▶️ VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: CRY THE BELOVED EUROPE?
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: CRY THE BELOVED EUROPE?
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othing bothers the European elite as much as American Conservatives praising the European foundations of their shared, but threatened, Western Civilization. Europeans especially resent having their social-welfare state system critiqued by upstart, crass Americans.
Their pique only increases as they push back against the condescending American idea that the U.S. could possibly offer any constructive advice, much less help a more civilized Europe follow the “American model.”
Americans, in turn, are worried that Europe is not just stagnating but is on a trajectory of permanent decline—with dire consequences for the entire Western world.
As for symptoms, the U.S. cites a steadily declining European share of world GDP. It points to Europe’s unsustainable 1.39 fertility rate, which ensures a steadily smaller, older, and costlier native population.
More than ten percent of Europe’s resident population is now foreign-born—some 45 million people. However, the European host, unlike a classless America, does not have a long tradition of melting-pot assimilation, integration, and acculturation.
Unlike America’s mostly Christian-nation immigration patterns, European immigrants are predominantly from the Middle East and North Africa, Islamic, and increasingly anti-Western.
Far too many of Europe’s immigrants profess too little desire to assimilate into what they consider a culturally decadent place—one that, ironically, they have no desire to leave.
The Christian Church, the linchpin of Western Civilization, was born in Europe. Yet nowhere do atheism, agnosticism, and open hostility to Christendom grow stronger.
Europe, the birthplace of a dynamic Western military tradition, has been, by contemporary standards and at least until recently, virtually disarmed and unable to protect its own borders or interests.
Europe’s overregulation and war on fossil fuels, combined with a generous social welfare state, have resulted in too little revenue and too many costly dependents.
Americans dare to lecture Europe because the same Western pathologies—open borders, unassimilated immigrants, tribalism, declining fertility, green fanaticism, unsustainable budget deficits, and massive national debt—are likewise beginning to threaten America.
However, unlike Europe, millions of Americans at the eleventh hour are galvanizing to stop their own insidious downward spiral.
So Americans claim to know firsthand the causes for these shared, but even more distressing, European symptoms of decay. And their answers are the threats of several dangerous ideologies.
One pathology is green fanaticism, which has led Europeans to not only ignore their fossil fuel resources but also to dismantle existing coal, nuclear, and natural gas plants.
That suicidal folly ensured that transportation fuels and electrical power became so exorbitant that once sought-after European exports are now uncompetitive, while Europe’s strapped middle classes slip into poverty.
Meanwhile, China funds green causes in the West, exports below-cost cheap wind and solar systems, and then builds three coal or nuclear plants a month to ensure that it has much cheaper energy than the green West.
Other existential threats are diversity/equity/inclusion mandates—a precivilizational emphasis on tribal affinities of race and religion rather than shared national values and unity. The results are legions of drone DEI commissars who sow disunity, spike racial tensions, wage war on meritocracy, and increase overhead.
America further warns Europe that only cutbacks in unsustainable entitlements can allow it to reboot its militaries enough to prevent Russian bullying and threats of attack, protect supply lines of imported fuels and natural resources, and deter terrorists.
And what happens if a petulant and snarky Europe utterly rejects the American diagnosis, therapy, and prognosis?
America will decide that it can no longer afford, as NATO’s leader, to protect European borders when it struggles at home to ensure its own. Nor can the U.S. understand an increasingly two-faced Europe.
One of its faces is the self-righteous 27-member European Union that is becoming increasingly anti-American. The EU attacks the U.S. nonstop on matters of culture, energy, trade, censorship, and foreign policy.
Yet nearly the same nations of a 32-member NATO alliance—Europe’s other face—praise America for its military leadership and call for closer U.S.-European strategic relations.
This one-eyed Jack policy of censoring and fining American companies, blasting American allies at the United Nations, and belittling conservative, Christian, and traditional American culture, while praising the U.S. military and courting its armed assistance, is simply not sustainable.
Is there a solution? Perhaps, given that both civilizations are offering diametrically opposed correctives to their shared morbidities. Europe is only growing more socialist, censorious, globalist, pacifist, multicultural, atheistic, and green.
In contrast, the U.S. is undergoing a counter-revolution toward smaller government, fewer regulations, more fossil fuels, an expanding military, less DEI and woke, more secure borders, legal-only immigration, and renewed faith.
America warns Europe that only one of them is truly fighting to reverse the West’s decline—and the clock is running out for the other to follow suit.
Only one of these competing solutions will solve the shared crisis of Western Civilization. Let us hope the one remedy that works will be fully adopted by both. ✪
▶️ JB SHURK: LEFTISTS CHOOSE CENSORSHIP OVER DEBATE
JB SHURK: LEFTISTS CHOOSE CENSORSHIP OVER DEBATE
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eople often advise me not to engage in debate with Leftists because there’s simply no point: Their beliefs are too dogmatic for their minds to be changed. Although I believe rational debate is like a healthy supply of water for any society, I understand the sentiment. It is incredibly difficult to find points of agreement with our political foes when they prefer to scream in our faces and call us “fascists” rather than listen to arguments that might weaken their positions.
Take the immigration issue. Why is it “racist” of me not to want hundreds of thousands of Somalis, Haitians, or Afghans to move into public housing right next door but “colonialist” or “imperialist” if a hundred thousand Americans take over Somalia, Haiti, or Afghanistan? Why am I “deplorable” for calling those places “shithole countries” when natives with the means to escape are fleeing their homelands as quickly as possible? Must I really pretend that third-world nations are every bit as luxurious and stable as most of the United States?
This whole “pretending” nonsense bothers me greatly. Are we not adults? Are we not capable of expressing our thoughts and debating each other without having to participate in wild fantasies just to avoid “hurting” someone’s feelings? Compared to all of human history, our present obsession with “feelings” is a total aberration.
“Feelings” aren’t just a luxury problem. They’re the kind of problem that could exist only in lazy, welfare-dependent societies in which a majority of the population believes the government should hand out “free” food, medicine, and shelter. When most of your country is obese, men are too busy playing video games to get married and provide for their children, and people believe they are “entitled” to burn down Walmart unless the Treasury refills their EBT cards, “feelings” become a big issue. People too busy earning enough to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves don’t have time to get angry about the newest list of words deemed “politically incorrect.”
“Politically incorrect” is a commie idea. It’s a rhetorical weapon meant to make it impossible for certain speakers to win public debates. When you can’t mention uncomfortable facts, those facts effectively disappear. People inclined to support freedom generally do not tie one hand behind their backs when debating ideas. In fact, freedom-minded individuals tend to push the limits of any discussion because vigorous debate and contentious arguments have a way of breaking down cognitive presuppositions. People who like to learn often defend untenable positions in order to grapple with sophisticated counterarguments and solidify the foundations of their own convictions. When leftists start censoring what can be said out loud because the contents of the debate are “politically incorrect,” they treat adults like children and leave society the dumber for it.
Perhaps because westerners have grown tired of “political correctness” lectures these last few decades, leftists now use government power to target “hate speech” and “misinformation.” Europe has gone all-in on prosecuting citizens for the “crime” of communicating “hate.” Again, talk about luxury problems. Can you imagine someone trying to make a living a century ago having enough time or energy to care about what or whom his neighbors “hate?”
If you don’t like what someone says, walk away. If you don’t like what someone believes, don’t hang out with him. These are basic playground rules that humans learn at an early age. Only leftists grow up to decide that — akshually — the best way to handle a difference of opinion is to obsess about it, scream at the “hurt feelings offender,” and use the criminal justice system to shut the bad people up!
On the playground, young members of the “feelings police” used to receive a wet willy or wedgie as a gentle encouragement to mind their own business! Unfortunately, junior members of the “feelings police” grew up to take control over Western governments and now want payback for all those saliva-moistened fingers inserted into their ears and tightened underpants raised up to their necks.
Let’s be honest: When you look at Starmer, Macron, Merz, and Queen Ursula von der Leyen, don’t you see a quartet of socially awkward kids who probably excelled at being tattletales?
Adults don’t fear so-called “hate” or “misinformation.” If information isn’t true, the answer isn’t to censor it. The solution is to advance truthful information and to counter what is false. If an argument is biting, callous, or offensive, the answer isn’t to lock up the speaker as a thought “criminal.” Occasional outbreaks of “hurt feelings” are the necessary cost of safeguarding free speech.
Make no mistake: When governments award themselves the power to decide what is “hateful” or “false,” they do not limit their purview to racial slurs and fringe beliefs. Instead, they quickly move to criminalize opposing viewpoints as forms of “hate” and political dissent as “misinformation.” This absolute slipperiness of government censorship’s slippery slope is why so many Western nations have made it impossible for Christians to practice their faiths publicly without risking prosecution. It is why “climate denialism” is adjudged every bit as “dangerous” as Holocaust denialism. It is why illegal immigrants are encouraged to wave the flags of foreign nations, but patriotic Westerners are condemned as “bigots” for waving the flags of their own countries.
Healthy societies embrace healthy debates. Unfortunately, it is difficult to debate Leftists when they outlaw all debate. ✪
▶️ ‘BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP’ IS A FEUDAL RELIC
‘BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP’ IS A FEUDAL RELIC
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ith the Supreme Court’s announcement last week it will hear a case challenging President Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship for children of illegal immigrants, the internet has been awash in debate over the meaning of Section One of the 14th Amendment.
That’s the part that says, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” At issue is what the phrase, “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” really means. Does it mean anyone physically present inside U.S. territory, even foreign nationals who illegally crossed the border? Are the children of those people American citizens simply because they were born on U.S. soil?
That’s the view of those who support birthright citizenship today. According to them, citizenship is simply the product of one’s birth. They think the 14th Amendment is quite clear on this point, and that the men who drafted it in 1866 and ratified it two years later had nothing more in mind than to tie citizenship to the accident of birth.
There are however two major problems with this view, one jurisprudential and one practical. Because the first problem leads to the second, let’s take them in order.
Proponents of birthright citizenship will point — as they’ve been doing incessantly over the past week — to an 1898 Supreme Court case, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, as proof positive that the 14th Amendment automatically confers citizenship based on birth. Proponents of birthright citizenship, most of them on the Left, want to stick to the letter of the Constitution as a way to thwart Trump’s executive order.
Without going into all the details of Wong Kim Ark, arguing persuasively the Supreme Court should overturn the decision — it isn’t the silver bullet the Left thinks it is. Specifically, Wong Kim Ark introduced a theory of citizenship to American jurisprudence that was alien to both the 14th Amendment and the Founding. Wong Kim Ark’s parents were subjects of the Emperor of China, but at the time of his birth in San Francisco in 1873 they were “domiciled residents.” The Supreme Court, ignoring how citizenship had been understood in America up until that time, declared that because Ark was born in the United States, the 14th Amendment meant he was a U.S. citizen.
Writing for the 6-2 majority, Justice Horace Gray argued that the 14th Amendment must be understood in light of English common law. By doing this, the Supreme Court enshrined the idea of citizenship based on feudal obligation found in English common law. Feudal obligation meant that, “one is bound from birth to the place where he is born,” as Hillsdale College’s Kevin Portteus has written. “He owes perpetual allegiance to the ruler of that place in gratitude for the protection he has been given. He is a subject, in the sense that he is involuntarily and perpetually subjected to a lord, and has no choice in the matter.”
According to feudal obligation, expatriation is impossible without the consent of the lord to which one owed fealty by birth. This is of course totally incompatible with the American Founding, to say nothing of the American Revolution, both of which rely on a theory of citizenship based on consent, not birth.
The Founders themselves were of course born in lands controlled by the British crown, but by breaking with the crown and declaring (and then winning) independence, they put forward a radically different understanding of citizenship and political community — one based on the mutual consent of free men. In framing the 14th Amendment, writes Portteus:
The Amendment’s authors and sponsors believed that they were expunging a relic of European feudalism. The nature of political obligation under American chattel slavery very closely resembles European feudal obligation. Slaves were bound from birth to a master, and could only be released from their obligation with the master’s assent. They sought to transform subjects, slaves in this case, into citizens. The author of the citizenship clause and its supporters consciously and vocally rejected the doctrine of feudal obligation.
Indeed, Congress passed a companion to the 14th Amendment, the Expatriation Act of 1868, which declared expatriation to be “a natural and inherent right of all people, indispensable to the enjoyment of the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” This was an explicit rejection of the medieval English doctrine of feudal obligation. As Rep. George Woodward of Pennsylvania said on the floor of the House of Representatives, “It is high time that feudalism were driven from our shores and eliminated from our law, and now is the time to declare it.”
With Wong Kim Ark, the Supreme Court reintroduced to American law the concept of feudal obligation that the framers of the 14th Amendment only thirty years earlier had thought they were stamping out! And as they so often do, Democrats today are apt to defend the political arrangements of the antebellum south; they would impose a conception of citizenship and political obligation that, in the American context, applied to slaves, not free men.
So much for the jurisprudential problem with birthright citizenship. Based on a fair and accurate reading of the relevant history and legal philosophy, the Supreme Court should overturn Wong Kim Ark and reject the feudal idea of citizenship based solely on birth — just as the framers of the 14th Amendment had sought to do.
However there’s another, more immediate reason to reject birthright citizenship. As a practical matter, under conditions of mass immigration birthright citizenship is simply national suicide. Consider that during the four years of the Biden Administration, some 10 million people (probably more) entered the country illegally. Most of them were released or paroled by federal authorities pending the outcome of immigration and asylum cases that will take years to be adjudicated because of the backlog in our immigration courts.
The fact is, mass uncontrolled immigration has fundamentally changed the debate over birthright citizenship. Do proponents of birthright citizenship really believe that the children born in America to these 10 million illegal immigrants are and should be U.S. citizens simply because they were born on American soil? Maybe they do, but it’s an insane position to hold. It would mean millions of new citizens whose only connection to this country is that their parents snuck over the border in violation of our laws. Accepting this, and codifying it, amounts to a total rejection of national sovereignty and a repudiation of the American idea of citizenship by mutual consent — consent of the members of the political community and consent of those who wish to join it.
Whatever the Supreme Court said in Wong Kim Ark, and whatever our understanding of the 14th Amendment has been in the 127 years since that decision, the situation created by mass immigration has changed the terms of the debate. Biden’s four years of industrial-scale illegal immigration and retroactive “documentation” conferring dubious legal status on millions of illegal aliens represents a total break with the past.
Perhaps in the 1890s and early 1900s we could presume to confer citizenship on the children of foreign nationals born on U.S. soil. Maybe we had enough social and cultural cohesion to afford the luxury of pretending that the framers of the 14th Amendment really meant to return to the medieval idea of citizenship based on feudal obligation.
But we cannot afford that luxury today. We need a complete overhaul of our posture toward immigration and citizenship — namely, a return to how we thought of these things for the first 150 years of our republic, when citizenship was based on the consent of free men, not the obligations of fealty imposed by the accident of birth.
We used to base citizenship on consent, not birth. In an era of mass immigration, it’s time to return to that older understanding. ✪
▶️ CANADIAN EUTHANASIA KILLS 96% WHITE PEOPLE
CANADIAN EUTHANASIA KILLS 96% WHITE PEOPLE
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illions of Americans want to move to Canada. While few have actually left the country after Trump’s latest victory, they fantasize about living under a leftist government with free health care. And during the recent debates about ObamaCare’s self-destructing subsidies, every self-respecting liberal vehemently denounced America’s backward ‘paid’ health care.
Every civilized country has free health care, they insist. Just look at Canada. Free health care for Muslim migrants. Free death for Canadian taxpayers.
Canada does have free health care in the sense that there are government insurance systems that cover “medically necessary services” funded by paying 70% more in taxes than Americans.
This ‘free health care’ comes with a 3 month wait time for a referral to a specialist, and another 3 months to get treated, with 2 month wait times for a CT scan, 4 months for an MRI and over a month for an ultrasound. Mostly it’s just easier not to bother. Half a million Canadians left ERs without seeing a doctor. And, in one year, over 23,000 patients died waiting for surgery. But the best part of free health care is that death is always free. And fast.
While it may take months to see a specialist, “the median wait time between first request and referral was 1 day” for Canada’s free death health care system. Beat that or die trying.
Ever since Canada embedded free death or ‘euthanasia’ in its free health care, business has been good and patients are being rapidly cleared off waiting lists and into morgues. What started out as killing people whose natural deaths appeared inevitable was expanded to service also those whose deaths are not “reasonably foreseeable” except under socialism.
In the last two years, 1 out of 20 deaths in Canada were due to euthanasia. Free health care deaths climbed from 4.7% to 5.1% of all deaths from 2023 to 2024. And there are high expectations for a new free health care death record as the end of 2025 draws nigh.
Mastectomy patients going in for surgery have been asked if instead of having part of their bodies removed, they would consider saving the government some money and ending it all. Veterans calling a helpline are being offered euthanasia, too. A depressed young woman going to a hospital, worried that she might try to commit suicide, was offered government suicide.
There’s no medical problem that free government health care can’t solve by killing you. For free.
The bad news is that, for now, Canada’s free health care system (financed by high taxes that make home ownership all but impossible for a new generation of native Canadians) won’t kill you if you’re depressed. Not because killing the mentally ill smacks of Nazi eugenics.
According to Health Minister Mark Holland, Canada’s free health care system isn’t quite ready to kill so many people. “At issue here is a question of readiness,” he explained. “What I specifically heard from my health counterparts in provinces and territories is in order to get to that state they were going to need a significant amount of time.” Hannah Arendt, call your office.
Killing the mentally ill may have to wait until 2027. Or perhaps even later depending on the readiness of the various parts of the free health care system to be turned into death traps.
With over 75,000 free health care deaths since 2016, the free death system’s performance is no more impressive than that of the rest of the Canadian health care system. And while the limited capacity of Canada’s free health care system has traditionally taken lives, it’s now saving them.
Canada’s free health care could be killing far more people if only it could function better. Unlike most other medical procedures, wait times remain artificially low. A 10-day waiting period was introduced, but is waived for between a quarter and a half of patients especially if the patient is at risk of dying before he or she can be officially killed by the government.
Still eventually the Canadian government’s killing capacity is bound to catch up to the demand. Most governments are terrible at providing all the services that their people want or need, but few governments fail to figure out how to kill enough people. In Quebec, there’s talk of euthanasing babies and dementia patients. Once you start giving people free health care, it’s hard to stop them from making use of it unless you also use the same system to kill them.
However, it is interesting to note one vital statistic. The Carney Government and its progressive predecessors have thrown around terms like ‘genocide,’ whether it involves fictitious burials in schools, equally fictitious bodies in Gaza or the triply fictitious ‘systemic’ inequities, but its MAID free death program kills a disproportionate number of people of one single race.
The latest ‘MAID’ report (the innocuous name for the free euthanasia program) states that out of the 15,927 people who were asked about their race before they were killed, “the vast majority (95.6%) identified as Caucasian (white).”
When a government program kills nearly 96% of one race, that does look a whole lot like the ‘g’ word. But you can’t have genocide without the other ‘g’ word. Government. And governments figure out whom they want to kill and whom they want to see take over the country afterwards.
Canada’s excitingly diverse new arrivals, whom the Carney Government celebrates, are happy to line up for every welfare program in the nation, but aren’t showing up for free death.
The Afghans, Pakistanis and Turks showing up as ‘refugees’ love free health care (especially since they don’t pay into it) but don’t seem nearly as enthused about getting some free death. And paying for their ‘free health care’ will require getting rid of some of the old white people.
Mass migration to Canada sent the cost of migrant health care up from $60 million to over $800 million. While white seniors are told to go and die, Muslim migrants receive “supplementary benefits that many Canadians either cannot access or must pay for out of pocket, including vision care, counselling, home care, physiotherapy and speech therapy. In fact, there was over $456 million of taxpayer money spent on supplementary coverage in 2024/2025 alone.”
Since 2016, the medical costs for migrants soared and so did the euthanasia of white seniors. Some would call it colonization, replacement and genocide: Canada calls it health care. ✪
▶️ ILLEGAL MS13 GANG MEMBER ABREGO GARCIA IS FREE AGAIN
ILLEGAL MS13 GANG MEMBER ABREGO GARCIA IS FREE AGAIN
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n a decision that reeks of judicial overreach and disregard for American safety, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis—an Obama appointee—has once again unleashed a dangerous illegal alien onto our streets. Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a confirmed MS-13 gang member from El Salvador with a rap sheet including human trafficking and domestic abuse, was ordered released from ICE custody on Thursday.
This isn’t justice. It’s a blatant invitation for more crime, all while the Trump Administration fights tooth and nail to protect its citizens from the very threats pouring across our unsecured borders.
Let’s rewind this sordid tale. Abrego Garcia, who illegally entered the United States years ago, was granted withholding of removal in 2019 based on claims of fearing persecution from rival gangs. However, that status didn’t stop him from continuing his criminal enterprises. Fast-forward to March 2025: In a rare win for enforcement, ICE deported him to El Salvador, where he was rightly tossed into the notorious CECOT mega-prison alongside other gang thugs. There, he belonged—with the MS-13 vermin he represents.
Democrats, predictably, threw a tantrum. Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen jetted off to El Salvador in April to personally lobby for Abrego Garcia’s return, painting him as some innocent “Maryland dad” caught in a bureaucratic snafu. Van Hollen and his leftist allies decried the deportation as an “administrative error,” ignoring the mountain of evidence that this man is a public menace. By June, thanks to activist judges and political pressure, Abrego Garcia was yanked back to the U.S.—not to face swift deportation, but to languish in detention while fighting charges in Tennessee for human smuggling.
And fight he did. A federal grand jury indicted him over the summer for transporting undocumented migrants across state lines, a clear-cut case of aiding the very invasion crippling our nation. DHS dropped a bombshell investigative report in April, detailing a 2019 traffic stop where Abrego Garcia was caught hauling eight individuals in a vehicle on a three-day trek from Texas to Maryland—sans luggage, reeking of trafficking. Law enforcement noted he’s a validated MS-13 member, the savage Salvadoran gang designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S. Government. Prince George’s County Police confirmed his affiliation back in 2019, after finding him with rolls of cash, drugs, and two fellow MS-13 goons.
But it gets worse. Abrego Garcia’s ex-wife filed two restraining orders against him for verbal and physical abuse, including incidents where he terrorized her and their children. This isn’t some misunderstood family man. He’s a wife-beater, a child predator, and a cog in the human trafficking machine that’s exploited countless vulnerable people—all while Democrats shielded him from accountability.
Enter Judge Xinis, stage left. In her Thursday ruling, she granted a writ of habeas corpus, declaring Abrego Garcia’s detention “without lawful authority” and demanding his “immediate release.” She dismissed the Trump Administration’s efforts to deport him to alternative countries like Uganda or Liberia as inadequate, even as ICE stonewalled her queries—likely because no sane nation wants this thug either. Xinis’s order blocks ICE from rearresting him for 72 hours and ties his hands with conditions from his Tennessee case: no contact with MS-13, no weapons, the usual toothless restraints on a man who’s already thumbed his nose at the law.
This is the rotten fruit of Biden-era policies and the activist judiciary that’s sabotaged every attempt to secure our borders. Remember when the FBI under Biden cut him loose despite the trafficking red flags? Or how Democrats muted their “hero” narrative once his MS-13 tattoos and abuse records surfaced? Now, with Trump back in the fight, we’re seeing the deep state’s true colors: prioritizing illegal aliens over American victims.
MS-13 isn’t a “youth group” or a “cultural club,” as some woke apologists claim. It’s a bloodthirsty cartel responsible for murders, extortion, and fentanyl floods that have claimed thousands of American lives. Abrego Garcia embodies the chaos of open borders—illegal entry, gang infiltration, exploitation of our asylum system, and zero regard for the rule of law. His release endangers every community from Maryland to Tennessee, where his trial is set for January. How many more innocents will suffer before we say enough?
Conservatives have been warning about this for years: Weak enforcement breeds predators. The Trump Administration must appeal this farce to the circuit court and ramp up deportations, stripping activist judges of their veto power over national security. Congress needs to act too—pass laws mandating detention for all gang-affiliated illegals and defund sanctuary jurisdictions that harbor them.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia is free today because the left values optics over safety. But freedom for him means peril for us. It’s time to lock down the border, deport the threats, and remind every judge: America First isn’t negotiable. If we don’t, the streets will run red with the consequences. ✪
▶️ TRUMP’S STRATEGY TO END THE UKRAINE-RUSSIA WAR
TRUMP’S STRATEGY TO END THE UKRAINE-RUSSIA WAR
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redictably, recent bellicose statements by Russian President Putin, including a threat to attack Europe, after spending five hours with special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, were quickly cited by President Trump’s critics as evidence that his efforts to end the bloody 45-month-long war in Ukraine are hopeless.
On the other hand, there have been many claims by Trump Administration officials in recent weeks that the U.S. has made “tremendous progress” toward a peace deal. These claims came after a new push by Trump’s diplomats to negotiate a comprehensive peace agreement that replicates his 20-point Gaza War peace plan, which succeeded in freeing all living Israeli hostages from Gaza and implementing a shaky cease-fire that is still holding.
Are Trump’s Ukraine peace efforts succeeding or failing? Are we now closer to a peace deal? Trump’s push for a Ukraine deal is grinding forward, proving both that progress exists and that ending the war will demand tougher, tighter, long-haul diplomacy.
I believe the answers to both questions are yes. However, finalizing an agreement will probably be difficult and time-consuming and is likely to require adjustments by the administration and assistance from Europe and China.
It can’t be stressed enough that there was no Ukraine peace process before Donald Trump was inaugurated last January. Instead of attempting to engage Moscow in negotiations to end the war, President Biden refused to talk to Putin and demonized him, once comparing the Russian leader to Hamas. In addition, Biden’s senseless policy of arming Ukraine “for as long as it takes” without a strategy for a Ukrainian victory or a cease-fire worsened the conflict and turned it into a bloody stalemate.
Biden’s incompetent foreign policy also made the Ukraine War much harder to solve by destroying U.S.-Russian relations and driving Russia into the arms of China. President Trump has acknowledged this on several occasions, stating that ending this war has proven far more difficult than he anticipated and accusing Putin of letting him down. So, needless to say, the Ukraine crisis that Biden left to Trump was quite a mess.
Ending wars requires dialogue, which is often lengthy and painstaking. Trump’s stubborn efforts to engage both parties in the Ukraine War established a diplomatic process that did not exist before, and he has been discussing peace plans and conditions to end the conflict. Regardless of what one may think of President Trump, it is undeniable that this process represents hope to end this war.
Convincing Putin to set aside his fanatical views that Ukraine is not a state and his paranoia about Ukraine aligning with Europe and NATO troops in the country has been an uphill battle. Putin is determined to seize critical Ukrainian territory—if not all of it—and subjugate the country. Putin also appears confident that Russia will eventually win this war.
Finding a formula to convince Putin to end the war that Zelensky can accept and does not make Putin and Russia look like losers is a difficult task. Throw in Putin’s refusal to negotiate in good faith or honor his commitments, and this seems nearly hopeless.
However, Trump hasn’t given up. Putin is still talking. Zelensky is finally on board with Trump’s approach. Trump has cards to play to inflict significant pain on Russia, such as comprehensive energy and economic sanctions, and providing Ukraine with more powerful weapons, including Tomahawk missiles.
It will take time, possibly months or years, for U.S. energy and economic sanctions against Russia, combined with tough diplomacy, to force Putin to agree to a cease-fire. Putin will continue to attempt to distract the U.S. from this strategy by pretending to want peace or by agreeing to meetings in which he refuses to make meaningful concessions. President Trump is wise to this, which is why he cancelled a Trump-Putin summit scheduled for Budapest in October because Putin was not prepared to agree to an immediate cease-fire, and Trump did not want a “wasted meeting.”
President Trump needs to tighten his diplomacy with Russia and Ukraine in 2026 for an extended period of negotiations over many months. A single senior U.S. official with exceptional foreign policy gravitas and experience should be given sole responsibility for the Ukraine War peace process with President Trump’s full support—Secretary of State/acting National Security Adviser Marco Rubio. This would force Putin and Zelensky into a rhythm of regular negotiations with a cabinet member who is dedicated to ending this conflict and who is in constant contact with the president.
As much as I respect Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, and others who have been involved in the Ukraine war peace process, the rotating set of U.S. officials who have been involved in these talks has not been a good way to ensure consistency in U.S. diplomacy or accountability by the two warring parties. I also believe President Trump desperately needs the talents of Witkoff and Kushner to ensure that the Gaza peace plan succeeds.
Rubio skillfully won Zelensky’s support for what is now a 19-point U.S. peace plan to end the war, although there are still some issues to be resolved. Rubio needs to keep the Ukrainian leader aware that a final peace agreement will be far from perfect and will require painful concessions by Ukraine. The secretary also must make clear to Putin that President Trump is prepared to tighten the screws on Russia for the rest of his presidency if he does not stop the war. However, the off-ramp that Trump offered Putin at the Alaska summit to end the war and give Russia a prosperous future will still be available.
U.S. pressure alone will not be enough to convince Putin to end the war. This is why President Trump raised the Ukraine War during his recent phone call with Chinese President Xi. Chinese cooperation with U.S. energy sanctions against Russia would put enormous pressure on Putin.
The U.S. also needs much more help from Europe to end the war. Instead of complaining about President Trump’s peace efforts, Europe must cease buying oil and gas from Russia as soon as possible. The EU’s recent decision to phase out Russian gas imports by late 2027 was woefully inadequate. Europe also must help the U.S. in firmly pressing China and India to stop buying Russian energy.
In addition, Europe and the U.S. should give Putin an ultimatum on the $300 billion in Russian assets frozen in foreign banks. If he continues to refuse to agree to a cease-fire, these funds should be seized and used to fund arms for Ukraine, humanitarian aid, and rebuilding the country.
I am hopeful that Putin’s recent threatening statements against Europe, falling Russian oil revenues, growing economic problems, and reports of tension between him and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov indicate that he is feeling the pressure from Western sanctions and U.S. diplomacy.
President Trump should build on these indications by establishing a long-term strategy to end this war by working with other countries to substantially increase the pain on Russia for the rest of his presidency, unless Russia agrees to a peace agreement that starts with a permanent cease-fire. This will send a message from Trump that he is serious about ending the killing in this conflict and will not let the Russian leader manipulate him or wait him out.
Giving sole responsibility for the Ukraine War peace process to Secretary of State Rubio will toughen U.S. diplomacy and ensure that Russia and Ukraine receive a constant and consistent message from President Trump that they must immediately stop the killing in this conflict. ✪
▶️ KEN BURNS: PROGRESSIVE MORAL MASCOTS ARE BAD HISTORY
KEN BURNS: PROGRESSIVE MORAL MASCOTS ARE BAD HISTORY
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very few years, someone tells us the United States is not really the child of the long tradition of republicanism, English Common Law, colonial self-government, the natural rights principles enshrined in our Declaration, and the debates involving the framing of a new government that transpired in Philadelphia after the war. No, we’re subtly led to assume that our political father is someone else entirely: this time, it’s the Haudenosaunee—the Iroquois Confederacy.
Ken Burns’s new PBS documentary on the American Revolution leans into that claim, suggesting in the first episode’s preamble that the very idea of our Union was inspired by the Iroquois. By subtly juxtaposing the Iroquois and the Founding Fathers, viewers are invited to believe that if they thought Franklin, Washington, and company fathered America, then they’ve been building the wrong monuments.
Burns tells a vivid story. But it’s also a deeply misleading one—and the very treaty on which his opening narrative depends says almost the opposite of what he needs it to say.
The scene in question is the 1744 Lancaster Treaty Council. Representatives of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia met with Iroquois leaders to settle land disputes and keep them allied against the French. During the talks, an Iroquois speaker did just as Burns relates—namely, he advised the colonial governors to live at peace with one another and act together as the Iroquois nations did. But the colonial reply—effectively omitted by Burns—matters just as much.
The lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania thanked the sachems for their counsel and then calmly explained that the colonies already were in “good agreement” under “the Great King beyond the water,” united in allegiance to George II and bound in mutual friendship. Translated into modern idiom, the answer is: We appreciate the advice, brothers, but we already do this. That is not the birth certificate of a new American idea. It is one people politely listening to another.
The same treaty minutes contain another exchange that exposes how strained this whole “Iroquois invented our Union” theory really is.
The colonial representatives proudly described a school for youth and invited Iroquois families to send children to be educated among the English. The response was gracious but firm. The sachems said, in essence, that they loved their children too much to send them so far away, that their people were not inclined to this kind of schooling, and that their customs differed greatly; they asked to be excused.
Now imagine a commentator pointing to that refusal and announcing, “Here! This is the true origin of the Western idea that parents—not the state—are the primary educators of their children. Our ‘parental rights’ tradition actually comes from the Iroquois!” You would rightly roll your eyes. To hang the entire Christian and legal tradition of the family on one polite “no, thank you” at a treaty council would be ridiculous. Yet that is exactly the kind of leap Burns asks us to make about the origin of the American Union.
There is also the not insignificant matter of context. The Iroquois arrived at Lancaster to secure recognition for territory they had recently conquered from rival tribes—lands that English settlers also claimed. Their counsels of unity seem to have been part of hard-nosed diplomacy aimed at solidifying those gains by alleging disunity among the colonies so that they could make a meaningful claim to lands where all three colonies’ settlers were mixed together. It looks less like a civics seminar for future founders and more like a clever ploy to foreclose any colonial claims on newly (and brutally) conquered Iroquois lands. The colonists, for their part, already lived within a functioning constitutional order: the British Empire, with its charters, assemblies, and inherited liberties.
When Franklin later proposed the Albany Plan of Union in 1754, he did cite the Iroquois Union. But before this ploy, now made famous by Burns’s documentary, Franklin’s citation had always been considered a rhetorical trope. Using a virtue of barbarians (or, in this case, the “savage”), Franklin shamed a civilized people by asking them how much better they should be than their barbarian counterparts:
It would be a very strange thing, if Six Nations of ignorant savages should be capable of forming a scheme for such an union, and be able to execute it in such a manner, as that it has subsisted ages, and appears indissoluble; and yet that a like union should be impracticable for ten or a dozen English colonies, to whom it is more necessary and must be more advantageous, and who cannot be supposed to want an equal understanding of their interests.
Franklin’s admiration of the Iroquois was not flattering. The idea that Franklin—with his detailed historical knowledge of political unions stretching from the United Colonies of New England all the way back to the Delian League of ancient Greece—took his bearing for Union from a single Iroquois ambassador’s words (or the Iroquois Confederacy) is neither historically justifiable nor a reasonable speculation from his brief rhetorical mention of the Iroquois’s “scheme for such a union.”
Why, then, does this implicit origin story have so much appeal that it can open a major national documentary?
Part of the answer is our discomfort with our actual political parents. Many in our culture are uneasy giving too much credit to a tradition they have spent decades teaching students to despise: Greek democracy, ancient Roman republicanism, Christian teaching, canon and common law, British constitutionalism, natural law and natural rights philosophy, and those annoying writers of The Federalist who insisted on things like Providence, human nature, and the separation of powers. If you’ve formed two generations to treat the Founders as little more than selfish slaveholders, it becomes awkward to admit that these same men also achieved something genuinely noble in framing a durable, liberty-protecting union. So the temptation arises to doubt the Founding’s paternity.
The thinking goes that if our institutions can be misrepresented as coming from anyone other than those powdered, problematic gentlemen, then we can keep every institution we like while distancing ourselves from the heritage that actually shaped them.
However that sleight of hand does no honor to the native nations and historic tribes. In fact, it flattens the Haudenosaunee into a kind of moral mascot whose every utterance must have sired a modern, progressive ideal.
The real Iroquois Confederacy was a formidable power with its own covenant chains, rituals, and political genius—and with its own wars, alliances, and territorial ambitions. To pretend by means of suggestive arrangement of details that the 18th-century diplomacy of a brutal Iroquois confederacy that famously tortured and slaughtered Christian Hurons by the village was actually the secret founding grandfather of the U.S. Constitution is to refuse to take the Iroquois seriously on their own terms. Burns reduces them to being mere figurines in a faddish, cold war game against those who would seek, let’s say for instance, to cut PBS funding.
We do not respect our fellow Americans, those descended from the American Indians, or those descended from the English, European, and African settlers, colonists, immigrants, freedmen, and slaves with whom they traded, intermarried, and warred manfully for centuries, by turning any of them into plastic saints who conveniently endorse today’s fashionable narratives. We respect them by acknowledging their full, complicated humanity, and by telling the truth about what they actually did and did not give us.
So watch Ken Burns’s The American Revolution if you like. Learn from its strengths; argue with its interpretations. But then go to the sources. Read the Lancaster minutes. Read Franklin’s Albany Plan. Read the Constitution and The Federalist. Go read Cicero’s On Duties as the Founders did. Let the actual voices of our political past—not a disrespectful 21st-century ventriloquism—tell you who fathered and founded our Union. Only then can we foster proper gratitude to all who really did, respect for all those who did not, and the duty to uphold the dignity and rights of every American in accord with what was so marvelously founded for all. ✪
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