This essay is free, but with Premium Membership you get MORE. Join today.

👉 Join Premium - Tons of Bonuses!

by Peter Hague
August 21, 2026

The second launch of LandSpace’s Zhuque-3 rocket has concluded with a successful first stage landing, although there are some reports that a post-landing fire damaged the booster. Regardless, for a second flight and second landing attempt, this is impressive — SpaceX had a whole blooper reel worth of landing mishaps to get the Falcon 9 to where it is today.

This private launch vehicle follows the successful recovery of a Long March 10B first stage by the state-owned launch company CALT. China now has two separate entities demonstrably capable of recovering a rocket, and nobody else outside the United States is close to the capability.

China is also considered a serious competitor for the U.S. in getting back to the Moon, and will be soon launching their Chang’e 7 probe to the lunar South Pole, which will no doubt cause much handwringing in Washington. It remains the fact that SpaceX retains an overwhelming lead in reusable rocket technology and mass delivered to orbit. Even with the advantages they provide, Chinese competition in space is routinely raised in political debates around NASA.

What western lead remains in spaceflight is almost entirely due to one company, SpaceX, and downstream of that one man, Elon Musk — whose journey to being a space magnate is unlikely to be repeatable. It is worth taking a step back and looking at how we got to this point.

Hillsdale College’s wonderful “The Story of America” series is now FREE for you to watch! Learn about the most important episodes in America’s Founding.
Click here for the full series!

The Crown in the Gutter

In 1969, when the U.S. amazed the world by landing men on the Moon, China was a desperately poor economic basket case. Reeling from the disastrous Great Leap Forward, and suffering under the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, it had a GDP per capita of around $100, on par with that of Ethiopia. Only a handful of Soviet-derived nuclear weapons and a massive conscript army let it rank as a power at all. At the time someone suggesting that China might challenge the U.S. for the Moon would have been dismissed out of hand.

But the U.S. abandoned its lunar program. It gutted funding for NASA. It pursued the Space Shuttle as a cheap option — and even then underfunded its development, ensuring that it could never meet its lofty goals.

As the Shuttle prepared for its maiden flight, China began its economic reform under Deng Xiaoping. Its economy was a tenth the size of the U.S. (at purchasing power parity), and per capita almost 50 times smaller. But the introduction of private enterprise triggered a process by which it would quickly close much of the gap, economically at least.

In 1992, China had grown to a fifth the size of the U.S., and it initiated its Project 921 human spaceflight program. The U.S., meanwhile, had lost interest in spaceflight. The Challenger accident had shown the promises of the Shuttle as a rapid and cheap means of space access to be hollow, President Bush’s Space Exploration Initiative had flopped in the face of high projected costs and disinterest from Congress, and the American people expected a peace dividend from the end of the Cold War.

Share

Thereafter, NASA settled into low-cadence Shuttle flights, a space station program in collaboration with the Russians, and a “Faster, Cheaper, Better” ethos of space probes. The Moon and Mars were off the table.

The U.S. finally turned its eyes back to the Moon in 2005, in the aftermath of the loss of another Space Shuttle and the understanding that something needed to replace that vehicle. The Constellation program promised to use Shuttle-derived launch vehicles to return to the Moon by 2020.

Meanwhile, China was now a successful industrial power, a member of the World Trade Organization, and had an economy around 45 percent the size of America’s. They were flying their first Shenzhou missions with humans on board, learning the ropes of safe human flight, EVAs, and docking.

The Constellation program failed, producing only one suborbital test launch of an Ares 1 rocket with a boilerplate upper stage, while spending a huge amount of money. It was canceled by the Obama administration, and after wrangling with Congress, the SLS was born, as a means to fly the Orion capsule to the Moon.

As part of this process, almost as an afterthought, NASA was directed to use commercial providers to send crew to the ISS. Had this decision not been made, the U.S. today would have no means of sending people to space at all. The Shuttle retired in 2011, leaving the U.S. dependent on the Russians for Space Station access. Meanwhile, the Chinese space agency began a series of increasingly complex space station missions on their own.

Finally returning to beyond Earth orbit human spaceflight with Artemis II in April of 2026, the U.S. now faces a competitor with a robust industrial base, a near-peer economy, and a space program that maintains a continuous human presence in Low Earth Orbit. Now with reusable rocket technology, China has launched the majority of unmanned landers to the Moon this century and returned the only samples since the 1970s, and is well into the development program of its human lunar systems.

Most likely the next astronauts to leave Earth orbit will be Chinese. The U.S. still has a chance to get boots on the surface again before China does, but only due to SpaceX and, to a far lesser extent, Blue Origin — NASA and its traditional contractors do not have the capacity to get from lunar orbit to the surface at all.

In summary, the political choice to abandon the Moon, and the clear possibility that Apollo could have led into a more long-term program of lunar development, left the chance to take the lead in lunar development wide open to more or less anybody who had the patience and the will — which China does.

Second Mover Advantage

Many observers look at Long March 10B and Zhuque-3 landings and assume these vehicles are mere cheap copies. Physics does only allow a limited number of ways to do things, but indeed there likely is some “inspiration” going on, if not outright industrial espionage.

Yet this doesn’t diminish what China has achieved — because Europe, Russia, India and Japan have all been watching what SpaceX does, and have had a decade to do it themselves. None of them have flown an operational rocket of this type.

This shows implementation is far from trivial, even when you know what the goal is. But where it does help is giving direction to government procurement: leaders who generally lack deep technical knowledge can point to a technical achievement in another country and say “build that”.

Indeed, this has happened before with the Space Shuttle. The Soviet leadership, in their paranoia, decided it was a weapon and demanded their space industry build one of their own to maintain parity. This effort gave birth to the ill-fated Buran program. Rather than being an integrated stack, the Soviet Shuttle launched on the side of a self-contained heavy-lift vehicle called Energia (the vehicle the engineers in charge actually wanted to build), which only superficially resembled the solid boosters and external tank of the American Shuttle.

In the case of reusable rockets, what is being copied is agreed by the leadership and by the engineers to be a good and useful thing, so the end product of this is not going to be some confused and expensive mess like Energia/Buran. And while it is easy to mock the second mover for copying, bear in mind that the process does allow technical growth which will ultimately spawn indigenous development.

The first generation of Chinese space capsules and station modules had a not-coincidental resemblance to Russian spacecraft. But their newer modules and Mengzhou spacecraft are clearly novel designs. Once Chinese companies are comfortable flying their own version of the Falcon 9, they will likely come up with their own original designs.

This has consequences. As Joseph Trevithick put it in The War Zone:

At the same time, it is hard not to see this continued push toward new reusable space launch capabilities having huge impacts on Chinese military and other national security activities outside the Earth’s atmosphere. A mature, reliable reusable space launch capability would drastically accelerate China’s access to space across the board while also lowering costs. This is especially vital for the deployment of new large distributed constellations.

This would also increase China’s ability to compete on price in the commercial space launch market globally. As noted, the United States currently enjoys a decided competitive advantage in this arena worldwide, thanks largely to SpaceX and its reusable launch options. The benefits of securing a greater share of this market could easily feed back into Chinese national security applications by helping further spread cost burdens and fueling accelerating development of this class of space launch systems.

In the meantime, the Chinese government has already been expanding its space-based intelligence gathering and other capabilities at a breakneck pace using non-reusable launch options.

“I think the ongoing greatest challenge is just the speed at which China is moving to rapidly improve their space capabilities and the breadth that that potentially poses,” U.S. Space Force Gen. Stephen Whiting, head of U.S. Space Command, said at the annual Space & Missile Defense (SMD) Symposium last week, at which TWZ was in attendance. “China is moving breathtakingly fast.”

The Question of Will

The European Space Agency agreed a three-year budget of €22.3 billion this year, or €7.4 billion per year. This is roughly one thirtieth of one percent of the GDP of its member states. Meanwhile, the Chinese space program is estimated to spend at least €17 billion each year, decidedly not including its military space program. Applying a purchasing power factor of 1.4, that means the Chinese budget is about three times that of the European one. Unsurprising that, even factoring out different political choices in what to do with the program, Europe lags behind.

Share

But increasing the budget to match that of China would be a very small effort, still keeping the overall commitment at a tenth of a percent of GDP. Europe has the scientific and technological base, for sure, and could have entered this race at any point — and still can. Similar arguments could be made for other space powers, or even those who are not space powers.

Consider the UK; applying the 1.4 factor and converting to pounds, it would cost us around £20 billion a year to match China. The annual growth in our welfare budget is already £18 billion a year — not through new commitments, but merely the automatic updating of existing ones. The NHS spends around £20 billion every single month. Our spending on debt interest alone is more than 5 times the annual Chinese space budget.

It might be difficult to find that kind of money, but it’s clearly not outside the scope of what we spend on just treading water. Not doing so is a political choice, not one bound by fundamental economic constraint. Similar spending arguments could no doubt be made for France, Japan, Germany, and a host of other developed nations.

Decline or greatness are not things that happen to a nation. They are choices. And with sufficient will, nations can make different choices.

Some may look at SpaceX and think that they can just wait for their own Elon Musk to solve the problem for them — and somehow for another SpaceX to survive and scale without the government contracts the original got — but this is foolish, relying on historically contingent events that are unlikely to be repeated. The great powers of the 22nd century will not be those who are fortunate, but those who opted in to the future.

— This analysis first appeared at Planetocracy, which you should follow.

👉 Join Premium - Tons of Bonuses!

Recent Analysis:

This essay is free, but with Premium Membership you get MORE. Join today.

👉 Join Premium - Tons of Bonuses!

NOTE: We still live with the legacy of a powerful, extremely well-funded Soviet propaganda machine and intelligence operation in countless fields. The KGB invented Liberation Theology to subvert the Catholic Church in Latin America and legitimize the creation of Marxist regimes there; that morphed into the Woke takeover of many U.S. denominations now. It funded, trained, and supported Islamist terrorism to dislodge Arab states from Western alignment and threaten the West’s oil supplies. It directly overthrew countless governments, establishing communist dictatorships that still threaten us today. Communism is international in scope. The fall of the USSR did not kill the idea or stop its spread.

The KGB did not have to invent antisemitism or anti-Zionism. But it refined it, weaponized it, and mobilized it. We’re still living with that legacy too. — RDM

This piece was originally published on Paul Bargetto’s Substack. You can read the original article and subscribe to his excellent writing here.

by Paul Bargetto
August 20, 2026

Long before anti-Zionism became the dominant moral language of Western radical politics, it was refined in the corridors of the KGB as a potent weapon of hybrid warfare.

After 1967, Soviet institutions developed, standardized, and exported an anti-Zionist language system that fused older antisemitic motifs with the vocabularies of anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, and anti-fascism. That system depicted Zionism as racism, fascism, colonialism, apartheid, and hidden global power.

Hillsdale College’s wonderful “The Story of America” series is now FREE for you to watch! Learn about the most important episodes in America’s Founding.
Click here for the full series!

It also pioneered Holocaust inversion, including the claim that Jews (or Zionists) had become the new Nazis.

This is certainly not a claim that every critic of Israel is a Russian asset, nor that every charge leveled against Israel originates in Moscow. The reality is narrower — and far more dangerous.

The most totalizing, demonizing, and emotionally mobilizing forms of anti-Zionist rhetoric now circulating in Western politics descend directly from that Soviet political lexicon designed for strategic disruption. That lexicon was useful during the Cold War because it delegitimized a Western ally, aligned Moscow with the post-colonial world, and created fractures inside liberal democracies. It is useful again now for much the same reasons.

The decisive shift came after the Six-Day War of June 1967. Soviet hostility to Jewish life and Jewish mobility long predated that conflict, but the defeat of Soviet-backed Arab clients created a new ideological problem. Moscow needed a language that would delegitimize Israel, protect Soviet prestige, and mobilize allies across the Arab world, the post-colonial world, and parts of the Western left. What later became known as “Zionology” was the result.

A recognizable anti-Zionist circle began to form in the early 1960s around figures such as Yuri Ivanov and Yevgeny Yevseyev, with institutional protection from Ivan Milovanov in the International Department of the Central Committee. This network linked party oversight, Middle East policy, academic cover, and propaganda production into a durable system.

Seen in that light, Zionology was not a clean break with earlier Russian practice. It was a re-coding of familiar material into Marxist-Leninist language. Conspiracy theory became anti-imperialist analysis. The Jew as hidden subversive became the Zionist as hidden organizer of Western power. That continuity helps explain both the speed and the durability with which Soviet anti-Zionism took institutional form after 1967.

Yuri Ivanov was one of the key organizers of that system. He was an early activist of the circle, directly under Milovanov in the Central Committee’s Middle East section, where he handled relations with Israeli communists, knew English well, and traveled in the region, including Israel. At Milovanov’s urging, he wrote Ostorozhno: Sionizm! — usually rendered in English as Beware: Zionism! or Caution: Zionism! — published in 1969. It sold roughly 800,000 copies in the Soviet Union and was translated into at least 16 languages.

Its importance lay less in original scholarship than in ideological packaging. Ivanov recast classic conspiracist antisemitism inside the only permissible philosophical frame: the Marxist-Leninist one.

Hidden Jewish power became “international Zionism.” Financial and media conspiracy became anti-imperialist critique. In that form, older prejudices could circulate in settings that would have rejected explicitly racial antisemitism. The template remains recognizable today in claims that a uniquely powerful “Zionist lobby” secretly bends Western states against their true interests, without regard to any of the countless other, better-funded foreign and domestic lobbies with which it competes.

Yevgeny Yevseyev brought a different but equally important profile. He graduated from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations in the late 1950s, worked at the Institute of Philosophy of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, served as deputy chairman of the Russian Palestinian Society at the Academy, lectured for the Moscow party organization and the Znanie society, and at one stage acted as a personal Arabic interpreter for Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev.

In Fascism Under the Blue Star, published in 1971, Yevseyev helped codify one of the most enduring Soviet rhetorical moves: the equation of Zionism with Nazism and fascism. That was more than invective. It supplied what may be called Holocaust inversion, a framework in which the Jewish state could be re-coded as the moral heir of the regime that murdered Europe’s Jews. Much present-day rhetoric that treats Israel as Nazi by definition, or reaches immediately for the language of genocide as a total delegitimizing device, works inside this discursive inheritance, whether knowingly or not.

Valery Skurlatov represented the harder nationalist edge of the same milieu. He was a prominent Moscow Komsomol functionary, one of the most radical authors of Soviet Zionology, and later a major figure in the nationalist and neo-pagan current that fed post-Soviet far-right culture. Skurlatov later prepared the 1984 special-course syllabus “Criticism of the Ideology of Zionism,” which he treated as a near-programmatic summary of the circle’s worldview, and whose themes circulated widely in Soviet anti-Zionist publishing.

Skurlatov’s 1975 book Zionism and Apartheid helped systematize the analogy between Israel and South Africa inside Soviet propaganda. That matters because the “apartheid” frame did not arise as a neutral comparison after dispassionate institutional study. It was shaped inside a political culture that also promoted racist and neo-pagan mythmaking.

The same system pushed these themes through mass media and cultural production, notably the 1973 pseudo-documentary film Secret and Open: The Aims and Deeds of the Zionists, which Russian reference materials now openly classify as antisemitic propaganda and which the Russian state itself added to the federal list of extremist materials in 2021.

Test Case: Communist Anti-Zionism in Poland

Poland’s anti-Zionist campaign of 1967 to 1968 was one of the earliest and clearest operational deployments of this new language outside the Soviet center.

The campaign began as an anti-Israeli response to the Six-Day War and quickly became a domestic anti-Jewish campaign. The label “Zionist” made it possible for the Communist Party to represent Polish Jews, including fully assimilated citizens, as a suspect internal formation linked to foreign interests. This allowed the authorities to discredit students, intellectuals, party rivals, and cultural figures without openly embracing the language of racial antisemitism.

The political utility of the campaign was multipurpose. It crushed dissent after the student protests of March 1968, reshaped factional balances inside the ruling apparatus, aligned Warsaw with the Soviet Middle East line, and encouraged the forced emigration of around 13,000 Polish Jews. In security terms, the lesson is lasting: Anti-Zionism offered the regime a way to redirect public frustration towards a fabricated internal enemy while presenting repression as patriotic vigilance.

That same mechanism remains recognizable today. “Zionist” rhetoric allows actors to aggressively gesture towards Jews and Jewish power while preserving plausible deniability. It can be used to define opponents as alien, compromised, disloyal, or morally contaminated. It can also be widened rapidly from a foreign policy object, Israel, to domestic political targets inside Europe.

Share

Poland’s 1968 experience therefore matters not only as a chapter in the history of antisemitism, but as an early example of the cognitive warfare use of anti-Zionist language.

The Soviets, the Palestinians, and the ANC

The Soviet system never treated anti-Zionism as an isolated theme. It sat inside a much wider repertoire of active measures. A recent survey of Russia’s shadow war against the West lists the classic elements of the Soviet toolkit: disinformation, agents of influence, front organizations, support for revolutionary and terrorist organizations, political blackmail, kidnapping, and assassination.

The point is not simply that the USSR supported violent proxies. It is that Moscow combined ideological production with covert action, diplomatic warfare, and sponsored militancy in a single strategic field.

Support for the Palestine Liberation Organization and related Palestinian formations must be read inside that field. The Eastern bloc maintained secret relations with Palestinian organizations, supplied arms, provided training, and used commercial and intelligence channels to sustain cooperation. The PLO received direct military support and training from and even inside the Soviet Union, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and to a lesser extent Romania, while Soviet services also supported more radical Palestinian actors beyond Yasser Arafat’s immediate camp.

This matters analytically because anti-Zionism was never only about Jews or Israel. It was also a way of linking disparate theaters of conflict into a single anti-Western moral map.

The same state that armed and trained Palestinian actors could also sustain revolutionary networks elsewhere, back friendly “liberation” movements, cultivate European radicals, and exploit separatist or anti-state grievances. Anti-Zionism was one of the ideological adhesives that made this international system more legible and more emotionally potent.

In southern Africa, Soviet support earned durable political credit. Moscow beamed Radio Moscow into the region, the African National Congress (the ruling political party in South Africa that led the movement to end apartheid) later opened a mission in Moscow, and MK (Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the ANC) cadres trained in the USSR.

The Soviets did not support the ANC because they were black. They supported them because they were communists. They hoped to capture the most strategically vital country in the southern half of the continent — and the essential waterway it controls — in part by weaponizing Western moral outrage to serve the revolution.

Arianna Lissoni likewise notes that MK’s shift towards guerrilla warfare depended heavily on support from African and socialist countries including the USSR. Vladimir Shubin’s work on Soviet and then Russian relations with South Africa documents how central those ties remained into the late Cold War. The USSR built real reservoirs of trust, gratitude, institutional familiarity, and ideological overlap inside movements that later acquired enormous moral authority in global debates on racism and liberation.

This matters because the anti-Zionist language that matured in Soviet hands found in South Africa an especially potent moral vocabulary. The global word “apartheid” carried unmatched delegitimizing force after 1948, and by the 1970s Soviet diplomacy was already working to yoke Zionism to racism and to South African racial rule.

The apartheid analogy is politically powerful while analytically weak, and that analogy should not be mistaken for rigorous historical comparison. That caution is important.

Yet precisely because the analogy is politically stronger than it is historically exact, it has proved useful as a weapon. It allows Israel to be inserted into the emotional architecture of the anti-apartheid struggle, where the accusation does not merely criticize policy but seeks to place the Jewish state in the same moral category as one of the 20th century’s most reviled regimes.

Share

Present-day Russia has tried to reactivate this Soviet African inheritance. A 2024 report from the Danish Institute for International Studies describes Russia’s post-Ukraine Africa policy as a mix of diplomacy, soft-power campaigns, Wagner-style military activity, and information operations designed to affect local actors, UN voting, and sanctions evasion.

A 2024 study shows that Moscow’s revived anti-colonial rhetoric is not decorative. It is a strategic narrative aimed at legitimizing Russian foreign policy, attacking the West through accusatory inversion, and appealing to audiences in the global South.

Russia still benefits from the positive standing created by Soviet opposition to apartheid in South Africa, even as it repackages that memory for present geopolitical use. In that setting, South Africa’s present use of apartheid and genocide language against Israel has effects well beyond the Middle East. It carries the symbolic authority of an authentic anti-racist struggle, even when the concepts deployed are stretched or instrumentalized.

That is why modern Russian influence in Africa belongs inside this paper. It helps explain how Soviet-era political capital, anti-colonial memory, and present information warfare now interact in a common strategic field.

Lessons Applied: The Rise of Euroterrorism

By the 1970s and 1980s, the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Western European far-Left converged in practice as well as rhetoric. Multiple European terrorist groups were created or supported to undermine and destabilize various NATO countries, including the Red Brigades, the Red Army Faction, Action Directe, and the Irish Republican Army.

For present purposes, two points matter. First, the Soviet bloc learned that language, logistics, and legitimacy could travel together. Ideological narratives gave militant organizations a universal script. Training and arms gave them means. Diplomatic and media platforms gave them reach.

Second, the anti-Zionist frame helped blur boundaries between local grievances and global confrontation. It enabled a student radical in Western Europe, a Palestinian militant in Lebanon, and a Soviet propagandist in Moscow to speak in what appeared to be the same moral language.

This is one important reason the field still matters for contemporary security analysis. The issue is not nostalgia for the Cold War, but institutional memory. Once a state has learned how to convert grievance into alliance, and ideology into transnational mobilization, it tends to preserve the method even when the client list changes.

The Rise of Former KGB Officer Vladimir Putin

Vladimir Putin is not merely a Russian nationalist who happens also to be a former Soviet intelligence officer. He is the product of an institutional environment that treated disinformation, manipulation, and fracture as core instruments of national power.

The continuity is documented both in biographies of Putin and in specialist analyses of Russian influence operations. Putin served 15 years in the KGB, including in Dresden. Present-day Russian practice is better understood as a modern adaptation of Soviet techniques than as a wholly new doctrine.

Putin-era antisemitism is not accidental rhetorical spillover, but a deliberate continuation of earlier Kremlin disinformation practice. Its central contemporary examples are revealing: Russian officials and state media have portrayed Ukraine and its supporters as Nazis, antisemites, and Russophobes. They have demonized President Volodymyr Zelinsky, who is Jewish, while simultaneously claiming that Jews themselves were among the worst Nazis.

They have also manipulated the history of the Holocaust and of the Second World War for present political ends. This is not ideological confusion. It is methodology. Antisemitism is used when useful, and set aside when not, in order to intensify suspicion and moral disorientation in the target audience.

The aim was not simple persuasion, but corrosion. The target was trust, cohesion, and confidence inside rival societies. That logic fits Putin’s Russia exactly. Its foreign information operations repeatedly seek to intensify internal divisions inside democratic states rather than to establish one universally believed story. Contradictory stories are acceptable if they deepen confusion, fatigue, or mutual suspicion.

Anti-Zionism fits this method perfectly. It can be used against Israel directly. It can be used against Ukraine indirectly, by moving Western attention, emotional energy, and political pressure away from the Russian war. It can be used inside Europe to pit minorities against one another, students against institutions, street activism against public order, and moral signaling against strategic thinking.

It can also be activated in different ideological dialects: anti-colonial on the Left, conspiratorial or civilizational on the Right.

The most important contemporary continuity lies in the use of Nazi language. In the Ukraine theater, the Kremlin has invested heavily in the claim that Ukraine is fascist, Nazi, or in need of “denazification.” Antisemitism and Holocaust distortion have become elements of Russian influence operations and disinformation aimed at Western audiences, and Russian officials have repeatedly manipulated Jewish history in order to discredit Ukraine and Zelensky. The “Ukrainian Nazis” motif has deep roots in Soviet and post-Soviet propaganda and remains central to Russia’s war narrative.

The Kremlin’s antisemitic messaging about Ukraine includes the grotesque claim that Jews were central to Nazism, the insinuation that Zelensky’s Jewishness somehow masks or validates extremism, and the recycling of the old Soviet trick of severing Nazism from antisemitism so that the term can be detached from its historical content and reassigned at will.

Once that move has been made, the same propaganda system can denounce Ukraine as Nazi and describe Israel as Nazi or genocidal without any sense of contradiction. The point is not coherence. The point is delegitimation through moral overload.

In the Israel theater, the same rhetorical logic appears in another form. Israel is represented as Nazi, genocidal, fascist, or apartheid by definition. In both cases, the accusation does more than condemn behavior. It strips the target of moral legitimacy at the level of identity. It says, in effect, that the enemy is not merely wrong or excessive, but metaphysically outside the circle of legitimate politics.

This is why the genocide charge matters so much. The word does not function only as a legal allegation. In mass politics it often functions as a delegitimizing master-signifier. It can collapse history, erase agency on the other side, and place any counter-argument beyond the pale.

The Soviet anti-Zionist tradition helped make exactly this move thinkable by normalizing the equation of Jews, Zionists, and Israelis with fascism. Contemporary anti-Israel mobilization did not invent the device. It inherited and amplified it.

Share

A further strategic point follows: Russia’s information war against Israel is not separate from its war against Ukraine. Russian influence operations around the Gaza war should be understood as part of a broader cognitive campaign against the West, aimed at weakening solidarity, undermining the United States, and intensifying internal strains in allied societies.

In practical terms, the scripts run in parallel: Ukrainians are Nazis, Israelis are Nazis, Zelensky is a mask for Nazism, Jewish statehood is racism, and Israeli war is genocide. The specific object changes. The delegitimizing template does not.

Current Implications

Several policy implications follow from this analysis.

First, anti-Zionism should be treated not only as a social pathology or a campus culture problem, but also as a security-relevant propaganda system. That means recognizing that some of the most inflammatory rhetorical forms now in circulation descend from a hostile state tradition of cognitive warfare.

Second, Holocaust inversion and Nazi analogy need to be monitored as strategic indicators. When a political environment begins to normalize slogans equating Jews, Israelis, or Zionists with Nazis or genocide, the issue is not merely prejudice. It is also the activation of a lexicon designed to remove moral brakes and intensify polarization. This applies equally to the language used against Ukraine.

Third, universities, media organizations, and state institutions need a historically grounded vocabulary for distinguishing legitimate debate from manipulative narrative packages. The problem is not disagreement about the Middle East. The problem is the circulation of prefabricated frames that deny Jewish legitimacy altogether, collapse war into genocide by reflex, or connect every conflict to a totalizing theory of Zionist power.

Anti-Zionism in its most radical contemporary form is best understood as a recycled instrument of political warfare. It was systematized by Soviet institutions after 1967, operationalized in places such as Poland in 1968, internationalized through propaganda, diplomacy, and support networks linked to militant and revolutionary actors, and reactivated under Putin inside a much broader program of hybrid warfare. Its contemporary force lies in four linked capacities: to invert the Holocaust, to strip Jewish self-determination of legitimacy, to connect unrelated grievances into one emotional front, and to generate discord inside democratic societies.

The connection to Ukraine is not incidental. The same state that says Ukraine must be “denazified” benefits when Israel is described as Nazi and genocidal, when Jewish communities become politically isolated, when liberal institutions are thrown into moral panic, and when European publics lose the capacity to rank threats coherently. In that sense, anti-Zionism is not a relic. It is an old weapon in active service.

The practical task is therefore twofold. We must defend open debate, including debate about Israel, while also naming the historical pedigree of the most toxic rhetorical forms now in circulation.

We must also treat the manipulation of antisemitic and anti-Zionist language as part of the same security environment that includes foreign disinformation, sabotage, covert influence, and political destabilization. If we fail to make that connection, we will continue to answer a strategic threat as though it were only a cultural misunderstanding.

— Paul Bargetto is President and Founder of Fundacja Teatru Trans-Atlantyk in Warsaw, Poland. You may subscribe here.

👉 Join Premium - Tons of Bonuses!

Recent Analysis:

Share

👉 Upgrade to Premium or Inner Circle!

Full Discussion Transcribed After the Break:

by Rod D. Martin and Erick Stakelbeck
August 20, 2026

On Stakelbeck Tonight: Erick Stakelbeck and I discuss:

• Why Putin’s war is destroying Russia

• Why China’s “alliance” with Russia is entirely predatory

• Golden Dome, the Golden Fleet, and rebuilding America’s atrophied defense industry

• The “Islamic NATO”: threat to America or to Iran?

• How global energy is shifting from the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of America

• PLUS why the midterm math may defy the pundits

It’s 24 minutes of in-depth analysis you won’t want to miss. Watch and share!

Share

See Also:

Hillsdale College’s wonderful “The Story of America” series is now FREE for you to watch! Learn about the most important episodes in America’s Founding.
Click here for the full series!

Our Full Discussion:

Erick Stakelbeck: Welcome to Stakelbeck Tonight. I’m Erick Stakelbeck, and the war in Ukraine may have just entered a dangerous new phase.

For more than four years, Vladimir Putin has tried to grind Ukraine into submission: missiles, drones, artillery, a war of attrition designed to break Ukraine’s military and its will to fight. But now Ukraine is sending Putin a very different message. The war is coming home to Russia.

On Sunday, Ukraine unleashed one of the largest drone assaults of the entire war, sending hundreds of long-range drones deep into Russian territory. Russian authorities claim they shot down over 800 drones across the country, but they didn’t stop them all.

South of Moscow, a massive logistics hub, part of Russia’s largest online retailer called Wildberries, went up in flames. This wasn’t some remote outpost on the Ukrainian border. This was the Moscow region. Ukraine is showing that its long-range strike capability can reach deep into Putin’s backyard, targeting the logistics, industrial, and economic infrastructure that helps keep Russia running.

And it comes as the human cost for Moscow continues to climb. Ukraine’s General Staff says Russia suffered close to, get this, 43,000 battlefield casualties in the month of July alone. That’s an extraordinary price for a war that Putin started and once expected to win quickly.

Now the war is threatening to spill even further beyond Ukraine’s borders. On Sunday, a Spanish fighter jet operating on behalf of NATO shot down a suspected Russian drone after it entered Romanian airspace. One miscalculation, one escalation, and this war could take on an entirely different dimension.

Meanwhile, the diplomatic off-ramp remains elusive. Moscow continues to demand terms that Kyiv rightly considers unacceptable, while both sides are increasing their long-range strikes.

So here’s the big question tonight: Is Vladimir Putin’s war beginning to boomerang? Because it’s very clear, folks, that the economic and logistical war is now reaching toward Moscow itself.

Joining me now to break all of this down is our good friend, Dr. Rod D. Martin. He’s the CEO of Martin Capital and creator of the Rod Martin Report. Rod, it is always great to see you.

President Trump’s view here has been what you’ve called, basically, Commerce Not Chaos. He’s trying to use economic levers to bring Russia to the table and end the war. Is it effective? Is this strategy thus far making some headway in terms of potentially ending this war?

Commerce Not Chaos: Russia’s Choice

Rod D. Martin: It is very effective, but with this great caveat: Donald Trump gives everybody the opportunity to have commerce. We can all get rich together. We can all have a better life together. Everything can be better. And if not, we’re going to give you the stick. That’s exactly what’s happening here.

Soon to be added to it are 3,350 of the new ERAM missiles that are going to start being shipped to Ukraine within about 60 days. It’s an extraordinary system, significantly better than what they’ve had up to now. And of course, the Ukrainians are doing wonders for themselves with their drones.

Now, that’s a two-edged sword, because eventually there is nothing high-tech about what Ukraine is doing with drones. The Russians can imitate that if they choose to. What’s interesting is that they haven’t yet. For whatever reason, I would predict that before the end of the year, that’s going to change. Ukraine is going to be getting hurt more than it is currently from the air, as much as it is getting hurt now.

But the truth is, Putin believed that Ukraine was going to be a pushover, that they were going to lose this in three days. And here we are four and a half years later. Russia cannot move forward. Russia is not winning by any stretch of the imagination. It does not meaningfully control that much more territory than it did in the first two months of the war. In some areas, it has much, much less.

And here’s the crucial thing: Ukraine has now successfully taken 58 percent of Russia’s oil-refining and transport capacity offline. Most of that is never coming back. It’s just never going to come back unless the United States goes in and rebuilds it, which, as things stand, there is absolutely no chance of that.

So if Putin, or his oligarchs, reach a point where they decide, “You know what? Commerce sounds a little better than this chaos after all,” well, sure, we can come to a peace. We can absolutely get to a point that is not going to make everybody happy. That’s not going to happen. But happy enough.

You don’t negotiate with your friends. You negotiate with your enemies. That’s how you make peace. We can get there.

But if they want to continue down this path, Ukraine is on track to remove Russia from the board as a major oil-exporting power within the next six to 12 months. And they’re not going to be able to come back from it. Putin is destroying his country with this war.

Erick Stakelbeck: Wow, Rod, a stunning miscalculation on the part of Vladimir Putin. And the casualties: over one million in the past four and a half years since he launched this war. Hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers killed, many more injured. It’s just a meat grinder, as many have called it.

Putin got himself into this. Can he get himself out of it? And who is propping him up? Who is helping to sustain Vladimir Putin? We’re talking China, North Korea, and Iran.

China’s Predatory Embrace

Erick Stakelbeck: Putin, despite all his losses and, again, the severe miscalculation we mentioned, is still going. Part of that is support from China, North Korea, even perhaps tens of thousands of North Korean troops on the battlefield right now fighting alongside Russia, with more reportedly planned to come, and of course Iran’s regime supplying drones.

Can you talk a bit more about how this unholy alliance has helped prop up Putin’s war machine?

Rod D. Martin: The North Koreans help. They aren’t enough, but they are able to produce quite a lot of artillery rounds and other things that help take the pressure off Russian industry. That has been a benefit to Putin.

On the other hand, you look at China, and that’s a completely different situation. China’s embrace is entirely predatory. The Russians are forced to buy what they are able to buy from China, primarily in gold and yuan. They are draining Russia’s gold reserves. They are draining Russia’s foreign-currency reserves and just putting it in a worse and worse position.

They’re also obviously the chief purchaser of Russian oil at this point, but they’re taking it at an extremely steep discount. These are not the actions of a friend.

Can the Chinese help them? Sure. Are they? To a degree. But honestly, Putin is in a bind here, because the longer this goes on, the more China’s neocolonial ambitions in Siberia and the Russian Far East metastasize.

Erick Stakelbeck: Predatory is the key word, as you mentioned. But what’s the endgame here for Vladimir Putin? If this doesn’t go his way, could he find himself in jeopardy, with his head on the chopping block as Russia’s leader?

Rod D. Martin: That’s exactly the problem, and that’s why we probably didn’t have a peace deal two years ago. Putin is at least in the game as long as this war continues.

At some point, his oligarchs might be done with him anyway, but he feels like he’s in the game. He’s got a fighting chance. And of course, that’s true. The longer a war goes on, the more the odds change one way or another.

The problem is that at some point he can’t sustain it. Back in the fall, the Ukrainians had taken out a third of Russian oil capacity. Now, like I said, it’s almost two-thirds. It’s just getting worse.

And you’re actually taking the battle to the Russian civilian population in a way that they were promised they would never experience at the outset of all this. At some point, you reach a point where somebody has got to cry uncle. It might be the people backing Putin. It might be Putin himself.

And that’s where Commerce Not Chaos comes in. Donald Trump has a plan for how to make this all work for everybody in a way that gives everybody at least some of what they want. That deal can be done at some point. But Putin has so far decided that it isn’t this point, and he just keeps dragging it out. That isn’t working for him. We’ll see where it goes from here.

Rebuilding American Sea Power

Erick Stakelbeck: Back to communist China, Rod. President Trump just put 14 new nuclear submarines under contract, a massive deal worth more than $76 billion: five Columbia-class ballistic-missile submarines and nine Virginia-class attack submarines. He also ordered plans for the first new public Navy yard in more than 80 years.

It’s a big development as China is building up its Navy. You’ve called this potentially the best defense news of the year, but also very late. Unpack this a bit more.

Rod D. Martin: It absolutely is. We have let American shipbuilding atrophy to such a point that there hardly even is such a thing. We simply can’t keep up with our own pre-Trump demands.

The law says that we’re supposed to be launching two Virginia-class attack submarines per year. We’re actually launching 1.2. We can’t keep up with what we have set as our own legislated target.

But now we’re also going to supply Virginia-class boats to Australia. So how is that going to work? We actually need to be able to produce 2.33 when we’re producing 1.2.

Ditto for the Columbia-class ballistic-missile submarines. We’re retiring the Ohio-class ballistic-missile submarines at an accelerating rate. That’s where most of America’s nuclear deterrent is fielded, on those subs. They are hitting the end of their life cycle. You can’t actually extend it. So you’ve got to build these Columbia-class boats as quickly as possible.

What does what the President just did mean? It means that we actually start having enough shipyard capacity to do these things. We are paying the manufacturers enough money that they can expand their production lines, hire more skilled people, train people who may not be as skilled but get them up and running, so that we actually recreate a proper naval shipbuilding industry in this country.

Share

And of course, that fifth public shipyard that you mentioned: private shipyards build the fleet; public shipyards maintain it. We do not have enough of either.

Erick Stakelbeck: It could be a boon to the economy, with so many benefits, obviously, and most of all to our national security.

China right now: Would you say this is the largest military buildup by a nation since World War II, including its nuclear buildup?

Golden Dome and the Nuclear Balance

Rod D. Martin: Unquestionably. It dwarfs everything. The nuclear buildup is especially scary because China has tripled its number of nuclear weapons in just a very short number of years. It’s on track to double that again by 2030 or 2031. That is greatly destabilizing.

Deterrence works because we know about how many weapons the Russians have. We know about how many weapons the Americans have. You counterbalance that.

You add a third party here that could conceivably gang up on you with the Russians, and it puts you into an incredible arms race if something doesn’t happen, either a new treaty or Trump’s Golden Dome.

But Congress needs to quit dragging its feet on Golden Dome. We have to obsolete these weapons. We’re not going to be able to work this out through a treaty. It’s just not going to happen.

A New Anti-Iran Bloc?

Erick Stakelbeck: We’ve covered the largest land war in Europe since World War II. We’ve covered the rise of China. Now we’re going to head to the world’s most volatile and strategic region: the Middle East.

Rod, a major new alliance is taking shape there, one that could potentially alter the balance of power across the region. You’ve got Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and nuclear-armed Pakistan. They’ve entered into a collective-defense pact. It’s obviously raising some big questions about Iran, Israel, and American interests. What’s your take on this?

Rod D. Martin: At least in the near term, this is a net positive. Certainly, there are all kinds of ways this could go horribly awry at some point in the future, although I honestly wouldn’t give it that great a life expectancy.

I think it probably lasts about as long as CENTO or the United Arab Republic did, which was like the lifespan of a fruit fly. So I’m not that concerned about it in the long term.

In the short term, just look at a map. You’ve got Pakistan on Iran’s eastern border. You’ve got Saudi Arabia right across the Persian Gulf from Iran. You’ve got Turkey in the northwest, bordering Iran. And two of those three countries have been attacked by Iran.

Never mind that they’re sitting out this war. Never mind that they’re not attacking Iran. Iran is nevertheless attacking them, less Turkey than Saudi Arabia, and not at all Pakistan.

But Pakistan is a little sick and tired, honestly, of the Iranians supporting the Taliban, who are actually conducting a low-level war inside Pakistan as we speak.

So you look at all this, and it’s pretty clearly a defensive alliance aimed at our number-one current conflict. That’s a net positive for the United States.

Erick Stakelbeck: Turkey, obviously, has the second-largest military in NATO. Pakistan is a nuclear power, and the Saudis have their economic and oil might. So it’s a very interesting alliance, no doubt.

And by the way, as you know, it’s akin to NATO in that if one is attacked, supposedly the others will defend their partner. We’ll see if that happens, because Iran and the Houthis continue to target the Saudis as we speak.

Iran, Hormuz, and the Gulf of America

Erick Stakelbeck: Speaking of Iran, President Trump said the other day, yes, oil and gas prices are up. Not as severely as many thought before this war started, but he said it’s worth it to weaken, and hopefully just destroy, the world’s number-one state sponsor of terror, the Iranian regime, before it can acquire the bomb.

Donald Trump (recorded clip): So I just say this: For you to pay a tiny little bit more for your gasoline, just remember, you’re doing it so that a very evil country cannot have a country. Really, it’s the number-one state sponsor of terror in the world. We don’t want to have them have a nuclear weapon.

So remember that when you have to pay a little bit more. You’re at four dollars. It’s okay. I mean, I’ll never apologize. I did the right thing.

Erick Stakelbeck: Rod, he did do the right thing. He did what his seven predecessors failed to do and finally confronted this evil regime in Tehran.

I think he makes a great point about oil and gas prices. It’s not pleasant, of course, but is this what’s necessary to prevent an insane, apocalyptic, jihadist regime from acquiring the bomb?

Rod D. Martin: First, you’re exactly right. And of course it is. Of course it needed to be done. And of course it needed to be done a long time ago, before Iran got to the point where it could become the armament, the direction, and the funding source for every armed conflict in the Middle East, bar none.

Share

It doesn’t really matter where you look. If you’re talking about the Houthis in Yemen, if you’re talking about Hezbollah tearing up Lebanon now for pretty much 50 years, if you’re talking about the Gaza war, you pick a war and Iran is openly behind it.

Until you solve that problem, until you chop the head off that snake, peace in the Middle East is impossible, even in the short run, and American troops are bogged down there forever and ever, amen.

The President’s aim here, as in every theater, is to create local defensive structures that make it possible for America not to have to do all the lifting, not to always have to provide boots on the ground.

Then, if you really have a crisis, let’s say Putin invaded Poland or China invaded Taiwan, we wouldn’t be bogged down somewhere. We could respond with decisive force immediately wherever that’s needed. That’s a vastly superior approach.

But the other thing that gets missed is that the net result of this conflict is going to be not only a dramatic reduction in the price of oil, not merely a reduction in the price back to February, but a reduction to something from decades ago.

The Iranian threat to Hormuz has been a $10 to $20 risk premium in the price of oil for the last 40 years. That’s going to go away.

It’s going to go away in two respects. First, by removing Iran’s ability to threaten the Strait. Second, with the plethora of pipelines that are getting constructed, the Gulf states are going to be able to ship something like 70 percent of the oil that used to go through the Strait of Hormuz by pipeline to other seas that Iran can’t reach. That’s an extraordinary development.

But the bigger thing, of course, is that the whole world is coming to the Gulf of America to buy oil and liquefied natural gas, LNG. That is a game changer.

We are shifting the center of gravity in global energy from Russia and the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of America. And that means an insane number of American jobs, investment, and prosperous futures.

The Midterm Math

Erick Stakelbeck: President Trump is playing the long game. He said, “Rod, I’m patient. I have all the time in the world with Iran. I’m taking my time.”

The midterms are coming up in November. The economy, I believe, is about to boom, and you’ve written a bunch about this. What’s your outlook as you have communists and Islamists on the Democrat side? How are you feeling about the midterms at this still relatively early stage?

Rod D. Martin: Pretty bullish. Historically, of course, the party in the White House loses the election. That’s just part of it, and I think Trump factored that in from before he took office again.

However, the truth is, the Democrats would have to pick up two-thirds of the competitive House races to be able to eke out a very slim majority. I don’t see any math where they’re going to pick up the Senate.

So we’re probably going to have at least an upset, in part, compared to what the pundits are claiming. And if the President ends up in control of both houses of Congress, he’s going to romp and stomp for his last two years.

Erick Stakelbeck: No doubt. It’s going to be very interesting. We’re getting there, and Rod, you’re following it every step of the way. Thanks for your great breakdown, as always.

Follow him on X and across social media, and check out the Rod Martin Report. Rod, God bless. Keep up the great work. We’ll see you again soon.

Erick’s Final Thoughts

Erick Stakelbeck: As we wrap up here, we did a great around-the-world journey and breakdown with our good friend Rod D. Martin. It’s a crazy world, needless to say, from Russia and China to the Middle East and beyond.

Here’s the good news. The Gospel of John, chapter 14, verse 27: “Peace I leave with you,” Jesus said. “My peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. So do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not be afraid.”

That’s the key. God is on the throne. Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. So if you feel a little faint as you follow all this crazy news, remember that He will never leave you or forsake you.

More great stuff to come here on Stakelbeck Tonight. Until then, God bless you. We'll see you soon.

👉 Upgrade to Premium or Inner Circle!

Recent Articles:

This essay is free, but with Premium Membership you get MORE. Join today.

👉 Join Premium - Tons of Bonuses!

by Aaron Gifford
August 19, 2026

Arabella Puckett was in pre-kindergarten when she watched classmates jump off tables and chairs, imitating video footage they saw of the burning World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. A second grader in the same district repeatedly attempted to watch porn in school, while pregnant teenage girls asked teachers for rides to the doctor.

“That 9/11 footage — it’s not a conversation you should have with a 6-year-old, let alone those things in the other grades,” Arabella’s father, Justin Puckett said.

His wife, Jennifer Puckett, taught various grades in the same rural Georgia district. Her full-time job was controlling bad behavior, not educating kids.

Hillsdale College’s wonderful “The Story of America” series is now FREE for you to watch! Learn about the most important episodes in America’s Founding.
Click here for the full series!

Five years later, the couple and both of their children are part of a growing family at the nearby Providence School of Tifton, Georgia, which had just started up when they had had enough of public schools. Jennifer Puckett now teaches there, and Justin Puckett is a volunteer board member.

Arabella, 11, and Gideon, 9, are thriving. They love learning Latin and showing off their detailed knowledge of the Bible, ancient Greece, and American history.

They joined one of the fastest-growing segments in American K–12 education. As the 2025–2026 academic year winds down, classical school enrollment exceeds 677,500 across 1,551 schools and is easily on track to surpass the 1 million-student mark within a decade.

Demand to Expand

All told, classical academies, the majority of them Christian evangelical, have increased tenfold in 16 years, from just 150 schools in 2010.

Industry leaders say they are focused on careful growth to ensure that teacher training programs nationwide keep pace with demand. “It’s been explosive,” according to Eric Cook, president of the Society for Classical Learning. “It’s been pretty remarkable.”

His organization accredits schools and provides support services. It recently announced a $60 million fundraising initiative to open more schools.

Private classical Christian academies will benefit from a new federal scholarship tax program authorized by Congress last year. It allows each American taxpayer to receive up to a $1,700 dollar-for-dollar credit for contributing to a private school scholarship-granting organization in his or her state.

Leaders in 30 states so far have officially opted into the federal program or announced intentions to do so. It will provide taxpayers with the option to contribute to a specific private school choice option in the state where they live, if their governor signs on to the federal initiative.

The American Federation for Children, a national organization that tracks and advocates for universal school choice, will contribute $10 million to support the federal program.

“The federal tax credit could be very short-lived, or it can be another mechanism to provide more access,” Cook said. “That’s why the supply issue is so important. Build more incredible schools, and it will be hard to scrape away from families who really value it.”

What Is Classical Education?

Brick-and-mortar classical education in the United States consists of 1,024 Christian evangelical schools, 308 classical Catholic schools, and 219 nondenominational classical public charter schools that by law cannot include a religious component, according to consulting firm Arcadia Education.

Classical education is rooted in Christianity and Western thought, although it dates back to ancient Greece. It promotes moral development and emphasizes classical literature, such as Aristotle and Shakespeare, rather than contemporary (frequently Woke) texts, according to the Association of Classical Christian Schools.

This model holistically applies three pillars of learning—grammar, logic, and rhetoric — to all subjects to obtain wisdom, not just understanding. Typical classical schools still teach reading through phonics, in addition to Latin and cursive handwriting. Classroom instruction is more likely to provide information sources — such as the periodic table, the Declaration of Independence, and classic novels — on paper, rather than on digital devices.

Mathematical instruction also goes much deeper. Its roots are described as a language of the universe, and students develop real-world ways of looking at ratios and proportions rather than just drilling for correct answers, according to David Goodwin, president of the Association of Classical Christian Schools.

A 2019 study led by the University of Notre Dame found that nearly 90 percent of graduates from schools accredited by the Association of Classical Christian Schools went on to complete a four-year degree or higher, exceeding the rates of other types of schools.

Justin Puckett said the Christian element solidifies an objective truth free from “chaos, immorality, and confusion.”

“Teachers cannot tell a student that violence, theft, or cheating is wrong without a standard of morality and ethics,” he said. “Parents cannot hold schools accountable without a standard of morality and ethics.”

The Network for Public Education, which opposes public charter schools and voucher initiatives, previously denounced classical Christian schools as institutions that serve white Christian nationalism and “the Conservative agenda.”

“If we continue to divert public money to privately managed charter schools, religious schools, and home schooling, we put our nation at risk,” Diane Ravitch, the network’s president, said in a public statement posted on the organization’s website.

Public School Exodus

In a 2024 report, Arcadia Education forecast that enrollment in classical curriculum institutions, whether private and religious or public charter schools, would exceed 1.4 million students across nearly 2,600 schools by 2035. This comes at a time when public school enrollment is dropping nationwide.

Cook said the biggest spikes took place after the COVID-19 pandemic, when public school parents across the nation got a closer look at what their children were — or were not — learning. Private school vouchers, educational savings accounts, and other school-choice incentives followed in various states.

“People thought about their choices and didn’t default to big-box public schools,” he said.

Cook, who previously taught in public schools, said he has witnessed the vastly different approaches firsthand. “The learning wasn’t anchored in thoughtful, philosophical constructs, and there was so much passive test-taking,” he said. “It just seemed very thin.”

The Expanding Catholic Sector

The Chesterton Schools Network of classical Catholic education opened its first school in 2008. Four more were added in 2014. Today, the network has 71 schools, with another 18 planned across the United States and Canada and 12 in Europe and Africa, said Dale Ahlquist, the program’s founder.

Share

Chesterton, unlike other classical Catholic organizations, is limited to grades nine to 12. Student bodies are made up of those who attended traditional Catholic schools through eighth grade, as well as former public school and homeschooled students. The schools have a similar approach to that of their evangelical counterparts, focusing on great literature as the vehicle for telling the human story — but require daily Mass. Annual tuition is less than $10,000.

“We’re astounded by this growth,” Ahlquist said. “We had a good model, and the word got out without us doing any publicity.”

Chesterton was awarded the $1 million Yass Prize from the Center for Education Reform last year. Ahlquist said the money will be used to train more teachers.

Classic Learning Test

The Classic Learning Test, introduced in 2015, is an alternative to the SAT and ACT for college admissions. It also measures verbal and mathematical reasoning, but the reading passages are longer, and students are not allowed to use calculators.

Today, it is accepted by more than 300 institutions, including private religious colleges, the U.S. military service academies, and entire state university systems in Florida, Georgia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Indiana.

The Common Core curriculum adopted by most state education departments replaced whole books with shorter passages for summarizing on laptops. The SAT was modified to reflect that change, along with the allowance of calculators.

Many colleges and universities stopped requiring the SAT in recent years, either because of COVID-19 pandemic-related learning loss or to boost racial diversity. Advocates of the Classic Learning Test say their preferred exam reflects a better way to teach, learn, and assess aptitude for a more rigorous higher education.

In an April report provided to The Epoch Times, Classic Learning Test administrators said research across a variety of colleges and universities in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Texas indicated that students who took the test had maintained grade point averages 5 to 10 percentage points higher than their peers who took the SAT.

The Future of Classical Learning

Justin Puckett said his school in Georgia began as pre-K through fifth grade but will add a grade each year to accommodate local demand. Without middle and high school classical Christian programs in Tifton, families would otherwise have to drive their children more than 40 miles to continue that curriculum.

At less than $8,000 per year, the Providence School costs less than other private institutions in the region, and state and federal school-choice initiatives could help scores of families.

“It’s become very popular because people see how the kids act in the classroom, and they’re engaged with what’s going on around them, not just memorizing things,” Justin Puckett said.

The American Enterprise Institute reported that the supply of teachers trained in classical (Christian) instruction will not keep up with demand unless a pipeline specific to this approach is established to provide between 70,000 and 117,000 teachers by 2035.

“Classical education demands an unusual synthesis: a teacher who is intellectually serious, well-versed in the great books, morally grounded, and pedagogically effective in techniques such as explicit instruction and Socratic seminars,” the August 2025 report states.

Meeting that demand requires less of an institutional approach and more of a grassroots effort led and spread by the classical education community, said Brad Dolloff, dean of the School of the Ozarks, a classical Christian academy located on the campus of the College of the Ozarks in Missouri.

The tuition-free school is funded by the college, which offers a minor in classical Christian education and allows undergraduates a live look at this educational approach. The institutions hold an annual summer training program for established teachers and other professionals interested in this specialty, as well as a spring conference that provides training and networking opportunities.

“They’ve filled up just by word of mouth,” Dolloff said, noting that alumni include people involved with a new great books program planned at Pepperdine University. “We no longer have to advertise it.”

Dolloff was a public school teacher for 25 years before helping open the school in 2012.

As a middle-aged adult, he had to learn what he would be teaching in this new institution and read dozens of classic novels. Now he is helping experienced engineers who want to teach math at classical schools and nurses who want to share their knowledge of biology.

“People are set free to do education the way they always wanted to,” he said.

— This analysis is published in cooperation with The Epoch Times.

👉 Join Premium - Tons of Bonuses!

Want to support America’s educational renaissance? The Herzog Foundation is front and center in the fight. Learn more here.

Recent Analysis:

👉 Upgrade to Premium or Inner Circle!

by Rod D. Martin
August 19, 2026

Perhaps you’ve heard. The same experts who told you America and the world were reaching “peak oil” — the point at which production supposedly must drop forever — have decided we’re now at “peak fracking”.

Why? Because they lack the imagination needed for innovation. Fortunately, ExxonMobil does not. It’s shredding their argument. It’s about to blow U.S. production sky high.

Get ready. There’s a lot of opportunity in that.

For most of my lifetime, all we heard was “peak oil”, which (you benighted souls must understand) was “settled science”. The obvious arguments to the contrary — that rising prices drive innovation, and that regulation is its enemy — were laughed off.

I know: I made those arguments. Long before there was any such thing as fracking.

Hillsdale College’s wonderful “The Story of America” series is now FREE for you to watch! Learn about the most important episodes in America’s Founding.
Click here for the full series!

The “experts” saw no reason why, in 2008 when oil reached a stratospheric $147.50 per barrel, that rise wouldn’t continue to $250 and ultimately on to infinity. We would have to shift to wind power (but never nuclear!), they told us: even Russia and the Middle East would soon run dry. We would have to get used to rolling blackouts and declining standards of living. The age of energy, and with it modern civilization and population sizes, was over.

Then a funny thing happened. American entrepreneurs did what they always do when prices make innovation profitable: they blew up the “settled science.”

As I’ve been saying forever, there is far more oil, coal, and natural gas in the ground than we’ve ever used in all of human history. The constraint is not the size of God’s creation; it’s whether we’re allowed to invent the tools to use it. Fracking, as Alex Epstein says, is “very likely the single most beneficial technological development of the last 25 years,” precisely because it turned “once useless rock” into the world’s most important source of reliable energy.

First with shale gas. Then with shale oil. Then with an LNG and refining build-out that turned America from the world’s biggest energy importer into the world’s largest producer, its third largest exporter of petroleum, and its top exporter of natural gas.

Now comes a fourth turn of the wheel. Not a new field. Not some miracle discovery. Something much more transformative: turning what used to be refinery trash into an economy-altering asset.

Welcome to America’s new shale revolution.

From “Inevitable Decline” to Record Production

In 2008, going into the Global Financial Crisis, America was the world’s largest oil importer and a permanent ward of foreign producers. We “exported” $700 billion a year to our enemies, and as we saw twice in the 1970s, we lived at their mercy.

But if we’ll get out of its way, the market solves most problems. When oil got expensive enough, innovation became profitable. “Settled science” said American production could only drop, forever. Yet between 2009 and 2019, U.S. crude production jumped from roughly 5.4 million barrels per day to over 12.3 million — an increase of about seven million barrels per day in a decade, or an average 700,000 barrels per day of new supply every single year.

In human terms, cheap shale gas alone has saved American consumers more than half a billion dollars every single day compared to the old price regime. The Gasland crowd wasn’t just wrong on the geology; they were wrong on the economics and the morality.

That’s what a real technological revolution looks like.

I have repeatedly laid out how this flipped the entire global map. Instead of sending hundreds of billions of dollars each year to hostile petro-states, the world is sending their money to us. The energy tributary now flows toward Houston and the Gulf Coast, not Caracas and Moscow.

Even with a lower rig count, production keeps climbing. In the Permian, rigs are down significantly from their peak — but oil output is up roughly a million barrels a day. That’s not magic. That’s technology: longer laterals, smarter completions, and now a quiet revolution in the one part of fracking nobody was thinking about — the “sand” itself.

The New Shale Revolution

Hydraulic fracturing is conceptually simple. You drill a horizontal well. You pump water, chemicals, and sand downhole at enormous pressure. The rock cracks. The sand gets shoved into those cracks to prop them open — proppant — so the oil and gas can flow.

For years that proppant was literal sand. Then some producers upgraded to ceramic beads: stronger, more uniform, more expensive.

Now ExxonMobil, Chevron, and others have opened a new chapter: lightweight, synthetic proppant made from petroleum coke, a refinery by-product that used to be treated as waste.

That matters. A lot. Here’s why.

Read more

This essay is free, but with Premium Membership you get MORE. Join today.

👉 Join Premium - Tons of Bonuses!

by Roger Stone
August 18, 2026

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) marked the centenary of Fidel Castro’s birth by attempting to resurrect one of the bloodiest dictators of the twentieth century as a champion of humanity.

In an official statement, the DSA praised Castro as an “organizer, a fighter” and a “stalwart symbol of anti-imperialist struggle”. It accused Secretary of State Marco Rubio of committing “genocide” against the Cuban people, demanded his prosecution for “crimes against humanity”, and blamed the United States for the devastation created by nearly seven decades of communist dictatorship.

This was not an impetuous social media post from an errant intern. It was a considered declaration of allegiance to the totalitarian regime Castro built and his successors still operate.

Hillsdale College’s wonderful “The Story of America” series is now FREE for you to watch! Learn about the most important episodes in America’s Founding.
Click here for the full series!

Stone’s Rule applies here: when the left invokes genocide, examine whose firing squads actually operated at dawn.

Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz was born on August 13, 1926 near Birán in eastern Cuba, the son of a prosperous landowner. Educated by Jesuits, he studied law at the University of Havana, entered violent revolutionary politics, and developed the instincts of a demagogue. The mythology surrounding Castro depicts him as a humble peasant champion. In reality, he came from privilege and exploited legitimate grievances in pursuit of absolute power.

Castro also experienced American freedom firsthand. In 1948, he married Mirta Díaz Balart and spent an extended honeymoon in New York and Miami. The young revolutionary enjoyed American hotels, restaurants, automobiles, and consumer abundance, reportedly purchasing a Lincoln equipped with the modern luxuries of the day. He later returned to solicit money and political support among Cuban exiles.

Share

After seizing power in 1959, Castro visited America on a public relations tour, presenting himself as a democratic reformer who was supposedly neither a communist nor an enemy of the United States. Vice President Richard Nixon met with him and perceived both Castro’s formidable political talent and the danger beneath his protestations.

Castro had seen private property, open commerce, political pluralism, and individual liberty at close range. He understood that a free people could criticize its government, build independent institutions, remove its leaders, and refuse obedience. Those were precisely the reasons he rejected the American model. Liberty places limits on rulers, and Fidel Castro had no interest in limits.

Castro took power after Fulgencio Batista fled Cuba in January 1959. He promised constitutional government, political freedom, and elections. Once secure, he postponed and then abandoned elections. Independent newspapers were silenced. Private property was confiscated. Political parties were eliminated. Labor unions became appendages of the state. Churches were harassed, religious education was restricted, and faithful Catholics were treated as politically suspect. Cuba became a one-party Marxist state aligned with the Soviet Union.

The prisons filled while the firing squads began their work. Revolutionary tribunals dispensed verdicts with the efficiency of an abattoir. Some defendants had committed crimes under Batista, but Castro’s machinery quickly expanded beyond proven wrongdoers. Former revolutionaries who opposed communist rule, journalists, businessmen, farmers, clergy, students, labor organizers, and ordinary citizens accused of disloyalty were imprisoned, terrorized, or driven into exile.

Cuba Archive has documented thousands of deaths and disappearances attributed to the regime, including executions, extrajudicial killings, prison deaths, and people killed while attempting to escape. The precise total remains disputed because communist dictatorships do not preserve transparent records of their crimes. Secrecy is part of the murder weapon.

What cannot be disputed is the existence of thousands of documented victims and an immense exile population whose families experienced the repression directly. Castro’s admirers quibble over numbers as if revising the inventory of a graveyard absolves the men who filled it. Human Rights Watch described Castro’s system as one that punished virtually every form of dissent. Amnesty International documented the ruthless suppression of expression, assembly, association, and movement. Critics faced arbitrary arrest, beatings, isolation, sham proceedings, dismissal from employment, denial of educational opportunities, and retaliation against relatives.

The state did not merely demand obedience in public. It insinuated itself into homes, friendships, schools, workplaces, and neighborhoods. The Committees for the Defense of the Revolution placed surveillance at the block level. Neighbors observed neighbors, recorded visitors, reported gatherings, and identified anyone displaying insufficient revolutionary ardor.

Cubans learned that an innocent celebration could invite scrutiny if too many people arrived, curtains were closed, or someone suspected an unauthorized meeting. Imagine fearing a local party functionary because you closed the curtains during a five-year-old child’s birthday party. That is not solidarity, equality, or liberation. It is totalitarianism in its most intimate and suffocating form.

Castro’s Cuba became a tropical panopticon. The palm trees remained, the music survived, and the Cuban people retained their irrepressible spirit, but behind the picturesque facade stood informants, political police, ration books, prison cells, and permission slips. The state could determine where someone worked, whether a child received an education, whether a family obtained housing, and whether a citizen could leave the country. Fear became an invisible public utility, distributed more reliably than electricity or water.

The consequences are visible across Cuba today. Many residents endure power outages lasting most of the day. Food spoils because refrigerators cannot run. Water pumps fail, leaving neighborhoods without dependable service. Hospitals suffer blackouts and shortages of medicine, equipment, and basic supplies. Public transportation has been crippled by fuel scarcity. Farmers struggle to operate machinery or move crops. Food production declines while prices exceed the means of ordinary workers and pensioners.

Sanitation has deteriorated into a public health menace. Havana has endured enormous accumulations of uncollected garbage because collection trucks are broken or lack fuel. These are simply not priorities for the regime. Rotting waste attracts flies, mosquitoes, and rats. Stagnant water encourages disease. Residents burn rubbish because no functioning system removes it. Pharmacies lack ordinary medications. Schools lose instructional time. Elderly Cubans survive on meager pensions and help from relatives abroad. Parents spend hours searching for milk, eggs, cooking oil, and meat while Communist Party officials enjoy privileges unavailable, if not unimaginable, to the people they lecture about sacrifice.

American sanctions and recent pressure on Cuba’s fuel supplies have intensified immediate shortages. The DSA exploits that fact to erase the preceding 67 years of confiscation, command economics, corruption, decrepit infrastructure, suppression of private enterprise, and dependence on foreign patrons.

The Soviet Union subsidized Havana for decades. Venezuela later supplied discounted oil. Each patron temporarily concealed the same congenital defect. Castro built an economy incapable of sustaining itself because political control mattered more than production.

Communism consumes accumulated wealth the way locusts consume a field. First, the revolution distributes property it did not create. Then it exhausts inventories, drives away expertise, punishes initiative, and blames saboteurs for the resulting scarcity. When shelves empty and the electrical grid collapses, the party demands another sacrifice. Socialism promises abundance through confiscation and delivers equality by making everyone outside the ruling caste equally poor.

The Cuban people have paid in hunger, darkness, separation, and exile. The Camarioca exodus, the Freedom Flights, the Mariel boatlift, the balsero crisis, and the enormous recent migration were not vacations from a socialist paradise. Cubans boarded overloaded vessels and improvised rafts because remaining under communism had become intolerable. Many arrived in Florida carrying little beyond photographs, memories, and the knowledge that everything their families built had been stolen.

The DSA regards these exiles as inconvenient witnesses. Their testimony punctures the gauzy mythology taught in radical seminars. Cuban Americans know that Castro did not merely nationalize corporations. He confiscated neighborhood shops, family farms, homes, savings, and futures. They understand that “free” medicine means nothing when medicine cannot be found, and that literacy is not liberation when the government dictates what may be read, published, or believed. A prison can contain schools and clinics and remain a prison.

The DSA’s attack on Marco Rubio is especially repellent. Rubio is the son of Cuban immigrants and has spent his career warning Americans about the ideology his family escaped. To brand him the architect of genocide while celebrating Fidel Castro is moral inversion of the most grotesque kind. It is comparable to prosecuting the fireman while presenting the arsonist with a humanitarian award. The DSA absolves the jailer, condemns the jailer’s opponent, and demands that Americans finance the prison.

This statement also destroys the organization’s favorite semantic evasion. DSA activists routinely insist that their “democratic socialism” bears no relationship to communist dictatorship. Yet when given the opportunity to commemorate Castro, they did not lament his political prisons, renounce his firing squads, or express solidarity with Cuban dissidents. They praised him and adopted the propaganda vocabulary of his regime. Their “democratic” modifier collapses the moment an actual Marxist dictator enters the room.

Share

The DSA’s evil resides not merely in mistaken economic theories but in its willingness to excuse coercion whenever it advances the preferred ideological project. It romanticizes governments that abolish opposition, censor journalists, imprison dissenters, and impoverish workers while claiming to represent democracy and labor. Its rhetoric may be mellifluous, but its political lineage is sanguinary. The rose in its emblem cannot conceal the barbed wire growing beneath it.

History supplies ample warning. Lenin promised power to workers and created the Cheka. Stalin collectivized agriculture and produced famine, purges, deportations, and the Gulag. Mao promised a Great Leap Forward and presided over mass starvation. Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge pursued ideological purity until killing fields replaced civil society. North Korea constructed a hereditary prison state. Venezuela, once among the wealthiest countries in Latin America, descended into scarcity, repression, and mass emigration under socialist rule. Different flags, languages, and climates produced the same lugubrious procession of censorship, rationing, corruption, terror, and graves.

President Donald J. Trump understands this pattern and refuses to indulge the euphemisms surrounding it. He has declared that “Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty” and described it as an enemy of free people, the Constitution, and the principles of July 4, 1776. He established Anti Communism Week in November of 2025 to remember more than 100 million victims of communist regimes and reaffirmed that America will never surrender its freedom to this pernicious ideology.

President Trump recognizes that communism advances when decent people dismiss it as antiquated, fashionable, or harmless. It seldom arrives by announcing the abolition of freedom. It advances through confiscatory promises, resentment, institutional infiltration, historical falsification, and the gradual stigmatization of dissent. By the time bars appear on the windows, the propagandists insist that the prison was built for the public good.

The MAGA movement stands against that advance because MAGA is rooted in national sovereignty, private property, religious liberty, constitutional government, secure borders, and the dignity of productive work. Those principles are irreconcilable with a doctrine that subordinates the individual to the state and treats faith, family, property, and independent thought as competing sources of allegiance.

The contrast is unmistakable. The DSA commemorates Fidel Castro. President Trump commemorates communism’s victims. The DSA curses Marco Rubio for confronting the Cuban dictatorship. Trump supports those who want Cuba to become free, prosperous, and governed by its own people. The DSA looks at Castro’s ruined island and demands ideological obedience. MAGA demands liberation from the system that has persecuted and impoverished the Cuban people.

Fidel Castro died in 2016, but the machinery he constructed continues to crush Cuba. Its people deserve reliable food, clean water, functioning electricity, safe streets, honest courts, open churches, private businesses, independent newspapers, and free elections. They deserve homes in which a family can close its curtains without fear. They deserve to speak without whispering, celebrate without surveillance, and raise their children without teaching them to hide the truth from local police.

The DSA’s centenary tribute strips away the organization’s cosmetic language and reveals the communist rot beneath it. An organization that eulogizes a butcher cannot credibly call itself democratic. A movement that venerates the jailer has no concern for the prisoner. A political faction that excuses tyranny abroad will eventually discover reasons to excuse it at home.

Castro belongs in history’s mausoleum of dictators, beside the false messiahs who promised utopia and constructed charnel houses. His ideology belongs on the ash heap. The Cuban people belong among the free. President Trump and the MAGA movement are determined to keep communism from gaining power in the United States and to expose its American apologists before their euphemisms become edicts.

The DSA has told us exactly what it worships. We should believe it.

— Roger Stone is a veteran of ten national presidential campaigns who served as a senior campaign aide to three Republican presidents: Nixon, Reagan, and Trump. He is a speaker, pundit, and New York Times bestselling Author featured in the Netflix documentary ‘Get Me Roger Stone.’ This analysis first appeared at his Substack, StoneColdTruth.com.

👉 Join Premium - Tons of Bonuses!

Recent Analysis:

This essay is free, but with Premium Membership you get MORE. Join today.

👉 Join Premium - Tons of Bonuses!

by Antonio Graceffo
August 17, 2026

Across Asia, countries are realigning their defense relationships to counter the Chinese communist regime. This shift includes new and expanded defense agreements among Asian countries, as well as stronger defense ties with the United States.

Over the past several weeks, China has extended maritime patrols to cover Taiwan’s east coast, demonstrating its ability to encircle the island; intensified military, trade, and diplomatic pressure on Japan; and test-fired a submarine-launched ballistic missile, showcasing its growing sea-based nuclear capability.

In response, the region’s democracies are drawing closer to one another while also strengthening bilateral defense ties with Washington.

Hillsdale College’s wonderful “The Story of America” series is now FREE for you to watch! Learn about the most important episodes in America’s Founding.
Click here for the full series!

Tokyo’s military buildup began with the December 2022 National Security Strategy adopted under then-Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, which set a goal of raising defense spending to 2 percent of gross domestic product by fiscal year 2027. Under Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, Japan accelerated that timeline, pledging to reach the 2 percent target by March 2026.

The Cabinet’s fiscal 2026 budget, approved in December 2025 at roughly $58 billion, was the 12th consecutive budget containing record defense spending. Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi called the increase “the minimum needed as Japan faces the severest and most complex security environment in the postwar era.”

Japan and the Philippines have moved in parallel. The two countries signed a visiting forces agreement and have expanded joint training, port visits, and military intelligence sharing, while Philippine efforts to modernize its surface fleet through Japanese technology transfers are giving Manila greater capability to confront Chinese activity in the South China Sea.

The United States has separately strengthened its own bilateral ties across the region. For the Philippines, Trump administration officials have reaffirmed the “ironclad” commitment, supporting Philippine military modernization and a bilateral task force to deter Chinese coercion in the South China Sea.

Congress appropriated an additional $144 million in fiscal year 2026 for Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement site infrastructure, and defense ministers from the United States, the Philippines, Japan, and Australia have held four multilateral meetings to strengthen cooperation.

Indonesia has also deepened its defense ties with Washington. On April 13, the two countries established the Major Defense Cooperation Partnership. The agreement elevated years of informal cooperation into a structured framework covering joint exercises, technology collaboration, and the modernization of Indonesian military equipment.

The pact expands the U.S. military’s reach over the Strait of Malacca, the choke point through which roughly 29 percent of the world’s maritime oil trade passes.

Indonesia has maintained an open channel with Beijing. In April 2025, China and Indonesia held the first ministerial meeting of their Joint Foreign and Defense Ministerial Dialogue. They also signed a memorandum establishing a comprehensive strategic dialogue mechanism.

Still, it would be easy to make more of this than is justified.

On the defense equipment side, the State Department reported $1.88 billion in active government-to-government sales cases with Indonesia as of mid-2025, including proposed F-16 fighters, Apache helicopters, Osprey aircraft, and Javelin and AMRAAM missiles.

That builds on a 2022 deal in which Washington approved a $14 billion sale of F-15 fighters, engines, and munitions to Jakarta, formalized through a 2023 memorandum for 24 F-15EX jets that remains subject to final U.S. authorization and delivery. As of April 2025, Indonesia was still weighing additional purchases of U.S. fighter jets and munitions, in part as leverage against tariffs imposed by the Trump administration on its exports.

Indonesia and China have also had recurring maritime disputes over the Natuna Islands. In March 2016, an Indonesian navy ship fired on and detained a Chinese fishing boat, the Kway Fey, after it was caught in the Natuna exclusive economic zone.

In September 2020, an Indonesian patrol ship confronted a Chinese coast guard vessel that had spent nearly three days in the same waters before it withdrew.

In October 2024, a Chinese coast guard vessel shadowed an Indonesian survey ship contracted by state oil company Pertamina for 12 days over the Natuna D-Alpha gas field, and Indonesia’s Maritime Security Agency expelled the same vessel from its waters twice within days.

As of March 2026, analysts reported ongoing low-level Chinese fishing incursions backed by maritime militia and coast guard vessels in the area, along with Chinese demands that Indonesia halt drilling and military exercises in Natuna waters.

In the days following the May 2026 Trump–Xi summit, several major news outlets claimed that the Trump administration was weakening U.S. support for Taiwan. However, the numbers show that the U.S. commitment is increasing, not waning.

In November 2025, Washington approved a $1.3 billion package that included medium-range air defense systems and F-16 parts. The following month, the administration notified Congress of an $11.1 billion package covering high-mobility artillery rocket systems, Army tactical missile systems, howitzers, and precision-guided munitions. It was the largest single U.S. arms sale to Taiwan in history.

Together, the 2025 packages total roughly $12.4 billion, exceeding the entire $8.4 billion in arms sales approved during the four years of the Biden administration.

The negative media framing stems from a delay. A follow-on $14 billion package, already approved by Congress, had its announcement postponed in early 2026 ahead of the Trump–Xi summit in Beijing. That postponement was compounded by political developments inside Taiwan.

The opposition-controlled Legislative Yuan spent months blocking President Lai Ching-te’s proposed $40 billion special defense budget, which was intended to fund the arms purchases already agreed to. Taiwan’s legislature did not resolve the impasse until May 8, when it passed a scaled-back NT$780 billion (about $24.9 billion) special defense budget, well below the amount Lai had requested.

Taiwan’s own government has consistently said that U.S. policy has not changed. Taiwanese officials said they received a letter of guarantee from Washington indicating its willingness to authorize the next arms sale, and Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense said in March that the U.S. internal review process was proceeding on schedule.

Although the media has claimed that Trump is withdrawing U.S. support for the United States’ Asian allies, the facts tell a different story. Across Asia, democracies have accelerated their own defense buildups, while Washington has simultaneously deepened its bilateral commitments across the region. Together, the United States and its allies are strengthening regional defenses to deter Chinese Communist Party aggression.

— Antonio Graceffo, Ph.D., is a China economy analyst who has spent more than 20 years in Asia. Graceffo holds an MBA from Shanghai Jiaotong University, and studied national security at American Military University. This analysis is published in cooperation with The Epoch Times.

👉 Join Premium - Tons of Bonuses!

Recent Analysis:

Share

This essay is free, but with Premium Membership you get MORE. Join today.

👉 Join Premium - Tons of Bonuses!

by Doug Ponder
June 8, 2025

In view of the importance that our Lord gives the command to love your neighbor (Matt. 22:36–40; Mark 12:28–33; cf. Matt. 7:12; Luke 10:25–28), it is no mystery why Christians have followed suit in making much of the same. This is well and good, provided that we understand what is (and is not) required of us. Unfortunately, there are two common ways the neighbor-love command is hellishly misinterpreted and misapplied.

The first is when someone turns the command into a cudgel for beating the consciences of Christians, all but forcing submission in matters not required by the Lord (whether explicitly or by good and necessary consequence). This is not new, but we did see a recent example of it in the dogmatic insistence that Christians who dissented from the government’s demonstrably arbitrary lockdowns and/or abstained from getting the COVID vaccine were failing to love their neighbors.1

Cards on the table: I think mounting evidence continues to justify the courage and prudence of those who refused to be blown about by every wind of the zeitgeist. As such, I think it would be good for the souls of any who publicly employed the neighbor-love argument in that way to issue an apology in the form of, “I was wrong. I’m sorry. You didn’t fail to love your neighbor.”

Yet I am even more concerned about the second way that we can abuse the command to love our neighbors, which I fear is even more common — and significantly more destructive — than the first. Namely, there is a growing tendency among many Christians in the West to redefine the second greatest commandment instead of simply misapplying it. To these misguided minds, when Christ said, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” he actually meant, “Make sure your neighbor feels loved by you.” The difference between those statements can be a matter of (eternal) life and death.

When Man Is the Measure, Truth Always Comes up Short

Though it was Protagoras who first said, “Man is the measure of all things,”2 it is postmoderns who have embodied that outlook par excellence. For the West today is a place where people not only feel free to determine what is true for themselves but also assume that everyone constructs reality according to their own desires.3 This is why Francis Schaeffer felt the need to speak of “true truth” (a tautology in every age before ours).4 He foresaw that a day was coming, and is now here, when people will speak of “my truth” and “your truth” as if such phrases have the power to settle any dispute about reality. Perhaps ‘2 + 2 = 4’ is true for you, a Harvard PhD recently opined, but ‘2 + 2 = 5’ is also true for others.5

That is the way of madness.

Yet many well-meaning Christians have failed to grasp how the postmodern ethos has infected (to the point of destruction) their own understanding of Christ’s command to “Love your neighbor.” In our hyper-subjective age, this command is emptied of all objective content. The result is that some cannot even conceive of a situation in which a Christian could fulfill this command in such a way that a neighbor who is loved according to God’s standards might not feel loved according to his own..

I have spoken about this with pastors around the country, and I regret to inform you that it is not a problem found only along America’s progressive coasts. To give just one example, a friend who lives in the pejoratively labeled “flyover country” recently told me that his ecclesial superior rebuked him for failing to speak the truth in love (Eph. 4:15). My friend was not at all certain that this was the case, nor were many of those who knew him best. So he asked, “Who gets to determine whether the truth is spoken in a loving way?” My friend’s interlocutor replied, “It all comes down to whether the person we are speaking to feels loved after we have spoken the truth to them.”

If Feelings Are the Standard, Then Jesus Is a Sinner

All who think this way have fallen for the poisonous lie that hurt feelings, per se, are proof that you have failed to love your neighbor. Yet if that is so, we make Christ himself out to be a sinner! For there were not a few times when his words were poorly received by some of those who heard him. Indeed, Jesus was not murdered because he was too nice but because he did and said things that caused some to despise him — yet in all this he was “without sin” (Heb. 4:15; cf. 1 Pet. 2:22; 1 John 3:5).6

The point here is not that we have the license to be jerks for Jesus.7 We plainly do not. We cannot turn the phrase “Love your neighbor” into “Hate your neighbor.” Even so, the idea that we are commanded to make our neighbor “feel loved” is ultimately a form of relativism in Christian drag, a kind of sentimentality that holds to the form of godliness — “love your neighbor!” — while denying its true power.8

Furthermore, in addition to making Jesus guilty of sin (by definition), such a view of Christ’s command places the standard for fulfillment not in the hands of the Creator but in the hands of creatures who are estranged from him (James 4:4). If feelings are the standard, then there is no standard. There also are no constraining limits. For if making someone “feel loved” is the requirement for being loving, there is no end to what darkened hearts may demand in order to feel sufficiently loved. This is, of course, precisely what is happening everywhere in the West.

The Devil Is Cashing the Blank Checks You’re Writing

We have reached the point where no matter how kindly you articulate the biblical view of gender and sexuality, you will be branded a “hater.” Which is to say, you will be seen as unloving (even though you aren’t), and you will hurt feelings (no matter how lovingly you speak the truth). Yet if you have wed the fulfillment of Christ’s command to a runaway train, where then will you go?

Share

In case the answer to that rhetorical question was not plain: you will go to wherever you are told to go, and Christians who are ruled by their sentiments instead of by the Scriptures are sitting ducks for this sort of manipulation.9 They have turned Christ’s command to love our neighbors — along with the many biblical commands to be compassionate and kind — into a blank check for the world to cash. “If you aren’t a bigot, then you will bake the cake” (never mind your religious convictions). “If you truly love me, then you will use my preferred pronouns” (never mind God’s commands not to lie or bear false witness). “If you really cared about the poor, then you will vote for this candidate” (never mind their manifestly destructive policies that mutilate children or undermine the family).

The devil is only too pleased with this arrangement. Indeed, the situation reads like a new chapter in The Screwtape Letters: since the powers of hell cannot make Christ’s command go away, they will settle for leading Christians to think the ultimate arbiters of whether we’ve obeyed the command are precisely those who are least qualified to understand it (1 Cor. 2:14). In a demonic inversion of Christ’s own words, the worldly person says: “If you really love me, you will obey my commandments.”

The Dead End of Subjectivity (And The Only Way Out)

I am not suggesting that every professing Christian who has fallen prey to the devil’s lies at this point will go to hell — but their neighbors will unless these Christians find the courage to begin doing and saying what is actually loving, according to Christ, instead of according to what makes their neighbor always feel loved. In other words, the only way out of this demonic cul-de-sac of subjectivity is to anchor the command of Christ in the Scriptures, letting the character of God, the acts of God, and the words of God define for us what is (and is not loving) according to the One who gets the final say on the matter.

This is precisely what the apostle Paul alludes to when he says, “The commandments, ‘Do not commit adultery; do not murder; do not steal; do not covet;’ and any other commandment, are summed up by this commandment: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love does no wrong to a neighbor. Love, therefore, is the fulfillment of the law” (Romans 13:9–10).

These words can set us free if we let them (John 8:31–32), for they remind us that our Lord has not commanded us to love our neighbors without telling us what he means. Indeed, he has given us explicit teaching on the nature of love (1 Cor. 13:1–8), including additional commands that fill out what love is and what love does (Rom. 12:9–22). On top of this, he has given us examples in the Scriptures, not only in himself (John 8:12; 13:5; 1 Cor. 11:1) but also in those who belong to him (Rom. 15:4; Phil. 3:17; 2 Thess. 3:9; James 5:4; Hebrews 11:1ff).

Learning to Love a World That Hates You

Yet some will say to me, “Physician, heal thyself!” It is true that I write as a man who has at times been too quick to speak and too slow to listen (James 1:19). My carelessness has caused unnecessary offense (Prov. 18:19). My pride has hindered apologies for legitimate wrongs (Matt. 5:23–24). And my selfishness has surely been the occasion for many missed opportunities to serve others in a way that accords with their salvation (1 Cor. 10:33).

But I have also known the pressure to keep quiet about matters of eternal significance. I have been tempted to soften the truth in the name of “love.” And I have, in the past, been guilty of espousing a caricature of winsomeness that replaced the real Jesus of history with a false Christ of impotent faith.10 All this was a fool’s errand, for our Lord said the world would hate us in the same ways and for the same reasons that it hated him (John 15:18–20).

This doesn’t mean I now have a desire to be hated (I don’t), but it does mean that I have a firm resolve to fulfill Christ’s command to love my neighbor on Christ’s terms, not on my neighbors’. We cannot be more loving or winsome or compassionate or kind than Jesus. Therefore, he and his Word are the standard — which means learning to love a world that hates us begins with the One who was hated first.

In view of all this, Christians must no longer ask, “Does my neighbor feel loved?” (according to their standards) but rather, “Has my neighbor been loved?” (according to Christ’s Word). Or, to borrow a phrase from the apostle Paul, we all must ask ourselves: Am I seeking the approval of my neighbor or of God? For if I were still trying to please my neighbor, I would not be a servant of Christ (cf. Gal. 1:10).

— Doug Ponder is Biblical Studies Professor at Grimké Seminary and Teaching Pastor at Remnant Church in Richmond, Virginia. He writes on X and Substack, and sometimes here.

👉 Join Premium - Tons of Bonuses!

See Also:

Recent Analysis:

Share

👉 Upgrade to Premium or Inner Circle!

by Robert Bryce
August 15, 2026

In 2019, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that his charitable organization, Bloomberg Philanthropies, would give $500 million to the Beyond Carbon campaign, an effort designed to “finish the job” of transitioning the U.S. “from coal and other fossil fuels to 100 percent clean power.”

In 2021, Bloomberg’s charity launched a campaign “to close a quarter of the world’s 2,445 remaining coal plants and all 519 proposed coal plants by 2025.” Bloomberg said his group would achieve that goal by expanding its efforts from the U.S. and Europe to “25 developing countries where coal power is projected to rapidly grow.”

In 2023, Bloomberg was at it again. He announced that he was donating an additional $500 million to the Beyond Carbon campaign, which Earthjustice said was “one of the largest philanthropic efforts to fight the climate crisis in the U.S.” In a press release, the group said that by 2030, it aims to “shut down every last U.S. coal plant.”

Hillsdale College’s wonderful “The Story of America” series is now FREE for you to watch! Learn about the most important episodes in America’s Founding.
Click here for the full series!

Yes, well. Bloomberg may be lavishing a cool $1 billion on his activist pals at Earthjustice, Sierra Club, League of Conservation Voters, and other groups, but a bunch of Asian countries didn’t get the memo about quitting coal.

I recently returned from a trip to three of the world’s fastest-growing countries: Vietnam, Singapore, and Malaysia. It was my first trip to Southeast Asia, and it was a remarkable experience. Saigon is a boom town. Construction cranes were visible throughout the city and all along the Saigon River. In Singapore, new buildings were going up all around the Marina district. From the top floor at the Hilton Kuala Lumpur, I counted more than 30 construction cranes.

All three cities were clean and safe, the people were friendly, and the vibe was optimistic. There’s reason for the optimism. The major economies in Asia are booming, foreign capital is flowing in, and incomes are rising.

What’s fueling Asia’s economic boom? Coal-fired power plants.

I may be spoiling my own punchline, but here it is: The U.S. isn’t really using less coal. Instead, it has exported its coal use to Asian countries. These seven charts tell the story.

I’ll start with Vietnam, a country that has become a manufacturing powerhouse. In 2025, Vietnam’s economy grew by 8 percent. That means its economy will double in size roughly every nine years.

Three factors are driving Vietnam’s manufacturing boom. First, the country has a large working-age population, which means labor is relatively cheap. Second, it’s a big country with lots of land available for new factories. And finally, and perhaps most important, global companies are reducing their dependence on Chinese suppliers and supply chains.

In Singapore, I interviewed an investment strategist who called this “the China Plus 1” strategy. He told me that due to the rising tensions between the U.S. and China, “companies are realizing that they should diversify. So they are not reducing their manufacturing in China, but they are building new manufacturing centers outside China.”

Vietnam has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of that strategy. More than $100 billion in foreign direct investment has gone into Vietnam since 2020 as multinational corporations like Intel, Samsung, Apple, Foxconn, Nike, Adidas, LG, Unilever, Nestlé, Cargill, and others have flooded into the country.

As shown above, Vietnam’s economic growth and its electricity generation are closely correlated. That’s not a surprise. Economic growth drives electricity use, and electricity availability fosters economic activity.

So here’s where coal comes in:

Read more

This analysis is free, but with Premium Membership you get MORE. Join today.

👉 Upgrade to Premium or Inner Circle!

Our full discussion transcribed after the break:

by Rod D. Martin
August 14, 2026

I appeared on NTD Good Morning with Cary Dunst to discuss how Beijing launders highly-subsidized exports (“dumping”) through as many as 40 countries, and how Trump’s new AI tools will turn China’s cheating into leverage before Xi comes to Washington.

Cary and I discuss:

• How China launders exports through third countries to avoid U.S. laws and break U.S. companies

• The 500,000 American jobs lost as a result

• The $60–$100 billion annual hit to U.S. GDP

• How Trump is using AI to crack down before the September summit

It’s a quick 6 minutes that explain this incredibly complex issue. Watch the interview, and pass it along!

Share

Nothing matters more than educating the next generation with the values we cherish. The Herzog Foundation is making that possible. Learn more here.

Our Full Discussion:

Cary Dunst: Thanks to Fiona for that report. For analysis of this scheme to evade U.S. tariffs, we welcome Rod D. Martin. He is founder and CEO of Martin Capital.

Good morning, Rod. Thanks for joining us. I want to get your reaction to the numbers in the White House’s transshipment-scam report: billions of dollars and nearly half a million jobs.

Rod D. Martin: That’s exactly right. It’s the nearly half a million lost jobs that ought to jump off the page for people. People have treated Chinese transshipment as either a nonissue or something so arcane that only nerds could love it.

No. We’re talking about real moms and dads across America who are in the unemployment line because China cheats. It really is that simple.

And it’s not just China doing the cheating. This transshipment scam has been going on for a long time because, especially since 2018, we have had sizable tariffs on the Chinese for their assorted bad acting.

Earlier, someone on this show said that this is China flooding the United States with cheap goods. I want to amplify that. It isn’t merely that these goods are cheap. They are government-subsidized in a way designed to make them so cheap that they drive Western businesses out of business.

China absolutely destroys industry in the United States and Europe, not through free trade and fair competition but through the kind of cheating only a Communist government can pull off. The Europeans are now facing this in an even bigger way than the United States because they have refused to deal with it as concretely as President Trump has.

The scam, of course, is that they ship to a country with lower tariffs, or perhaps no tariffs, and then pretend those shipments came from that third country.

It might be Vietnam, which is probably the worst offender, or even Mexico, where we actually have a pretty good trade regime. It doesn’t matter. They claim their Chinese product is actually Vietnamese or Mexican to avoid the law.

As a result, they’re lopping between $60 billion and $100 billion off U.S. GDP each year and, as you said, costing around half a million U.S. jobs.

Cary Dunst: It’s truly shocking when you put it into perspective like that. You probably named two of the worst actors, but the White House says the network could run 40 countries deep.

They’ve proposed a technological solution they’ve already developed. It’s called Detective Border. Could you explain your understanding of how it works?

Detective Border: AI to Trace and Stop the Fraud

Rod D. Martin: This is a really cool system and a great application of the stuff we all use every day now. We’re making memes with ChatGPT; the president is making money. That’s exactly what we would expect from Donald Trump.

This AI tool is designed to track the origin, the details, and the deceptions. Where is this product really coming from? If you know that, you can charge the right tariff rate. That rate matters. It isn’t arbitrary, as so many of the president’s critics have said.

I’m a free trader. I want us to have no trade barriers with these countries, and vice versa. I want free and fair trade for the whole world. That would be fantastic.

China doesn’t. China wants to destroy our industry and force us into a position of dependency. We’ve seen that with rare earths, pharmaceuticals, electrical equipment, and countless other things, where the Chinese use unfair trade practices to destroy key sectors of our economy.

This new AI tool is capable of tracking that in a way a bunch of federal bureaucrats would struggle to do. That’s no slap at them, but if you’ve been to the post office, you know these aren’t necessarily rocket scientists to start with.

They need help. There aren’t enough of them for this purpose because the Democrats haven’t had any interest in prioritizing it over the past several decades. We simply don’t have the team we need to sort out all these points of origin.

The AI tool will, and we will actually start to level the playing field.

Cary Dunst: As you point out, perhaps that’s a better use of AI than making memes.

Leverage Before the Trump-Xi Summit

Cary Dunst: I want to get your view on how this transshipment scam, as the White House refers to it, fits into their broader asymmetric war.

We’re just a few weeks away from President Trump’s second meeting this year with Xi, this time in Washington. How does the timing fit together?

Rod D. Martin: It’s highly relevant. All these moves are orchestrated.

Don Ma and I were talking the other day about how this is playing out with reports of Chinese MANPADS being shipped to Iran. That’s a shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile.

Are they actually shipping them? Maybe, maybe not. It doesn’t matter. It’s positioning against the United States leading into the summit, trying to pressure us not to proceed with the next arms deal with Taiwan.

This is the same thing. This is the White House positioning and saying, “Look, this is all going to go easier, Xi, if you don’t cheat.”

It’s that simple. We’re willing to have a full and fair trade regime with China. We aren’t willing to do it if they’re cheating all the time.

So yes, this sends a big signal. The Chinese know what can be done with AI. They’re using it in surveillance tools against their own people every day. They know we can use this to great effect.

Cary Dunst: Rod D. Martin, thank you so much for sharing your analysis.

Rod D. Martin: Thank you.

Download the full report here:

The Great Transshipment Scam

3.89MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

👉 Upgrade to Premium or Inner Circle!

Recent Analysis:

Normally our Deep Dives are for Premium Members only, but we think this is so important everyone should read it. Enjoy, share, and join Premium today.

👉 Join Premium - Tons of Bonuses!

by Rod D. Martin
August 14, 2026

In some of the better news of the year, President Trump just put fourteen new nuclear submarines under contract in an historic $76.6 billion shipbuilding award: five additional Columbia-class ballistic-missile submarines, nine Block VI Virginia-class submarines, and billions for shipyard productivity.

Days later, the Navy gave the enlarged, Virginia Payload Module-equipped Virginias their proper designation: guided-missile submarines — SSGNs. It plans 19 of them, every one of them needed sooner than they can possibly be produced.

Then yesterday, Trump attacked the missing half of America’s desperately needed submarine buildup: the shipyard capacity to turn those contracts into a fleet.

His August 13 memorandum orders plans for the first new public Navy yard in more than eighty years, with up to three drydocks sized for every current and projected submarine class. It also calls for a repair center stocked with complete “ship sets” of spare components, and an overhaul of the naval bureaucracy that’s focused on exactly one result: ships actually delivered.

Hillsdale College’s wonderful “The Story of America” series is now FREE for you to watch! Learn about the most important episodes in America’s Founding.
Click here for the full series!

This is the first credible plan in decades to restore America’s lost undersea striking power, strengthen the nuclear deterrent, fulfill AUKUS, and rebuild the yards. The contract buys the submarines, and perhaps even more important, provides the long-lead material investments and multi-year procurement plans necessary for the private shipyards to expand capacity. Yesterday’s memorandum creates the additional, necessarily government-owned, capacity to deliver and maintain them.

It’s exactly the right plan. It’s also dangerously late. For decades, Presidents of both parties allowed the Navy and its shipyards to atrophy while China built the world’s largest navy and moved toward submarine parity — and soon, numerical superiority.

Now comes the hard part. A contract is not a submarine, and a plan is not a fleet. The last of those 19 SSGNs isn’t expected before 2038. China isn’t waiting. America can’t either.

The Undersea Gap Is Only Part of the Threat

China already has the world’s largest navy by hull count: more than 370 battle-force platforms, with 435 projected by 2030. Most are inferior. America still leads in technology, training, combat experience, global logistics — and above all, nuclear submarines.

But quantity has a quality all its own — particularly when the larger fleet can concentrate near home while the smaller one must defend the world.

China can mass its fleet near Taiwan and the First Island Chain. America cannot. Our submarines must cover the Western Pacific, Atlantic, Arctic, Mediterranean, Middle East, and Russia, plus strategic deterrence, intelligence, special operations, training, and maintenance. A boat watching Russia can’t stalk China, and one in overhaul counts on paper but not in a crisis. America therefore needs far more than parity: enough boats to sustain simultaneous forward operations, absorb losses and delays, and retain a strategic reserve.

As I warned last year, China is on track to surpass the United States in total submarine numbers around 2030. Most of those boats will be inferior to a Virginia. That isn’t comforting. An inferior submarine can still sink ships, lay mines, threaten logistics, divert scarce assets, and complicate every Western Pacific operation. And enough inferior submarines can overwhelm too few superb ones.

Submarines are only part of the danger. China commissioned its third carrier, the Fujian, last November, and the Pentagon says Beijing intends to field nine by 2035. Its two older carriers could already serve as expendable decoys to delay an American response, as a wargame analysis I published last year explained. With nine, Beijing could actually project power.

That’s a pretty extraordinary and material change.

Behind all of it stands China’s greatest maritime advantage: industrial scale. Chinese shipyards account for more than half of global commercial shipbuilding. A Navy estimate put China’s gross shipbuilding capacity at roughly 230 times America’s. Commercial tonnage isn’t the same thing as nuclear-submarine output. But that disparity isn’t a rounding error. It’s an industrial nightmare.

Trump is making all the right moves, diplomatically and otherwise, to close the map around China. It’s an extraordinary reversal from even just two years ago.

But as with the submarine contracts and shipyards, it’s not a moment too soon. The next decade is the most dangerous. As I explained in The Illusion of Chinese Strength, China’s impending demographic collapse, economic brittleness, and political instability make Beijing more dangerous, not less. Great powers often gamble when their rulers believe time is turning against them. And China knows it’s running out of time: it has to grab what it wants while it still can.

America must build fast enough to make that gamble irrational.

Nineteen SSGNs Help Change the Equation

The urgency of the Columbia-class boats should go without saying: America is retiring its aging Ohio-class SSBNs — which carry the lion’s share of its nuclear deterrent — at breakneck speed. Extending the life of at least the final five Ohios, and adding at least four additional Columbias to the currently planned 12, is absolutely vital in the face of a rapid Chinese nuclear buildup.

But the SSGN story is far more important day-to-day.

Years ago, the Navy converted four older Ohio-class SSBNs into SSGNs. They are among the most powerful conventional-strike platforms ever built. Each can carry up to 154 Tomahawk cruise missiles, plus special-operations forces and sophisticated command-and-control capabilities. Combined, that is as many as 616 Tomahawks hidden beneath the sea, and in high demand for a variety of U.S. operations around the world year after year.

All four will be gone by the end of 2029.

To help replace them, the Navy has created the Virginia Payload Module, which will be standard on 10 new Block V and all of the Block VI boats. The VPM adds an 84-foot hull section containing four large payload tubes to an already superb nuclear attack submarine. Those tubes add 28 Tomahawks, bringing the boat’s total potential load to 40. At full strength, 19 such boats could carry as many as 760 Tomahawks — more than the combined strength of the retiring Ohios.

But the greater advantage is distribution: four enormous magazines become 19 smaller ones, spread across far stealthier and more survivable hulls. They can cover more theaters, attack from more directions, and force an enemy to hunt nearly five times as many targets — all while hunting ships, collecting intelligence, and supporting special operations. The Navy can disperse that precision-strike power, then mass it wherever needed.

The payload module also makes these submarines more than Tomahawk trucks. Its large tubes can accommodate Conventional Prompt Strike hypersonic missiles, unmanned undersea vehicles, sensors, special-operations equipment, and payloads not yet invented. Like the Mk 41 VLS, the VPM gives the fleet room to improve without designing a new hull for every new weapon.

Nor is 19 an arbitrary number or a bureaucratic relabeling exercise. When the Virginia Payload Module design was selected in 2013, the Navy estimated that it needed at least twenty VPM-equipped boats to replace the disappearing Ohio SSGN capacity. The Navy is finally creating the guided-missile submarine fleet it said it needed thirteen years ago.

The problem is not the plan. It’s the time. The Ohios retire by 2029; the complete Virginia SSGN force won’t arrive until 2038 unless something very big changes. That gap falls directly across the decade in which China’s fleet, submarine force, and carrier arm are expanding fastest.

Shipbuilding Is the Real Weapon…and the Real Gap

You can’t command the seas with ships you can’t build, refuel, repair, or replace. And America’s atrophied shipbuilding sector has become its biggest bottleneck, as well as its greatest vulnerability.

The significance of the $76.6 billion award isn’t just the fourteen hulls. It is the certainty required to build them faster, to keep building them, and to expand production capacity.

American procurement has spent decades ordering one ship here, two there, then re-debating the entire program in every budget cycle until costs and delays mount and Congress pulls the plug. Remember the Seawolf class? It was originally 29 boats, reduced to just three, thus radically increasing the unit cost of the few the Navy got. That’s a stupid, stupid way to do anything. It guarantees too few ships at too high a price. It’s utterly self-defeating. It’s a system only the Beltway could love.

A company can’t possibly build a new facility, buy advanced tooling, finance suppliers, or order long-lead materials in bulk — much less hire and train the thousands of new welders, electricians, machinists, pipefitters, naval architects, and nuclear technicians needed to produce these boats on time — when it’s faced with a one-year promise Washington may revoke next Tuesday. Suppliers can’t add second production lines when their customers can’t tell them whether the line will still exist five years from now. Workers can’t master nuclear shipbuilding if the government repeatedly destroys the production rhythm that sustains their careers.

Long-term orders change that. Electric Boat’s president said the new contracts provide the company and its suppliers the demand certainty required to invest in capacity and hire the necessary workforce. That certainty converts appropriations into plants, machines, materials, suppliers, skills, and eventually hulls in the water. It also creates the scale and repetition that drive costs down and delivery rates up.

This is the sort of thing that a lifetime in complex construction and luxury real estate development makes obvious to the current President. He’s the first to get it in decades.

Share

Certainty changes purchasing too. Fourteen boats require enormous quantities of specialty steel, castings, valves, pumps, electronics, cables, reactor components, and thousands of other items. With a known production run, the yards can buy in bulk, commit earlier for long-lead materials, and schedule rationally. That gives fragile single-source suppliers reason to expand. It also gives the Navy time to qualify second sources before a single failure stops an entire class.

Shipbuilding is learned by doing. Teams get faster by building the same modules repeatedly. Managers eliminate wasted steps. Engineers redesign difficult assemblies so they’re easier to build. Suppliers learn to deliver components in the order the yards need them. Digital design, automation, modular construction, and distributed fabrication all work better on a stable production line than on another tiny batch of floating prototypes.

Henry Ford understood this a century ago. Someone should have told Congress.

The law requires two new Virginia-class submarines per year. But in the real world, Electric Boat and Newport News are delivering just 1.2. Add to that the need to fulfill our AUKUS commitments while replacing the boats transferred to Australia and now you’ll need roughly 2.33 new Virginias per year, in addition to one enormous Columbia-class ballistic-missile submarine annually.

That’s not a small increase. It requires an industrial mobilization.

The contract supplies the required volume. Trump’s memorandum adopts remedies I’ve repeatedly called for. In my recent analysis of the Trump-class battleships, I said an expanding fleet required a fifth public yard because new ships accomplish little or nothing if we can’t “repair, refuel, and overhaul them.” Public yards maintain the fleet. Private yards build it.

Trump’s plan gets that division exactly right. Its fifth public yard is a readiness weapon, not a construction yard: up to three Pacific-oriented drydocks sized for every current and projected submarine class. Its Component Repair Center — the submarine facility I’ve also called for — would maintain at least one full ship set of spare equipment for the Los Angeles, Seawolf, Virginia, Ohio, and Columbia classes at all times. That means less waiting, less cannibalizing one boat to repair another, and more submarines actually at sea.

This is not to say we don’t need more private shipyard capacity: we do, starting (but not ending) with at least one more nuclear-capable yard. But the Trump team will get to that in due course.

Crucially, the President also ordered Naval Sea Systems Command reorganized around speed: strip away red tape, eliminate competing priorities, stop endless design changes, and judge its leaders by whether ships arrive. That’s quite an upgrade from the Pentagon’s normal procurement “system.” Stable designs allow teams, suppliers, and yards to learn; bureaucratic redesign destroys the repetition that makes production faster and cheaper.

This is how the Navy must operate from now on: buy the fleet America needs, hold designs steady long enough to build them efficiently, and expand public maintenance beside private construction. That’s a recipe for rebuilding American capacity. Allies can multiply it.

An Allied Arsenal of Shipyards

AUKUS, South Korea, and Trump’s new “Finland Model” do exactly that. Allies should not become permanent claimants on an American industrial base already too small for America’s own needs. They should become additional producers.

AUKUS demands more from American yards in the near term. America plans to transfer Virginia-class submarines to Australia beginning in the 2030s, and Australian sailors and shipyard workers are already training inside the American system.

But that’s just the short-term plan. With American help, Australia is constructing a sovereign nuclear-submarine shipyard at Osborne in South Australia and plans to begin building SSN-AUKUS by the end of this decade. Delivery of the first Australian-built boat is planned for the early 2040s. It’ll be here sooner than you think.

South Korea is moving in the same direction. In May, Seoul announced the Jang Bogo N project, with plans to develop and build nuclear-powered submarines inside the Republic of Korea, launch the first in the mid-2030s, and make it operational before the decade ends.

Those are partners, not dependents. Australia and South Korea gain sovereign undersea power. America gains allied boats, trained workforces, additional production lines, and stronger supply chains. More capable partners will increasingly cover missions too few American submarines otherwise have to perform (and which America’s longtime naval partner Great Britain no longer can).

AUKUS is not a scheme for dividing too few American submarines among more flags. It’s the creation of another allied industrial base and trusted nuclear-submarine power.

Trump’s memorandum applies that principle to surface combatants and auxiliaries as well. Under the President’s new “Finland Model,” a foreign builder may construct its first two ships abroad, utilizing existing shipyard capacity we lack, but only if it simultaneously builds or takes control of a domestic American yard, trains an American workforce, licenses its shipbuilding methods, and creates a U.S. supply chain. Those first foreign-built hulls will bridge an urgent gap; everything after them will expand American capacity.

In this way, allied expertise becomes American yards, American jobs, and American ships.

In this analysis, I have focused on submarines, but the entire fleet needs urgent attention. America needs the 16 aircraft carriers I’ve argued for, not the 11 it actually has. It needs all 15 Trump-class BBGNs. And it needs enough destroyers, frigates, and smaller surface combatants to meet any need America has, anywhere at any time.

But that just makes the industrial challenge bigger. Every part of Trump’s proposed Golden Fleet depends on the sort of industrial capacity America created to win World War II and the Cold War. It cannot happen, and America cannot be safe, if we continue as we have since the 1990s just “managing decline.”

For thirty-five years, Washington treated naval capacity as overhead to be cut rather than power to be preserved. China did the opposite.

Now we’re paying the price. The boats are not in the water. The yards are not large enough, not numerous enough, and definitely not producing at the rate the danger requires.

Trump is laying the foundation, as Reagan did after Carter. The victory celebration will take longer.

But America finally has a plan. Now it has to build it, before China closes the gap so far that it decides it can afford to gamble.

👉 Join Premium - Tons of Bonuses!

Recent Analysis:

The text of our full discussion appears after this:

by Rod D. Martin and Frank Gaffney
August 13, 2026

My latest interview on Securing America with Frank Gaffney. Sign up NOW for Frank’s Rumble channel and don’t miss a single episode!

Frank and I discuss:

• The Saudi-Turkish-Pakistani defense pact surrounds Iran

• Why the midterm math favors Republicans

• The burgeoning Trump economic boom: the energy and defense supercycles and why it’s 1983 all over again

• PLUS: The DSA openly declares, “Our goal is communism.”

Share

It’s a full 27 minutes of in-depth analysis you won’t want to miss. If you prefer to read, the full transcript is below. Watch, read, like, and share!

Hillsdale College’s wonderful “The Story of America” series is now FREE for you to watch! Learn about the most important episodes in America’s Founding.
Click here for the full series!

Now, here’s our full discussion:

Frank Gaffney: Welcome back. And when I get to say welcome to my friend Rod Martin, I think it’s a very happy day indeed. Happy because he is a happy warrior. He is one of the people who brings sunshine to this program, which is much needed.

Rod, of course, is the chairman of the board of the outfit that makes this program possible, the Institute for the American Future. He is also the author of the Rod Martin Report, which you can find at RodMartin.org, and I strongly commend you do that. He’s a serial entrepreneur, a man who has been active in the Southern Baptist Convention. He is a profoundly impressive essayist and pundit now, and we’re delighted always to have him visit with us. Welcome back, my friend. It’s good to have you with us.

Rod D. Martin: Great to be here.

Frank Gaffney: I’m going to read a little bit of a commentary that I want you to respond to. My glass-half-empty prognosis and yours — mostly full — would be, I think, very interesting.

Rod D. Martin: More full than not.

Frank Gaffney: Here we go.

While official Washington is understandably preoccupied with the war with Iran, a tectonic shift has just occurred in the region that threatens to overshadow that conflict’s ongoing challenges and knock-on effects. For many years, we’ve been encouraged to believe that three Sharia-supremacist nations — Turkey, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia — are reliable U.S. allies. Indeed, the Trump administration has counted on them to negotiate on our behalf with the Iranians.

The announcement that those three nations have just established a mutual defense accord is ominous. It means that Saudi Arabia is now joining the Turks and Pakistanis in aligning with the red-green axis forged by Communist China and the Muslim Brotherhood. Reports that Egypt may soon join them signal our enemies are filling a perceived vacuum of power in the Mideast, increasingly threatening Western civilization at a particularly bad time.

Well, those are my views. I hope that you will follow me on X, at Frank Gaffney, for more of them, and also at the Institute for the American Future, where you will find us at USFuture.org. It makes this program possible, and I hope you will generously support us in doing so. USFuture.org is the site.

Rod Martin, let’s talk a little bit about this. The red-green axis is a real thing. I believe it’s been mostly discussed in the context of what’s being done by the Democratic Socialists of America and the other friends of Communist China here, with jihadists who happen to be also here in substantial numbers.

But much of the wellspring of the funding, as well as the organizational heft that those guys are relying on, comes out of places abroad: Communist China, yes, but also a number of these countries. Qatar didn’t get mentioned in this context because it’s bankrolling a lot of it, but not in the defense pact just yet. But I imagine it’ll wind up there soon.

So why shouldn’t we be a bit troubled, shall we say, by the Saudis now seemingly throwing in with the Muslim Brotherhood, Erdogan’s Turkey, and Qatar, of course, and quite possibly Egypt in the near future?

The New Alliance Is Aimed at Iran

Rod D. Martin: Before we get there, let me just briefly say that the glass-nearly-empty approach is actually really important. Because if we don’t have watchmen on the wall, like yourself, Frank, who are telling us what could go horribly awry, we can’t plan for it. We can’t prepare for it. We can’t prevent it.

So anything that I say that contradicts you here is my assessment, but doesn’t necessarily say that, first of all, all of the dangers that you’re identifying couldn’t happen, or that we shouldn’t be on guard for them.

With that said, I think, on balance, this is probably a positive development. Because if you look at a map, and you look at where all these countries are, they make a very interesting circle around Iran. And Iran has hacked off the Pakistanis by their double-dealing in these negotiations.

Pakistan wants a win with the United States. They’re not our enemy, but they’re not our friend. What’s that term — frenemy? You can’t count on them, my gosh. But the Chinese can’t count on them either. And they’re sitting there wedged up against India. They’ve got strategic considerations that we may factor out, but they don’t. They’re sitting there, a nuclear-armed power with a real arsenal, and a real delivery system, and a real existential threat next door.

At the same time, they’re somewhat in bed with the Chinese. But they want to counterbalance that by also being in bed with the United States. And I think that’s what we’re seeing here overall.

These guys are all hedging their bets. And you should certainly pay attention to that. It’s not as though we’re able to just send viceroys to each of these countries and dictate what they do, separate from each other. Maybe in a perfect world that’s what we’d do, but we’re never going to do that.

So if you have Pakistan kind of triangulating, if you have Saudi Arabia kind of triangulating because its interests are different — it certainly wants Pakistan’s nuclear umbrella, but it’s pretty sure of ours if push came to shove — then you have Turkey, who’s been in our tent since 1952. They are not our friend, but again, they’re kind of a half-hearted enemy. What they want is an empire. They want to restore the Ottoman Empire. The Saudis very much want them not to.

So, okay.

And then you’ve got Egypt, which has managed to stay at peace with Israel since 1979, which is getting to be a while. I remember when it was ten minutes ago, but it’s turning out to be half a century.

So you look at all this together, and what do they each get out of it? There isn’t a collective “it.” It reminds me very much of — I would say CENTO, but really the United Arab Republic. Those guys couldn’t get along. They were quite certain that they were establishing the future of the Arab world. And in reality, they couldn’t even get their own futures together, and the whole thing spun apart in less than three years.

So I think what you have here is three, possibly four, countries who have an interest in Iran — which has attacked two of the three of them — an interest in navigating that, and an interest in seeking to have some independent ability to defend themselves. If we have a bad election, we could elect Kamala. They’re not stupid. They get that. That’s part of the problem.

But the rest of the problem is they all have an interest in counterbalancing each other. And I think what you get down to here is, on balance, helpful for the United States. Within this so-called alliance itself, I think they’re keeping their friends close and their enemies closer. And this is a way to have a mechanism to keep them out of each other’s backyard to one degree or another.

Share

Now, Pakistan’s all right. They want Saudi money, but they have no territorial designs on the Middle East. But Saudi Arabia and Turkey, they are in each other’s hair.

Sharia Supremacism, China, and America’s Reliability

Frank Gaffney: All right, let me just respond. Let me tease this out. And thank you for that endorsement of the glass-half-full role that we play here. But the idea that the various elements — and I don’t disagree with the thing you said as far as it goes — it’s just that it does seem as though something that is not in that mix that has to be, Rod, is this idea. Well, two, really, but particularly the idea that these countries all do espouse a Sharia-supremacist end state, whether it’s the Ottoman Empire, or whether it’s the Saudi dominant role, or whether it’s something else. It nonetheless does come back to this point that we don’t tend to take that seriously.

And in fact, we are now relying on the Qataris, no less, as well as these other characters, to sort of be looking out for our interests. I don’t think that’s actually advisable.

But the other piece of this is the Communist Chinese are unmistakably working with all of these guys. Is it a perfect marriage in every case? No, I guess not. But do the Chinese have the ability to screw us in various partnerships with these folks? I think that is true. And I just worry that, especially if we’re perceived as no longer reliable, or no longer maybe even competent — I don’t know — that that danger is considerably greater.

Rod D. Martin: They think Trump is highly competent. They’re worried about 2028. America goes through these spasms where we’re doing just wonderful, and then we torpedo Nixon and end up with Carter, or we’re doing great with Trump and somehow we end up with Biden. And they know that American elections are regular and regularly disappointing. So, of course, they’re going to hedge their bets. And the Chinese are always in play.

But it’s worth remembering that the Chinese would be in play whether they have this particular alliance or not. That will always be true, so long as they are a player on the board. So I wouldn’t overthink that.

I think, on balance, this is an anti-Iran alliance. They’re not going to call it that. They shouldn’t call it that. But that’s what it is. And if it stays that, and if we have a competent administration in Washington, then on balance, it’s probably a net positive for the United States.

Frank Gaffney: Okay, well, let that be the last word for the moment. But I have the feeling we’ll be back to it in due course, because I think we’re going to see — again, in the analogy that I use there — tectonic shifts do have ripple effects. And we’re going to watch these ones carefully.

Rod Martin is going to stay with us. We’ll be right back with more on the other side of a short break. I hope you will stay tuned as well.

The Midterm Map and the Trump Economy

Frank Gaffney: We’re back, and so is Rod Martin, the author of the Rod Martin Report. Actually, he uses that wonderful platform as a vehicle for others, and we’re going to talk about one of those in a moment.

But Rod, prominently featured on the page these days is the economic boom that Donald Trump hath wrought. And I’m interested in two questions. One is: Is it real, and is it likely to endure — point one — especially with the buffeting of the Strait of Hormuz, oil, and all that inflation? But secondly, is Donald Trump going to get credit for it or, more to the point, will his team be rewarded for it in the fall elections? Do you think?

Rod D. Martin: Okay, let’s go backward on that. Starting with the election, I don’t think Trump is overly concerned about this election. He’s going to contest it hard. He’s going to spend a ton of money. His Super PACs collectively have $400 million. By contrast, the Democratic National Committee has a debt of $2 million. There is a radical mismatch this cycle which tells you how deeply unpopular “democratic socialism” is among the donor class.

Frank Gaffney: Is the President spending that money, though, Rod? I’m being told it’s sort of sitting in the bank someplace.

Rod D. Martin: Yes, and Elon says he’s going to spend a hundred million more, so I don’t think that we’re going to lack for money. I think you’re going to start seeing it flow after Labor Day, as is normal.

I also think that he’s not overly concerned because redistricting, on net, went dramatically our way. We have a much bigger cushion than we did. Just speaking in terms of numbers of seats, not specific races, the upside for the Democrats in a big year was probably around 236 seats. After redistricting, it might be 223. And that is a majority, but it’s just a very, very slim majority. They’ll have trouble doing business, just as we’ve had trouble doing business.

But that’s if they win, and I’m not convinced that they win. First off, on the Senate side, they’re not going to win. We might even pick up a seat, especially after the Democrats screwed up in Michigan. I think Mike Rogers has a real shot. I don’t know if we have a shot against Ossoff in Georgia. And I think Whatley is kind of throwing away that seat in North Carolina, just not running a good campaign at all. But if they can get their act together, they have time.

Nevertheless, we could hold even, drop a seat, add a seat. The Senate’s probably fine. By the way, the quality of Republicans in that Senate will have gone up dramatically, having lost Cassidy, Cornyn, Tillis, and McConnell. Big improvements on our side of the aisle.

On the House side, though, here’s the bottom line everybody’s got to understand: The Democrats would have to win two-thirds of the seats in play to win the majority. They’d have to win two-thirds. We only have to win a third to keep the majority. That’s a big difference. That’s a real uphill climb.

So I honestly think that we’ve got a really good shot going into November if we don’t screw it up. And we’re Republicans, so odds are we will screw it up. But if not — we’re going to try, that’s for sure — I think we can end up in control of both houses, and Trump has an incredibly productive final two years.

The Reagan Parallel

Rod D. Martin: Now, as for the economy, we’re exactly in 1983. All of our younger viewers here won’t know what that means, but the older viewers should.

In 1983, you’re coming out of the horrible recession set up by Jimmy Carter and then compounded by the Reagan-Volcker plan to slay inflation. We were coming off just staggering inflation, vastly worse than anything we’ve experienced recently, or really in the last 40 years. And they slayed inflation by jacking up interest rates to a point where it just stopped cold.

So we had this terrible recession in ‘82, ‘83. And everyone said Reagan was toast. But the groundwork was being laid, because the most deleterious factor in any economy is inflation. If you get that under control, everything gets better

.Add to that the massive tax cuts Ronald Reagan was able to pass in 1981 and Donald Trump was able to pass in 2025. Add to that the greater features, in some respects, of the Trump tax code. Add to that the $18 trillion of external investment that the President has recruited into this country. And no, it’s not all in the bank yet, but a huge amount of it is actually breaking ground on real plants that are going to be employing real Americans really soon.

So that capex boom is already extraordinary. We’re seeing a bigger capex boom right now than we did in 1983. And when it really ignites, it’s going to be unquestionable how great the economy is, in much the same way it was in 2019 before COVID. Everybody knew Trump had killed it in 2019, and then COVID killed that.

Share

Well, barring Trump being stupid and rehiring Anthony Fauci, we’re not going to have that problem again. So once this really kicks into gear, oh my gosh, you’re setting up a supercycle.

Energy and Defense Supercycles

Rod D. Martin: And I’ll add just two points to that. This war has done more to divert global energy purchases to the United States, away from the Persian Gulf and Russia, than anything ever. That’s one. And that’s money coming to the United States instead of leaving the United States to its enemies.

Second — and this is actually pretty important — we are right now at the beginning of a defense supercycle. Now, if we screw up and elect Kamala in ‘28, that won’t be true. But when you look at what Lockheed Martin is doing, when you look at what Anduril is doing, when you look at what SpaceX is doing, when you look at the orders — the orders that the Secretary of the Navy just announced for Virginia-class and Columbia-class boats, both boomers and attack subs, which, by the way, are now redesignated SSGNs — we’re going to have 19 SSGNs, each with a smaller capacity than the Ohio-class boats that are retiring but similar in total, distributed over many more platforms.

It’ll take a while to build them. But when they’re letting that kind of huge contract, Electric Boat and Newport News can actually plan for the future, actually add staff, actually add capacity. That’s going to be huge. And this economy is just going to boom.

Frank Gaffney: We pray, as always, Rod, from your lips to God’s ears, that these things will eventuate, as opposed to some of the more dour prospects.

Rod D. Martin: They’re happening now.

Frank Gaffney: Let’s pray.

The DSA’s Goal Is Communism

Frank Gaffney: We’re back with Rod Martin, the driving force behind a wonderful online resource called the Rod Martin Report. You can find it and subscribe at RodMartin.org.

As I mentioned earlier in the program, one of the things I especially appreciate is that, in addition to being a platform for the remarkable wit and wisdom of its proprietor, he is also curating a wonderful group of guest contributors. One of them is a good friend and very much admired colleague of mine, Stella Morabito, who has written brilliantly over the years about, among other things, the Left and the mindset that operates in its ranks—and that, when they have power, they impose on everybody else to terrible effect.

Rod, Stella has a piece about socialism in our time. In particular, it is aimed, I think, at trying to help the young in our country, who seem to be fairly clueless about this — or worse yet, enamored of it — appreciate that this never works out, because of the nature of the radical Left.

Talk us through that, if you would, sir, because the prognoses about the elections and so on in part turn on whether the Left mobilizes behind some of these candidates who you would think could never get out of the chocks, in a way that does, in fact, put the country in peril.

Rod D. Martin: Look, some of our viewers will get this and some won’t, so let me cut to the chase. We just had the Democratic Socialists of America convention. These are the guys who are winning all these Democrat primaries. These are the guys who are taking control of the Democrat Party. Don’t ask me. Ask James Carville. Ask Bill Maher. Ask Hakeem Jeffries. These guys are more than a little wigged out about it.

The DSA is the enemy. And one of its key leaders stood up at the podium less than two weeks ago and said—these are the words, direct quote—“Our goal is communism.” And the crowd cheered.

So we have to understand: if you’re still thinking that socialism is just some hippie thing, or a fad that college students indulge but don’t really mean, or whatever, these guys mean it. These guys mean the real thing.

Hillsdale College’s wonderful “The Story of America” series is now FREE for you to watch! Learn about the most important episodes in America’s Founding.
Click here for the full series!

Communism has never existed anywhere without mass murder. It just never has. In every country the communists have taken control of, they have liquidated their enemies in short order — ranging from comparatively small numbers in Eastern Europe, to be fair; I mean, compared to America, vast numbers, but not compared to China, where Mao murdered 65 million of his own people; or Cambodia, where Pol Pot killed a third of his population in just over two and a half years; or Russia, where Stalin killed at least 20 million, and eight million in a “terror famine.” Whoever had even heard of a terror famine in Ukraine? And, of course, the Western media covered that up for him.

So this is a horrible thing, and they’re telling you flat-out: “Our goal is communism.”

Now, communists are really good organizers. It’s kind of their religion. They don’t believe in a god other than the state, but their theology — their atheology, if you will — is all about organizing. And it always takes a particular form. As you know, there is always a Popular Front. That’s what they call it. That was true in Russia in 1917. That was true in Nicaragua in 1979, and everywhere in between.

What they do is divide people into as many tiny interest groups as you can come up with. There’s your intersectional pyramid. There’s your gay, transgendered, whatever. They subdivide people into so many tiny identity groups that they all feel oppressed. They’re all told they’re oppressed. They all believe no one is for them except the Party. And the Party unites that into this Popular Front.

Now what happens next? When they take over, the communists always kill all of the people who were in the Popular Front with them. It’s just like night follows day. This is true everywhere. If they don’t kill them, they throw them in jail or exile them from the country. And the communists end up on top because they’re the most ruthless.

There is exactly one exception to that anywhere in the world, and that would be Iran in 1979, where the Islamists actually got the upper hand on the communists. Even more ruthless. But other than Iran, you can’t really find an example where this strategy didn’t end up in a communist system, assuming it was victorious — and it is victorious way too often.

America is uniquely resistant to that for many, many reasons, the chief of which is our brilliant constitutional structure, which makes it very, very difficult to implement sweeping change quickly. It can happen once in a while, such as at the beginning of the New Deal, but it’s really, really hard. Those conditions almost never exist.

And so I’m absolutely convinced we can beat them. But we’re in a fight. And if we don’t take it seriously, our kids and grandkids will not live in a free country.

The Red-Green-Blue-Yellow Axis

Frank Gaffney: And Rod, as you know, one of the things we talk about a lot — including at the beginning of this program — is that this danger is made all the more severe by the fact that, at least for the moment, they are making common cause with what I think of as at least two other totalitarian forces: the jihadists, of course, but also the globalist elites.

Our mutual friend Kevin Freeman likes to add a fourth element, which he calls the traitors and fools. So you’ve got the red-green-blue-yellow axis. But whatever you characterize it as, and however you slice and dice it, they’re all seeking one common purpose at the moment, and that is to get rid of this country.

You’re absolutely right. That is the fight we’re in. We have to recognize it as such, and we have to mobilize to resist it in its several parts, as well as its complicated but dangerous whole.

Rod Martin, we have to leave it at that for the moment. So much more to talk about, but thanks, as always, for giving us a little bit of sunshine, as well as some very, very thoughtful observations about the future. God bless you. Come back to us soon.

I hope the rest of you do the same next time. Until then, go forth and multiply.

👉 Upgrade to Premium or Inner Circle!

Recent Analysis:

👉 Upgrade to Premium or Inner Circle!

Our full discussion transcribed below:

by Rod D. Martin
August 12, 2026

I appeared on NTD Newsroom with Don Ma to discuss how Iran’s Hormuz gamble is shifting energy power from the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of America, while Blue State socialists are driving global finance south.

We discuss:

• Why Iran’s deal with Oman cannot overcome American naval dominance in the Strait of Hormuz

• How new pipelines, maritime insurance, and continued shipping are steadily destroying Iran’s remaining leverage

• Why the disruption is moving long-term energy contracts and capital from the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of America

• How the new Texas Stock Exchange and Texas business courts offer companies an escape from New York and Delaware

• PLUS why even BlackRock, Nasdaq, and the New York Stock Exchange are preparing for a financial future centered in Texas

Share

It’s 20 minutes of in-depth analysis you need. Watch the interview, and pass it along!

Nothing matters more than educating the next generation with the values we cherish. The Herzog Foundation is making that possible. Learn more here.

Our full discussion:

Iran’s Oman Gambit and Midterm Elections Strategy

Don Ma: The newest stock exchange in the United States is now up and running in Texas. Joining us to share his insights on the Texas Stock Exchange and what it could mean for America’s financial markets is Rod Martin, founder and CEO of Martin Capital.

Rod, it’s always great to have you on the show. Thank you for joining us today.

Before we talk about the Texas Stock Exchange, let me get your quick thoughts on the latest developing situation with the Iran war.

Apparently, Iran is talking with Oman to try to open the Strait of Hormuz. It seems to me that this says the United States and its actions, whether you think about the blockade or anything else, are working. Iran wants the Strait open.

Why is Iran talking to Oman?

Rod D. Martin: Of course, they’re across the Strait from each other. In a perfect world, from Iran’s point of view, it would get the Omanis to join it in making the Strait the national territorial waters of Iran and Oman. They would set up a joint tollbooth.

That is just not going to happen. They don’t have any way to enforce that, and nobody is going to stand for it.

Can they make trouble for a while? Yes. Is this the best leverage Iran has right now? Yes.

But is it really all that effective? As you know, we’ve moved around a thousand commercial ships through the Strait in the last few weeks with very little incident. Every day the blockade seals Iran’s ports is a day they’re losing $400 million to $500 million in a relatively poor country.

This is a bit of a waiting game. They think they’re going to wait Trump out through the midterms. I think they’re very much mistaken about where we are right now, especially after the Michigan primary last week.

I think we stand a very good chance of not just a Republican Senate, but at least the possibility of a Republican pickup in the Senate. On the House side, generic ballot notwithstanding, the Democrats would have to win two-thirds of the seriously contested races on the ballot in November to get a majority. Then they wouldn’t have enough seats to actually be able to legislate.

I think our chances are pretty good. More to the point, I think Donald Trump thinks our chances are pretty good. The Iranians trying to wait that out isn’t going to get them anywhere. Eventually, we’re going to bankrupt them.

Who Controls the Strait?

Don Ma: There are a couple of democratic socialists running against Republicans. Some people say this is good for Republicans because they believe the majority of Americans aren’t that far left. We’ll have to see what happens.

But to your point, this deal Iran is making with Oman really is irrelevant because the United States controls the Strait of Hormuz. Whatever happens with the Strait, at the end of the day, is what the United States decides. Iran still has to get approval from the United States.

Rod D. Martin: If we had elected Kamala, I guess this could work for them. Short of that, there’s just no way an American government is going to allow a chokepoint like this to become national territorial waters.

It’s against international law. It’s against U.S. principles going back to the Revolutionary War era. There’s just no way that’s going to happen.

The U.S. Navy is absolutely dominant. Iran can harass shipping, but it can’t stop it. It can raise people’s maritime-risk insurance. It can certainly do that.

But even there, the president has created a facility through the Development Finance Corporation that backstops the insurance. They assigned Chubb to take the lead on the private side. The more we do that, first of all, the more business we transfer here from London, and the more the insurance risk goes down. You’re not going to be able to price that the way Iran would like.

Within 18 to 24 months, you’re going to be able to route almost 75 percent of the prewar volume of oil through pipelines going to other seas. That doesn’t leave Iran much leverage at all.

Don Ma: That’s another great point. The longer the Strait of Hormuz is “closed,” the more irrelevant it becomes because people will find other ways.

One thing I see Iran doing with this deal with Oman is that it could potentially give Iran a way to cause trouble without accountability. Iran could say, “We never had a deal with the United States, so we’re free to do whatever we want. Our deal is with Oman.” It has that excuse. What do you think?

Rod D. Martin: They’re not free to break international law. These are international waters. They don’t get to annex them. That’s silly.

Share

It’s even sillier when you consider that it’s basically as if, 10 minutes after the Soviets took Berlin in 1945, the Nazis had said, “And now Russia has to surrender.” It’s ridiculous.

They are posturing. A lot of that is for their own domestic audience. A lot of it is because they’re used to America doing stupid things, as we did at the end in Afghanistan and at the end in Vietnam. We win wars and then lose the peace. They figure that, if they can outlast us, they might get to that.

I don’t think that’s going to work for them here. I don’t think Oman is going to be able to get very far with this either, because it has neighbors that are awfully well armed. I don’t think the UAE is going to put up with it. I don’t think Saudi Arabia is going to put up with it.

The only thing that might work in Oman’s favor is that the UAE is doubling pipeline capacity across Oman to its port of Fujairah. They might like to see the Strait closed a little longer so they have more financial advantage that way.

However cynical it may sound, the United States is benefiting immensely from the semi-closure of the Strait. The rest of the world may be sucking wind, but the United States is selling more oil and liquefied natural gas from the Gulf of America than you can shake a stick at. In many cases, those are 20-year contracts.

We are shifting energy’s capital from the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of America, and it’s going to last.

Don Ma: Let me make one more comment on the Oman and Iran situation, and then I’ll ask you about the stock exchange.

At the end of the day, do you think Oman will stand with the United States in this Iran war, or is Oman more of a wild card?

Rod D. Martin: I don’t think Oman is that much of a wild card. It may mess with us a little bit, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t want the Saudis down its throat. It doesn’t want the UAE down its throat.

This disrupts Oman’s other relationships in favor of a country that can’t make any of this stick. Oman doesn’t have a navy worth mentioning, so it’s not as though it can go fight the USS George H.W. Bush or something. That’s not going to happen.

Premises considered, I think this is a tempest in a teapot. I think it’s maneuvering mostly for the domestic audience in Iran.

The truth is that every day this goes on, they’re losing, as I said, about half a billion dollars that they can’t afford to lose. Yes, they’re fanatics, and yes, they’re going to hang on to the death. But at some point, the lower-level guys aren’t getting paid.

When enough of that happens, armies have disintegrated for thousands of years. This isn’t going to be different.

Texas Challenges New York

Don Ma: Let’s move on to another important topic: the latest with the Texas Stock Exchange. Why is this significant?

Rod D. Martin: Your prior segment actually showed it very well. We’ve got all these democratic socialists winning all these primaries. We’ve elected a few. Zohran Mamdani, of course, is the poster child for all this in New York.

He’s doing everything in his power to drive capital out of the city. As long as I have been vaguely familiar with the field of economics, I have heard liberal economists tell me that changing tax rates doesn’t really affect behavior: They can take as much out of your pocket as they want, and you won’t do anything about it.

That is never, ever true.

There’s a reason East Germany had to build the Berlin Wall. It had to keep its people in. Trump is building a wall on the southern border to keep people out. The Germans had to build a wall to keep them in because they were confiscating everything they had.

New York, and for that matter California, Michigan, Illinois, New Jersey, and Delaware, are all doing the same thing. But they can’t build a wall to keep anybody in. So where are people going? They’re going to Florida. They’re going to Texas.

This new development in Texas is really quite remarkable. New York has been the financial center of the globe for a century. It’s absolutely unassailable, except by shooting itself in the foot. That’s exactly what’s happening here.

It’s not just the Texas Stock Exchange, which fully opened at the end of July. That’s an extraordinary thing. The two lead partners are BlackRock on the left and Citadel on the right. They put in probably about $100 million between them. The total raise has been $275 million.

This is a well-capitalized exchange. It’s a good business. The Texas government in Austin has gone out of its way to roll out the red carpet and keep regulations really low.

You have national trading on that exchange. Two-thirds of the public companies in this country can be traded on the Texas Stock Exchange.

But wait, there’s more, because Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange have now opened branches in Texas. In fact, one of those was a different exchange in Illinois. They rebranded it and moved it to Dallas.

Even the New York exchanges are now planning their exit route. If New York becomes impossible to do business in — and there’s no question it’s doing everything it can to ruin itself — you’re going to see an exodus.

You’ve already seen, since the beginning of COVID, a tremendous movement of highly qualified personnel and capital into South Florida and North Texas. It could become a flood very quickly.

You’re seeing the same thing with incorporations coming out of Delaware and headquarters coming out of Illinois and California. This is a huge development in the history of global finance, and it’s not going away.

Texas’s New Financial and Legal Operating System

Don Ma: Is there any reason capital markets must be centered in New York? Is there anything stopping the current status quo from moving from New York to Texas?

Share

Rod D. Martin: Historically, yes, because that’s where all the finance professionals were: all the guys who knew how to do this stuff, who had the money, and who had the relationships.

New York has been the nerve center of the world. If you’re going to do that kind of business, of course you go to New York to do it. That’s a no-brainer.

Well, not so much anymore.

When New York — not just the city, but the state government as well — does everything it can to make itself inhospitable to capital and its free flow, people start looking around for alternatives.

I think the most remarkable thing about the Texas Stock Exchange is not that it has big backers, but that one of those big backers is BlackRock, the absolute tip of the spear in pushing ESG regulations on all of us. Yet it, too, sees the need for an escape hatch.

You’re getting an accumulation not just of capital, but of financial infrastructure and, crucially, legal infrastructure.

Texas has rolled out a separate court of chancery, just as Delaware has, that is exclusively for business. You can get predictable results in a Texas court focused entirely on the specialized needs of large businesses.

That’s a huge development. It was one of the main reasons to incorporate in Delaware. Delaware shot itself in the foot.

The more you have the legal infrastructure, the more you have the capital already there, because Texas is becoming the global center of energy. Then you throw in the financial infrastructure and the financial people - the personnel who understand it and make it happen.

No, New York has absolutely no barrier to its own demise. There are plenty of qualified people in Texas, and that was the principal thing keeping New York a global financial capital.

Don Ma: You mentioned fair courts in Texas. What does the Texas exchange offer that’s different from other existing exchanges?

Rod D. Martin: The exchange itself is really quite well constructed.

They went in and said, “What are all the things that would make somebody not want to list in New York? Let’s do the opposite.”

They don’t have all this ESG stuff. They don’t have all these state mandates that force public companies, whose shareholders want a completely different result, to do what politicians in New York force them to do. Texas has taken an incredibly hands-off position on all of that.

I come back to the new Texas business-court system because it really is a huge feature. Business is an incredibly specialized thing. If it’s just the corner grocery, maybe not. But if you’re talking about multinational corporations operating in 100 countries, with really complex issues coming before judges, you need judges who understand them.

Your normal local judge who mostly hears divorces and dog-bite cases isn’t the guy. That was always a huge advantage Delaware had over everybody else: its unique court of chancery for hearing these very high-end business cases.

Now Texas has it, and Texas isn’t in the business of just voiding your pay plan, as Delaware did to Elon Musk. There were two different shareholder votes at Tesla, and a single activist judge blocked the man from being paid for five years of extraordinary work.

That eventually got overturned by the Supreme Court in Delaware, but by then the damage was done.

There’s an exodus of those incorporations from Delaware. Delaware, another blue state, makes a shocking percentage of its state budget from franchise taxes on corporations that are domiciled there but not headquartered there.

That is a huge blow to Delaware. If this starts accelerating, as I said, it will be a flood. You’re going to see all these companies move to Texas, and it’s going to be really good for the U.S. economy.

Socialists’ Problem: Capital Votes With Its Feet

Don Ma: One final question: Does the Texas exchange have the depth of liquidity? Is it growing, and how fast is it growing?

Rod D. Martin: It’s growing really fast. They represent right now about two-thirds of the public liquidity in the United States. That’s a very big deal.

They’ve just started. They’ve been fully open for a little over a week. The exchange itself is well capitalized and extremely well run. They’ve got top-quality people. They’re actively recruiting, and they’ve got the state government doing everything in its considerable power to help them recruit because it’s good for Texas.

It’s great for Texas’s tax base. It’s great for Texas’s roads and schools. All of these things are working together in a way that you’ll never get out of New York anymore.

Kathy Hochul is not going to do what Rick Perry or Greg Abbott are willing to do. She’s too busy trying to destroy business, and so is Mamdani.

We saw that from another direction in the Trump cases, where they absolutely made up new law out of the blue. In one case, the state legislature passed a law that applied only to Donald Trump so they could prosecute him.

If you’re sitting in a bar in New York and you flirt with the wrong waitress, and it turns out she’s the niece of a Democrat prosecuting attorney, you’re going to lose your pay package. You’re going to get bankrupted by the courts. That isn’t okay.

That’s why Trump has moved as much of his business as possible out of New York and changed his domicile. He is a resident of Florida. No one ever imagined that, least of all Donald Trump.

New York is creating inhospitable circumstances. Those circumstances drive people and capital to vote with their feet, and they’re going to Texas.

Don Ma: Rod, that sounds good. Great conversation today. As always, thank you for your time.

Rod D. Martin: Thank you.

👉 Upgrade to Premium or Inner Circle!

Recent Analysis:

👉 Join Premium - Tons of Bonuses!

by Jonathan Leake
August 12, 2026

Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Gulf’s energy producers have a major problem.

The main shipping routes to export their barrels of oil and tanks of gas — the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait and the Strait of Hormuz — have become war zones. Ships transiting Hormuz alone carry 20 percent of the world’s oil. On that hang the economies of both the buyers and the sellers.

The situation has left Saudi Arabia, as well as some of the region’s other key oil producers, searching for a solution. Now, many think that could come from the unlikeliest of places: Israel.

Israel and the region’s oil powers have been enemies for decades, but are drawing up plans to use an overland pipeline to render the straits irrelevant. The proposal would see a pipeline built across the Saudi desert to the Israeli border, where a second pipeline built through Israel in the late 1960s — ironically in partnership with the Shah to carry Iranian oil around the then-closed Suez Canal — would carry it north to ports on the Mediterranean.

Hillsdale College’s wonderful “The Story of America” series is now FREE for you to watch! Learn about the most important episodes in America’s Founding.
Click here for the full series!

If it worked then it would create a new export route, bypassing both the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz. The Gulf Arab states are intent on removing Iran’s leverage, building or expanding pipelines (with U.S. investment) from the UAE to Fujairah on the Omani coast, from the oil-rich Saudi Eastern Province to Yanbu on the Red Sea, and from Iraq to the Mediterranean by way of Syria.

Even so, more capacity — and more routes — are needed. And there are real hopes that binding Israel and the Gulf together through mutual energy dependence could have greater consequences. Could a pipeline expand the Abraham Accords and help bring peace to the Middle East?

Brief details of the scheme have been released by Eli Cohen, Israel’s energy minister.

Read more

This analysis is free, but with Premium Membership you get MORE. Join today.

👉 Join Premium - Tons of Bonuses!

by Rod D. Martin
August 11, 2026

I get a lot of letters. I certainly did this morning regarding our piece on Chinese dark money stirring opposition to U.S. data centers. The following is a representative sample of my response, one which I think more Americans need to take to heart.

Dear _______,

A few thoughts in response to your very detailed email.

You have been using data centers most of your life. You wrote your email using a data center. Your streaming of movies and TV shows comes from a data center. Your cloud storage is literally just a data center. And we’ve been building and using them for decades. They’re already all over the place, and the world has not come to an end. That’s likely instructive for what is to come.

Data centers are no different from steel mills. If America had not built steel mills, it would have remained an agrarian backwater down to the present day and be completely dominated by foreign powers. It likely would not exist as a single country.

Hillsdale College’s wonderful “The Story of America” series is now FREE for you to watch! Learn about the most important episodes in America’s Founding.
Click here for the full series!

Contrary to your assertion, there’s nothing “scammy” about AI. I use it daily in my work and it has increased my productivity about fivefold. That means one of me can do what five would otherwise have to do, which means I get a lot of things done that would have gone undone. As a result, I have a better standard of living and am able to hire more people who are similarly up-powered by having better tools.

This is exactly like adding tractors to a rural economy previously dominated by slaves and sharecropping. Most people don’t know this, but we now produce many times as much food as we did in those days in just one-third of the total farmland worldwide. We’ve gone from constant famine in West Africa to childhood obesity issues there. Big difference for real people.

But it’s more than that, because we’re using AI for weaponry now. Which means in short order, the country that doesn’t use AI in that way will have the equivalent of wooden ships sailing against aircraft carriers.

So if we were to forego those advantages, a totalitarian Communist power would turn us into a de facto colony over the next 20 years. They would dominate the world, and an America-led world, and maybe America itself, would be a sad memory.

Does this mean every planned data center is a good idea? No. Does this mean the companies building them shouldn’t provide their own power and thus not burden the grid? Of course not: they absolutely should.

But a lot of the protest is of things that aren’t real, like the idea that these things take up some extraordinary amount of water. Water use is entirely a choice: we’ve been building data centers for 40 years that don’t use any water at all. But where there is plentiful water, it makes more sense to use a bit of it than burning electricity in chillers and fans.

China has deployed 158 data centers since January 1, and two new coal plants per week to power them. That is better? That’s a future without any safeguards or public input into how we determine what goes where and who pays for the energy. That seems like a bad plan.

Anyway, here’s what’s going to happen:

1. Unless we elect Kamala, America will build enough data centers to beat the Chinese.

2. Most likely, you will be successful in stopping any from being built where you are, as a result of which more high-paying jobs will go elsewhere, and the children of your community will continue to leave to find the opportunities your community will increasingly lack.

3. Communities that take a sensible regulatory approach to mitigate any harm they’re concerned about will gain high-paying jobs, lots of new power infrastructure, and watch their utility bills drop over time. Communities that don’t get that infrastructure will pay more for the same electricity, out of a shrinking economic base.

4. If every community goes full NIMBY, all of these things will be built in Earth orbit, meaning no one gets those jobs, power plants, investment, etc. Eventually, the factories will move offworld too, because the economics will make sense if every community fights everything new. So get ready for the Democrats to pass “Universal Basic Income” because they’ll have to, and we will be Venezuela.

That may sound crazy and impossible. 100 years ago everyone thought literally everything we have today was crazy and impossible, especially the exact things we were doing a mere 80 years ago (like destroying Battleship Row at Pearl Harbor from the air, or dropping the Atomic Bomb, or breaking the sound barrier, or making passenger rail obsolete). That was all “crazy talk” 100 years ago! Elon is rapidly reducing the cost per pound to orbit from about $10,000/lb. to about $100/lb. It will drop from there. That makes Luddites highly uneconomical.

The story is told in Jefferson, Texas, which 150 years ago was the most important river port in the state, of how Jay Gould came to town to speak with the city fathers about bringing the railroad to Jefferson. The city fathers told him in no uncertain terms that they did not need or want any of his newfangled technology.

So instead, Gould took his railroad to Dallas, a relative backwater that became one of the greatest cities on Earth. Jefferson no longer has any river traffic at all and actually lost about half of its population. It’s a (lovely) sleepy little town with a bed-and-breakfast. Most of its people have to work somewhere else.

Choose your future. You can participate in making the rules for advancing technology, or you can drive it away and let other people make those rules. What you can’t do is stop its advance.

Anyway, China has already chosen. And it’s doing everything in its considerable power to hold America back. People would do well to take note.

👉 Join Premium - Tons of Bonuses!

Recent Analysis:

Share

This analysis is free, but with Premium Membership you get MORE. Join today.

👉 Join Premium - Tons of Bonuses!

UPDATE: I got a LOT of feedback on this essay. Here is my response, and I think it’s very much worth your while. — RDM

by Eva Fu
August 11, 2026

As small towns across the United States reckon with power-hungry data centers springing up, the Chinese Communist Party is muddying the waters and sowing division.

By tapping into the tensions around water usage, power demands, and environmental costs, the regime is trying to widen the wedge using an old playbook: influence peddling and propaganda.

There’s no discounting the groundswell of anger in American towns about data centers in their neighborhoods. Local resistance has blocked or delayed at least 75 data center projects, worth some $130 billion, in the first quarter of 2026 alone, according to Data Center Watch.

Hillsdale College’s wonderful “The Story of America” series is now FREE for you to watch! Learn about the most important episodes in America’s Founding.
Click here for the full series!

But while analysts caution against categorically dismissing all opposition against data centers as Beijing’s work, they say the regime meddling behind the scenes is nonetheless serious — and growing.

Whether it’s energy or water, each is “definitely a real issue,” according to Cleo Paskal, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “But it’s also a real issue that the Chinese Communist Party is perfectly happy to exacerbate to create even more division with the goal not of leading to any solution, but of paralyzing the United States,” she said.

‘Data Center Bandwagon’

Part of the regime’s effort is about harnessing U.S. artificial intelligence against itself.

Using virtual private networks, or VPNs, Chinese operators tapped into ChatGPT, which is not accessible in China. They instructed the chatbot to create English-language comic strips and comments that suggested AI center construction was hiking up electricity costs for average American households.

One comic features a family of three saying “This is unfair!” while glaring at a man in a suit puffing a cigar and clutching bags full of cash, a June OpenAI report found. A set of likely fake accounts then amplified such materials on social media.

OpenAI dubbed the effort the “Data Center Bandwagon campaign.”

Chinese influence operators are “testing narratives against AI infrastructure — a foundation of U.S. technological leadership, economic growth, and the broader democratic AI ecosystem,” the company said in its report.

Keeping an edge on AI has been imperative for the Chinese regime. Its 15th five-year plan, adopted in March, pushes to integrate AI in all sectors of the economy. In a speech on July 17, Chinese leader Xi Jinping laid out another global AI order, in which China will take the lead in training and collaborating on the technology for developing countries.

Chinese authorities see AI as a “battle,” said retired U.S. Marine Col. Grant Newsham, who authored the book When China Attacks to warn about the Chinese regime’s gray zone tactics.

“They want to win it, and they want to defeat us,” Newsham said. And defeating means ensuring the United States falls behind them, and ideally, is dependent on them, he said.

Newsham pointed to green energy as a case study.

The world’s shift to clean energy has led to heavy dependence on China, which produces around 80 percent of the world’s solar modules and batteries and 70 percent of wind turbine equipment. The refining process for several key electric vehicle batteries largely takes place in China.

Now, the Chinese regime wants to achieve the same thing with AI, Newsham said.

Chinese actors appear to still be experimenting at the moment with their fake social media accounts, but analysts and OpenAI warn that they are getting better.

Beijing is not looking for quick results, said Scott McGregor, a former intelligence adviser to Canadian federal law enforcement. “It’s very incremental,” he said.

Share

Volume matters, and AI is enabling Chinese influence campaigns at scale, said Nicolas Chaillan, a cybersecurity expert and former Air Force chief software officer. “If you become the noise and you have the volume with you, then you can control the narrative, and then you can really push your thoughts into people’s minds,” he said. “The more volume it has, the more it’s repeated, the more people are going to believe it.”

Sowing Discord

Running alongside the covert cyber operations is a more overt propaganda push.

In recent months, Chinese state media have carried dozens of articles — in English and Chinese — taunting U.S. buildout roadblocks while boasting China’s successful AI expansion. Many of them echo the same talking points as the fake social media accounts.

This pattern appears to have caught the attention of Washington. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, at a May policy event, said that some of the activism against data centers is driven by “foreign source dark money coming in.”

“It’s not organic or local,” he said.

Several Republican lawmakers have pointed to a network funded by Neville Roy Singham, an American businessman living in Shanghai who has parroted Beijing’s talking points. Singham is now under federal grand jury investigation over potential unlawful money funneling.

The groups linked to him have gained congressional scrutiny previously for fueling protests in the country. Several have openly defended Beijing’s strategic interests, denouncing the United States on Chinese state media and organizing courses that praise Chinese socialism.

Their role in mobilizing anti-data center protests is a chief focus of Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.).

“China would like to dominate the future of artificial intelligence, and it is clear that they are actively seeking to exploit Americans’ legitimate concerns and sow discord in our own backyard for one purpose, and that is to seize this technological advantage for themselves,” Smith, who chairs the House Ways and Means Committee, said in a June congressional hearing on Chinese influence.

He vowed to “follow the money and get to the bottom of the dark web of funding sources.”

In late July, Smith subpoenaed three Singham-associated nonprofits, citing tens of millions of dollars funneled through Singham.

Some of the opposition voices said their core issue is a lack of transparency from the government. Residents “want to feel heard in decisions that will impact their lives for decades to come,” Elizabeth Hutchings, communications manager of Alliance for a Better Utah, said. The group has fought a major data center project in the state and denies any foreign hand in its work.

Lawmakers and experts say true community-led opposition and the Chinese influence campaigns are two distinct issues. “There’s a place for legitimate concerns about data centers and AI, but let’s have that debate separate from the malign influence by the Chinese Communist Party,” David Shedd, former acting director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said.

The Chinese regime, he said, has “every vested interest” in sowing discord.

McGregor agreed, saying the regime is trying to catch up on AI, and it will want to slow the United States down in any way it can.

Singham couldn’t be reached for comment.

‘Tell Half a Story’

Exploiting friction points in open societies is a familiar tactic for the Chinese regime.

When the United States grappled with anti-Asian hate crimes in 2021, Beijing saw an opportunity to divert attention away from human rights abuses in its own country. Its diplomats and state media accused the United States of hypocrisy and boasted that the Chinese version of governance was better.

Share

“They tell half a story, or they change the story enough so that it corrodes the truth,” Stephen Nagy, a professor of politics and international studies at Tokyo’s International Christian University, said. “These are patterns that are only accentuated and put on steroids with AI.”

Ethan Tu’s Taiwan AI Labs has used AI to track coordinated influence operations. In most cases, he said, the operators aim to wear down public trust and push both sides to the extreme until there’s no room for objective conversation.

When democratic functions become paralyzed, people might think, “democracy is really chaos, it’s no better than China,” he said.

In the case of AI, the regime is running the campaign on top of a litany of efforts to gain the coveted AI edge. Where the technology has fallen short, it makes up the difference by stealing American tradecraft, smuggling chips through third countries, and leveraging supply chain dependencies to impede U.S. AI infrastructure growth.

Beijing — by far the most capable competitor in this space — is running a “multifaceted, national-level strategy” to displace the United States as the world’s most influential AI power, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in a 2025 report.

A number of lawmakers said they were concerned.

Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said the United States is “absolutely dealing with Chinese influence” on the AI front.

“At a local level in the United States of America, we’re not run by Washington, D.C. Each community gets to go out there and make their own decision about what they see as fits well within their communities,” he said. “That’s our system of governance at the lowest possible level. But yes, we are absolutely dealing with Chinese influence on that front, because it benefits them for us to not have compute.”

Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), like Smith, backed the grand jury investigation of Singham. He said the regime doesn’t “belong anywhere in our American political debates.”

These are “important local political debates that often involve local and state laws and policies, and the Chinese shouldn’t meddle in those debates,” he said. “So we should crack down on them for it, and be fully aware of their motivations.”

If China achieves its goal, the threat to the United States and other democracies will be “existential,” said Kerry Gershaneck, a National Chengchi University professor who has closely studied Chinese political warfare operations.

The Chinese communist rulers are “already far ahead of any other country in weaponizing AI,” he told The Epoch Times. Combine that with a “massive global data-collection ecosystem,” he said, and the regime would have the ultimate tool to export its totalitarian model and “destroy us from within.”

— This analysis is published in cooperation with The Epoch Times.

👉 Join Premium - Tons of Bonuses!

See Also:

Recent Analysis:

Share

This analysis is free, but with Premium Membership you get MORE. Join today.

👉 Join Premium - Tons of Bonuses!

NOTE: This essay was first published ten years ago, but is perhaps even more pertinent today than it was then. — RDM

by Stella Morabito
March 15, 2016

Nikolai Bukharin was executed by shooting in Moscow on March 15, 1938. He had been revered as a giant of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, as one who even worked side by side with Vladimir Lenin himself. Alas, Bukharin’s Marxist chickens had come home to roost by the time he was shot like a dog during Josef Stalin’s reign of terror. His execution marked the pinnacle of Stalin’s show trials of high-level officials.

You see, Bukharin invested in building a political system that inevitably puts the reins of power into the hands of just a few strongmen who end up calling all the shots. It’s a system in which suspicion and the smell of treason tend to hang in the air.

Hillsdale College’s wonderful, beautiful “The Story of America” series is now FREE for you to watch! Learn about the most important episodes in America’s Founding. Click here for the full series!

Socialism, by the way, is just such a system. This is the case whether you call it by any other name, whether communism, utopianism, or collectivism. Oh, go ahead and slap some lipstick on that pig and call it “democratic” socialism or “progressivism” or “communitarianism.”

Lenin and his gang all started out calling themselves socialists. Social democrats, to be exact. So the fact remains: the path of socialism is ultimately paved with coercion, censorship, and, yes, terror. Does stating this make me an alarmist? No. It makes me a realist.

Socialism Is a Bait-and-Switch Scheme

Socialism and communism both involve ceding to the state control over the distribution of goods and services for the masses. This involves giving up individual rights, and giving the state a good measure of control over our personal lives. This road always leads to tyranny, no matter what you pave it with, and no matter what you name it.

Socialism requires a power clique — or, as Lenin put it, an elite “vanguard” — in order to pretend to function. This means going heavy on executive power and rubber-stamp light on the legislative. Socialism demands that we place blind trust in whoever takes the reins of power to distribute society’s goods and services. This tiny elite, by the way, typically enjoys enormous privileges and a much higher standard of living than the hoi polloi, simply by being a part of the elite “nomenklatura.”

Sure, this oligarchy claims to distribute in the name of “equality.” That’s typically the cover story. The historical fact is that the vanguard, the power clique, eventually takes control of everything that’s produced — medicine, education, housing, food, transportation, etc. Its members then bureaucratically ration out — as they see fit — the means of human survival. In the end, you’ve basically got an elite corps of mobsters with the power to decide which folks are more equal than others.

Socialism also has a way of producing bloated bureaucracies that in turn produce ever greater scarcity. Along the way, this produces ever more corruption and cronyism. Censorship puts down deep roots because dissent cannot be tolerated or the system would collapse. Those are all prime ingredients for a closed society and surveillance state. Yet everybody is supposed to lay back and enjoy it.

Millennials for Sanders: Be Careful What You Wish For

So why should we meditate on the gruesome anniversary of Bukharin’s execution 78 years after the fact? Because Stalin’s purges and the reign of terror he invoked throughout Soviet society are actually pretty natural outgrowths of a system that puts too much power in the hands of too few people. That’s why.

The current professed yearning for socialism — a system so conducive to corruption, cronyism, censorship, and coercion — just keeps rearing its ugly head.

Yet the current professed yearning for socialism — a system so conducive to corruption, cronyism, censorship, and coercion — just keeps rearing its ugly head. One case in point is the open support for Stalin himself in today’s Russia. On March 5, the anniversary of Stalin’s death, a group of communists led a brazen procession to his grave to pay homage to this man who is responsible for the deaths of untold millions during his reign of terror in the Soviet Union.

We are also witnessing a new trendiness for all things socialist and communist among college youth. They sport T-shirts featuring the image of nauseatingly murderous tyrants like Che Guevara. Thanks to the popularity of the avuncular Bernie Sanders, coupled with an astonishing ignorance of history, millennials have fast become trusty mouthpieces for socialism. This is ironic, because socialism has a way of redistributing power away from the “99 percent” and puts it into the hands of the few central planners — a teensy fraction of 1 percent — at the top.

Then what? Well, too often the answer is in the title of this recent article written by libertarian Matt Kibbe: “Socialism Kills.” R.J. Rummel chronicled and documented the killing habits of socialist regimes in his work “Death by Government.” There’s an indisputable correlation between big government and terror that keeps turning up throughout history. That’s because big government is really Borg government. It just can’t get enough of itself.

We’d better get acquainted with it if we’d like to avoid it, no?

Nikolai Bukharin’s Wretched Ides of March

Bukharin’s execution, as well as all of the wild show trials with forced confessions and executions of so many high-level Soviet leaders, caused shock and disillusionment among several prominent communists in the West. (One of them, Arthur Koestler, reflected on the impact of the show trials in his novel Darkness at Noon.)

In that last letter, he requested poison to drink rather than a bullet to the head.

Bukharin wrote more than 30 letters to Stalin while in prison, none of which were answered. But his last letter is particularly poignant. It’s an utter mess of emotions and contradictions: wailing self-pity, confession to crimes, pleas for his innocence, Stockholm Syndrome, total despair, and hope against hope. He referred to Stalin by his revolutionary nickname “Koba,” in an attempt to hearken back to their old Bolshevik days of being comrades-in-arms.

But Bukharin knew he was finished. In that last letter, he requested poison to drink rather than a bullet to the head. (According to one report, he was made to watch the executions of 16 other defendants, then shot last.) He requested to see his wife and infant son. (Obviously, not granted or answered. His wife was sent to a gulag prison camp.)

He even requested to be exiled to America, where he promised to wage Stalin’s war against by-then-enemy-of-the-people Leon Trotsky, the founder of the Red Army. (This seems a pathetic Hail Mary pass.) He also expressed regret for pal-ing around with Lev Kamenev, another high-ranking Bolshevik Stalin had purged earlier.

Here’s how Bukharin’s letter to Stalin ends:

In me you have lost one of your most capable generals, one who is genuinely devoted to you. But that is all past. It is bitter to reflect on all this. But I am preparing myself mentally to depart from this vale of tears, and there is nothing in me toward all of you, toward the party and the cause, but a great and boundless love. I am doing everything that is humanly possible and impossible.

I have crossed all the t’s and dotted all the i’s in spite of a headache and with tears in my eyes. My conscience is clear before you now, Koba. I ask you one final time for your forgiveness (only in your heart, not otherwise.) For that reason I embrace you in my mind.

One Soviet scholar in particular, Stephen Cohen, has defended Bukharin as courageous, and as one who never truly confessed but engaged in a war of words—in an Aesopian language—during his spoken defense at the trial itself. Be that as it may, Bukharin’s letter displays the full human wreckage that lay at the end of the road of socialism.

A fascinating postscript here is that Cohen came into possession of the last letter Bukharin wrote from prison to his young wife Anna Larina. Cohen actually delivered it into her hands in 1992, 54 years later.

Socialism Separates People and Causes Great Misery

Bukharin’s letter to Anna displays in stark clarity what a socialist system ultimately does to the most intimate of human relationships. Once socialism is entrenched, it is tailor-made to separate human beings and stand in the way of intimacy. Indeed, its general premise is that the good of the collective trumps the good of the individual, which means it is actually invested in wreaking havoc on family relationships and loyalties.

Below is an excerpt from Bukharin’s letter to Anna Larina. It’s loaded with pathos, suffering, loneliness, and all manner of contradictions. It’s a testament to the fact that in the end, we only want familial closeness with real, flesh and blood people. Not “communitarian” efficiency. Yet, at the same time, Bukharin extols the very system, socialism, that would destroy these relationships for him and for everyone:

My sweet Anushka! My Darling!

I write to you on the eve of the trial, and I write to you with a definite purpose, which I emphasize three times over: No matter what you read, no matter what you hear, no matter how horrible these things might be, no matter what might be said to me nor what I might say – endure everything courageously and calmly. Prepare the family. Help all of them. I fear for you and the others, but most of all for you. Don’t feel malice about anything. Remember that the great cause of the USSR lives on and this is the most important thing. Personal fates are transitory and wretched by comparison. A great ordeal awaits you. I beg you my dearest, muster all your strength, tighten all the strings of your heart, but don’t allow them to break.

Do not talk carelessly with anybody about anything. . . .

There you have it. Bukharin feels compelled to say that the great Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) is “the most important thing.” And be careful, oh, so very careful, what you say to anybody. Political correctness on steroids. That’s socialism in a nutshell for you.

No doubt the stated intentions are oh-so-pure and oh-so-good, like “liberte, egalite, fraternite.” It’s the sort of compassion Flannery O’Connor wrote of when she noted that “tenderness leads to the gas chamber.” That’s because, at the end of the day, socialism is a manipulative machine of human cruelty powered only by a blind greed for power. It forces people to finely mince their words, or remain silent.

Of course it operates under the fig leaf of “equality.” Because how else can it seal the deal?

Socialism Is a Well-Trod Path to Absolute Power

Somehow, a lot of folks missed the memo that a system without checks and balances on political power is conducive to creating power-mongers, and even monsters. Lord Acton famously stated: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

A system without checks and balances on political power is conducive to creating power-mongers, and even monsters.

Lord Acton’s warning is oft quoted, but little noted, despite the fact that history proves it correct time and bloody time again. Witness Nazi Germany, Mao’s China, Kim Jong Un’s North Korea, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and myriad other examples. Lord Acton’s statement has even been laboratory-tested, and you can check that out in this Leadership Quarterly article.

Bukharin’s Bolshevik comrades had held him in the highest esteem. He was a prominent leader of the Russian revolution and party theorist who worked side by side with Lenin himself, the firebrand who overthrew czarist Russia and entrenched communism there. Lenin even dubbed Bukharin “the golden boy of the revolution.”

But Bukharin basically had two killers, as did all of the other cronies in the government’s power clique. One, of course, was the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. The other killer was the ideology of socialism that Bukharin put into place—a system of unchecked power that grows monsters like Stalin.

We need to remember that, when soft socialism with its siren song of “equality” is left to its own devices, it takes ever more rigid forms. The political hubris of “progressives” who know better than you and me—and with such utter certainty—always leads to central control, corruption, cronyism, censorship, and abject conformity.

The more than 100 million victims of communism shows just how slippery a slope socialism is. Any person of goodwill who is familiar with the history and realities of socialism would do everything possible to avoid going down that minefield of a road.

— This essay originally appeared at The Federalist.

👉 Join Premium - Tons of Bonuses!

Recent Analysis:

👉 Upgrade to Premium or Inner Circle!

by Rod D. Martin
August 10, 2026

On Friday, July 31, Texas stopped merely recruiting Wall Street. It began operating one of its own.

The Texas Stock Exchange completed its phased launch and brought every stock in the National Market System into live trading. Its first exchange-traded product listing is expected in September. Its first corporate listing is expected in October. TXSE is now a functioning national securities exchange, headquartered in Dallas, built around its own technology, and preparing to compete for the listings, liquidity, and capital formation that New York has long treated as a birthright.

TXSE is more than a new exchange. It is the capstone of a migration already reshaping the American financial system. Corporate headquarters, factories, jobs and even legal domiciles are fleeing blue states: California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois and Delaware. Texas is taking an ever larger share, though Florida is close behind.

COVID totalitarianism started the exodus. But the blue states just kept piling on. Delaware, home of two-thirds of America’s Fortune 500 companies, voided a shareholder-approved pay package for Elon Musk, twice, thus destroying its reputation as a safe haven and an honest broker. By the time an appeals court overturned the activist judge, the damage had been done.

New Jersey taxed ExxonMobil away. California and Illinois did everything in their considerable power to render their states as inhospitable to business as possible. New York did likewise, went after The Trump Organization on “trumped up” charges, thus demonstrating the unsafety of its courts, and finally elected a Marxist mayor who promises to “seize the means of production.”

That’s a bridge too far even for BlackRock. Citadel founder Ken Griffin is one of the Republican Party’s largest donors. But Larry Fink spent years turning BlackRock into the corporate driver of ESG activism. Both reached the same conclusion: they needed an escape hatch. And so Texas needed a stock exchange.

Nor is the new exchange just a bunch of good ol’ boys capitalizing on the North’s unforced errors. BlackRock and Citadel Securities headlined the more than two dozen investors in TXSE’s original $120 million capital raise. JPMorgan, Charles Schwab, Fortress, Susquehanna, Jump Trading, and dozens of other financial institutions followed. TXSE has now raised more than $275 million, making it the best-capitalized new exchange ever approved by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Share

Beyond capitalization, the TXSE’s owners include nine of the ten largest liquidity providers in the country, firms responsible for more than 85 percent of American equity order flow. Its exchange-traded product sponsors represent nearly 70 percent of the entire U.S. market. And that’s after a single week of operation.

An exchange is one of the hardest businesses to start: it’s not something anyone would do lightly. Traders go where the traders already are; issuers list where investors already look; brokers connect where their customers already demand access. A new venue can have excellent technology and still die from an empty order book.

TXSE’s backers are the exact firms with the power to solve that problem. They supply the market makers, order flow, assets, listings, brokerage access, and credibility required to create a truly national market.

And it’s not just them. The incumbent exchanges reached the same conclusion at the same time — and began building Texas beachheads of their own.

Why and How Wall Street Is Betting on Texas

Read more

This analysis is free, but with Premium Membership you get MORE. Join today.

👉 Join Premium - Tons of Bonuses!

by Rod D. Martin
August 9, 2026

I actually think evangelists and revivals were valuable. I wish we still had them.

I grew up in churches that brought in evangelists and had revivals regularly. I can distinctly remember at least one who was quite manipulative. He was never brought back. The rest seemed valuable to my young mind, at the very least for shaking things up and causing people to actually bring other people to church.

Oh, and they were also useful for proclaiming the Gospel.

It seems to me that the reason Southern Baptists (and specifically, the North American Mission Board) killed their evangelism and revival emphases was a growing dismissal of such things among then-younger seminarians and their “cool” younger professors. Perhaps I’m mistaken. But I don’t think there’s any reasonable doubt that this growing culture was the leading edge of the trend away from all such things.

That hasn’t worked out very well. There are many reasons Southern Baptists lost 4 million out of 16 million members — 25 percent of total membership — over the last 15 years. There are many reasons for the inflation-adjusted collapse in Cooperative Program giving (never mind that Nashville never adjusts for inflation: the real numbers are ghastly, but never reported). There are many reasons we’re baptizing fewer people than we have in over half a century.

But wouldn’t it make sense that one of those reasons might be that we no longer ask people to become Christians? You know: actually ask them.

We did once. Now we don’t. And the difference in results is pretty obvious.

Nothing I say here is intended to step on anyone’s soteriology. I affirm that God is sovereign. I’m talking about what is expected of us. I would argue this just the same with Tom Ascol as I would with Jerry Vines (although with the former, I’m sure we’d veer off into a discussion of the Regulative Principle).

The thing is, the Great Commission teaches us one particular lesson of universal applicability: that for us, God commands persuasion rather than force. This applies to economics, to politics, and certainly to discipling the nations.

At the Final Judgment God will use force. But in this life, he does not send Paul to Mars Hill with a sword (like a jihadist); and at the same time, He does not refrain from sending Paul to Mars Hill (like a Zoroastrian). He does not plead like a beggar (as some maintain, shamefully), but he pleads nevertheless, as a Father who knows the fate of His wayward children and earnestly desires their return.

He would have been entirely right to kill Adam and Eve in the Garden; and likewise, to give no warning to Noah and let His greatest of resets be complete. He would have been entirely within His right and His power to create men who would entirely choose Heaven.

He did not. And He chose persuasion as His mechanism of action. We are commanded to persuade. By implication, we are also commanded not to compel.

Now anyone who’s sold, or been sold to, recognizes what’s happening when the salesman hands his prospect off to his manager. And likewise, the Holy Spirit must close the sale. None of us are that persuasive.

Yet persuade we must. And I invoke the Great Commission as a universal principle, because it informs everything else. If God would entrust the most important matter in all of life to persuasion (humanly speaking), that fact teaches us how He addresses other lesser matters too. Government must be by the consent of the governed. There is a time for force (as there will be at the Judgment), but it is limited. Even the offerings for the construction of the Tabernacle and the Temple were voluntary, and God Himself (in 1 Samuel 8) limits the government’s legitimate taxing power to less than the tithe, leaving the state with very little capacity for compulsion.

Share

We should live as free men. We should reason lovingly with our wives and children as we disciple them. We should organize our economies on market principles rather than state planning. In all things, we should be imitators of Christ, applying God’s own chosen priorities.

So as Zig Ziglar would have said, we are all salesmen, and everything is selling.

Now if God has made persuasion a guiding principle in virtually all arenas, how much more so in that core arena of the Gospel, in which He states it boldly and explicitly?

I am persuaded by our many Calvinist friends that invitations, and revivals, and evangelistic appeals may be manipulative. I have witnessed it myself. But I am equally persuaded by our many Provisionist friends (and what Calvinist could disagree?) that the mere fact that there are bad evangelists should not abolish evangelism.

Church planting is wonderful, and sometimes involves evangelism (though it often relies far more on proselytizing). But it is not itself evangelism. For fifteen years, NAMB has gutted the latter in favor of the former, and the results are plain to see. But NAMB did not do that alone.

Our numbers bear out our neglect of such things. We are told our prior numbers were inflated by the aforementioned emotional manipulation, and perhaps that is so. But is the current system working? And did the prior system actually fail? Or are these two assertions without adequate evidence, and once we examine the evidence, we find that it was the innovators who were wrong?

The Great Commission commands persuasion. We grant that the Holy Spirit must “close the sale”, but “how will they hear without a preacher?” Evangelistic meetings and revivals incentivized members to invite their lost friends (and to come themselves) to hear the Gospel, night after night. They came, they heard, and many were unquestionably saved. They multiplied. They were made new, they went about making new converts, and the world was made better with them.

The less we do of this, the more we preach only to the faithful. Except even that is not true, because in fact, our churches now hardly meet at all. Where is Sunday night? Where is Wednesday night? Prayer Meeting is gone. Church Training is gone. How can we even consider whether or not to give an invitation at a service that never takes place?

The first rule of political advertising is that a voter must hear your message seven times before it connects. How many fewer times do average people hear the Gospel message now than they did 25 years ago? Than 50?

This all began at NAMB and in the seminaries. It culminated in the SBC’s ill-fated “Great Commission Resurgence”. The men who led that effort tried to do something great, no matter what their detractors may say. And yet like the men who brought you Betamax, Pets.com, Billpoint, and the Zune, they were still wrong.

We are failing by our own hand. We have lost a quarter of all Southern Baptists in a country that is growing. We are doing so in precisely the same way so many businesses have failed: by ceasing to do what we originally did that succeeded.

It’s not too late to change course.

We could start at your church.

👉 Join Premium - Tons of Bonuses!

Recent Analysis:

This analysis is free, but with Premium Membership you get MORE. Join today.

👉 Join Premium - Tons of Bonuses!

NOTE: My friend Alexander Muse is one of the most prolific and thoughtful voices online, and well worth following on all platforms. Please read and share. — RDM

by Alexander Muse
August 8, 2026

When the Supreme Court decided Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, the conventional verdict in Washington was that the tariff agenda had been decapitated.

That reading confused a vehicle with a destination. The Court did not hold that presidents may not impose tariffs. It held that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act was not the statute that authorized these particular ones, because IEEPA lacks the express duty language and the defined ceilings that Congress ordinarily supplies when it delegates the taxing power over imports. Chief Justice Roberts explained that Congress delegates tariff authority in explicit terms and under strict limits. Then the majority did something unusual for an opinion striking down executive action. It named a statute that satisfies its own test.

That statute is Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, codified at 19 USC §1338. Justice Kavanaugh, in dissent, was blunter still. He wrote that the tariffs had simply been placed in the wrong statutory box, and he identified Section 338 as one of several boxes that might have held most or all of them. The provision had never been used in its entire 96-year history.

The President took the hint. Earlier this month, President Trump signed three proclamations under Section 338, imposing an additional 50% duty on roughly $20 billion in Canadian goods, effective August 19, after the statute’s mandatory 30-day waiting period.

I want to walk carefully through why this is not merely a lawyer’s workaround but a genuinely superior instrument, because the distinction matters. A workaround preserves a policy by finding a technicality. What happened here is different. The administration abandoned a broad, contested authority and replaced it with a narrow, express one, thereby acquiring capabilities the original approach never had.

Consider first what Section 338 actually says. It authorizes the president to impose new or additional rates of duty when he finds that a foreign country imposes any unreasonable charge, regulation, limitation, prohibition, classification, or administrative practice on American products that it does not apply equally to like products from every other country. The trigger is not an emergency. It is discrimination.

Congress capped the additional duty at 50%. Congress required the president to find that the public interest will be served. Congress required that the duties be designed to offset the burden on American commerce. Congress imposed a 30-day delay before collection begins. Congress permitted the president to suspend, revoke, supplement, or amend the proclamation at will. Congress permitted action against a whole country or against particular subdivisions of it, which matters enormously when the discriminating parties are provincial liquor monopolies. Congress even authorized duties on goods produced in a third country that benefits from the discrimination.

Read that list again with the Court’s opinion in mind. Express tariff language, a numerical ceiling, a defined factual trigger, a public interest finding, a waiting period. These are precisely the features the majority said distinguish a legitimate tariff delegation from an improvised one. The administration did not resist the ruling. It complied with it, and that compliance strengthened the policy.

The constitutional pedigree here runs deep, and it is worth pausing on, since critics will call this novel. In Field v. Clark, decided in 1892, the Court upheld a reciprocity provision empowering the president to respond when foreign nations imposed unequal or unreasonable burdens on American products. Congress had made the policy; the president merely found whether the triggering condition existed. In J.W. Hampton, Jr. & Co. v. United States, decided in 1928, Chief Justice Taft wrote for a unanimous Court upholding flexible tariff adjustment under congressionally prescribed standards, and gave us the intelligible principle doctrine that still governs delegation law.

Section 338 sits comfortably inside that tradition. Indeed, it is more constrained than the statutes upheld in either case, since its operative finding is tied to identifiable foreign misconduct rather than to production cost differentials or presidential judgment about what the national interest requires in the abstract.

Now to the facts, which are the strongest part of the administration’s position and the part critics most want to skip past. Since April 2025, Canada has imposed a 25% tariff on non-USMCA-qualifying American vehicles and has applied that rate to non-Canadian and non-Mexican content in qualifying vehicles, reaching up to 85% of a vehicle’s value. It created company-specific tariff-rate quotas. Most remarkably, it reduced quota access for companies that moved manufacturing from Canada to the United States. The measurable result was that American vehicle exports to Canada fell by about 22%, from $25.9 billion to $20.3 billion, while Mexican vehicle exports to Canada rose by 23.6% and shipments from Japan, Korea, and Germany rose by between 10.1% and 13.5%. Non-US suppliers picked up roughly $2.85 billion in Canadian sales, with Mexico accounting for nearly $2 billion of that.

Alcohol tells the same story with even sharper numbers. Beginning in March 2025, every Canadian province and territory suspended the purchase, distribution, or retail sale of American alcoholic beverages. Ontario’s monopoly canceled orders, delisted American products from its catalog, and pulled them from shelves. Only Alberta and Saskatchewan later relented. No comparable national-origin ban was applied to anyone else’s liquor. Canadian imports of American alcohol collapsed by 81%, from about $718 million to $137 million, while imports from other countries rose by more than $170 million, even as total alcohol imports fell by 12%. European suppliers absorbed more than $100 million of that shift.

Dairy is the quietest of the three and in some ways the most instructive. Canada operates one cheese tariff-rate quota under the USMCA and another under its agreement with the European Union. Under the American quota, retailers may not obtain or use allocations. Under the European quota, they may. Same product, same market, different rules, and the difference is drawn by nationality. That is, in fact, discrimination, which is exactly the phrase Congress used.

Share

So the statutory trigger is satisfied not by inference but by documentation. Compare this to the posture the administration occupied under IEEPA, where the legal predicate was a declared emergency, and the remedy was global. Here the predicate is a specific foreign rule, the injury is quantified in trade data, and the remedy is tailored to it.

Tailored is the operative word. The three proclamations cover 554 tariff classifications and approximately $20 billion of imports, which White & Case calculated at roughly 5% of everything America buys from Canada, and Reuters put at 5.2% of 2025 volumes. The White House excluded energy, potash, critical minerals, fish, civil aircraft covered by the World Trade Organization agreement, and goods already carrying Section 232 duties. Every one of those exclusions protects a supply chain where American substitution would be slow or where continental security interests are implicated. The administration chose pressure points rather than mirroring Canada line by line, which the statute expressly permits, since Section 338 allows duties on any products of the offending country rather than only the products caught up in the discrimination.

The three-proclamation structure deserves more credit than it has received. Each contains its own factual record, its own finding, its own product list, its own severability clause. Each can be negotiated, narrowed, suspended, or defended in court independently of the others. If a judge somewhere finds a defect in the dairy action, the auto action survives untouched. That is what legal durability looks like when it is engineered rather than hoped for.

Then there is the clock, which is the whole point. The 30-day delay is not bureaucratic sludge; it is the bargaining instrument, and Ottawa understood this immediately. Prime Minister Carney announced within a day that he and the president had agreed to intensify negotiations, Canadian officials publicly discouraged preemptive retaliation before August 19, and none of that would have occurred if the schedule were not credible. Canada knows the rate, the products, the effective date, the conduct that caused it, and the conduct that would end it. Ambassador Greer told the Senate Finance Committee that the administration remains open to discussing a path forward, which is the language of leverage rather than punishment.

History suggests this is how the provision was always meant to work. Section 338 was copied largely from Section 317 of the Tariff Act of 1922, which the Tariff Commission designed to secure equality of treatment for American commerce. Veroneau and Gibson’s scholarship found that the prospect of tariff action was frequently sufficient on its own. In 1932, the United States threatened Section 338 action against France over discriminatory quotas and a tax arrangement favoring Belgium, and obtained an agreement assuring equal treatment without ever imposing a duty.

The weakness of the old model was that the threat was eventually no longer believed. Trump has repaired that, permanently. Every trade ministry contemplating a discriminatory digital tax, licensing rule, port fee, or shelf ban must now price in a statute they had written off as decorative.

This is why the move works regardless of which way Canada jumps. If Ottawa and the provinces restore equal treatment before August 19, American producers get what reciprocity was always supposed to deliver, and not a dollar is collected. If Canada refuses, collection begins, and the world learns that access to the American consumer is conditional on treating American goods no worse than anyone else’s. The America First Policy Institute called Section 338 the best statutory vehicle available two months before the proclamations issued, and even the Center for Strategic and International Studies, hardly a friendly forum, concedes the statute gives this administration a faster path to the table.

Greer testified that the goods deficit with Canada grew from $13 billion in 2020 to $61 billion in 2024, and American Compass has documented that the average world tariff of 6.7% is more than double the 2.7% American rate. Those numbers describe an asymmetry that decades of polite negotiation failed to correct.

A defeat at the Supreme Court has produced a narrower, faster, better-grounded, and considerably more dangerous instrument than the one it replaced. That is not luck. That is reading the opinion carefully and doing what it said.

— This essay first appeared at The Enterprise, which you should follow.

👉 Join Premium - Tons of Bonuses!

Recent Analysis:

Share