them to communicate Scriptural truths to a pagan audience while illustrating how Christianity fulfilled and surpassed the best of pagan thought. Natural law gave them a language through which to speak to pagans about sin and their accountability to their Creator. “Nature” in this sense is not a term for the physical world. It connotes something more: the innate moral structure of the world, the rational underpinning of the cosmos. Nature’s God is the benevolent Creator and the source from whom that rational pinning emanates. Natural law is the moral order of creation. Covington, McGraw, and Watson offer two parts to their definition of natural law. First, “human beings have a normative nature that is directional: some behaviors accord with and promote the fulfillment of that nature, and others hinder and corrupt it.” Second, “people have the capacity to reason and thus understand to some extent what helps or hinders this nature.” The authors summarize millennia of Christian thinking in this vein with a brief overview of natural law in the Bible coupled with a chapter on mainstream Christian thinking about politics. (Mainstream means the tradition of thinking that is neither theocratic nor pacifist; the tradition that accepts that the state is legitimate but limited). These initial chapters are written at just the right level for Christian undergraduates, seminarians, and young pastors who need an introduction to the very large topic of political theology. Covington, McGraw and Watson attempt to offer a distinctively evangelical take on natural law, accounting for the unreliability of the human mind and the stark antithesis between special revelation and general revelation. Doing so requires a host of qualifications and caveats about what we are able to know, with what level of confidence, and how far such knowledge applies. The authors succeed in conveying the humility with which we should make claims about what Nature says. That said, I’m not convinced there’s anything that is distinctively evangelical about this. The criticism of natural law—that it puts too much faith in the autonomous human intellect—might be true if we’re talking about Thomas Hobbes or Immanuel Kant. But it was never very persuasive when leveled against the likes of Augustine, Aquinas, or the 17th-century Protestant thinker Francis Turretin. The authors are not wrong to insist on epistemological humility, but evangelicals do not have a monopoly on that insight. Covington, McGraw and Watson know this, of course. They cloak their argument in Augustine’s authority, using “Augustine” as a sort of shorthand for “Christian tradition that won’t sound too Catholic.” It’s a rhetorical sleight of hand to get evangelicals to learn something about the broad and orthodox Christian intellectual tradition without provoking their autoimmune response to anything that smells like Rome. (This isn’t a criticism of the authors, but a compliment that they know their audience. I’ve used “Augustine” in the same way in my own work). Covington, McGraw and Watson proceed to list the basic creational goods that Nature affirms as good: physical, relational, volitional, and rational goods. This is a shorter and more generic list than others writing in the same vein, but each category is elastic enough to get the job done. Within those categories, Covington, McGraw and Watson elaborate the natural law as applied to “the common good and civic friendship,” “confessional pluralism and religious liberty,” “restraint and liberty,” and “democracy and decentralization.” While I agree with their conclusions, some readers may want more connective tissue showing how their first principles get to their more specific categories. The authors devote a chapter to making natural law practical. It is essentially a guide for thinking through issues of public concern, weighing pros and cons, recognizing tradeoffs, etc. It is a process, a rubric, or a heuristic. They cannot presume to cover every public policy issue themselves; instead they try to equip the reader with mental tools to structure their thinking. All that is ambitious enough, but it is just half the book. The second half is a series of case studies: natural law as applied to economics, the family, war, and religious liberty. This follows a template of sorts in the other works on natural law I mentioned earlier. It helps demonstrate how to use natural law reasoning. Most readers will get the idea better by seeing it in action rather than reading the theory. It again highlights this book’s target audience. It is meant for the nonspecialist Christian who want to think a bit more carefully about politics. Readers who want an extremely deep dive into the scriptural foundations of natural law can find it in Van Drunen’s Divine Covenants. Those who want a more technical argument rooted in Catholic thinking can find it in Melissa Moschella’s Ethics, Politics, and Natural Law (or in Robert George’s work). Those who want more on the history of natural law thinking can consult Charles’ and Grabill’s work (or older books by Heinrich Rommen or Paul Sigmund). By design, Covington, McGraw and Watson leave a few things unaddressed. There are much longer conversations to be had about how we know natural law and about the relationship of natural law to civil law. Those questions are fit for the longer, more technical, or more historical books. Covington, McGraw and Watson have written an excellent and accessible overview for students relatively new to the subject who need some acquaintance with the church’s historic teaching about Nature and Nature’s God.

There are a number of striking revelations in the documentary Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story that’s currently on Hulu in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the release of Jaws, Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece of oceangoing terror. But the most delightful is that Fidel Castro read the source material, Peter Benchley’s same-named bestselling novel,

For the past several months, a homeless man named Joshua has taken up residence in a dank crawl space beneath a crumbling building, situated at the end of an old train tunnel. The ceiling is low, making it impossible to stand, and there are rats crawling everywhere. “I hate them,” Joshua complains. “I try to

President Donald Trump’s attorney general, Pamela Bondi, recently announced that the Justice Department will not release documents about the politically connected sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, citing privacy concerns around child pornography allegedly included in the files. But the department’s recent memo contradicts the agency’s prior legal rationale in a concurrent court case seeking the release

At its recently held 52nd General Assembly, the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) passed an overture establishing an ad interim committee on “Christian Nationalism.” The stated reasons for the overture were several: there is a question, for example, whether those ordained in the PCA who hold to the view of the civil magistrate outlined in the original form of the Westminster Confession of Faith (1647) must “take an exception” to the American form of the WCF (1788), which is the version adopted by the PCA. There is a question whether the 1647 WCF is “Christian Nationalist,” and whether “Christian Nationalism” and “Ethno-Nationalism” are coterminous, or at least comfortable bedfellows. And, most importantly, the overture states that these and other issues “have caused confusion, division, and dissension even among the congregants of PCA churches and affected PCA pastors and officers.” The committee is thus tasked to study “the relationship between Christian Nationalism, Ethno-Nationalism, and related teachings” and “write a report that gives pastoral guidance when addressing congregations, new members, and future officers of the PCA.” To some extent, this controversy and consequent overture may seem a bit too “inside baseball” to warrant outside attention. However, the questions raised by this committee, and by proponents of Christian Nationalism more generally, are related to a broader ongoing conversation within intellectual Protestantism about retrieval of historic Reformed thought, a project of “Ressourcement” about which much has been and continues to be written. Have we, some wonder, gone astray from important aspects of historic Protestant teaching on social and political issues? Are there older, better ways of thinking waiting to be gleaned from various reformers, both the famous and the obscure? The landmark case for this was made several years ago by Stephen Wolfe in his book The Case for Christian Nationalism (Canon Press, 2022). Wolfe is a political theorist by training, having published scholarship on Reformed political thought in the American founding era before writing his most famous work. In it, drawing on both secular and Christian sources, Wolfe advocates for the justifiability of the “principle of similarity:” that similarity between people facilitates fellow-feeling and therefore that it is right and natural to desire to dwell with people like yourself, with whom you share a common “ethnos.” Defining who should fall within this principle of likeness is difficult, and Wolfe denies it is identical to physical appearance or skin color; instead, the likeness is predicated on a combination of language, culture, and highest ideals that unify nations. The principle of similarity and its relationship to Reformed political thought dating back hundreds of years will undoubtedly need to be addressed in whatever report the committee produces. To be clear, Stephen Wolfe is not the only representative of Christian Nationalism, nor is his book the best or only resource for the committee to assess. It is, however, a sort of cultural touchstone for the conversation, and so the committee would undoubtedly be wise to evaluate its claims. In so doing, the committee will necessarily need to consider Wolfe’s repeated claim, both inside and outside of the book, that what he offers in The Case for Christian Nationalism is nothing more or less than the historic Reformed position on the civil magistrate. This claim is really three claims packaged into one. The first is that the view advanced by Christian Nationalism’s contemporary proponents is a historic view. That is, it is a view drawn from the example of history and the writings of people within the broader Reformed tradition that the PCA would not be willing to haphazardly anathemize. The second claim is that Christian Nationalism is not only historically grounded, but also represents the consensus within Reformed Protestantism. That is, it is not merely one of many styles or camps of political theology within the broader tradition, but that it represents the majority or overwhelming consensus view. These first two claims can, I think, be fairly objectively assessed by turning to the sources Wolfe and others employ. The third claim however, that Christian Nationalism should be embraced by Christians today as theologically sound and politically prudent, will require much more discernment to adjudicate. It is undeniably true, for example, that past theologians and commentators within the Reformed tradition have advocated the civil magistrate do things most PCA leaders and members today would not support (think here of the oft-repeated debates around the execution of Servetus in Calvin’s Geneva, or the laws enacted in places like Puritan New England or Knox’s Scotland). When engaging in some sort of retrieval, then, contemporary Reformed thinkers have several options available. They could, like David VanDrunen in his Politics after Christendom, suggest that the principles and the framework established by 16th- and 17th-century thinkers like Calvin and Turretin is broadly correct and useful, establishing a difference between what is “common” and what is “sacred,” leaving the sacred to the church and the common to the magistrate. At the same time, they could suggest these thinkers are merely mistaken when they treat, for example, blasphemy laws as within the proper purview of the civil magistrate. Retrieval of this kind says that these thinkers are broadly correct in principle, incorrect in their application, and can thus be adopted with modifications. One could, alternatively, suggest that the entire category of “social and political doctrines” is more context-dependent than those doctrines we might call “theology proper.” As my friend John Ehrett has argued, “With this distinction in view, it makes sense to treat the retrieval of ‘theology proper’ differently from the retrieval of certain social and political doctrines. Reformation-era claims about social and political order are in general more likely to be contingent and time-bound, while the former are not.” A proper work of retrieval, then, would not be quite as simple as “X and Y reformers agreed on A and B social doctrine, and thus all Reformed people should affirm the same.” It would instead be a project of making good cases, given the contingencies of politics and changing political and economic situations that a past teaching is in some way binding on or prudent to adopt for present believers. This is a much more difficult task for especially Protestant thinkers to undertake, but one that has been undertaken with vigor by Oliver O’Donovan, among others. In any case, I am glad this committee has been established and I hope and pray that it will produce something of value to the church. I, along with Christian Nationalism’s proponents, sincerely hope that the committee will, as they say, “do the reading,” and will likewise avoid any imprudent anathemas of positions within the pale of our confessional tradition. At the same time, I expect the committee will find much troubling about both the teachings and the conduct of those who advocate for Christian Nationalism today, and likewise find that, among the Reformed, there is widespread disagreement on these social and political doctrines that cuts against any claim of exclusivity or unity on them within the Reformed tradition.

Patriarchy stretches to every corner of the world. Rahila Gupta takes us from Riyadh and Russia to Rojava to spotlight the women who dare to resist.

The UK’s modern slavery identification system slows down asylum claims. It can even undermine them

In a landmark address delivered during the Jubilee of Hope in 2025, Pope Leo XIV turned the world’s attention to the Eastern Churches—not only to honor their sacred past but to demand a reckoning with their precarious future. Among his most urgent appeals was a renewed call to preserve and promote the heritage of Eastern Christians living in diaspora. “In our own day,” he warned, “many of our Eastern brothers and sisters… risk losing not only their native lands, but also, when they reach the West, their religious identity.” Pope Leo drew explicitly on the legacy of his namesake, Leo XIII, whose 1894 encyclical Orientalium Dignitas called the Eastern Churches “a treasure for the universal Church” and denounced any attempt to Latinize them as “a form of ecclesiastical violence.” The Pope’s words resound deeply for the various Syriac Christian communities across Europe, the Americas, and Australia, where generations displaced by genocide, war, and persecution face the twin challenges of assimilation and amnesia. His call is particularly relevant to the legacy of Father Boulos (Paul) Bedari, whose life work foreshadowed the very concerns the Pope now echoes. For Bedari, preserving Syriac identity—in liturgy, in language, and in communal consciousness—was not a nostalgic exercise. It was, and remains, a matter of survival. In a moving celebration of Palm Sunday 2025, the faithful of Zakho commemorated not only the triumphal entry of Christ into Jerusalem but also the life and legacy of one of their own great sons—Father Boulos Bedari. The day began with a grand procession led by Bishop Mar Felix Saeed Dawood Al-Shabi, beginning at the Chaldean Church of Mar Gorgis and making its way to the historic village of Bedaro, now part of the growing city of Zakho. Hundreds of parishioners joined the joyful march, waving palm fronds and singing hymns. At the conclusion of the festivities, a statue was unveiled to honor Father Bedari, a towering figure in the religious, cultural, and national history of the region. A recently erected statue of Father Boulos Bedari in Zakho, Iraq. Born in 1887 in Bedaro, just two kilometers outside Zakho, Father Bedari’s life was intertwined with the land and its heritage. The village’s name—“Battlefield” in Syriac Aramaic—hearkens back to an ancient victory by Mar (Saint) Qardagh of Arbela over the Roman army, a symbol of resilience that would characterize Bedari’s own life. From a young age, Bedari showed a keen love for knowledge. Recognizing his potential, the parish priest selected him to study at the Seminary of Mar Yohanna Habib (St. John the Beloved) in Mosul, a prestigious institution founded by the Dominican fathers in the 19th century. Over more than a decade, he immersed himself in theology, languages, and sciences, laying the foundation for his future service. In 1912, he was ordained a priest by Bishop Timotheus Maqdassi. Father Bedari initially served his home village, but his mission soon expanded. He ministered in Beirut, Hasakah, and Qamishli, where he directed the Kifah School, known for its high academic standards, particularly during his leadership. Father Bidari was also a rebellious and defiant figure. In February 1960, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, a fierce Arab Nationalist, visited northeastern Syria during the brief existence of the United Arab Republic (UAR), the political union between Egypt and Syria (1958–1961). This visit was part of a broader campaign to solidify his control over Syria and promote pan-Arab nationalism. While many Arab Syrians welcomed him with enthusiasm, the various Syriac Christian communities reacted with suspicion, resentment, and even open resistance—especially in places like Qamishli, which had significant Christian populations. Many of the Syriac Christian communities in the area were survivors or descendants of survivors of Sayfo—the Ottoman-led genocide of indigenous Christian communities—and were particularly wary of pan-Islamic or exclusive nationalist ideas and Nasser’s pan-Arab rhetoric emphasizing Arab identity to the exclusion of other ethnic and cultural groups. Assyrians and Syriacs feared forced Arabization, loss of linguistic and cultural rights, and marginalization of their Christian identity. During his visit, Nasser publicly referred to the region as an “Arab land,” further alienating non-Arab Syriac populations who view their identity as distinct from that of Arabs. After Nasser’s speech, Father Bidari ascended the stage without permission and shouted: “O barefoot Arabs! You came to our lands as invaders. Go back to your deserts!” Security forces arrested him immediately and dragged him to intelligence headquarters. Nasser was unable to differentiate between the non-Arab Syriac Christians and the Coptic Orthodox in his native Egypt, who largely adhere to Arab culture. He noted to his aides his displeasure at seeing non-Arab culture and identity being displayed in Syria and made sure that clubs promoting Syriac language, literature, and Christian heritage came under pressure. One of the most prominent Christian football clubs in Syria, Rafidain Sports Club in Qamishli, deeply tied to the community’s cultural and social life, was shut down. Activities perceived as promoting non-Arab identity were banned or tightly monitored, including Syriac language classes, traditional dance/music groups, and heritage preservation societies. Church-affiliated youth and cultural groups were also scrutinized, especially if they operated outside of strictly religious activities. Nasserist policies discouraged any form of ethnic or religious communalism that was not explicitly Arab-Muslim. Father Bedari was a prolific writer and scholar. Fluent in Syriac, Arabic, French, Kurdish, Latin, and English, his works spanned languages and genres. Many of his manuscripts, including critiques of church leadership, historical poems, and geographical treatises, remain unpublished or were lost due to his many travels and the political turmoil of his time. Throughout his ministry, Father Bedari placed special emphasis on teaching the sacred Syriac language, church hymns, and traditional liturgical practices. But more than that, he instilled in his students a deep sense of cultural pride and national unity, transcending the sectarian divides that had fragmented the Syriac-speaking peoples. Graduates of his school were known for their strong attachment to their language, faith, and ancestral heritage. His writings reflect a passionate plea for unity among all branches of the Syriac-speaking peoples—Maronites, Assyrians (Church of the East, Ancient Church of the East, Russian Orthodox, and various Protestant Churches), Syriac Orthodox, Syriac Catholics, and Chaldean Catholics alike. During a eulogy he delivered in honor of Patriarch Ephrem Barsoum (of the Syriac Orthodox Church), during a commemorative gathering held in Qamishli, he famously declared: “We are all, with our different names, equally Syriac—without one being superior to another. May God’s curse be upon the one who scattered the Syriac people into warring factions…” In 1960, the Chaldean Patriarch Paul Cheikho summoned Father Bedari back to Iraq, where he joined the Supreme Council of the Kurdish Revolution under Mulla Mustafa Barzani. He fought and advocated tirelessly in the mountains of northern Iraq, the land he loved so dearly and tried to get Barzani’s approval for a Syriac Christian/Assyrian national homeland in northern Iraq. But when Barzani grew in power, he reneged on his promises and Fr. Bedari’s efforts were in vain. His dream was not merely political—it was a call for a national homeland for his people, the original inhabitants of these ancient lands. Father Bedari’s revolutionary engagement distinguished him even among his contemporaries. He stood out as one of the rare Chaldean Catholic figures who openly sought self-determination for his people, contrasting with the more cautious stance of others. Father Bedari never parted from two things: his prayer rosary and his pistol — symbolizing his dual commitment to faith and defense of his people. His pistol remains preserved today in the Chaldean parish of Jesus the King in Hasakah. He spent his final years in the Monastery of Mar Gorgis near Mosul, passing away in 1974 at the age of 87. He was laid to rest in the Cathedral of the Martyr Masqenta in Mosul, remembered by all who knew him as a fierce fighter for his faith, his people, and their rightful place in history. The story of Father Paul Bedari is one of faith, courage, scholarship, and undying devotion to a people and a cause greater than himself. His life continues to inspire new generations to cherish their identity, heritage, and the bonds that unite them. Pope Leo XIV lamented that “the priceless heritage of the Eastern Churches is being lost” as younger generations in the West grow increasingly detached from their ancestral traditions. He noted that many of these communities, particularly those born into the diaspora, face a quiet erosion of their identity. In his words: “It is vital, then, that you preserve your traditions without attenuating them, for the sake perhaps of practicality or convenience, lest they be corrupted by the mentality of consumerism and utilitarianism.” Father Bedari would have recognized this danger. As a scholar, militant cleric, and cultural visionary, he understood that identity could not survive on sentiment alone. It required intentional formation—schools to teach Syriac, churches to uphold Eastern liturgical life, and a communal narrative capable of bridging ancient roots with modern realities. Whether resisting Arabization in Qamishli or petitioning Kurdish leaders for Christian autonomy in Iraq’s highlands, Bedari fought not just for physical safety, but for cultural and spiritual continuity. A commemorative plaque honoring Father Boulos Bedari in Zakho, Iraq. It is precisely this continuity that Pope Leo XIV now seeks to uphold, calling on Latin bishops and global Church structures to “concretely support Eastern Catholics in the diaspora in their efforts to preserve their living traditions.” His directive is a challenge to complacency—not just in Rome, but in the parishes and dioceses of the West that host dispersed communities. In Pope Leo’s vision, these communities are not relics of a lost world but vessels of renewal for the broader Church. “The contribution that the Christian East can offer us today is immense,” he said, praising the mystagogy, liturgical richness, and penitential spirituality that remain alive in Eastern worship. These, he noted, are “medicinal” traditions—a term that could easily describe the example of Father Bedari himself, whose rosary and pistol embodied the paradox of faith and defense, devotion and resistance. In modern times, amid trends of secularization and modernization, Syriac Christian identity has expanded to include pre-Christian heritage under Assyrian, Aramean, Syriac, or Chaldean labels. These labels, which largely follow ecclesiastical divisions, are often a source of further division within the community and often reflect the unique identities of each sect and that sect’s regional ties and identity. Syriac Christian identity today is a layered one: rooted in religion, shaped by history, and negotiated through competing narratives of unity and distinction. For Syriac Christians living in the diaspora, the story of Father Bedari is more than a chapter of distant history; it is a living call to remember who they are and the importance of unity. In lands far from Zakho and Mosul, where assimilation and forgetfulness threaten to erode ancient traditions, Bedari’s life stands as a witness to the sacred duty of preserving faith, language, and communal memory. His fierce love for his people—their prayers, their hymns, their identity—reminds those scattered across the world that exile need not mean erasure. Wherever they live, Syriac Christians are called to cherish and renew the spiritual and cultural inheritance that was passed down at great cost, lest it be lost to the tides of time. For the diaspora, Pope Leo’s message is both a reassurance and a responsibility. They are, as he put it, “lights in our world,” called not merely to adapt but to illuminate. They must carry forth the legacy of saints and fathers like Boulos Bedari—men who refused to compromise the sacred even under persecution. As Pope Leo concluded, “Christ’s peace is not the sepulchral silence that reigns after conflict… but a gift that brings new life.” That peace must be built not only by diplomats and statesmen, but by families, parishes, and pastors who pass on the prayers, songs, and stories that shaped our ancestors. In this, the life of Father Boulos Bedari is no historical footnote. It is a map. And now, thanks to voices like Pope Leo XIV, the Church universal is being summoned to follow it.

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There is a dangerous romance at the heart of certain revolutionary ideologies: a conviction that violence is not only inevitable, but redemptive. Across both sacred and secular registers, the willingness to destroy has often been cast as the ultimate proof of moral seriousness. From Robespierre’s guillotine to the slogans of contemporary street uprisings, violence, baptized in the name of justice, is often framed as the harbinger of a new world. However, this is a theological mistake and a political dead end. As William Cavanaugh, Hannah Arendt, and Isaiah Berlin each argue in their idioms, violence is not a vision. It is rather what emerges when vision collapses, when the political imagination grows impatient, or intoxicated, and mistakes sacrifice for transformation. In his seminal work, Theopolitical Imagination, William Cavanaugh traces how modern states, although formally secular, are animated by deeply theological myths of redemptive sacrifice. The state’s power to compel death in war, he argues, is sustained by a quasi-liturgical structure: rituals of memory, symbolic martyrdom, and sacred borders. The citizen-soldier does not merely die for policy, but for the imagined community––the sovereign abstraction of nationhood. Cavanaugh warns that when revolutionary politics internalize this logic of sacrifice, violence becomes its justification. Bloodshed ceases to be regrettable and instead becomes a sacred act. The revolutionary subject is then bound to a mimetic logic: to prove commitment, one must suffer; to purify the future, one must destroy the present. Nevertheless, Cavanaugh is not merely condemning the state; he is contrasting its logic with a different theological inheritance, one rooted in the anti-sacrificial tradition of the early church. For the first Christian martyrs, the refusal to kill was the very sign of mortal and divine witness (martyria). True transformation comes not through ritualized bloodshed, but through the radical break of mercy, forgiveness, and endurance. To kill for the good is to betray it. Hannah Arendt, writing from a different tradition, reaches a parallel conclusion. In “On Violence,” she distinguishes violence from power. Power for Arendt arises from collective action and mutual recognition; it is plural and discursive. Violence, by contrast, is instrumental: it destroys rather than persuades. It is the means of those who have lost the capacity to act with others. Crucially, Arendt notes that revolutions that begin in the name of freedom often end in tyranny when violence becomes the organizing principle. The glorification of force—the cult of breaking and burning—eviscerates the political space itself. “Where violence rules absolutely,” she writes, “power is absent.” The Left’s temptation to romanticize violence as spontaneous, pure, or morally unambiguous can lead to the annihilation of the very world it hoped to redeem. Isaiah Berlin deepens this critique by turning to the metaphysics of politics. His famous defense of value pluralism challenges the utopian assumption that all goods are compatible, or that history can be bent into perfect harmony. For Berlin, political maturity means accepting the tragic: the recognition that liberty may conflict with equality, that justice may come at the expense of mercy. When utopian ideologies deny this truth, they have the tendency to become totalizing in nature. The desire for unity metastasizes into coercion. It is a short step from imagining a purified world to the elimination of all who would obstruct such a vision. In this sense, the absolutist spirit, whether on the Left or Right, makes violence necessary, not incidental. The result is a political theology of apocalypse. Within segments of the contemporary Left, one finds a troubling aestheticization of collapse: a delight in the imagery of burning cities, guillotines, and overturned institutions. This is not to deny that the rage is absolute or that the injustices are grievous. Regardless, the nihilistic fervor for destruction, often cloaked in the language of justice, betrays a failure to imagine durable alternatives. There is little interest in the slow, painful work of institutional reform, persuasion, or compromise. Instead, the symbolic immediacy of violence replaces institution-building with spectacle. In such moments, the revolutionary becomes indistinguishable from the sacrificial priest, demanding blood to sanctify a future he cannot describe. Against this backdrop, we must recover a politics of limits, mercy, and imagination. It is not a politics of passivity, but one of building. It begins with the refusal to treat human beings as expendable in the name of abstract ends. It insists that means matter, that the dignity of political life lies not in purity but in patience. Here, Arendt’s vision of natality—the capacity to begin anew—offers a corrective: politics must be grounded in the possibility of dialogue, not the certainty of domination. Berlin, too, offers counsel: to choose in conditions of plurality is not to betray justice, but to honor the irreducibility of the human condition. Moreover, Cavanaugh reminds us that a truly redemptive politics must break the cycle of sacrifice, not perpetuate it. Violence may clear the ground, but it cannot plant. It may shatter illusions, but it cannot sustain meaning. The world we inherit is fragile and fractured, yet it remains ours to shape and mold. Violence is not vision. If we seek the good, we must construct it—brick by brick, not corpse by corpse.

Vice President JD Vance’s Munich Security Conference speech in February rocked Europe’s political establishment. Instead of focusing on external threats to the US-led transatlantic alliance, Vance brought attention to what he called the “threat from within,” pointing to Europe’s increasing willingness to restrict political freedoms, especially the speech of Europe’s political right. Though many were critical of Vance, the truth is that European suppression of political freedoms has become so heavy-handed that even The Economist has taken note. The newspaper recently published an article expressing concern with mainstream Europe’s approach to political freedoms, such as the ongoing legal ordeal of Finland’s former interior minister and member of parliament, Paivi Rasanen, enduring legal persecution for using Biblical text to discourage the Finnish Lutheran church from sponsoring a Pride event. European institutions conceptualize free speech differently from those in the United States. The European Convention on Human Rights protects freedom of expression, but unlike America’s First Amendment, it includes a loophole, noting that freedom of expression is limited by “duties and responsibilities.” As The Economist explains, in Europe, “[y]our right to offend is limited, in some instances, by my right not to be offended.” With the passage of the Digital Services Act in 2022, the EU expanded the loophole and its ability to suppress what EU regulators consider “harmful” speech and “disinformation.” The EU’s suppression of speech under the guise of hate speech and disinformation coincides with other efforts to weaponize government against the Right. Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s National Rally party, was convicted of embezzling EU Parliament funds, which comes with a legal ban against running for France’s presidency in 2027, even though she is a leading candidate for the office. This case is troubling because the actions that led to Le Pen’s conviction are common among politicians across the political spectrum. Yet she was the only member of the European Parliament prosecuted for the alleged violations. It is not unreasonable to conclude that authorities targeted Le Pen because of her political viewpoints. And more recently, Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the Verfassungsschutz, designated the Alternative for Germany (AfD), an increasingly popular political party, a right-wing extremist organization. This designation allows the intelligence agency to surveil the party, discourages other parties from working with it, and could eventually lead to the AfD being banned from politics. This all begs the question: how can Europeans decry Vance’s criticisms while simultaneously stripping right-wing politicians and parties of their political freedoms? The answer is an ever-evolving definition of democracy used to stigmatize and punish right-wing parties for competing with mainstream parties. These efforts have gained more traction in Europe than in the United States, leading to a contested understanding of democracy and strained transatlantic relations, particularly when conservatives hold power in Washington. Defining and Measuring Democracy Democracy is an increasingly contested concept, yet most will agree that it must entail broad democratic participation, meaningful competition, and the protection of individual rights. While the first two elements of this definition are simple enough, where one citizen’s rights end and another’s begin can be complicated. Take the Finnish example: while Europeans generally value the right of sexual minorities to not be offended over the rights of Christians to express their sincerely held religious beliefs, many Americans reach the opposite conclusion. These questions become even more perplexing when trying to discern precise measurements for a country’s level of democracy. These conceptual and measurement challenges have not deterred organizations like Freedom House and others from publishing precise, scientific-sounding democracy measurements for virtually every country’s political system. For instance, in a 2019 New York Times opinion piece, Michelle Goldberg discusses results from a Freedom House report showing that the U.S.’s democracy score plummeted to 86 (out of 100) under the first two years of Donald Trump’s presidency from a high of 94 during the Obama administration. As relayed in Goldberg’s op-ed, America’s score would have plummeted even further if not for a rise in anti-Trump civic activism over the same period. Goldberg identifies Trump’s “racist demagogy” and “effort to rescind Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals,” an Obama-era executive order, as causes of America’s reduced democracy score. In other words, Trump’s mean Tweets and a ‘bad’ executive order undoing Obama’s ‘good’ executive order are indicative of America’s democratic decline. Unsurprisingly, recent research from Dr. Andrew T. Little (UC-Berkley) and Anne Meng (UVA) casts doubt on the accuracy of democracy measures. In particular, Freedom House concludes that the world is experiencing global democratic backsliding, and it provides substantial data to support its case. In contrast, Little and Meng argue that coder bias has contaminated democracy measurements, resulting in misleading assessments of democracy. “Freedom House meets with expert analysts to reach a consensus of country-level scores,” and they note that “considerable subjective judgment is required to produce democracy scores.”   Little and Meng test their coder-bias hypothesis by distinguishing between objective measures of democracy requiring little judgement to interpret, those related to participation and competition, versus measurements around what constitutes liberal rights, which require much more discernment to interpret. For example, while Little and Meng used data points such as the number of journalists jailed and murdered in a particular country, Freedom House utilized over ninety analysts assessing twenty-three dimensions of press freedom to produce a 0-100 score for each country and territory assessed. According to Freedom House, “[a]nalysts gather information from field research, professional contacts, reports from local and international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), reports of governments and multilateral bodies, and domestic and international news media” to arrive at their scores. The results of Little and Meng’s analysis are striking. Contra Freedom House, Little and Meng argue there is “little evidence” of global democratic backsliding. Instead, “changes in the media environment or changing coder standards may have led to a time-varying bias in expert surveys that could make it appear that the world is becoming less democratic absent any true trend.” In other words, they suggest that social processes are altering assessment standards and leading to the appearance of democratic decline in sophisticated democracy measures when, in reality, no such decline exists. The Democracy Divide As should be readily apparent, Vance and the Europeans he scolded in Munich are working from significantly different definitions of democracy. This is how Freedom House can give Finland a perfect democracy score (100/100) despite the Finnish government’s efforts to silence speech and quell religious freedom. On the other hand, Vance’s conception of religious liberty is rooted in the Western tradition and reflects the US Constitution. He sees freedom of expression—especially religious freedom—as a cornerstone of democracy. Much more could be said about the origins of the emerging transatlantic democracy divide. In a recent State Department Substack, “The Need for Civilizational Allies in Europe,” Samuel Samson notes how the transatlantic partnership is founded on shared values. Vice President Vance emphasized this much in his controversial Munich speech. For Samson, “the transatlantic partnership is underpinned by a rich Western tradition of natural law, virtue ethics, and national sovereignty,” highlighting the theistic and Christian origins of the Western tradition. Today’s transatlantic elites undoubtedly have a different conception of Western values and their point of origin. Because of these fundamentally different starting points, the democracy divide—the gap between the transatlantic elite’s and the Right’s conceptualization of democracy—is unlikely to narrow in the future.

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Fitting for the sovereign of the seas, Queen Victoria’s 1897 Diamond Jubilee climaxed in a display of naval power. At the Spithead Review on June 26, an armada of 165 warships saluted Prince Edward. Against these brave proceedings, Rudyard Kipling struck a discordant note. “Far-called, our navies melt away; On dune and headland sinks the fire,” his Recessional prophesied. Naval intelligence confirmed his forebodings. 92 years after Trafalgar in 1805, British naval mastery was ebbing. In 1883, the British fleet possessed as many battleships as all others combined. By 1897, the ratio was 2:1 against it. Strategic insolvency threatened: British squadrons were too few, too far apart, and facing too many adversaries to protect vital interests, a situation greatly exacerbated by Germany’s pursuit of a battle fleet in the North Sea.  A decade later, Britain’s situation seemed to have improved markedly. Strategic prioritization reconcentrated a newer and larger battlefleet in home waters to counter Germany. Obsolete ships, outdated practices, and unaffordable missions were scrapped. Friendships were formed with the United States, Japan, France, and Russia. Prioritization, however, also brought risks. Abandoning the navy’s traditional diplomatic, commercial, and policing duties frayed the disparate empire. Embracing Japan diminished Britain’s relevance in the Far East. Alignment with the Franco-Russian Dual Alliance entangled Britain’s global interests with its allies’ continental priorities, a perilous combination in July 1914. Addressing why Britain gained and lost its naval dominance, how it regained security through prioritization, and what risks prioritization entailed are relevant as the United States today confronts similar opportunities and uncertainties. Few states have lost less and benefited more from war than Britain after 1815 and America after 1945. Following Napoleon’s final defeat in 1815, Britain produced two-thirds of the world’s coal, half of its iron, and half of its cotton. Similarly, post-WWII, half of the world’s manufacturing, two-thirds of its gold reserves, a third of its exports, and half of its shipping were American. These economic advantages were further complemented by geopolitical developments. For 50 years after the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, only Britain enjoyed a significant network of overseas colonies and bases. Admiral Jacky Fisher boasted that London controlled the “five strategic keys [to] lock up the globe!”—Dover, Gibraltar, Cape Town, Alexandria, and Singapore. Similarly, by 1970, the United States deployed one million soldiers in 30 countries, maintained defense treaties with 42 nations, and supported 100 countries with military and economic aid. Like Fisher’s “five strategic keys,” Washington dominated four of George Kennan’s five “centers of industrial and military power:” the United States, Britain, Germany, and Japan (the fifth being the Soviet Union).  Neither 19th-century Britain nor postwar America were unchallenged. France alarmed Victorians by invading Algeria in 1830, launching the ironclad Gloire in 1859, and intervening in Spanish politics. Likewise, the USSR’s gains in Eastern Europe, its advances in nuclear weapons, and its “third world” adventurism bedeviled America. Challenges were real, but seldom acute. In the 19th century, though France held Algiers, Britain was able to use its Mediterranean dominance to support Greek and Italian independence, protect Turkey, and frustrate Egyptian, Russian, and French regional ambitions. Similarly, after 1947 the United States used its command of the Western European and East Asian “rimlands” of Eurasia to control most of the world’s maritime activity. Assured of economic and geopolitical superiority, Britain and America chose to project power globally. The Royal Navy suppressed piracy, interdicted slave ships, responded to disasters, and “opened” (via cannonade) ports reluctant to trade. Over 100 British ships were deployed on foreign stations around 1850. Only 35 were retained for home waters. Similarly, during and after the Cold War, U.S. armed forces dispersed globally, providing deterrence, reassurance, and diplomatic/humanitarian support. The U.S. Navy became practiced at “showing the flag” to exert influence via imposing aircraft carriers. Whether in helping tsunami victims in Indonesia, destroying armored columns in Iraq, or protecting seaways from piracy, the U.S. military is as globally far-flung and flexible as its British predecessor. In both cases, comparative economic decline bespoke the dangers of maintaining such an expansive strategic outlook. In 1875, Britain held a third of global manufacturing capacity, comparable to America’s share of the global economy in 2000. By 1905, Britain’s share had fallen by half, less than the newly-unified Germany. Today the United States constitutes a quarter of the world economy. The People’s Republic of China, just 3% of the global economy in 2000, now constitutes a sixth. Germany, which had no fleet in 1875, initiated construction of 19 modern battleships in 1897. Ten years ago, none of the world’s largest defense firms were Chinese. Now, four of them are, including the two largest. A declining share of global production does not necessarily spell doom for great powers, but it does require prioritization. Britain initially resisted prioritization, neither reorganizing its navy to guard against growing threats nor employing diplomacy to reduce tensions. The results were grim. Already in 1884, the French approached the British in modern battleships. Alarmed, parliament in 1889 legislated a “two power standard” whereby the Royal Navy would remain larger than the combined fleets of the next two largest navies. Nevertheless, in 1894 the allied Franco-Russian fleets outnumbered the British in the Mediterranean and East Asia. The United States displaced British naval mastery in North America, while Japan approached parity in East Asia. In 1905, Germany doubled its projected fleet from 19 to 38 first class battleships. During the Boer War, the Royal Navy feared it could not transport troops to South Africa without denuding key stations. Once dominant, Britain was overstretched and isolated. Historian John Seely worried that, next to its larger rivals, Britain was like “sixteenth century Florence surpassed by the great-country states.” The United States has also begrudged prioritization, preferring to not make a choice between the “peace” dividends from reduced defense spending and enjoying the influence that comes with a global range of commitments. The consequence of this in East Asia is parity in Sino-American power. In 2000, the United States operated 100 more warships than China. By 2030, China will operate 135 more warships than the U.S. Navy. PRC investments in ballistic missiles like DF-21D and DF-26, growth in its cruiser and destroyer fleets, and the doubling of its submarine and advanced fighter and bomber forces jeopardize American operations in East Asia, particularly around Taiwan. American weapons which would mitigate PRC advantages like the Constellation-class missile frigate and Virginia-class submarine are mired in production delays. In most simulations of a Sino-American clash in the Taiwan Strait, “the United States usually depletes its inventory of long-range anti-ship missiles within the first week.” Britain overcame its strategic dilemma by economizing and intensifying naval strength. It could do so because, after 1901, it recognized that it could not afford the enmity of all the other great powers. To prioritize the threat Germany’s battlefleet posed to the home islands, politicians like Arthur Balfour and Edward Grey ameliorated relations elsewhere, entering into Britain’s first defensive treaty in decades with Japan, by renouncing isthmian canal rights to the United States, and by compromising on colonial claims with France and Russia. Strategists like Fisher reconcentrated strength in homewaters and expanded modern battleship construction. Diplomatic conciliation enabled Britain to reinforce the North Sea fleet with ships withdrawn from North America and East Asia. Fisher’s restructuring resulted in a newer, larger, and better trained force prepared for combat with Germany.  The United States announced a “pivot to Asia” in 2011. It named China a “peer competitor” in 2017. Since then, naval redeployments to the Pacific have occurred, as have diplomatic overtures like AUKUS. Yet U.S. prioritization of East Asia is at best incomplete. Past initiatives, like Franklin Roosevelt’s War Production Board, offer precedents for revitalizing defense production and closing the materiel gap with the PRC. Reviving shipyard subsidies could similarly restore shipbuilding. Still, as Britain found with its “Two Power Standard,” production increases absent strategic direction are insufficient. Fisher scrapped the Victorian navy’s beloved “gunboats” for modern dreadnoughts. The United States should prioritize newer weapons-systems relevant to conflict with China, even at the cost of discontinuing legacy systems. Britain acknowledged the necessity of entrusting some of its interests to the protection of allies. American prioritization of East Asia depends on encouraging Europe to develop sufficient industrial capacity and military integration to deter Russian aggression with reduced American support. This is likelier to be assisted by making concessions on trade policy than by asserting territorial rights to Greenland.   Prioritization may incur steep costs for America as it did Britain. Prioritizing weapons-systems optimized for the Taiwan Strait could diminish U.S. ability to project influence and protect interests elsewhere. European deference to American leadership would decrease in proportion to the decline in European dependence on American security guarantees, as Britain found with dominions like Australia. These risks rest on a recognition that the postwar conditions which underpinned American primacy have attenuated. That recognition may be unwelcome, but it is fast becoming necessary.

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As I write, Pope Leo has just completed the fifth of his weekly (Wednesday) General Audience addresses at Saint Peter’s Square. The theme of these addresses has been “Jesus Christ Our Hope.” Depending on how one reads the texts of these messages, they might well be described as commentaries on the evils of war. In his June 25 address, the pontiff addressed conflicts involving Israel, Iran, Palestine, and Syria. His call, directed toward the war-torn Middle East, is to reject “arrogance and revenge” and choose “dialogue, diplomacy and peace.” Following his appeal, Leo concluded his address by citing Isaiah 2:4: “Nation will not lift up the sword against nation, neither learn war anymore.” Leo’s use of the eschatological promise of Isaiah, coupled with his exhortations to reject “arrogance and revenge” and choose “dialogue, diplomacy and peace,” require severe qualification and some comment. At the bare minimum, we might argue that the pontiff is swabbing symptoms and not getting to the root of the socio-political (and moral) problem of war, at least in the Middle East. For the challenge facing Israel is the reality of a decades-long campaign of hate and destruction. What is Israel to do amid a decades-long proxy war waged against it by Iran? And when Iran’s end goal is the destruction of Israel as a nation? Moreover, do relatively free nations have any responsibility in responding to this evil? Alas, Leo’s admonition to choose “dialogue, diplomacy and peace” is not within the purview of either Iran’s theocratic vision or its military mafia. At the international level, “arrogance and revenge,” on sad occasion, must be countered by coercive force when diplomacy inevitably fails. How, we might ask, should nations engage in diplomacy with socio-political evil at the international level? And at what point do dialogue and diplomacy become appeasement? Since its inception, Iran’s theocratic regime has demonstrated that it will not be content until Israel exists no more. For this very reason, the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, in 2017 described the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as “the new Hitler” of the Middle East region. Despite the pontiff’s calls for negotiation, the truth is that the Iranian regime cannot perpetuate itself without the outward threat of Israel and the West to justify itself. But our analysis must go deeper, if in fact we affirm in the context of wider Judeo-Christian faith the moral realities that attend justice among the nations. I refer here to the venerable tradition of “just war”—perhaps best described as the tradition of “justified war.” Pope Leo XIV needs to become acquainted—if not reacquainted—with that tradition, which is something his predecessor was unable (or unwilling) to do. Some of the essential elements of that rich tradition are delineated, albeit briefly, in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (nos. 2304-2312). While it is true that Leo’s predecessor did not “alter” the Catechism, it is no secret that he failed to affirm the Catechism’s—and thus the historic Christian tradition’s—acknowledgement of particular moral conditions that must guide the use of coercive force by nations. Among those conditions mentioned by the Catechism are the following: “Peace is not merely the absence of war . . . Peace cannot be attained on earth without safeguarding the goods of persons [and] . . .  respect for the dignity of persons and peoples . . . Peace is the work of justice and the effect of charity.” “. . . as long as the danger of war persists and there is no international authority with the necessary competence and power, governments cannot be denied the right of lawful self-defense, once all peace efforts have failed . . .” “Public authorities . . . have the right and duty to impose on citizens the obligation necessary for national defense.” “The Church and human reason both assert the permanent validity of the moral law during armed conflict.” While the Catholic Catechism neither outlines the primary moral conditions underpinning the just war tradition—i.e., legitimate authority, just cause, right intention, non-combatant immunity, and proportionality—nor offers in any detail the moral-theological basis of the tradition, it does acknowledge that not every “peace” is justified. Indeed, peace can be illegitimate; the Mafia, terrorists, and drug cartels illustrate this sad reality. Thus, peace must be justly ordered. In the words of Augustine, we go to war to establish peace. That war and peace confront the current pontiff should not be any surprise. And that Leo, at this early point in his pontificate, would seem to continue the line of thinking of his predecessor, might not be all that surprising either. But it should raise questions. In his fourth General Audience address (June 18) Leo issued a strong call for “peace,” exhorting his listeners not to “get used” to war, calling them to “reject as a temptation the allure of powerful and sophisticated weapons,” and to consider that “war is always a defeat.” Citing Pope Pius XII, whose pontificate was framed by the Second World War, he insisted, “nothing is lost with peace,” while “everything can be lost with war.” These at best are, of course, half-truths. Much, if not all, can be lost with peace, that is, a “peace” that is illicit and therefore unjust, while human dignity, human freedom, and justice can be gained by a war that is waged justly, which is the very aim of just war moral reasoning. But we must take issue with Leo’s closing citation of Isaiah 2:4. The promise that “They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks” and “Nation will not take up sword against nation, neither will they train for war anymore” is a promise of the coming age, the eschaton. It is not to be realized in the present life, nor should we pray for it (as Leo has done) short of the Kingdom come. As someone has quipped, if we insist that the lion and the lamb lie down together now, we shall continually need to replace the lamb. The Isaianic promise is future reality, and to expect—or assume theologically—that its fulfillment should be present is a distortion of biblical theology and an ethical distortion of Christian involvement in political life. Let us not only pray for nations in conflict but for Christian leadership as well, in the hopes that the Church will be guided wisely rather than foolishly as she attempts to exercise responsible engagement with a fallen world.

Reeves’ Mansion House speech shows the corporate takeover of Labour is complete

When Senator Charles Sumner first met Abraham Lincoln before his inauguration in 1861, the two men appeared to have only one thing in common: they were both 6’4”. But Lincoln wanted to be sure. The rustic Illinoisan suggested they put their backs up against one another to see who was taller. Sumner, the Harvard-educated, well-traveled lawyer from Boston, wasn’t amused, scoffing that “this was a time for uniting our fronts and not our backs before the enemies of our country.” As Lincoln later recalled amusingly, “I reckon the truth was, he was afraid to measure!” The president then struck a more serious tone: “he is a good piece of man, though—Sumner—and a good man. I had never had much to do with bishops down where we live; but, do you know, Sumner is just my idea of a bishop.” Lincoln was not the first to describe Sumner with religious imagery. Alexis de Tocqueville had compared the abolitionist to a prophet. When Sumner was famously caned on the Senate floor by South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks in 1856, an actual bishop in the Methodist Church declared that Sumner “bore in his body the marks of the Lord Jesus,” alluding to Galatians 6:17. For those in the anti-slavery cause, Sumner’s life often assumed a near-spiritual significance. “Grant won with the sword at Appomattox what Charles Sumner contended for half a century—an idea,” an abolitionist summarized after the Civil War. “That idea is the liberty of all, limited by the like liberty of each.” Sumner’s colossal footprint upon American political and social life is still seen and felt today. Not only did Sumner effectively help to found the Republican Party as its “moral spokesman,” but he was, according to Zaakir Tameez, “the most famous civil rights leader of the nineteenth century, much like Martin Luther King Jr. in the twentieth century.” Scholars have not always remembered Charles Sumner in a favorable light. One historian recently described Sumner as a “Cassandra” who was eager to capitalize on the latest controversy for his political benefit. However, Tameez’s recent portrait, Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation (Holt, 2025), aims to return the Senator “to the place he deserves in the pantheon of American heroes.” Tameez’s work is set apart from past biographies by its attention to at least two things: Sumner’s constitutional legacy and his connections to the Black community, two significant elements of his life, long underappreciated by historians and legal scholars. As a constitutional lawyer, Tameez is well-equipped to explore these overlooked facets of one of America’s most famed abolitionists. “He was, from the very beginning, a believer in constitutional nationalism,” Tameez states. Unlike radical abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison (who burned a copy of the Constitution), Sumner believed that the Constitution was a sacred document capable of protecting human rights and “that people had a direct relationship with the national government, one unmediated by the states.” In our own time, with many Americans highly critical of our constitutional order, Charles Sumner’s life is a rebuke to the idea that the Constitution has ever been a roadblock to freedom and social change. The foremost champion of equality and liberty in nineteenth century America, and the man responsible for many of the legal arguments for the Civil Rights movement, was convinced that “every word” of the Constitution, as understood by the Founders, “is to be construed in favor of liberty.” For his time, and for ours as well, this is a badly needed message. “The Constitution is not mean, stingy, and pettifogging, but open-handed, liberal, and just, inclining always in favor freedom,” Sumner once said. As Tameez illustrates, Charles Sumner was a liberal (or “radical”) who nevertheless saw himself in the conservative tradition by conserving the founding vision of America. As a result, he demonstrates to Americans today that even the most progressive social causes do not demand a negative view of the American Founding or a rigid devotion to one party. According to one abolitionist, “It is Sumner’s first and not least glory that he saved us the fathers and the Constitution. His enemies expected him to assail that venerable document … They never dreamed that he was going to snatch this very platform from beneath their feet, and make them … the violators of the Constitution itself.” After all, Sumner had an indirect connection to the Founders themselves. John Quincy Adams had taught Sumner that the Declaration of Independence phrase “all men are created equal” was actually a binding promise. As a result, in Roberts v. City of Boston (1850), a case seeking to end racial segregation in Boston public schools, Sumner coined the phrase “equality before the law.” Sumner was cited more than forty times by name by Thurgood Marshall in the NAACP’s brief in Brown v. Board of Education, tracing an intellectual lineage from the Civil Rights Movement to Sumner’s arguments more than a century earlier. Sumner is of course most known for his delivery of the address that Tameez calls “the most provocative speech in the history of the Senate”: “The Crime Against Kansas.” Given on May 19, 1856, it provoked his horrific beating by Rep. Brooks three days later. “In retrospect,” Tameez contends, “the blows that had struck his head were the first blows of the Civil War.” With the help of John Quincy Adams, Sumner was also among the first to promote a wartime emancipation theory which culminated in the Emancipation Proclamation (1863). After the war, Sumner’s vociferous advocacy for Civil Rights played a significant part in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. Sumner believed that the Declaration of Independence was a “baptismal vow” to all Americans irrespective of skin color. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Tameez’s biography is the author’s attention to Sumner’s upbringing, helping to explain Sumner’s passion for human equality and justice—something scholars have usually not explained. “Sumner grew up in a Black neighborhood in Boston, an astonishing and critical fact overlooked by almost every past biographer of Sumner’s life.” Sumner was no Boston Brahmin, and his experiences on the North Slope of Beacon Hill would ignite a zeal for racial justice that lasted his entire life. Tameez does not conceal Sumner’s prejudices, his pettiness, his loneliness, and his Harvard-styled haughtiness which often cost him political success. “There was a dose of narcissism to his love for praise,” Tameez admits. Sumner may have looked like a bishop and even sounded like one, but he did not always exhibit the humility of someone who preached the moral law of God. Yet, even as a remarkably flawed human being, Sumner was driven by a ceaseless pursuit of justice for the enslaved and the disenfranchised, eventually collaborating with African American professor John Mercer Langston in 1870 to draft a bill that became the “blueprint of modern-day civil rights law.”

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The ataman (head) of the “All-Russian Cossack Society,” Nikolai Doluda, addressed a meeting of the Atamans’ Council, in Krasnodar Krai, on February 4, and instructed those gathered that “the time has come when the Cossacks are once again becoming a stronghold and reliable shield of Russia, a guarantor of unity and protection of its national interests” (Vsko.ru, February 4). The … The post As Ukraine Crisis Simmers, Russian Cossack Movement Tightens Integration With Military Reserves appeared first on Jamestown.

Judi Bola Sbobet Bonus New Member Poker QQ Idn Poker Slot Dana PKV Games PKV Games Idn Poker Mix Parlay Mix Parlay BandarQQ PKV Games Over the last several years, Ukraine’s leaders have expressed grave concern over the dangers posed to regional energy security by Russia’s Nord Stream Two natural gas pipeline. From Germany and, more broadly, from Europe, the … The post The Many Faces of Nord Stream Two appeared first on Jamestown.

Judi Bola Sbobet Bonus New Member Poker QQ Idn Poker Slot Dana PKV Games PKV Games Idn Poker Mix Parlay Mix Parlay BandarQQ PKV Games On July 28, Ukrainian Orthodox Christians celebrated the 1,033rd anniversary of the Baptism of Kyivan Rus—a remarkable annual event for Ukrainian history and another reason for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s political speculations. After the Ecumenical … The post Religion as a Hybrid War Weapon to Achieve Russia’s Geopolitical Goals appeared first on Jamestown.

On May 25, just ahead of the 103rd anniversary of the First Georgian Republic’s (1918–1921) independence, Georgian protesters paralyzed the streets of the capital city of Tbilisi in the largest rally to date against the Namakhvani Hydroelectric Power Plant (HPP) project (Civil.ge, May 25, 26). Relatively small demonstrations against the planned dam, by locals organized under the banner “Guardians of … The post Namakhvani HPP: Georgian Hydropower Between Energy Security and Geopolitics appeared first on Jamestown.

Judi Bola Sbobet Bonus New Member Poker QQ Idn Poker Slot Dana PKV Games PKV Games Idn Poker Mix Parlay Mix Parlay BandarQQ PKV Games The Russian Cossack movement is emerging as one of the key social pillars supporting the regime, and increasingly it is taking on the mold of Kuban Cossackdom, found in the southern part of the country. … The post All Russian Cossacks Increasingly Resemble Krasnodar Movement appeared first on Jamestown.

On April 21, Vasily Piskarev, the head of the State Duma’s commission to investigate the facts of interference in the internal affairs of Russia, announced that his body was preparing legislative initiatives to combat foreign interference in Russia, including in its elections, by non-profits and non-governmental organizations (NGO). Piskarev said that “insults against Russia” will receive a “worthy response, including … The post Russia Cracks Down on ‘Foreign Threats’ appeared first on Jamestown.

On February 20, Ruslan Ablyakimov was walking in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, with two friends when he was stopped by six young men who proceeded to beat him. “Where did you come here from?” they asked, “You are from Moscow, right? What are you doing here?” Before the men left Ablyakimov, they told him, “You have until tomorrow to … The post Alexei Navalny’s Support in the North Caucasus: More About Corruption Than Navalny appeared first on Jamestown.

The foreign and security policy expert communities in Georgia (Neweurope.eu, November 17) as well as both the outgoing and candidate Lithuanian defense ministers (LRT, November 16, 19) have called for a permanent presence of United States military forces in their respective countries. These calls indicate a hope that the incoming administration of President-elect Joseph Biden will bring greater attention to … The post Georgia, Lithuania Call for Permanent US Troop Presences appeared first on Jamestown.

In the first week of August, cellphones across Russia lit up with surprising text messages. They came from different numbers, but each said the same thing in Russian: “The US State Department is offering up to $10 million for information about interference in the US elections. If you have information, contact rfj.tips/bngc.” The State Department confirmed the messages were authentic … The post US Messaging to Russian Citizens: Time to Step It Up? appeared first on Jamestown.

Recent comments by former vice president of the separatist Georgian region of Abkhazia Valery Arshba indicate a split between the older political elite and the current administration of President Aslan Bzhania (Gazeta-ra.info, October 19; Civil.ge, October 23). Arshba called for the breakaway republic to join the Union State of Russia and Belarus, “without losing [its] sovereignty.” Arshba himself has a … The post Former Abkhazian Separatist Official Calls for Joining Russia-Belarus Union State appeared first on Jamestown.