Quotes of the Day:

"To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture."

–Thomas Paine

“Everybody, my friend, everybody lives for something better to come. That's why we want to be considerate of every man – Who knows what's in him, why he was born, and what he can do?” 

– Maxim Gorky

"It seems, in fact, as the second half of a man's life is usually made up of nothing but the habits accumulated during the first half."

– Fyodor Dostoyevsky

1. For Trump’s national security adviser, Afghanistan still looms large

2. In a New Age of Empire, Great Powers Aim to Carve Up the Planet

3. A TikTok Ban Is Imminent: What Are the Financial Stakes?

4. Trump, TikTok and Xi Jinping

5. Voters Want MAGA Lite From Trump, WSJ Poll Finds

6. Left-Wing Cancel Culture Gets Canceled

7. Journal Writers Look Ahead to Trump 47

8. Can Trump Do Better the Second Time?

9. Support for Trump’s Policies Exceeds Support for Trump

10. Trump Vowed a Crackdown on the Mexican Border, but It’s Already Quiet

11.How ‘Mild Bill’ Burns led a covert CIA campaign in Ukraine

12. Arrogance sank CNN

13. Ahead of dreaded TikTok ban, US ‘refugees’ flee to China’s Xiaohongshu app but not all are welcoming

14. Apple suspends iPhone AI news summaries due to errors

15. How resistance to Trump may look different in his second administration

16. Behind the Curtain: A chilling, "catastrophic" warning (from Jake Sullivan)

17. Military hopes new helmet will protect special forces from traumatic brain injuries (Canada)

18. Nobody is talking about Trump’s biggest foreign challenge (ISIS)

19. For the Incoming Administration: Remember Before Relegating or Dismissing NATO

20. Federal employees quietly edit job descriptions to protect roles from DOGE scrutiny

21. Modernizing and Simplifying Defense Resourcing: Updated and Expanded PPBE Reform Report Released

22. The 20th Century’s Lessons for Our New Era of War

1. For Trump’s national security adviser, Afghanistan still looms large

A long survey of Mike Waltz. The most comprehensive I have seen in the mainstream media.

Photos at the link. https://wapo.st/42CJhKj

For Trump’s national security adviser, Afghanistan still looms large

Michael Waltz, a Green Beret lauded for valor in combat, opposed Trump’s 2020 deal with the Taliban as well as Biden’s 2021 pullout. He has warned of the risk of another 9/11.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2025/01/17/trump-cabinet-national-security-afghanistan/

January 18, 2025 at 7:00 a.m. ESTToday at 7:00 a.m. EST

Michael Waltz, President-elect Donald Trump's choice for national security adviser, during a deployment as a Green Beret to Afghanistan’s Tagab Valley in 2006. He was an officer in the National Guard who served in Afghanistan with the 20th Special Forces Group. (Michael Waltz)

By Craig Whitlock

In February 2020, Rep. Michael Waltz, then a first-term GOP lawmaker, received a coveted invitation to fly to his home state of Florida aboard Air Force One. During the flight, he seized the opportunity to lobby President Donald Trump about an issue to which he had devoted most of his career: the war in Afghanistan.

You are what you read. Reveal your 2024 reader type with Newsprint.

Trump had just approved a conditional peace agreement with the Taliban that called for the full withdrawal of U.S. troops within 14 months. Waltz, a Green Beret who had served two combat tours in Afghanistan, pleaded with the president to reconsider, arguing that the Taliban couldn’t be trusted and that the U.S. military needed to stay indefinitely. Yet Trump, who had campaigned on a promise to end the war, was unmoved. “We’ve been there so long,” he told Waltz, according to the congressman’s recently published memoirs. “It’s time.”

Despite their fundamental disagreement over the longest war in American history, Trump has tapped Waltz to return with him to the White House as national security adviser. The job does not require Senate confirmation but is one of the most powerful posts in Washington. In an administration that Trump is stacking with figures who share his isolationist leanings, Waltz stands out as the opposite: a post 9/11 veteran who still favors long-term commitments of U.S. troops to fight al-Qaeda, Islamic State and other terrorist groups overseas.

Waltz’s views are a reminder that sharp differences exist within Trump’s inner circle about how his “America first” campaign rhetoric should apply to myriad national-security challenges that his administration will inherit when it takes power next week.

In a recent interview with The Washington Post, Waltz, 50, downplayed his differences with Trump over Afghanistan and pledged to faithfully execute the boss’s wishes, pointedly drawing a contrast with aides who tried to obstruct Trump’s foreign policy decisions during his first term. “He welcomes disagreement. He welcomes the vigorous debate. But when he makes the decision, he expects you to implement it, and I will do that,” Waltz said.

At the same time, Waltz has made clear that his National Security Council staff at the White House — including career government employees — must be loyal to Trump. Last week, he told Breitbart News that he would ensure all staffers “are 100 percent aligned with the president’s agenda.”

Brian Hughes, a spokesman for Trump’s transition team, described Waltz’s difference of opinion with Trump over the 2020 deal with the Taliban as “not a disagreement but a discussion. Rep. Waltz clearly agreed with President Trump that there had to be a political solution in Afghanistan.”

In an email, Hughes noted that Trump decided at the end of his first term to leave a small military presence at Bagram air base in Afghanistan “to ensure the Taliban would honor their agreement.” Hughes blamed the Biden administration for bungling the final withdrawal.

When he moves into his West Wing office on Monday, Waltz will be responsible for coordinating U.S. policy on the world’s most pressing flash points, including relations with China, Russia, Ukraine and Iran. But he — and Trump — will also have to confront lingering fallout from Afghanistan and who should be held responsible for the war’s many failures.

After Trump’s term ended, President Joe Biden upheld his accord with the Taliban and ordered the remaining 2,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan to leave by September 2021. That culminated in the sudden collapse of the Afghan government, the emergency evacuation of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul and the frenzied exodus of thousands of Afghans who helped the United States during the war. Thirteen U.S. troops were killed in an attack during the final week of the withdrawal.

During last year’s presidential campaign, Trump promised to fire generals and diplomats who oversaw the 2021 pullout, excoriating them — and Biden — for the disastrous retreat. “We’ll get the resignations of every single senior official who touched the Afghanistan calamity to be on my desk at noon on Inauguration Day,” he told a National Guard conference in August.

Waltz also has criticized the Biden administration for botching the U.S. exit from Afghanistan. But unlike Trump, he has said it was a mistake for U.S. troops to leave and that they should have stayed for decades, if necessary, to deter jihadists and to maintain control over Bagram, a strategic air base near China’s western border.

In interviews, televised appearances and his writings, Waltz has repeatedly warned that terrorists are regrouping in Afghanistan and will try to attack America again as they did on 9/11. He has suggested the Pentagon may have to send forces back to Afghanistan eventually, just as it did to Iraq to fight the Islamic State three years after pulling out of that country in 2011.

“If we don’t fight the war on terrorism in places like Kandahar, that war will come to places like Kansas City,” Waltz wrote in “Hard Truths: Think and Lead Like a Green Beret,” a memoir that he published in October. “That’s not hyperbole — it is historical fact.”

Waltz and Rep. Bob Good (R-Virginia) arrive for a House Republican Conference on Oct. 13, 2023, in Washington, D.C. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)

In his interview with The Post, Waltz declined to specify how U.S. policy toward Afghanistan might change under Trump or to elaborate on scenarios under which U.S. forces could return there. But he emphasized that the United States needed to improve its ability to collect intelligence from inside the country.

The Trump administration will “be taking a hard look at the intelligence community and the counterterrorism enterprise, and what kind of eyes and ears do we have, to make sure we’re not surprised again — yet again — from that part of the world,” Waltz said. “I wouldn’t interpret that as, ‘We’ve got to go back and fight in Kandahar.’ I would interpret it as, ‘I don’t want to wait until a Kansas City is hit.’”

Ever since Waltz rejoined the U.S. Army in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the war in Afghanistan has shaped his entire career in the military, politics, media and business. His extensive experience in the field left him more hawkish on Afghanistan than Trump, who soured on the war more than a decade ago and once called the prolonged conflict “a complete waste.”

Waltz poses for a portrait outside the Capitol on Dec, 17, 2020. Waltz bonded with president-elect Donald Trump on a May 2020 trip to Cape Canaveral, Florida. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)

Colleagues and friends say the lessons Waltz drew from Afghanistan have influenced his worldview and given him credibility with Trump, even if he and the president-elect have disagreed on the war.

“If you look at the breadth and depth of his experience, this guy has done it all, from the street level to the pinnacle of national security and his time in Congress,” said Ryan McCarthy, who served as Secretary of the Army during Trump’s presidency and has known Waltz since the 1990s, when they attended Virginia Military Institute, or VMI. “National security runs through his veins. It’s his passion, his life.”

Michael Vickers, a former senior U.S. intelligence official and Green Beret who worked with Waltz during the Bush and Obama administrations, said his main challenge as national security adviser would be to serve as “an honest broker” in the decision-making process at the White House and as a conduit between Trump and senior members of his Cabinet. He said Waltz was well-qualified for the role.

“The key thing is really the relationship with the president,” said Vickers, who also served as an independent director for a defense-contracting firm that Waltz co-founded. “It’s a pretty high-level political job as well as a national security job.”

From Florida to Afghanistan

Waltz as a Green Beret in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, in 2006. (Michael Waltz)

A native Floridian, Waltz grew up in Jacksonville, raised by a single mother. In 1992, he moved to Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains to attend VMI, a state-supported military college known for its exacting academic, physical and disciplinary standards.

Of the 430 “rats” — VMI’s term for new cadets — who enrolled with him, fewer than half made it to graduation four years later, he said in an oral-history interview for the Library of Congress. “You get your head shaved every Monday. You get the crap beat out of you by the upperclassmen. And eventually, at the end, you’re recognized as a human being,” he added.

Waltz received an Army ROTC scholarship and majored in international relations. He studied abroad at the University of Valencia and became fluent in Spanish. He also boxed for the VMI club team.

One of his roommates, Jon Sherrod, said Waltz thrived on the challenges that the school threw at them. “Mike chose VMI because of its rigorous standards. At 18, he was more clear-eyed about that than I ever was,” Sherrod recalled.

Upon graduation, Waltz was commissioned into the Army and assigned to an armored cavalry unit. He graduated from the Army’s Ranger school, a notoriously grueling course, and was selected to join the Special Forces and become a Green Beret.

In October 2000, Waltz left the Army to take a job as a management trainee with a diamond company. But a year later, after the 9/11 attacks, he rejoined the military as a part-time soldier in the Army National Guard, he said in his interview with The Post.

His introduction to Afghanistan came when he deployed with a Special Forces unit to Central Asia in 2003. From a base in neighboring Uzbekistan, he made brief trips into Afghanistan that didn’t involve combat, he told The Post.

When his call-up with the National Guard ended the following year, he landed a civilian staff job at the Pentagon in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, focusing on counternarcotics policy. Because Afghanistan produced most of the world’s opium, he wrote in his memoir, the country demanded much of his time.

In September 2005, his National Guard unit returned to Afghanistan for a year-long deployment. As a captain with the 20th Special Forces Group, Waltz led a team of Green Berets that served as a liaison to NATO forces and other allies in southern Afghanistan.

Conditions had deteriorated since his last call-up. In remote areas, U.S. troops began to find themselves outnumbered by the resurgent Taliban.

Share this article

No subscription required to read

Share

‘You’re in the buzz saw’

In May 2006, Waltz and five other U.S. Special Forces personnel were guiding about three dozen allied troops from the United Arab Emirates on a mission to Musa Qala, in northern Helmand Province, to scout a location for a new firebase, according to an account provided by Waltz in “Warrior Diplomat,” another book that he published in 2014.

An operations officer at command headquarters had warned Waltz not to go, saying the route was too risky because of an influx of Taliban fighters. But Waltz and the UAE forces, which were part of the U.S.-led military coalition in Afghanistan, resolved to press ahead anyway, he wrote.

After a few hours, their convoy of about eight vehicles ran into an ambush in the town of Sangin, where Taliban armed with mortars and rocket launchers pinned them down in a crossfire. The convoy became separated and struggled to fight its way out, Waltz wrote.

As Waltz’s armored Humvee hurtled along a dirt track, a Taliban sniper took aim at Gordon Cook, a Special Forces medic riding in the exposed rear of the vehicle. Cook was hit in the chest, right arm and left thigh, opening his femoral artery. In an interview with The Post, Cook said he remained conscious, but began to bleed out.

Gordon Cook waits for a medevac flight after he was wounded by a Taliban sniper. Waltz is credited with saving Cook’s life. “His bravery was unquestionable,” Cook said. (Gordon Cook)

Under fire, Waltz crawled into the back of the Humvee and applied a tourniquet to Cook’s leg just below the crotch, tying it so tightly that it tore muscle, ligaments and tendons, according to Cook. The wounded medic said he was drenched in blood and in the “worst pain of my life.” But the tourniquet worked and the bleeding slowed.

Yet they weren’t out of danger. Moments later, Cook recalled, he saw Waltz briefly knocked cold by a Taliban rocket that landed nearby. “I looked over and he had dirt and black s--- all over his face and eyelids,” Cook said. “But then he got up, kind of shook it off and started returning fire.”

Miraculously, the convoy escaped without suffering any fatalities. Cook and two UAE soldiers were evacuated by helicopter to a field hospital.

Despite the ambush, Waltz and the UAE commander wanted to continue with their original mission, Waltz wrote in his book. The convoy regrouped and prepared to drive onward to Musa Qala, 30 miles to the north.

When Waltz radioed their plan to headquarters, however, the staff warned him that the firefight in Sangin was just a taste of what lay ahead. Surveillance aircraft showed a larger Taliban force massing nearby, according to Scott Mann, an Army lieutenant colonel who was on the headquarters staff.

“Of course, like a good Special Forces captain, he wanted to push on,” Mann, now retired, recalled in an interview. “I said, ‘Hey man, you’re going into a buzz saw. In fact, you’re in the buzz saw.’”

This time, Waltz listened and the convoy turned around. Over the following 12 hours, his team narrowly eluded Taliban fighters in close pursuit, thanks in part to a U.S. Air Force AC-130 gunship that arrived in time to wipe out two groups of insurgents. “His guys were really pinched,” Mann said in an interview. “I still get chills thinking about it because it was very, very bad.”

For his actions, Waltz was awarded a Bronze Star with a “V” device, denoting valor in combat. Cook, the medic, said he thought Waltz deserved additional recognition.

Years later, he offered to help nominate Waltz for a Silver Star, the U.S. military’s third-highest war decoration, for gallantry in action. But Waltz demurred. “He just said something to the effect of, ‘I’m not a medal chaser. Don’t do that,’” Cook recalled.

Cook said he remains a fervent admirer of Waltz — even though he’s not a fan of Trump.

“I’m not at all on the same political wavelength as Mike Waltz, but he saved my life that day and his bravery was unquestionable,” he said.

‘I knew they were full of it’

Waltz returned to his civilian job at the Pentagon in late 2006 and grew frustrated by a disconnect between how senior officials in Washington viewed the war and what he had observed in the field.

In his first book, Waltz wrote that the war had become “rudderless” because the Bush administration was preoccupied with the war in Iraq and had “basically outsourced” Afghanistan to NATO allies. Waltz strongly felt NATO was not up to the task. He had dealt with French, Dutch and other NATO troops in Afghanistan and found them risk-averse, difficult to coordinate and badly equipped.

In his interview with The Post, Waltz said his experiences with NATO forces left a lasting impression — one that echoes Trump’s harsh criticism of the military alliance.

“NATO was a phenomenal alliance in deterring the Cold War,” Waltz said. “But to see what a sad state their equipment has become and how politicized their chain of command was operationally in the field has certainly impacted my views now.”

At the Pentagon, Waltz took a new policy job as a country director for Afghanistan, then was detailed to the White House to work on counterterrorism issues for Vice President Dick Cheney.

As a junior White House staffer, however, he often bit his tongue in briefings when generals gave rosy assessments about how the war was unfolding, he said in his oral history interview. He became especially irked when they exaggerated their progress in training the Afghan security forces, a keystone of the U.S. war strategy.

Waltz said he witnessed “general after general saying, ‘Mr. President, I can turn this military, this Afghan army, around on my watch.’ And I knew they were full of it.”

At the outset of the Obama administration, Waltz briefly returned to his civilian job at the Pentagon. In March 2009, however, his National Guard unit mobilized again and he deployed for a third time to Afghanistan, this time as a major.

Obama had campaigned on a promise to fix the war and eventually boosted the number of U.S. troops to 100,000. In his books, Waltz wrote that the wave of reinforcements created a new set of problems, including a top-heavy and unresponsive chain of command. As a company commander, he sometimes needed to obtain authorizations from 12 different offices before his Special Forces teams could conduct raids against Taliban targets.

He also disagreed with Obama’s strategy for exiting Afghanistan, according to his memoirs. The president announced the troop surge would be temporary, to buy time for the Afghan government to build up its forces and pressure the Taliban into peace talks. Waltz felt the United States needed to make an open-ended military commitment and not let up in Afghanistan. Unlike many in Washington, he still believed the Taliban could be defeated outright.

“The underlying theme of everything we were discussing seemed to be how to end the war rather than how to win it,” he wrote in “Warrior Diplomat,” his 2014 book.

Federal contracts and TV interviews

Disenchanted with Obama’s policies, Waltz resigned from his civilian government job in 2011. While he remained a reservist in the Army, he co-founded two private-sector companies in the field of national security.

One was Askari Associates LLC, a small geopolitical consulting firm.

The other was Metis Solutions LLC, a Virginia-based defense contractor that ultimately earned him millions of dollars, documents show.

According to federal contracting records, Metis operated primarily at first as a services provider for the U.S. Special Operations Command, which is headquartered in Tampa. In 2016, a Northern Virginia venture capital firm, Blue Delta Capital Partners, invested in Metis, fueling an expansion.

With Waltz as CEO, the company grew from a handful of staff to 400 employees, with operations in 20 states and nine countries, according to a podcast interview that Waltz gave last year.

Kevin Robbins, a general partner at Blue Delta, said the firm invested in Metis because it was impressed with Waltz’s management skills, calling him “a very tough Green Beret.”

“We were writing a check to back Mike and the team and take the company to the next level,” Robbins said. “It was a phenomenal run.”

Metis obtained other federal contracts, including from the Treasury Department. Much of its work focused on analyzing how terrorist networks raise money. The Defense Department also paid Metis to send advisers to Kabul to work alongside Afghan ministries, records show.

Waltz sold his stake in the company when he ran for Congress in 2018, ultimately netting him between $5 million and $26 million, according to a financial disclosure form he submitted in 2020.

Meanwhile, Waltz’s credentials as a Green Beret and Afghanistan veteran opened doors for him in the media world.

The impetus was a 2014 deal negotiated by the Obama administration for the release of Bowe Bergdahl, an Army private whom the Taliban had held prisoner for five years. When Bergdahl was freed, Obama met with his parents in the White House Rose Garden and praised the soldier as a hero.

The description angered Waltz, who went public in interviews with his concerns. Waltz had led Special Forces teams that carried out an intensive — and risky — search for Bergdahl in 2009 when he went missing from a tiny outpost in eastern Afghanistan.

Though the circumstances surrounding Bergdahl’s disappearance were murky at the time, Waltz and others viewed him as a deserter who had endangered hundreds of U.S. personnel by forcing them to conduct a search in hostile territory. Bergdahl later admitted that he abandoned his post because he was unhappy with conditions in the Army. He was captured by the Taliban shortly afterward.

A telegenic Green Beret, Waltz soon found a regular home on Fox News, where he expanded his repertoire beyond the Bergdahl case to become a national security commentator and a critic of Obama’s foreign policy.

In January 2018, he used his perch on Fox to declare his candidacy for Congress. Brian Kilmeade, a host on Fox & Friends, was effusive. “If you want a guy that’s good on business, good on camera, who served in the military with distinction, you’re looking at him,” Kilmeade said.

Waltz listens to an aide during a hearing before the House Armed Services Committee on Dec. 11, 2019. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Waltz defeated Democrat Nancy Soderbergh in November 2018, making him the first Green Beret to win a seat in Congress. Though Waltz did not deploy again to Afghanistan, he remained in the Army National Guard until 2023, when he retired as a colonel. Over his 26-year military career, he received four Bronze Stars, including two with the “V” device for valor, according to his Army service records.

During his first term in Congress, Waltz bonded with Trump on a May 2020 trip to Cape Canaveral, Florida, to observe the launch of the SpaceX Crew Dragon and two astronauts to the International Space Station. Their relationship strengthened during last year’s presidential campaign.

In August, Trump visited Arlington National Cemetery to mark the three-year anniversary of a suicide bombing that killed 13 U.S. service members and 170 Afghans at the Kabul airport.

Federal law prohibits election-related activities at the hallowed site. A Trump campaign staffer got into an altercation with an Army official who tried to block the operative from recording video of Trump amid the gravestones.

The dustup kindled a national debate over whether Trump was politicizing the deaths of U.S. military personnel — or, in his supporters’ view, trying to hold the Biden administration accountable for botching the conclusion of the war.

One of the loudest voices defending Trump belonged to Waltz, who joined him at Arlington for the commemoration. Despite their past differences over Afghanistan, the retired Army colonel had built a rapport with Trump and introduced him to relatives of some of the fallen troops being honored that day. (While several of the Gold Star families supported Trump’s role at the ceremony, others declined to take part).

“Those families wanted him there,” Waltz said in an Aug. 30 interview on Fox News with Pete Hegseth, a talk-show host and fellow Afghanistan war veteran whom Trump has since nominated to serve as defense secretary. “And damn it, they deserve to have whatever they want.”

Alex Horton and Nate Jones contributed to this report.

2. In a New Age of Empire, Great Powers Aim to Carve Up the Planet

There is nothing new under the sun. We ignore history at our peril.

Thucydides:

"I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time. The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can."

My question is what happens to the populations that live in carved up areas who do it like living under the system they are forced to endure? What is to be done about that? Or must they simply suffer?

And of course what comes next after international organizations?

Excerpts:

Cooperation among the great powers at the U.N. began to unravel following the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, and ground to a halt after Russia’s full-scale war on Ukraine in 2022. Now the Security Council is deadlocked on all major issues, making the world body largely irrelevant.

“We are not the United Nations. We are the divided nations,” said Sen. James Risch of Idaho, a Republican, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Yet it’s too early to write off the world body completely, said Michael Keating, executive director of the European Institute of Peace and a former senior U.N. diplomat in Somalia, Afghanistan and the Palestinian territories. “People may come back to the U.N.—or something very like it—having been through the pain of realizing that the U.N. may be terrible, but the alternative to it is even worse,” he said.

“I just don’t know what the alternative is, other than a dog-eat-dog world.”

In a New Age of Empire, Great Powers Aim to Carve Up the Planet

After World War II, nations pledged to create a more equal and law-abiding world. Now Russia, China and the U.S. are returning to an older model in which powerful countries impose their will.

https://www.wsj.com/world/in-a-new-age-of-empire-great-powers-aim-to-carve-up-the-planet-fef072f7?mod=hp_lead_pos9

Illustration: Kyle Ellingson

By Yaroslav TrofimovFollow

Jan. 17, 2025 9:00 pm ET

In 1945, the victorious Allied powers gathered in San Francisco to draft a charter for the United Nations, the foundation of a new global order that would make another world war impossible. The charter proclaimed that all countries had equal rights and would no longer resort to “the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” President Harry Truman told the assembled delegates that “the responsibility of the great states is to serve, and not to dominate, the peoples of the world.”

Today, these lofty principles look quaint, if not outright irrelevant, as the world returns to what was presumed to be the natural law of statecraft since the dawn of history: The strong do as they please and the weak suffer as they must. Russia, one of five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, is three years into a war of conquest in Ukraine, annexing parts of the country and seeking to eliminate the independence of the remainder. Russian leaders openly talk about their designs on other neighboring states, including members of the European Union and NATO.

President Harry Truman greets the foreign minister of Saudi Arabia at the United Nations conference in San Francisco in 1945. Photo: Fox Photos/Getty Images

China, another permanent member of the Security Council, supports the Russian war machine and is preparing for a war to take over Taiwan, while bullying the Philippines and other countries with its claims on the South China Sea. And in the U.S., President-elect Donald Trump has begun to indulge in imperialist rhetoric of his own, repeatedly threatening to absorb Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal zone.

Smaller countries are following the great powers’ lead. Turkey and Israel are expanding their military presence in Syria following the collapse of the Assad regime. Azerbaijan is threatening to wipe out Armenia, which it claims was established on historic Azeri lands.

“We’re entering a new age of conquest,” said Sumantra Maitra, director of research at the American Ideas Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. “Great powers are the ones calling the shots again. Some countries have realized it early, and some have not, but they will soon too.”

The current revival of imperialist thinking represents an abrupt reversal of the post-Cold War order of the last three decades. After the fall of the Soviet Union, it seemed possible that humanity could finally learn to live by a set of universally recognized rules, with a few nasty exceptions on the periphery.

Ukrainian troops on patrol in the Kharkiv region, Dec. 15, 2024. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is part of what one expert calls ‘a new age of conquest.’ Photo: ROMAN PILIPEY/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

A Philippines vessel spots a China Coast Guard ship in disputed waters of the South China Sea, Aug. 26, 2024. Photo: jam sta rosa/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Today the concept of a rules-based international order looks more and more utopian—and the survival of the United Nations increasingly uncertain. “It’s a real question to ask, 80 years after the end of World War II, whether that structure can be saved, what it would take, and whether it would be replaced,” Norway’s Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide said in an interview.

“You have a few of us who think the rules should always apply, and I would say my country is one of them,” he said. “We have those who say they should apply most of the time, but not when it would really hurt their allies. And then we have many countries who say we would rather not have these rules because without these rules the world would be easier for them.”

Many strategists and diplomats see the world returning to something like the Concert of Nations that emerged in Europe after the Napoleonic wars of the early 19^th century. Under that system, praised by the late Henry Kissinger for preventing global war for nearly a century, empires recognized each other’s spheres of influence worldwide, including the right to oppress and dominate less powerful countries and peoples within those spheres.

The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 was the American version of this idea, proclaiming U.S. hegemony over the Americas and a refusal to get involved in European wars. This month Mike Waltz, Trump’s incoming national-security adviser, described the president-elect’s vision as “Monroe 2.0.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s frequent pronouncements about a multipolar world reflect a similar nostalgia for 19^th-century imperial power. The idea of multipolarity appeals to many people in the developing world eager to shake off American domination, but in practice it would take even more power away from the weaker nations, said German diplomat Volker Perthes, a former U.N. Undersecretary-General.

“You will have a couple of poles on the global level, and then regional poles, who will all make deals among themselves at the expense of the majority of people,” he said. “This is a much more inegalitarian and dangerous world.”

Donald Trump Jr. arrived in Nuuk, Greenland on Jan. 7, after his father said he wanted the U.S. to take control of the autonomous Danish territory. Photo: Emil Stach/Ritzau/Zuma Press

Israeli tanks on the Syrian side of the border fence in the Golan Heights, Dec. 11, 2024. Photo: Kobi Wolf/Bloomberg News

The idea of dividing the globe once again into spheres of influence isn’t something that smaller nations are likely to welcome. “The chaps who are supposed to be part of them, they don’t like it,” said Indian foreign-policy strategist Raja Mohan, a fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute in New Delhi. “That’s why there is a problem of Ukraine today, or the problem in Latin America. You can say Monroe Doctrine, but the question is how do you manage it? It can only be done on the basis of seduction and accommodation rather than the force of arms.”

There is widespread agreement around the world that the U.N. system is increasingly out-of-date. The U.K. and France, both Allied powers in World War II, were made permanent members of the U.N. Security Council in 1945 and so have veto power over its decisions. Much larger countries do not, including India, Germany, Brazil and Japan. Attempts at reform have been thwarted since the 1960s.

“The United Nations system was formed when most of the countries of the world were not sovereign entities, and whether we like it or not, it cannot reflect a true representation of the world’s current realities,” said Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley. “If we want to hold on to the past, we better get eyes in the back of our head rather than on the front of our head, because we are seeing the dying of the current world order.”

During the Cold War, the U.N. was used by the two rival superpowers—the U.S. and the Soviet Union—as an instrument of cooperation in areas where their interests aligned. That included curbing infectious diseases, safeguarding cultural monuments and containing local conflicts that neither Washington nor Moscow wanted to escalate.

In the 1990s, as the U.S. emerged triumphant from the Cold War and the arc of history appeared to be inevitably bending toward freedom, the U.N. had significant successes, ending many regional conflicts and creating tribunals for war crimes in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. At a U.N.-organized conference in Rome in 1998, some 120 nations signed the statute establishing the International Criminal Court.

U.N. peacekeepers aid an elderly Bosnian Muslim refugee during the Bosnian war, July 1995. Photo: Reuters

Barbados Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley, seen here addressing the U.N. General Assembly in September 2024, says ‘we are seeing the dying of the current world order.’ Photo: mike segar/Reuters

But when the ICC touched on conflicts of vital importance to the great powers, its limits became evident. In 2023 the Court indicted Putin for war crimes in Ukraine, but that didn’t stop the Russian president from being feted with honors in China, Vietnam and Saudi Arabia. Last October, even the Secretary-General of the U.N., António Guterres, posed for the cameras as he smiled and shook hands with Putin in the Russian city of Kazan.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, indicted by the ICC last year for war crimes in the Gaza Strip, has also continued business as usual. In Washington, the Republican-controlled Congress is working on American sanctions against the ICC.

Cooperation among the great powers at the U.N. began to unravel following the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, and ground to a halt after Russia’s full-scale war on Ukraine in 2022. Now the Security Council is deadlocked on all major issues, making the world body largely irrelevant.

“We are not the United Nations. We are the divided nations,” said Sen. James Risch of Idaho, a Republican, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Yet it’s too early to write off the world body completely, said Michael Keating, executive director of the European Institute of Peace and a former senior U.N. diplomat in Somalia, Afghanistan and the Palestinian territories. “People may come back to the U.N.—or something very like it—having been through the pain of realizing that the U.N. may be terrible, but the alternative to it is even worse,” he said.

“I just don’t know what the alternative is, other than a dog-eat-dog world.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, greets U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres in Kazan, Russia, Oct. 24, 2024. Photo: Alexander Kazakov/kremlin/Associated Press

Appeared in the January 18, 2025, print edition as 'In a New Age of Empire, Great Powers Aim to Carve Up the Planet'.

3. A TikTok Ban Is Imminent: What Are the Financial Stakes?

A TikTok Ban Is Imminent: What Are the Financial Stakes?

The app’s demise threatens to remove billions of dollars from the content creators and small businesses that rely on it

https://www.wsj.com/tech/a-tiktok-ban-is-imminent-what-are-the-financial-stakes-ef245d19?mod=hp_lead_pos5

By Sarah E. Needleman

Follow and Georgia Wells

Follow

Updated Jan. 18, 2025 12:00 am ET

TikTok, with offices in Culver City, Calif., is used by about 170 million Americans. Photo: Richard Vogel/Associated Press

The disappearance of TikTok threatens to erase billions of dollars from the U.S. economy and remove an important platform used by millions of American businesses and social-media entrepreneurs to connect with customers. 

TikTok’s demise won’t dent the U.S. economy overall, but it is poised to crimp a sizable sub-economy that has sprung up around the hugely popular app used by roughly 170 million Americans. Putting a precise figure on TikTok’s impact across the U.S. economy is difficult, though the company has touted a figure of more than $20 billion a year. 

Ella Livingston has a pretty clear idea of how it will affect her. She says a ban will cut off about $25,000 in monthly sales for Cocoa Asante, the artisan chocolate company she owns in Chattanooga, Tenn. She is anticipating having to lay off four to five part-time workers.

“It would be very, very painful,” said Livingston, 31, a former high-school math teacher who credits TikTok for helping her startup rapidly grow in 2023 after an influencer posted a flattering review on the app about one of her company’s products, unprompted. “It went viral on a Friday night, and by Sunday I wrote my resignation letter.”

A ban is expected to start Sunday after the Supreme Court upheld a federal law Friday that requires TikTok to separate from parent company ByteDance or else be banned. TikTok, girding for a possible loss, has been planning to shut down the app in the U.S. to comply with the law and avoid exposing companies that sell or distribute the app to legal liability. 

Ella Livingston, center, owns an artisan chocolate company in Chattanooga, Tenn., that relies on TikTok for sales. Photo: EPB

Proponents of a ban say any such impact is outweighed by the national security risks that the app could be used by China’s government to propagandize or spy on Americans—actions TikTok has said it wouldn’t allow. 

The sale-or-ban bill passed with broad bipartisan support. President-elect Donald Trump has suggested he might try to save TikTok.

Biden administration officials have signaled they don’t intend to enforce the ban on his final day in office and that enforcement would fall to the Trump White House, but that hasn’t been enough to give TikTok comfort. TikTok late Friday publicly pressed the administration for more assurance that it won’t enforce the law, saying otherwise it will be forced to go dark. A White House official said: “We have already gone to extraordinary lengths to communicate our posture.”

The most immediate effect of a ban would be on TikTok parent ByteDance and its employees and shareholders, which include major American backers such as BlackRock, General Atlantic and Susquehanna International Group. ByteDance, which also owns internet businesses in China, valued itself at about $300 billion recently. It hasn’t disclosed TikTok’s value, though the U.S. is that app’s most lucrative market. TikTok had about 7,000 employees in the U.S. as of 2023. 

TikTok makes money by selling ads and by taking a cut of the sales that creators and small businesses like Livingston’s make directly on its platform through individual company profiles, the TikTok Shop or the app’s For You page. 

Advertisers will likely reallocate their spending elsewhere—including to Meta Platforms’ rival Instagram app—just as people will be prone to shift their attention to other social media, said Brett House, professor of economics at Columbia Business School.

“Beyond a few months, the impact on the broader economy should be negligible to nonexistent,” he said, though he added that recovering could take longer for creators and small businesses that rely heavily on TikTok.   

The app generates more than $8 billion in annual advertising revenue, according to one estimate, and has been helping to fuel demand for talent agents, video editors and others that support the work of the creators and small businesses on it.  

A March 2024 report commissioned by TikTok and written by advisory firm Oxford Economics estimated that small businesses on TikTok contributed $24.2 billion to the U.S. economy in 2023—a figure that couldn’t be independently verified.

TikTok’s full impact includes not only the money that creators and small businesses make on it directly, but also indirect financial benefits in the form of increased website or retail-foot traffic, brand sponsorships, book deals and more. 

Gift Oluwatoye earns money by posting videos on TikTok that show him playing and commenting on videogames.   Photo: Gift Oluwatoye

Many Americans will also lose a significant source of free entertainment, which is a form of economic value in itself, said Erik Brynjolfsson, head of Stanford University’s Digital Economy Lab. A study he led, which is based on how much money people said they would need to be paid to voluntarily forgo TikTok, estimated that American consumers got about $73 billion of value out of TikTok in 2023.

It is a different story for TikTok’s creators, who make money from sponsored posts, affiliate marketing, brand partnerships, donations and sales of goods through the TikTok Shop. TikTok also has a rewards program for creators that doles out payments based on factors such as the amount of time people spend watching their videos.

“If this goes, it means no income, I’m out of a job, and I have to look for a way to make money elsewhere,” said 19-year-old Gift Oluwatoye of Prince George’s County, Md., who for the past year has been earning about $5,000 a month from posting videos to the app that show him playing and commenting on videogames.  

The gross merchandise value for TikTok’s digital store in the U.S. last year was $9.7 billion, according to an internal presentation reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The U.S. has become TikTok’s biggest e-commerce market, surpassing Indonesia, the presentation showed. 

Some creators haven’t prepared for TikTok to go away, citing the yearslong drama over its foreign ownership. Others say they have already diversified to other platforms such as YouTube or Instagram—or were on other platforms even before TikTok came to the U.S. in 2017—and that it hasn’t helped. They say such competitors lack the secret sauce that makes TikTok’s algorithm superior. 

“What’s great about it is it pushes you out every single second to a new audience,” said Oluwatoye, who has 265,000 followers on TikTok. “That’s how we’re able to grow so quickly, and that’s not found anywhere else.”

Mississippi Candle Company, a small online business in Foley, Ala., has been on Instagram and Facebook for far longer than it has been on TikTok, yet it has tens of thousands more followers on the latter, said owner Jessica Simon, 34. About 95% of the web traffic it gets comes from TikTok alone, she added.

With four full-time employees including herself and her husband, plus four part-timers, Simon said losing TikTok would be devastating, especially because they built a 2,100-square-foot warehouse over the summer. She started the business making candles out of her kitchen but has since branched out into other products such as laundry detergent, all-purpose cleaners and car fresheners. 

“We are panicking a little bit,” she said. “I just hope our followers find us on the other platforms so I don’t have to lay anybody off.”

Raffaele Huang and Catherine Lucey contributed to this article.

Write to Sarah E. Needleman at Sarah.Needleman@wsj.com and Georgia Wells at georgia.wells@wsj.com

Corrections & Amplifications

TikTok had about 7,000 U.S.-based employees as of 2023. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said it had 59,000 employees in the U.S. (Corrected on Jan. 18)

4. Trump, TikTok and Xi Jinping

Too soon for a Cronkite moment here? (for those who were not around back then to remember- when CBS newscaster Walter Cronkite opined against the Vietnam War it was said that if you lost Cronkite you lost the support of the American people).

If Trump loses the Wall Street Journal with this type of criticism, what does that mean for the Administration?

Trump, TikTok and Xi Jinping

The President’s duty is to enforce the law, not cut a deal with China.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/donald-trump-tiktok-ban-supreme-court-china-xi-jinping-bytedance-3edd9622?mod=hp_opin_pos_4#cxrecs_s

By The Editorial Board

Follow

Jan. 17, 2025 5:44 pm ET

Photo: David Zalubowski/Associated Press

The Supreme Court on Friday unanimously upheld a law requiring TikTok to divest from its Chinese owner ByteDance or face a U.S. ban. Now the question is whether Donald Trump will enforce this law.

The Justices in an unsigned ruling (TikTok v. Garland) affirmed the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals decision last month that the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act doesn’t violate the First Amendment. That’s because the law is content-neutral and narrowly tailored to address Congress’s compelling national-security concerns.

TikTok hoovers up data on U.S. users and their contacts. Chinese law requires its companies to share data with Communist Party officials on demand. The Court notes that U.S. officials worry Beijing could “track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.”

For these reasons, Mr. Trump in 2020 ordered TikTok to be banned if it wouldn’t divest. A lower court blocked his order because it exceeded his executive power. The Biden Administration then spent two years trying but failing to reach a deal with ByteDance that addressed the government’s security concerns.

Congress finally roused itself and passed the law giving TikTok 270 days—until Jan. 19—to divest or be banned. Beijing has effectively blocked a divestment by prohibiting ByteDance from ceding control over TikTok’s algorithms, which it treats as a state secret.

Yet after the Justices appeared poised in last week’s oral arguments to uphold the law, media outlets reported that Chinese officials are considering a sale of TikTok to Elon Musk. How interesting. Could Beijing be trying to play Mr. Trump?

President Biden on Friday kicked the issue to Mr. Trump, who says he wants to save TikTok. But the law lets the President extend the deadline by 90 days only if there is “significant progress” on a sale. There isn’t. Yet Mike Waltz, Mr. Trump’s pick for national security adviser, on Wednesday said the President-elect is actively exploring options to save TikTok.

Mr. Trump would do best to let ByteDance negotiate with willing buyers and not try to broker a deal as he did during his first term. His advisers at the time scotched a deal with Microsoft because it might be compromised from operating a search engine in China that complies with Beijing’s censorship. Mr. Musk would be similarly conflicted owing to his Tesla investment in China.

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin then tried to cut a deal in which U.S. investors including Oracle (whose co-founder Larry Ellison was a Trump fundraiser) would obtain majority ownership of a new TikTok Global, which would hire 25,000 Americans.

But the deal collapsed, and nothing short of a full divestment would mitigate the national security risks. Congress judged that alternative remedies would let ByteDance still use “surreptitious surveillance,” the High Court explains in its Friday ruling, and “the ‘size’ and ‘complexity’ of TikTok’s ‘underlying software’ may make it impossible for law enforcement to detect violations.”

One question is whether ByteDance and Beijing are now stringing Mr. Trump along by suggesting openness to a deal. Mr. Trump considers himself to be a master negotiator, and Chinese President Xi Jinping may try to coax him into a deal—perhaps by offering some trade concessions—that preserves the Communist Party’s control of the app.

Tech companies such as Apple and Google are subject to stiff penalties if they don’t remove TikTok from their app stores come Jan. 19. But it will be up to the Trump Justice Department to enforce the law. Non-enforcement would send a message that Mr. Trump isn’t serious about national security—or the law.

Mr. Trump on Monday will take an oath to be Commander in Chief, not to be Broker in Chief. His duty as President is to enforce the TikTok law, not ignore it in the hope of cutting a deal with China’s dictator.

You may also like

Copy LinkCopy EmbedFacebookTwitter

0:13

0:02

/

4:50

Tap For Sound

Review & Outlook: Like his Presidency, Joe Biden's farewell speech was needlessly divisive, warning about the rise of a 'tech-industrial complex' and a new 'oligarchy' bent on destroying democracy for their own designs. Photo: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

Appeared in the January 18, 2025, print edition as 'Trump, TikTok and Xi Jinping'.

5. Voters Want MAGA Lite From Trump, WSJ Poll Finds

If the Trump administration heeded this poll could he be the unifier he said he would be?

See the charts and data at the link.

Watch the video that accompanies this article at this link: https://www.wsj.com/video/series/on-the-news/voters-want-maga-lite-from-trump-not-extra-strength-maga-wsj-poll-finds/31464BEA-654A-4CF4-B492-0E5F633A63C6

Voters Want MAGA Lite From Trump, WSJ Poll Finds

Survey shows Biden leaves office with record-low approval and a badly tarnished party

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/donald-trump-policy-approval-poll-849feb84?st=Vj9BHh&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

By Aaron Zitner

Follow and Xavier Martinez

Follow

Jan. 17, 2025 5:35 pm ET

You may also like

Copy LinkCopy EmbedFacebook

Twitter

0:07

Playing

0:08

/

4:04

Tap For Sound

A new Wall Street Journal poll found that most Americans hope to see Donald Trump temper his aggressive plans in his second term. WSJ’s Aaron Zitner explains what voters want from the next administration. Photo Illustration: Annie Zhao

Voters support many of the goals President-elect Donald Trump has set for his second term. They are just not on board with all the ways he wants to accomplish them.

That is the central message voters are sending in a new Wall Street Journal poll, which finds that most want a tempered, less assertive set of policies than Trump promised in the most unbridled moments of his campaign. The appetite is for MAGA lite, rather than extra-strength MAGA.

Some 53% want Trump to make significant changes in how government is run once he is inaugurated Monday. But more than 60% oppose one of his central ideas for doing so—replacing thousands of career civil-service workers with people chosen by the president.

More than 60% also oppose eliminating the Education Department, a marquee Trump proposal for paring the federal government. Only 18% would supersede congressional powers and give Trump more authority over federal spending, as he has proposed.

Similarly, the poll finds that, while voters want Trump to build his promised wall along the border with Mexico and address illegal immigration, they also want limits to his plans for sweeping deportations of undocumented immigrants.

Nearly three-quarters say that only those with criminal records should be removed from the country, and 70% would protect longtime residents from removal if they don’t have criminal records. Trump is planning to scrap a policy that focused arrests on serious criminals and discouraged officials from targeting illegal residents who have no criminal record.

Republicans remain overwhelmingly supportive of Trump’s cabinet nominations and handling of the presidential transition. But voters overall are equivocal: Some 46% approve of his nominations and 47% commend his performance as president-elect, with essentially equal shares disapproving.

Voters are split on President-elect Donald Trump’s job performance, cabinet nominations

Strongly approve

Somewhat approve

Strongly disapprove

Somewhat disapprove

0%

25

50

Trump as

president-

elect

Trump's

cabinet

nominations

Source: Wall Street Journal poll telephone and text-to-web survey of 1,500 registered voters, conducted Jan.9 -14; margin of error: +/- 2.5 pct. pts.

The evenly divided view puts Trump in a stronger position than at the start of his first term, when more voters disapproved of his preparations to take office. It suggests, however, that Trump, who has said voters gave him “an unprecedented and powerful mandate” to govern, risks overreaching.

President Biden, meanwhile, leaves office as a diminished and damaged figure, the Journal poll finds, with his party’s image deeply tarnished. Of voters surveyed, 12% said they thought Biden was fit to serve a second term.

THE WSJ Poll

• Read the questionnaire and responses

The survey shows that 36% approve of Biden’s job performance, with 62% disapproving—a record-low rating in Journal polls during his presidency. By an almost identical gap of 36% to 60%, voters view the Democratic Party more unfavorably than favorably. That marks the party’s weakest rating in Journal polls dating to 1990. 

“There’s a clear brand problem for Democrats here,” said Democratic pollster Michael Bocian, who conducted the survey with Republican David Lee. At the same time, he said, “there’s just not strong support for a lot of things that the incoming Trump administration is pushing.”

Lee said that voters were looking for substantial change in government, and that the case against Trump’s plans would have to be made by Democrats, “who are viewed negatively but have to sell their message and make it believable.’’

Both parties remain underwater on favorability

Total favorable views

Total unfavorable views

Net unfavorable

Dislike toward Democrats has widened...

...while negative views of Republicans shrank

70

%

70

%

of Biden

of Trump

60

60

Democratic

Party

50

50

Republican

Party

40

40

30

30

2022

'23

'24

'25

2022

'23

'24

'25

Note: Party favorability is from a split sample of 750 registered voters with a margin of error of +/- 3.6 pct. pts.

Source: Wall Street Journal polls, most recently telephone and text-to-web survey of 1,500 registered voters, conducted Jan.9 -14; margin of error: +/- 2.5 pct. pts.

Voters in the new survey opposed some of Trump’s top proposals or were conditional in their support:

• His promise to pardon people convicted in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol drew opposition from 57% of voters.
• More than two-thirds oppose using economic coercion or military force to take control of Greenland, while 57% oppose using coercion or force to retake control of the Panama Canal. Trump has said he cannot rule out such tactics to accomplish his territorial ambitions.
• Two-thirds oppose making Canada the 51st state, an idea that set off tensions between the two countries. 
• Half say it is a bad idea for Elon Musk, the Tesla CEO advising Trump on federal spending cuts and other matters, to serve as an adviser, while 39% say it is a good idea.
• By a margin of 64% to 31%, voters oppose ending birthright citizenship—the constitutional provision that someone born in the U.S. is a citizen, which Trump has promised to try to eliminate.
• Voters place a high priority on protecting funding for education, healthcare and social safety-net programs—a caution for Trump and his advisers, Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who are leading an effort to identify large spending cuts. By about 60% to 34%, voters say protecting those programs is more important than cutting taxes or reducing the federal debt.
• Support is essentially split over another signature Trump plan—placing tariffs on imported goods—with 48% of voters in support and 46% opposed. At the same time, 68% also say that tariffs would make the products they buy more expensive.

Taylor Lane, 30 years old, is one of the voters who backed Trump in the election but hopes he is judicious in implementing his promises. A registered nurse in Braselton, Ga., Lane supports Trump’s calls to eliminate taxes on tips and overtime, hoping such moves will make life more affordable.

Favorability of Trump and his administration's picks

Favorable

Unfavorable

Can’t rate

0%

10

20

30

40

50

Trump

Vance

(VP)

Musk

Kennedy

(HHS)

Gabbard

(National

Intelligence)

Hegseth

(Defense)

Rubio

(State)

Note: Trump favorability is from a sample of 1,500 registered voters with a margin of error of +/- 2.5.6 pct. pts.

Source: Wall Street Journal poll, most recently telephone and text-to-web survey of 750 registered voters, conducted Jan.9 -14; margin of error: +/- 3.6 pct. pts.

Lane frequently interacts with immigrants at her job and thinks deportations should focus on undocumented people who have committed crimes, rather than targeting removals more broadly. Trump’s immigration agenda, she said, “is going to be a big problem.”

Jordan Porter, by contrast, agrees with most of the president-elect’s proposals, including his planned tariffs and sweeping deportations, saying they place a priority on Americans. 

Porter, 22, a heating and cooling technician in Mesa, Ariz., said he is sympathetic to undocumented immigrants who are “actually working and doing good for our country,” but that mass deportations are necessary for security reasons. 

The poll offers a mixed view of the tax cuts that are coming onto the congressional agenda. Voters support Trump’s campaign proposals to end taxes on Social Security benefits and overtime pay. They also favor extending the tax cuts for individuals that Trump signed during his first term and which expire this year.

That support, however, turns to narrow opposition when voters are asked if they would back a tax cut if it adds to the federal debt or hastens the insolvency of Social Security. One exception is Trump’s promise to end federal income taxes on tips, which draws majority support even if the cuts would add to the national debt.

The Wall Street Journal Poll interviewed 1,500 voters from Jan. 9-14 by cellphone and landline phone, with some voters reached by text and invited to take the survey online. The margin of error for the full sample is plus or minus 2.5 percentage points. Some questions were presented to half the sample and have a margin of error of 3.6 points.

Voters don’t support everything that Trump has pushed on issues such as immigration and taxes. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Write to Aaron Zitner at aaron.zitner@wsj.com and Xavier Martinez at xavier.martinez@wsj.com

6. Left-Wing Cancel Culture Gets Canceled

Cancel culture from any political or other perspective is wrong (on the left or right). 

The Trump administration would benefit by seizing the moral high ground and cancelling the extreme right wing cancel culture as well.

Left-Wing Cancel Culture Gets Canceled

The election of Donald Trump expressed widespread frustration with the censorious methods of progressives. But conservatives have a cancellation problem too.

https://www.wsj.com/politics/left-wing-cancel-culture-gets-canceled-9038162c?mod=djemLifeStyle_h

By Joshua ChaffinFollow

Jan. 17, 2025 8:45 am ET

Late on election night a rapturous roar rippled through the Palm Beach County Convention Center, where the Trump campaign was hosting its watch party. It was the sound of victory.

For some listening closely, that roar was also something else: the death knell of progressive cancel culture.

For years Americans had been bombarded with lurid details about the former president’s ill treatment of women and his inflammatory comments on minorities. And yet, come election day, roughly half the country decided that his transgressions did not matter much.

Trump supporters cheer during the campaign’s Nov. 5 watch party at the Palm Beach County Convention Center. Photo: Evan Vucci/Associated Press

Soon after the president-elect’s inauguration this Monday, his conservative supporters are expecting him to launch a frontal assault on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives throughout the federal government and in higher education and the private sector too.  

Trump’s victory may be the most obvious sign that the cultural winds that prevailed for a decade or more are now shifting, carrying America from a censorious era to a more permissive one, with cancel culture and its fellow travelers in retreat. But it is hardly the only sign.

Earlier this month, Meta announced that it would no longer police speech on its Facebook and Instagram social-media platforms. While critics accused the company of bowing to Trump, founder Mark Zuckerberg said that its attempts to check facts had too often devolved into left-leaning censorship. In a video address, Zuckerberg spoke of “a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.” 

Two days earlier, the director and producer Brett Ratner, whom six women accused of sexual harassment or misconduct in 2017 (charges he denies), was tapped by Amazon to direct a Prime Video documentary about First Lady Melania Trump. It marked his return from a seven-year #MeToo professional exile. 

Elsewhere in Hollywood, a messy legal dispute between actress Blake Lively and her co-star and director, Justin Baldoni, suggests that the bright lines of the #MeToo era may be blurring. Whereas Lively’s accusations of sexual harassment would have once destroyed Baldoni—no questions asked—his denial and counterclaims seem to be getting a hearing in the court of public opinion.

The #MeToo slogan “Believe women” has become more akin to “Hear women—and then verify.”

Above, director Brett Ratner poses at the unveiling of his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2017, just before accusations of sexual misconduct put him into professional exile. Below, Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively on the set of ‘It Ends with Us’ in January 2024, before they sued each other. Photo: mario anzuoni/Reuters

Photo: Jose Perez/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images

Meanwhile, in the Democratic Party, where it was hazardous just a few months ago to question DEI strictures, it now seems acceptable. There may even be a market for it.

Consider the case of Seth Moulton, a Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, who in early November cited his party’s rejection of concerns about transgender athletes in girls’ sports as an example of its unwillingness to offend its most progressive constituents. Activists rushed to the barricades, calling for Moulton to be unseated. Yet he seems to have garnered even more support for holding firm.

“I’ve never had more people, parents and, by the way, a lot of LGBTQ community members, reach out to me and say, ‘Thank you for saying this,’” he told the New York Times, sounding as though his necktie had been loosened. As Democrats cast about for explanations for their defeat, some party grandees, including James Carville, have focused on what they view as an excessively scolding tone, of which cancel culture may be the ultimate expression.

“The whole culture is changing, like, right now,” one publicist with deep ties in the worlds of media and politics observed, speculating about which canceled men, besides Ratner, might find rehabilitation in a new era. Al Franken, the Minnesota senator who stepped down seven years ago amid allegations of “unwanted touching”—which he disputed—seems like a good bet. Harvey Weinstein, not so much.

One catalyst in today’s cultural turn was Oct. 7 and the response on college campuses to Hamas’s attack on Israel. To many people, the justification—sometimes even celebration—at elite universities of Hamas’s slaughter of Israeli civilians seemed to discredit the claims to moral authority of the very institutions that created and then propagated the new speech orthodoxies.

Two months later, in congressional hearings on antisemitism, a trio of university presidents from Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology seemed incapable of explaining how their scrupulous campus codes could guard against a host of microaggressions—but not open hostility toward Jews. The emperors (or, in this case, the empresses) had no clothes. Two of the three resigned in the wake of their testimony.

Given such developments, it might seem surprising that Greg Lukianoff, co-author with Jonathan Haidt of “The Coddling of the American Mind” and a longtime critic of cancel culture and campus censorship, is not quite ready to celebrate. 

The era of cancellation and the groupthink it fostered have caused lasting harm to the trustworthiness of journalism and academia, Lukianoff said. Moreover, while the wider culture may become more relaxed about speech, he worried that the new generation of academics may be even more rigid and intolerant than their predecessors. 

“I think people are badly underestimating how many of these problems are entrenched,” said Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which keeps track of instances of deplatforming, boycotts and other attempts at cancellation on university campuses. 

Democratic Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, above, has called for his party to take more seriously concerns about transgender athletes playing in girls’ sports. Al Franken. below, a former Democratic senator from Minnesota, stepped down seven years ago over allegations of ’unwanted touching.’ Photo: Samuel Corum/Getty Images

Photo: Paul Morigi/Getty Images for Crooked Media

By FIRE’s count, more professors have lost their jobs since 2014 than at any time since the Red Scare of the 1930s. Many were brought down by campaigns and complaints whipped up by their own students. The trend peaked in 2021.

Cancellations began to tick up again last year—though this time from the right, as writers and professors faced sanctions for statements in support of Palestinians and critical of Israel. This trend raises the possibility that cancel culture is not abating but merely shifting from left to right as a new group of scolds gain power. 

It is a reminder that cancellation is less a partisan instinct than a human one. Or, as Jacob Mchangama, founder of Justitia, a free speech think tank in Copenhagen, recently wrote: “The original sin of cancel culture does not rest with any single ideology or group, but rather with our species’ hard-wired tendencies toward tribalistic behavior and the self-righteous urge to punish outgroups who transgress taboos.” That is, the desire to stamp out the ideological opponent or the inconvenient contrarian.   

Universities have long been the front line of America’s speech war, from the Red Scare and McCarthyism of the 1940s and 1950s to the free-speech movement of the 1960s and the more censorious atmosphere of recent years, when codes were devised to guard against speech that might be protected under the First Amendment but which campus authorities deemed offensive. Scores of administrators were hired to enforce the new orthodoxy. 

Though debates about speech are longstanding, one wrinkle is new: social media. It has served as both a forum for boisterous—sometimes problematic—discourse and a means for mobs to enforce vigilante justice against those they deem guilty.

To Nicole Holliday, a linguistics professor at the University of California at Berkeley, social media is to blame for much of what people deride as cancel culture. People have always placed limits on what speech is, and is not, acceptable, she notes. Often it’s confusing, as when, in the ‘90s, well-meaning white folks fretted over whether to say “Black” or “African-American.”

Such debates were once hashed out within disparate communities—be it Berkeley or Birmingham—that had little contact with each other.

Today, citizens of these worlds collide in real time in a social media landscape that rewards outraged reactions even to innocent mistakes. When someone missteps, they risk not merely an angry letter or email but a multitude of internet pitchforks. 

“The voices that are mad are so loud, and they’re going to have access to you,” Holliday said. “That is part of what gives people the impression that we live in a cancel culture.”

The same prickly rage has infected personal interactions, as Holliday has experienced firsthand. In 2016, on the first day of class, she asked students to introduce themselves, say their majors and their preferred pronouns. 

Pro-Palestinian protesters march against Israel outside the Columbia University campus in New York City in April 2024. Photo: Jeenah Moon for WSJ

“I cannot believe you just asked for our preferred pronouns!” a progressive student fumed. Did the professor not understand that pronouns were not a trivial preference but a reflection of someone’s authentic identity? Holliday was taken aback and apologized. Grace, it seems, is hard to come by in a polarized age.

Still, Holliday views the panic over cancel culture as overblown. “Let’s be honest,” she said. “There’s a lot of people who have done horrible things that still have their fancy jobs in Ivy League schools.”

Undoubtedly, some of the actions that provoked cancellation, like sexual predation by powerful men, were legitimate causes for protest and had long been neglected by the establishment. (Once again, see: “Weinstein, Harvey.”) But, like any revolution, the cancel culture uprising, and its DEI offshoot, seems to have overshot.

In a much-discussed 2022 essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Laura Kipnis, a cultural critic, described how the environment at her university, Northwestern, had devolved into one in which “craven snitches” had run amok, using DEI and other strictures to settle scores and beat down opponents. Among other excesses, Kipnis recounted a poisonous legal fight at the University of North Texas that dwelled on the racism of musical theory. Apparently some critics chafe at an “inequality” of tones.

Now she sees the persecution playing out in reverse as academic friends are sanctioned for criticizing Israel. “It’s exactly the people who were so outraged about ‘cancel culture’ and speech codes who are now trying to get profs who speak out about Gaza fired,” Kipnis wrote in an email.

There may be more to come. Christopher Rufo, the influential conservative activist, has drawn up plans for the White House to withhold potentially billions of dollars in federal funding from universities that maintain DEI practices—a move that critics say is essentially an effort to curtail discussion of race.

Even before Trump’s victory, there were signs that the corporate world was tiring of a doctrine that it embraced under duress, particularly when a right-wing pushback began to hurt its bottom line. Thanks to a clumsy attempt to align itself with the transgender movement, Bud Light is no longer America’s top-selling beer. It seems scarcely a week passes without another major company—Walmart, McDonald’s, Ford—announcing that they are scaling back their DEI programs.

Andrew Miltenberg has sensed a shift in his work as a lawyer specializing in sex discrimination cases in higher education, based on Title IX. A dozen years ago, he was the only lawyer at his firm, Nesenoff & Miltenberg, who handled them. The volume has grown so much that he now has six lawyers working alongside him.

At first, universities, hospitals and other big institutions panicked when confronted with #MeToo accusations, and the justice they doled out was rough. “The reaction tended to be: Let’s just fire the person and we’ll deal with the fallout. It’s better than having a mass rally in the quad,” Miltenberg recalled.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth testifies before Congress about antisemitism on campus, Dec. 5, 2023 Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

But that has moderated over the past year or so. Universities, in particular, he noted, were becoming more adept at investigating and adjudicating such complaints with greater nuance and sophistication. “I do see a real shift—a noticeable one—in the type of cases we’re seeing and the volume,” Miltenberg said. 

In April, MIT removed requirements for new hires to include statements about their commitment to DEI on their applications. MIT President Sally Kornbluth said they “impinge on freedom of expression, and they don’t work.” The University of Michigan, which built one of the nation’s most ambitious DEI programs, is also now reassessing it.

Whatever their achievements, proponents of this era of progressive cancel culture must reckon with the fact that they also helped to bring about the very thing they dreaded most: Trump’s restoration. It was delivered, in part, by voters tired of being told that their clumsy speech or unfashionable opinions made them not just wrong but bad. Even evil. Now they have been promised relief. Whether the new regime fosters a more relaxed speech environment or a vicious one of a different ideological stripe remains to be seen.

In the meantime, two lessons emerge. One, as Lukianoff suggests, is that fostering free speech—and deriving the full benefit of it—is difficult. It requires humility, self-restraint, a willingness to jettison deeply held beliefs and the risk of being unpopular, even disliked. The payoff, he explains, is that it might just deepen our understanding of who we are and the world around us.

Another is that censorship is ultimately about power, which, like speech codes, is ever-shifting. They/them who sow the censorious winds should be prepared to one day reap the whirlwind.

Illustrations photos: Getty Images (4); Associated Press (3); Bloomberg News (2); Zuma Press (2); EPA/Shutterstock; Reuters 

Appeared in the January 18, 2025, print edition as 'Cancel Culture Gets Canceled Trump’s Blow to Cancel Culture'.

7. Journal Writers Look Ahead to Trump 47

Journal Writers Look Ahead to Trump 47

Our hopes, fears and expectations for the first nonconsecutive White House term in 132 years.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/journal-writers-look-ahead-to-trump-47-second-term-hopes-fears-expectations-policy-9821aee0?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=1

Jan. 17, 2025 5:24 pm ET

What is your greatest hope for the second Trump term?

Karl Rove, columnist: That President Trump learned in the past eight years to keep the focus on the big things that the American people care about. That would require him to abandon his desire for retribution and domination of the political stage. Both would sap his energy, diminish his political capital, and lessen his chance for a productive second term.

Kyle Peterson, editorial board member: Not to jinx it, but is there some chance of finally getting serious about pruning an overgrown government? Mr. Trump’s cabinet secretaries are raring to deregulate, and Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy promise to identify unproductive government make-work. If they start a running list of bureaucratic output that looks ferociously useless, maybe Congress could rescind some of its many orders and delegations to the D.C. apparatus.

President-elect Donald Trump’s official portrait for his second term in the White House. Photo: trump vance transition team hand/Shutterstock

Barton Swaim, editorial page writer: I hope Democratic politicians and commentators consider the possibility that they overinterpreted the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. For the past four years they seemed to think that admittedly disgraceful event justified every over-the-top accusation they made since 2016 and every attempt to destroy Mr. Trump since. But voters didn’t buy it. Democrats would do themselves an enormous favor by internalizing an unfortunate but important truth: that 2020 was an idiotic year in which many Americans, including many well-heeled liberals, said and did a lot of ludicrous things. A majority of voters has chosen to forgive and forget. As liberals said after another impeachment, it’s time to move on.

Gerard Baker, columnist: Mr. Trump has a rare opportunity to vanquish for good the progressive ascendancy that has done so much damage to the nation’s institutions for decades and to re-establish the primacy of America’s global standing. In overcoming the challenges he has faced in the past few years, he has shown astonishing personal resilience and political skill. It is devoutly to be hoped that he can deploy those character strengths for America’s greater unity and success.

Matthew Hennessey, deputy editorial features editor: Growth matters. Americans are naturally optimistic. They believe in their bones that tomorrow will be better than today. But they will rescind the GOP’s majority in 2026 if it doesn’t cut taxes, reduce burdensome regulation and get the growth engine humming. Tariffs, industrial policy and net-zero immigration hinder the growth that Americans need and want. I hope the White House economic team understands that.

William McGurn, columnist: I hope that the press will reconsider its treatment of Trump voters. Mr. Trump has to expect pushback when he insults people, but ordinary Americans who support him have become used to a press that considers MAGA a synonym for “fascist.” The most recent absurd example was Pete Hegseth’s tattoo of the Jerusalem cross—the same cross featured on the cover of Jimmy Carter’s funeral program—as evidence of “white nationalism.” Maybe self-reflection from the press is too much to hope for.

Tunku Varadarajan, contributor: My greatest hope is that Mr. Trump becomes a 21st-century Reagan. The two presidents diverge on many policies, but their personal effect on America’s morale could be comparably electrifying. Mr. Trump could jolt it out of its malaise, prod it out of its defeatism, and lance the boils of wokeism that mar the body politic. This wouldn’t merely bring joy to this country; it would be welcomed by the world. Demand for a strong America is huge and global. For the past four years there’s been little supply.

What is your biggest fear?

Kimberley A. Strassel, columnist: The horseshoe theory of politics holds that the far left and far right tend to converge. Under Mr. Trump’s leadership, Republicans are chasing populist economic policies that sound much like the Bernie Sanders left. Mr. Trump’s first-term success came from a Reaganesque agenda: broad-based tax cuts, deregulation, muscular foreign policy. Yet a subsection of the party, including JD Vance, is increasingly focused on populist policies—handouts to families, crackdowns on business, price controls, industrial policy, even ending right-to-work laws. Mr. Trump got in on the act with promises to exempt tips and overtime from income taxes, limit credit-card interest rates, and ramp up tariffs. If this continues, the GOP may cease to be the party of free markets and limited government—and the economy will suffer.

Gerard Baker: That Mr. Trump has neither the self-discipline nor the interest in governing to secure the historic change he has the opportunity to achieve. If he uses his power to pursue vendettas, places his personal interests and vanity above the country’s needs, further coarsens and embitters the public discourse, and marginalizes constructive dissenters, he will deepen our divisions and weaken the country he leads. I fear that liberation from his many trials of recent years may bring the less benign qualities of the man’s character to the fore.

Tunku Varadarajan: My biggest fear is that another four years with Mr. Trump will lead the Democrats to embrace even more self-destructively the policies that lost them the 2024 election. So come 2029, Mr. Trump will leave a GOP rudderless without its cultic leader and a Democratic Party more awful than ever.

Matthew Hennessey: War between the U.S. and China. Xi Jinping seems intent on taking Taiwan by force, and America has promised before the world to defend Taiwan militarily. If that happens, things could quickly get out of hand. If the U.S. stands back as China takes Taiwan, the outcome would be even worse. Deterring Beijing from invading in the first place should be Mr. Trump’s top priority in dealing with Mr. Xi.

Allysia Finley, editorial board member: I worry there will be a recession or financial crackup, which Democrats will blame on Mr. Trump no matter the actual cause. The economy now appears strong, but there are signs that the labor market is cooling. The Biden administration has covered up problems in the housing market by waiving and reducing mortgage payments. Asset prices are stretched, and leverage in financial markets has increased. The European and Chinese economies have slowed, and their problems could dent U.S. growth. If there is a recession, Congress and Mr. Trump will almost certainly respond with a fire hose of spending, which would increase debt and borrowing costs. This could set Democrats up to retake Washington in 2028.

Collin Levy, editorial board member: My biggest fear is that the isolationist voices in the MAGA base will minimize threats to U.S. security and push rapprochement with adversaries such as “smart” Vladimir Putin and “brilliant” Xi Jinping. On the intelligence front, the worst thing that could happen would be a failure next year to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, an indispensable tool for collecting information from foreigners overseas. Tulsi Gabbard, Mr. Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence, has disparaged Section 702. She changed position recently, and let’s hope she means it.

Mene Ukueberuwa, editorial board member: Americans are desperate for their incomes to catch up with prices, and tax reform will be Mr. Trump’s biggest lever. His challenge will be to exclude juicy carve-outs that sound good in a stump speech but do little to boost work and wages. A local tax deduction here and an exemption for tips there would also siphon revenue that could be used to offset rate cuts for households and businesses. If Mr. Trump lets his tax bill get too muddled, it could become an economic dud and doom Republicans in future elections. Tariffs are another trap. Mr. Trump’s legacy may depend on whittling them down to something much smaller than the 10% levy he’s proposed for all imports. Achieving rapid real wage growth would be hard enough with no new tariff. With one or several in place, the odds of Bidenesque stagnation would be much higher.

Kyle Peterson: Erratic, ad hoc, ungrounded decision-making. A Truth Social post from Mr. Trump at 1:29 a.m. on a Sunday . . . declaring that imports from Denmark (except beautiful Greenland) are hereby subject to a 35% tariff . . . or summarily firing chief of staff Susie Wiles because she’s “DUMB AS A ROCK” . . . or promising that American forces will exit South Korea by July 4 . . . or announcing that the Navy’s next aircraft carrier will be named the USS Covfefe . . . or pledging to make bitcoin legal tender . . . or demanding that the GOP, as the “party of workers,” raise taxes and embrace union priorities. It’s easy to forget, four years after the fact, how much of the first Trump administration was a daily death match between sensible and screwball ideas.

Barton Swaim: On Tuesday the Yale historian Timothy Snyder reflected that “Trump’s nomination of Hegseth is best understood as a decapitation strike against the republic. A Christian Reconstructionist war on Americans led from the Department of Defense is likely to break the United States.” The vast majority of people take stuff like this for what it is: self-indulgent hysteria. A few will take it seriously. God forbid one acts on it.

What do you expect?

Allysia Finley: Nonstop chaos and gridlock. The GOP’s narrow majority in the House will make it difficult to extend the 2017 tax reform or do much of anything else. Democrats will likely retake the House in 2026 and launch more investigations into the administration. They may also try to lure Mr. Trump into cutting deals on spending or on regulation of politically popular targets—pharmacy benefit managers, social-media companies, drugmakers. Trump appointees will move ahead on deregulation, but the administration will be riven by divisions over trade and foreign policy. Administration policy will change by the day or hour, depending on who last spoke with the president. China will try to cozy up to Mr. Trump but will also test his mettle with more cyberintrusions and depredations in the South China Sea. Yet although his second term will be less successful than his first, Americans will get a welcome respite from progressive cultural imperialism.

Kyle Peterson: Good days and bad days, with the ratio determined by how Mr. Trump chooses to use his unexpected political leeway. He won a clean victory in November, or maybe it’s more accurate to say that Kamala Harris (and Joe Biden) decisively lost. Either way, this clear statement by the voters matters, and Democrats already sound more open to controlling illegal migration. Mr. Trump, in other words, has political capital. His history suggests he’ll sometimes spend it wisely, sometimes fritter it away, and sometimes light a pile of it on fire just to bask in the glow.

Gerard Baker: Serious economic turbulence. An expansion built on the sands of massive spending, a handful of tech giants, and a plentiful supply of cheap, illegal migrant labor, combined with a timid Federal Reserve that acts like the hapless respondent to monthly economic data and a political class that believes in the perpetual-motion machine of ever-expanding federal deficits—all is ripe for a reckoning. The U.S. remains the undisputed global economic leader, but there is more than the usual whiff of cyclical accountability in the air. Mr. Trump may find himself as much at the mercy of events as the master of them.

Daniel Henninger, columnist: A striking element of Mr. Trump’s victory was that he increased his vote share across so many demographics and districts. His voters want real wage gains and inflation tamed. His own economic priority is imposing a tariff regime on much of the world. A big question is how a grand scheme of tariffs will interact with the complexities of a new tax bill and Mr. Trump’s energy policies. If he doesn’t produce a tangible economic upside within two years, these newly acquired voters will turn against him. He has the GOP unified behind him. What I will be looking for from day one is whether he has acquired the political savvy, skills and focus to achieve his ambitious economic goals.

Matthew Hennessey: I expect it all—a bit of bumbling, plenty of bluster, a manufactured media scandal every week. Another impeachment wouldn’t surprise me. The left will go beyond ballistic if Mr. Trump gets to nominate another Supreme Court justice. And while there’s no way the U.S. gets the Panama Canal back, I put the chances of acquiring Greenland at better than 50/50. It makes strategic sense and the arguments against it aren’t terribly persuasive. I expect Mr. Trump to make Denmark an offer it can’t refuse.

Tunku Varadarajan: A better economy than most imagine and more peace in the world than most predict.

Karl Rove: For the next four years, we’ll be continually surprised by Mr. Trump’s words and deeds—many good, some bad, and a lot unexpected or entertaining. He will take Americans along on a wild ride as we celebrate our country’s 250th anniversary. The dissonance will be confounding at times. Buckle up, buttercups.

You may also like

Copy LinkCopy EmbedFacebookTwitter

0:23

Paused

0:02

/

5:41

Tap For Sound

Wonder Land: Donald Trump used to be accused of breaking norms. Now it’s ‘disruption.’ Question is: will this approach work in 2025? The answer doesn’t break easily into yes or no. Photo: Valerie Plesch/Bloomberg News

Appeared in the January 18, 2025, print edition as 'Journal Writers Look Ahead to Trump 47'.

8.  Can Trump Do Better the Second Time?

Can Trump Do Better the Second Time?

He’s stronger now, but his brand of political disruption has limits.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/donald-trump-inauguration-second-term-3ceb7729?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=1

By The Editorial Board

Follow

Jan. 17, 2025 5:45 pm ET

President-elect Donald Trump Photo: jeenah moon/Reuters

Donald Trump takes the oath of office on Monday for a second term promising to disrupt the status quo—in Washington and around the world. Lord knows the status quo needs disrupting, but how he’ll do it and how far he’ll go remains a mystery, albeit for different reasons than eight long years ago.

In 2017 Mr. Trump had won narrowly, almost by accident, and he inherited a GOP majority in Congress that had a long-developed agenda on taxes, healthcare, judges and much else. The main policy victories of his first term—tax reform, energy development and judges—were traditional GOP priorities. He was less successful on his own signature issues of tariffs and immigration control.

***

This time Mr. Trump arrives in the Oval Office after a clear victory that was largely his own. The GOP majority in Congress is loyal to him, and a remarkable two-thirds of Republicans in the House were elected since 2016. Congress doesn’t have much of an agenda beyond what Mr. Trump campaigned on.

Eight years ago Mr. Trump also faced Democrats who were determined to oppose him on everything, if not impeach him from the start. There is no Russia collusion narrative this time. The press—which went all in for the “resistance” the last time—has hurt its credibility so much that Mr. Trump can afford to ignore most of its criticism.

The President-elect thus starts his second term with a personal favorable rating that is close to 50% and new political capital. Susie Wiles, his chief of staff, seems to have imposed order on the transition and the new White House staff. Mr. Trump’s first six months in 2017, by contrast, were a daily riot of media leaks and make-it-up-as-you-go orders.

All of this means Mr. Trump has political running room, though it’s not unlimited. His victory was solid but no landslide. Half the country still dislikes him. And the GOP majority in the House is so narrow that a couple of willful Members can kill anything. Mr. Trump could quickly find himself in trouble if he exceeds his mandate from voters.

Take immigration and border security. Mr. Trump has a mandate to stop the flood of illegal migrants, and that will be an immediate priority. He will have support for deporting criminals and gangs like Tren de Aragua.

But he also promised mass deportation. If this means midnight raids on busboys, or separating mothers from children, the politics could turn fast. His best option is controlling the border and using his political capital on the subject to cut a deal with Congress on legal and illegal immigration.

Or take the tax bill that must pass to avoid a $4 trillion tax increase in 2026. Merely extending the 2017 tax provisions will be a heavy lift. But Mr. Trump campaigned on trillions of dollars more in tax breaks—no tax on tips, Social Security benefits or overtime.

The danger is that the tax bill becomes a vehicle for income redistribution rather than economic growth. Inflation more than anything else elected Mr. Trump, and he will fail as President if his policies don’t lift real wages for his new working-class coalition. He needs to support the Federal Reserve’s efforts to keep reducing inflation and promote growth with supply-side tax and regulatory policies.

***

Which brings us to tariffs, which he calls the “most beautiful word” except perhaps “faith” and “love.” A tariff is a tax and a tax is anti-growth. Mr. Trump is going to impose tariffs as soon as his first week, and they may be large and universal.

The impact of his tariffs, and of the retaliation from other countries, is a growth wild card. Congress has ceded so much authority to the President on trade that financial markets may be the only real check on his tariff policies. His policy advisers this time have all endorsed tariffs of some kind.

Mr. Trump also views tariffs as an all-purpose political tool, which raises the question of how much he wants to disrupt the current U.S. network of alliances. He may not leave NATO, at least not right away, but he will want Europe to provide for most of its own defense. Same with allies in Asia.

What we don’t know is whether Mr. Trump believes in a world in which there are dominant spheres of influence: the U.S. in the Western Hemisphere, China in the Asia-Pacific, and Russia in Europe. This is the logic of the GOP’s isolationist wing, and it is a recipe for a chaotic reordering of world affairs.

The biggest risk in our view is Mr. Trump’s desire to court adversaries in search of diplomatic deals for their own sake. He won’t settle the Ukraine war in a day as he promised, but an ugly deal that favors Russia could be his version of President Biden’s flight from Afghanistan. Mr. Trump will try again to coax North Korea’s Kim Jong Un into a nuclear deal, despite his failure the last time. Mr. Trump will be tougher on Iran at first, but he wouldn’t mind a nuclear deal with the Ayatollahs if they’re willing.

Most important will be his courtship of Chinese dictator Xi Jinping. Former Trump security adviser John Bolton writes in his memoir that Mr. Trump said in his first term that a U.S. defense of Taiwan was implausible, and Mr. Xi can read. China could react to Mr. Trump’s tariffs with a blockade of Taiwan, or perhaps by taking nearby islands now controlled by Taiwan. How would Mr. Trump respond to avoid the risk of war? Would he cede Taiwan to Mr. Xi?

***

Mr. Trump’s victory was most important as a repudiation of the woke left, and it creates a rare opening for Republicans to build a new majority. But Americans don’t want disruption for its own sake. They will support it if it means broader prosperity that they can share. They also don’t want Mr. Trump to indulge in the politics of retribution by siccing the FBI and Justice Department on opponents.

If Mr. Trump focuses on settling scores rather than raising incomes, Democrats will sweep the 2026 midterms and progressives will return to power with a vengeance in 2028. A second presidential chance would be a terrible thing to waste.

You may also like

Copy LinkCopy EmbedFacebookTwitter

2:13

Paused

0:00

/

5:41

Tap For Sound

Wonder Land: Donald Trump used to be accused of breaking norms. Now it’s ‘disruption.’ Question is: will this approach work in 2025? The answer doesn’t break easily into yes or no. Photo: Valerie Plesch/Bloomberg News

Appeared in the January 18, 2025, print edition as 'Can Trump Do Better the Second Time?'.

9. Support for Trump’s Policies Exceeds Support for Trump

Graphs and data at the link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/us/politics/trump-policies-immigration-tariffs-economy.html?unlocked_article_code=1.qE4.lqHz.EHOzQ74L4i2h&smid=url-share

Support for Trump’s Policies Exceeds Support for Trump

A new poll found the public is sympathetic to the president-elect’s plans to deport migrants and reduce America’s presence overseas.

Listen to this article · 11:41 min Learn more

• Share full article
• 
  
• 0

Migrants walking along the Rio Grande at the border between the United States and Mexico.Credit...Paul Ratje for The New York Times

By Jeremy W. Peters and Ruth Igielnik

Jeremy Peters and Ruth Igielnik wrote the questions for a poll of 2,128 Americans and analyzed the results for this article.

Jan. 18, 2025

Updated 8:54 a.m. ET

Sign up for the Tilt newsletter, for Times subscribers only.  Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, makes sense of the latest political data. Get it in your inbox.

Many Americans who otherwise dislike President-elect Donald J. Trump share his bleak assessment of the country’s problems and support some of his most contentious prescriptions to fix them, according to a new poll from The New York Times and Ipsos.

A little more than half of the country expresses some desire to see Mr. Trump follow through with his harshest threat to deal with illegal immigration: deporting everyone living in the United States without authorization.

Which of the following comes closest to your opinion about our nation’s political system, even if none are exactly right?

It has been broken for decades

It has been broken only for the last few years

It is not broken

U.S. adults

59%

29

9

Democrats

57%

32

10

Republicans

63%

28

9

Support for Trump’s Policies Exceeds Support for Trump - The New York Times

Note: The gray segment refers to the share of adults who did not respond or said they didn’t know. Democrats and Republicans include those who identified with or leaned toward each party.Based on a poll by The New York Times and Ipsos of 2,128 U.S. adults conducted from Jan. 2 to 10.By June Kim

The poll, which surveyed 2,128 adults from Jan. 2 to 10, found that 55 percent of Americans either strongly or somewhat support such mass deportations.

Americans are more evenly split on whether Mr. Trump should implement tariffs on countries like China and Mexico, which he has vowed to do as a way to reduce reliance on foreign goods. Still, 46 percent say that trade with foreign nations should be subject to increased tariffs.

And a large majority is sympathetic to efforts to strictly limit how doctors can treat children struggling with their gender identity — an issue Mr. Trump and other Republicans made central to their campaigns for office. Seventy-one percent said that no one under 18 should be prescribed puberty-blocking drugs or hormones. The Supreme Court is expected to issue a decision on the matter later this year.

The poll tells the story of a country turning inward, where people are more aligned with Mr. Trump’s “America First” agenda than they were during his first term in office.

For a political figure so divisive — Americans view him more negatively than any other president about to take office in the last 70 years — the level of support for his ideas is striking. Most Americans say the United States has ignored serious problems at home while entangling itself in costly conflicts abroad, the poll found. A majority believe the government is sending too much money to Ukraine. And many are expressing less tolerance of immigrants overall.

“Something needs to happen on immigration,” said Jose Hernandez, 48, of Atlanta, who works with a hotel chain on new projects. “I’m an immigrant myself, from Mexico, but I waited 25 years. I came to this country legally.” He added, “There’s no control over the system.”

Mr. Hernandez said he voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joseph R. Biden in 2020, and considers himself aligned with Democrats on social justice. But in 2024, he supported Mr. Trump as more of a vote “against Kamala” than anything else, he explained.

Sign up for the Race/Related Newsletter  Join a deep and provocative exploration of race, identity and society with New York Times journalists. Get it sent to your inbox.

Though Mr. Hernandez said he does not want to see mass deportation, he described the current situation at the border as “unsustainable.”

“We establish rules and guidelines. When you’re not following those rules, that’s it,” he said.

Mr. Trump has vowed to carry out the largest deportation operation in American history. And the public is with him, to a point.

Do you support or oppose each of the following:

Deporting immigrants who are here illegally and have criminal records

87%

10

Deporting immigrants who are here illegally and arrived over the last four years

63%

33

Deporting all immigrants who are here illegally

55%

42

Ending birthright citizenship for children born to immigrants who are here illegally

41%

55

Ending protection from deportation for immigrants who were children when they entered the U.S. illegally

34%

62

Notes: The gray segment refers to the share of adults who did not respond or said they didn’t know. “Support” includes the responses “somewhat support” and “strongly support,” and “oppose” includes the responses “somewhat oppose” and “strongly oppose.” The wording of the poll question and response options has been modified for clarity.Based on a poll by The New York Times and Ipsos of 2,128 U.S. adults conducted from Jan. 2 to 10.By June Kim

A vast majority of Americans — 87 percent — support deporting undocumented immigrants with a criminal record, which Mr. Trump has said would be one of the first orders of business he carries out.

Nearly two-thirds of all Americans — including 54 percent of Hispanics and 44 percent of Democrats — support deporting people who entered the country illegally during the last four years of the Biden administration, after it reversed many of Mr. Trump’s immigration restrictions from his first term. In that time, legal and illegal immigration soared to the highest levels in U.S. history.

A slim majority — 56 percent — said they believe that immigrants strengthen the country. About 41 percent agreed with the statement “immigrants today are a burden on our country.” That sentiment had subsided over the last decade, according to several public polls, but now appears to be rising.

The undocumented population was 11 million people in 2022, according to the latest government estimates. Demographers agree that the current number is higher, between 13 million and 14 million.

Americans are also eager to see their country less enmeshed in world affairs. Asked if it was better for the United States to be active in world affairs or, instead, to concentrate less on problems overseas and pay more attention to issues at home, 60 percent of Americans prefer less foreign engagement, according to the poll.

As recently as 2019, a smaller share of Americans expressed a desire to pull back from international affairs, splitting about 50-50 on the question, according to Pew Research Center.

The Ipsos survey, conducted for The New York Times, aimed to measure support for specific policy proposals Mr. Trump said he would implement if elected. It also surveyed public sentiment on a range of issues that have been the subject of partisan disagreement, from the scope of presidential power to programs designed to promote diversity.

The country remains deeply divided over Mr. Trump, the poll found, despite his inflated claims of winning “a powerful and unprecedented mandate.” Roughly the same share of people told The Times that they are worried or pessimistic about the next four years as excited or optimistic. His favorability rating, according to an average of polls from the website FiveThirtyEight, has hovered just below 50 percent lately. That matches his share of the popular vote in 2024.

Americans are far from willing to give Mr. Trump carte blanche. For instance, even though most people expect he will use the government to investigate and prosecute his political opponents, a vast majority of Americans do not want him to. That includes a majority of Republicans.

Overall, 73 percent of Americans say they oppose the idea of Mr. Trump pursuing legal charges against his adversaries — with 49 percent saying they are strongly opposed.

Mr. Trump would also lack majority support to eliminate the constitutional guarantee to citizenship for anyone born on American soil, the poll found.

The poll also revealed that Americans hold their government in exceedingly low esteem — far lower than during the Watergate era. Majorities across races, genders and partisan stripe say the political system is broken and that the economy works against them — a pessimism that tracks with some of Mr. Trump’s grimmer rhetoric.

There is a widespread belief, across parties, that Washington is corrupt, with two-thirds of Democrats and 80 percent of Republicans saying the government serves itself and the powerful over ordinary people. Two-thirds of Americans say the economic system unfairly favors the wealthy.

In interviews, respondents to the poll reflected the foul mood of the country.

“So many elected officials have the service of their constituencies at the bottom,” said Tarra Williams, 49, a compliance manager in Mooresville, N.C., who said she voted for Vice President Kamala Harris.

Ms. Williams said she did not trust Republicans, Democrats or the federal government. “The whole country is on cognitive dissonance autopilot,” she said. “We need a whole governmental reboot.”

Among some Democrats, there was a certain ambivalence about Mr. Trump’s second inauguration.

“I don’t think Trump becoming president is a good or bad thing,” said Booker Preston, 50, a mechanic in Fort Worth, Texas, who said he voted for Ms. Harris. Perhaps, he suggested, the government might spend some of the money it sends abroad tackling problems at home.

“I really feel that we spend a lot of money overseas that we might not be able to recoup — nor do we get enough benefits to offset,” he said. “We could spend those billions of dollars here to really help people here.”

Mr. Trump’s promise to do a better job managing inflation and the economy persuaded many voters. More Americans expect that Mr. Trump’s policies will help rather than hurt the economy. Even among Democrats, about one-third say he will help the economy or, at least, not make much of a difference.

Americans were mixed on whether Mr. Trump would be able to make good on some of those economic promises. Most Republicans expect that prices will go down during Mr. Trump’s tenure; most Democrats expect they will not.

But Americans largely expect him to follow through on what he said he would do. Nearly unanimously, and across parties, majorities said they thought he was likely to carry out mass deportations and that he would raise tariffs on China and Mexico.

Thinking about some of the things that Donald Trump has suggested he might do while in office, how likely do you think it is that he will try to do each of the following over the next four years?

Likely

Not likely

Increase tariffs on imports from China and Mexico

81%15Launch the largest deportation operation in U.S. history

80%17Use the government to investigate and prosecute his political opponents

69%28Involve the United States in fewer foreign wars than previous presidents

58%38Make life more affordable for regular Americans

46%51Significantly reduce the size of the federal budget

46%51

Notes: The gray segment refers to the share of adults who did not respond or said they didn’t know. “Likely” includes the responses “somewhat likely” and “very likely,” and “not likely” includes the responses “not too likely” and “not at all likely.”Based on a poll by The New York Times and Ipsos of 2,128 U.S. adults conducted from Jan. 2 to 10.By June Kim

A slightly narrower majority of Americans expect that Mr. Trump would involve the country in fewer wars. Republicans are about twice as likely to expect this as Democrats.

Like it or not, Mr. Trump did not begin any major wars, said Tim Malsbary, 56, a nurse in Cincinnati, who said he voted for Mr. Trump this election but used to consider himself a Democrat.

“The Democratic Party has made me bitter,” he added.

Though the issue of rights for gay and transgender people ranks far down most Americans’ list of priorities — only 4 percent cited it as one of their most important issues — Republicans have focused on it heavily. And Mr. Trump, who ran attention-grabbing ads attacking Ms. Harris as a radical on the issue, appears to have been more in sync with public sentiment.

The survey found, for instance, that just 18 percent of Americans believe transgender female athletes — those who were male at birth — should be allowed to compete in women’s sports. Nearly 80 percent say they should not.

On social issues, Republicans have also gone after attempts to increase racial diversity. When it comes to such efforts in schools and government agencies, Americans are evenly divided, with 48 percent saying they want to end such programs and 47 percent who want to keep them.

About 22 percent of Black Americans and 40 percent of Hispanic Americans support ending these programs.

Still, as polarizing as many Americans find Mr. Trump, some are withholding judgment.

Ali Romero, 43, of Moab, Utah, said she found it difficult to support some of Mr. Trump’s decisions on things like reproductive rights and social justice. But she did not see Ms. Harris as a compelling alternative, even though she leans Democratic.

“So instead of voting for someone and feeling not great about it,” she said, “I voted for nobody and I feel great about it.”

At the very least, a Trump presidency will be different, she said. “It’s not the status quo.”

Christine Zhang contributed.

How This Poll Was Conducted

Here are the key things to know about this poll from The New York Times and Ipsos:

• 2,128 Americans were surveyed nationwide from Jan. 2 to 10, 2025.
• The poll was conducted using the KnowledgePanel, a probability-based web panel hosted by Ipsos. You can see the exact questions that were asked and the order in which they were asked here.
• The sample was drawn from KnowledgePanel, which is recruited using address-based sampling to ensure representative coverage of the entire United States. Americans were then selected for this survey out of that panel.
• The margin of sampling error among all Americans is about plus or minus 2.6 percentage points. In theory, this means that the results should reflect the views of the overall population most of the time, though many other challenges create additional sources of error.

You can see full results and a detailed methodology here. You can view the cross tabs here.

Jeremy W. Peters is a Times reporter who covers debates over free expression and how they impact higher education and other vital American institutions. More about Jeremy W. Peters

Ruth Igielnik is a Times polling editor who conducts polls and analyzes and reports on the results. More about Ruth Igielnik

See more on: 2024 Elections: News, Polls and Analysis, Democratic Party, The New York Times, Republican Party, President Joe Biden, Hillary Rodham Clinton

10. Trump Vowed a Crackdown on the Mexican Border, but It’s Already Quiet

Does this illustrate the power of information and influence activities? Have the conditions on the border changed because of the President-elects words and people's expectations of his actions?

Graph and photos at the link. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/world/americas/migrants-trump-inauguration-border.html?unlocked_article_code=1.qE4.oGHQ.wZSGoR5snZUv&smid=url-share

Trump Vowed a Crackdown on the Mexican Border, but It’s Already Quiet

Ahead of the inauguration, migrant shelters south of the Rio Grande are far from full, a reflection of the tougher measures imposed on both sides of the border.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/world/americas/migrants-trump-inauguration-border.html

By James Wagner and Simon RomeroPhotographs by César Rodríguez

James Wagner reported from Ciudad Juárez, and Simon Romero from Mexico City.

• Jan. 18, 2025Updated 8:31 a.m. ET

Leer en español

Migrants used to gather by the hundreds in encampments in Ciudad Juárez, on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande, waiting for a chance to cross into the United States. But as President-elect Donald J. Trump prepares to take office on Monday, few people could be found this past week on the once-teeming embankments.

All that remained were extinguished campfires, discarded shoes, shirts and toothbrushes.

One Mexican city after another has reported a similar situation along the border with the United States, where the number of migrants has steadily dropped in recent months. The decline has been attributed largely to hardened restrictions introduced by the Biden administration and by Mexican and Panamanian officials meant to deter migration.

Image

Edgar Rudi Flores Coria, 31, and Marisol Romero Covarrubias, 28, from Michoacán, Mexico, with their children on Wednesday at a migrant shelter in Ciudad Juárez.

Image

Outside a migrant shelter in Ciudad Juárez. Shelters run by government and civic organizations in the city are currently only about 40 percent full.

As President Biden came under increasing pressure during his re-election campaign to curb migration flows, he issued in June an executive order effectively blocking undocumented migrants from receiving asylum. That month, U.S. border officials recorded 83,532 illegal crossings, a significant drop from the previous month’s 117,905.

Despite the decline, illegal crossings remain higher than during much of Mr. Trump’s first term, fueling calls by the new Trump administration, and even by some Democrats in Congress, for more severe restrictions on migration to the United States.

Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota, Mr. Trump’s pick to run the Homeland Security Department, told senators on Friday that she planned to reinstate a Trump-era policy forcing asylum seekers to stay in Mexico for the duration of their U.S. cases and reduce temporary immigration relief for people from countries experiencing unrest.

Who Are the Millions of Immigrants Trump Wants to Deport?

Trump wants to end several programs that offered new arrivals temporary relief. Millions of others without legal status may also be vulnerable to deportation.

“Border security must remain a top priority,” Ms. Noem said.

Some officials in Latin America are pushing back, arguing that the tougher restrictions on both sides of the border have worked to stem the crisis.

“The flow of migration from the south of Mexico toward the border has diminished in the last few months,” said Enrique Serrano Escobar, who leads the Chihuahua State office responsible for receiving migrants. “There is no crisis,” he said of Ciudad Juárez. “There is no problem.”

The quieter border these days contrasts with the recent years of frequent tragedies along the frontier, including family separations and the 2023 fire at a migrant detention facility in Ciudad Juárez that killed dozens.

Image

A member of the Texas National Guard by the border wall that separates the United States and Mexico.

Thousands of migrants are still trying to make their way north even as the authorities on both sides of the border harden restrictions. But overall, movement through the Darién Gap, the inhospitable land bridge connecting North and South America, and shelter capacity in U.S.-Mexico border cities like Ciudad Juárez and Matamoros have become indicators of how migration flows are easing.

“Normally, we would have around 150,” said Lucio Torres, who has been overseeing a shelter in Nuevo Laredo, across the Rio Grande, for three years. The shelter has capacity for 300 people. This week, the facility housed only seven.

Mr. Serrano Escobar said that migrant shelters run by government and civic organizations in Ciudad Juárez, with capacity for about 3,000 migrants, are currently only about 40 percent full. “The city is calm,” he added.

In November, more than 46,000 people crossed the border illegally, the lowest number during the Biden administration. December saw more than 47,000 illegal crossings. By comparison, in December 2023, illegal crossings surpassed a record of roughly 250,000.

Mexican security forces said that they detained more than 475,000 migrants in the last quarter of 2024. That is nearly 68 percent more detentions compared with the same period a year earlier, according to government data.

Image

On Friday, asylum seekers with scheduled asylum application appointments at the U.S.-Mexico border lined up at the Mexican migration agency in southern Mexico to obtain travel permits, allowing them to head north to a U.S. port of entry.Credit...Alejandro Cegarra for The New York Times

Image

Migrants lined up outside the Paso del Norte bridge in Ciudad Juárez on Wednesday to cross into the United States.

Solsiree Petit, 44, a Venezuelan teacher in Ciudad Juárez, said she had tumors in her breasts that require surgery. She said her sons, 10 and 17, had turned themselves in to the U.S. authorities seeking asylum about a week ago. She said she had an appointment with U.S. Customs and Border Protection in El Paso to submit her own asylum application on Jan. 29.

She said she hoped that her appointment would still be honored under the Trump administration. “I prefer not to think otherwise about that,” she said, “because it depresses you more.”

CBP One, the phone app that Ms. Petit used to schedule her appointment, allowed U.S. immigration authorities to process nearly 44,000 migrants in December at ports of entry.

While the Biden administration created the app to incentivize migrants to avoid crossing into the country illegally, Ms. Noem, the Homeland Security nominee, said she would wind down use of the app, reflecting concerns among Republicans that it was used to allow migrants into the country who should be barred from entry.

Similar to the tense calm seen in Ciudad Juárez, the Pumarejo shelter in Matamoros, which can accommodate 1,500 people, currently has only 260, according to shelter officials. In Tijuana, three notable shelters indicated that they were only 50 percent full.

Shelters in Guatemala City have also all but emptied of migrants heading north, said Karina López, a social worker at the city’s Casa del Migrante shelter. Several years ago, the shelter struggled to care for more than 3,000 weary migrants with just over 100 beds. Those numbers are unheard-of today, Ms. López said. That is partly because people are staying only a few hours in their rush to get to the border before the inauguration, she said.

Fear of violent crime and extortion is also thought to be keeping some migrants away from shelters targeted by organized crime in Mexico. Instead of seeking refuge there, some are choosing to stay with acquaintances, in rented rooms or with their smugglers as they try to make their way to the border, legally or illegally.

Image

A free dining hall for migrants at the cathedral in Ciudad Juárez.

“I don’t care if the devil himself is in my way, I’m going forward,” said Juan Hernández, a handyman from Honduras. Mr. Hernández, 45, said he had lived in the United States for 23 years and had been deported five times. He arrived six months ago in Monterrey, a major industrial hub in northeast Mexico, after being deported to Honduras following a conviction in North Carolina for drunken driving.

He said he planned to cross the border again soon in a bid to reunite with his two children living in Raleigh, N.C.

For now, migrants like Mr. Hernández appear to be a minority. Not long ago in the historic center of Guatemala City, the sidewalks were filled with people begging for spare change or a meal for their children, many of them draped in the Venezuelan flag. This week, they were mostly absent.

In the Darién Gap, the number of migrants fell sharply after the Panamanian government introduced tougher restrictions to complement the Biden administration’s new asylum policies.

Image

Migrants crossing a section of the Darién Gap in Panama in November. Credit...Federico Rios for The New York Times

Image

Jolisve Azuaje, 24, left Venezuela with her 4-year-old son. She decided to stay in Guatemala City a week before President-elect Donald J. Trump’s inauguration.Credit...Daniele Volpe for The New York Times

Two years ago, boatloads of people trying to get to the jungle would leave every day from Necoclí, a Colombian beach town at the southern end of the jungle. Migrants would often photograph the boat journeys and share pictures on social media, where they came to symbolize the migrants’ last moments of safety before entering the perilous Darién Gap jungle.

Now, days go by when there are not enough migrants to fill a single boat. Instead, the boats are leaving every two or three days and not always full.

In August 2023, a record 80,000 migrants passed through the Darién in a single month. In December, just under 5,000 people went through, according to Panamanian officials.

Yet, as the Trump inauguration approaches, smugglers have continued to urge migrants to get to the border and avoid a potential crackdown. Fearing it could be their last chance to make their way to the United States, some have resorted to begging friends to loan them money or to turning over the deeds to their homes to smugglers as collateral, shelter operators say.

One option offered by smugglers and referred to by migrants as the “V.I.P. route” shuttles migrants from Guatemala to Cancún, Mexico, by land, and from Cancún to Ciudad Juárez by air using false Mexican passports, according to Ms. López, the social worker. The price of a one-way flight on this route peaked at around $450 this week.

After the inauguration, the price drops to about $100.

Image

Outside the Chihuahua State office that receives migrants in Ciudad Juárez on Tuesday.

Reporting was contributed by Annie Correal from Guatemala City; Julie Turkewitz from Bogotá, Colombia; Chantal Flores from Monterrey, Mexico; Edyra Espriella from Matamoros, Mexico; Aline Corpus from Tijuana, Mexico; and Emiliano Rodríguez Mega and Rocío Gallegos from Mexico City.

James Wagner covers Latin America, including sports, and is based in Mexico City. A Nicaraguan American from the Washington area, he is a native Spanish speaker. More about James Wagner

Simon Romero is a Times correspondent covering Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. He is based in Mexico City. More about Simon Romero

11. How ‘Mild Bill’ Burns led a covert CIA campaign in Ukraine

Opinion

David Ignatius

How ‘Mild Bill’ Burns led a covert CIA campaign in Ukraine

Burns’s steadfast efforts mark a key chapter in his decades-long intelligence duel with Putin.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/01/17/bill-burns-cia-ukraine-biden/

January 17, 2025 at 4:55 p.m. ESTYesterday at 4:55 p.m. EST

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky shakes hands with CIA Director Bill Burns in Kyiv last month. (Ukrainian presidential press service/AFP/Getty Images)

No one would ever refer to CIA Director William J. Burns as “Wild Bill,” the nickname of William J. Donovan, who led the OSS, the agency’s swashbuckling predecessor, during World War II. But the self-effacing Burns has bravely commanded a CIA force in Ukraine since Russia’s invasion nearly three years ago.

Make sense of the latest news and debates with our daily newsletter

Burns had just returned from his 14th visit to Ukraine when I visited him in late December at CIA headquarters. Two days before, he had been with President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv. His trips are usually secret, but this time Zelensky posted a photo of the two shaking hands before a Ukrainian flag.

“Throughout this war, we’ve had many meetings, and I am deeply grateful for his assistance,” Zelensky wrote. “We don’t disclose secrets, but we keep in touch.”

Ukraine has been in many ways Burns’s war, more than for any other U.S. official. He warned Kyiv and the world in late 2021 that the Russians were coming by sharing highly sensitive U.S. intelligence. His CIA officers stayed on the ground after the Russian invasion began and after U.S. diplomats and military personnel had departed. They have been at the front for nearly three years, sharing intelligence to help Ukraine target Russian invaders.

Burns on a deeper level has been locked in an intelligence duel with Russian President Vladimir Putin. It’s not exactly George Smiley vs. Karla in John Le Carré’s novels, but it’s close. Burns first met Putin about 20 years ago as U.S. ambassador to Moscow, and he has been listening to Putin’s threats and boasts ever since.

Opinions on the war in Ukraine

Next

Opinion

Jim Geraghty

Ukraine needs a new sales rep for Trump and the GOP

Opinion

Marc Thiessen

Does Trump want Putin to get Ukraine’s $26 trillion in gas and minerals?

Opinion

Marc Thiessen

How Trump can end the war in Ukraine for good

Opinion

Editorial Board

Trump wants a deal on Ukraine. But a bad deal is worse than none.

Opinion

Edward Fishman

Biden’s gloves can finally come off to help Trump end the Ukraine war

Opinion

Josh Rogin

Trump’s MAGA advisers are setting him up for failure in Ukraine

Opinion

David Ignatius

The right way for Trump to play peacemaker

Opinion

Lee Hockstader

Biden has a 76-day window after the election to get Ukraine right

Opinion

Josh Rogin

Ukrainians in Pennsylvania are split on Harris and Trump. How can that be?

Opinion

Letters to the Editor

I’m a peace worker. But this is what Ukraine needs to win its war.

Opinion

David Ignatius

Don’t underestimate the risks of escalation over Ukraine

Opinion

George F. Will

As Putin’s military barbarism continues, U.S. credibility is at stake

Opinion

Editorial Board

Ukraine needs long-range missiles before winter’s onset

Opinion

David Ignatius

Ukraine is bleeding out. It cannot fight forever.

Opinion

Fareed Zakaria

In tense Kyiv, Ukrainians fear the war could be decided within months

Opinion

Lee Hockstader

Germany is wobbling on Ukraine — and the rest of Europe is watching

Opinion

Max Boot

Ukraine’s Kursk offensive isn’t just a raid. It’s upending assumptions.

Opinion

Serhii Plokhy

When a 12-hour shift turned into three weeks at Chernobyl

Opinion

Editorial Board

How an emboldened Ukraine caught Russia flat-footed

Putin is “an emperor who is not quite fully clothed,” Burns tartly cabled Washington in 2007. In his 2019 memoir, “The Back Channel,” he memorably described the Russian leader: “Putin’s intimidating aura is often belied by his controlled mannerisms, modulated tone, and steady gaze. He’ll slouch a bit and look bored by it all if not engaged by the subject … and be snarky or bullying if he’s feeling pressed.”

Burns was perhaps fated to meet Putin on the battlefield in Ukraine, in a war he has seen coming since 2008. But the conflict has become a brutal war of attrition beyond what even Burns could have imagined: The CIA estimates that Russia has suffered more than 700,000 casualties over the past three years, 10 times what it lost in Afghanistan over a decade. Burns sees little chance that Putin is ready for any deal that isn’t a Ukrainian capitulation.

Tall, silver-haired, implacably modest, Burns has been an extraordinary CIA director. He had been a career diplomat, often described as the finest State Department officer of his generation. But his combination of self-assurance and reticence suited him at Langley. He could make the phrase “gray man” seem glamorous — and, as I have often found, could seem disarmingly frank without saying anything newsworthy.

Follow David Ignatius

Follow

Burns focused on Ukraine in our conversation. He said he had visited there so often in part because he wanted to see his colleagues in the field. Each time, he would take the numbing 12-hour train ride from Poland and back. He would meet Zelensky and his generals and intelligence commanders in Kyiv — and then often journey to the front lines to see CIA officers there.

The closest Burns has come to a public description of what he encountered in his travels to the front came in testimony to Congress on March 12. He described how he was briefed on the battle of Avdiivka, a painful defeat for Ukrainian forces who were starved of supplies. He recalled how a Ukrainian commander told him: “Our men fought as long and hard as they could, but we ran out of ammunition. And the Russians just kept coming.” One Ukrainian brigade had just 15 artillery rounds a day for its 2,500 men before it was forced to withdraw.

“It is not that they didn’t fight with courage and tenacity. It is that they ran out of ammunition,” Burns told Congress, in what proved a successful Biden administration plea for more aid. When Burns is gone, nobody in the Trump administration will be able to make the case for Ukraine with the same experience or conviction.

The terrible thing about this war is that Burns has seen it coming in slow motion since he was ambassador to Moscow. When Burns presented his credentials, Putin warned: “You Americans need to listen more. You can’t have everything your way anymore.” He amplified that in a 2008 meeting: “No Russian leader could stand idly by in the face of steps toward NATO membership for Ukraine. That would be a hostile act toward Russia,” Putin said.

“Don’t you know that Ukraine is not even a real country?” Putin said in 2008. He repeated that denial of Ukrainian nationalism when Burns met him in 2014 — after the Maidan revolution had swept Russia’s ally from power in Kyiv and an enraged Putin had stealthily invaded Crimea.

“Don’t kid yourselves,” Putin admonished Burns, who was now deputy secretary of state. “And you shouldn’t kid yourselves,” Burns boldly replied. “You’ve managed to create an even stronger sense of Ukrainian nationalism than existed before.”

Burns summed it up in his congressional testimony last year: “I think Putin, and I have heard him say this many times in the past, believes that Ukraine isn’t a real country, that it is weak and divided. And what Ukrainians have done is demonstrate that real countries fight back.”

Spy novels often turn on the question of loyalty. Through his four years at the CIA, Burns has been the steadfast chief of America’s secret, on-the-ground assistance to Ukraine. He stood by Ukraine and his own officers at the front. The chapter of this tale that is about betrayal, if it happens, will come after Burns has left his office on the seventh floor.

Share

362

Comments

By David Ignatius

David Ignatius writes a twice-a-week foreign affairs column for The Washington Post. His latest novel is “Phantom Orbit.” follow on X@ignatiuspost

Follow

12. Arrogance sank CNN

Are there lessons to be learned here? Will the media learn them?

Opinion

Erik Wemple

Arrogance sank CNN

In a security contractor’s defamation suit, CNN journalists struggled to defend their work.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/01/17/cnn-trial-verdict-arrogance/

January 17, 2025 at 2:29 p.m. ESTYesterday at 2:29 p.m. EST

Alex Marquardt in 2018. (Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images)

Katie Bo Lillis, a CNN national security reporter, provided key testimony on Wednesday during a Florida defamation trial in which her reporting has come under scrutiny. The case relates to the work of Zachary Young, a Navy veteran and security contractor who sued CNN over a November 2021 story that rested in part on Lillis’s reporting.

Make sense of the latest news and debates with our daily newsletter

On the stand, Lillis was asked, “You didn’t think about whether the story might blow up Mr. Young’s life, did you?” Her reply: “Not particularly, no.” Then she was pressed on whether she cared about the “consequences” of the piece for Young.

“Yes, but it was a lower consideration than to other constituents that I had responsibilities toward, like Afghans,” said Lillis.

Uh-oh.

On Friday, the Bay County, Florida, jury that sat through nearly two weeks of proceedings in Young v. CNN ruled against the network. It concluded that the broadcast in question, which appeared on Jake Tapper’s show on Nov. 11, 2021, had defamed Young, and awarded him $5 million. The jury will also reconvene to determine punitive damages, which are usually much higher.

As I wrote previously, the case isn’t a blockbuster. It encompasses a single segment, a single online article, a single security contractor and little prospect for a groundbreaking legal precedent. The woeful performance of CNN journalists on the witness stand, however, juices the impact of Young v. CNN. They stumbled under questioning; they failed to defend a key wording choice; and in certain instances, as in the case of Lillis, they appeared clueless about the impact of their own massive network, which reaches more than 70 million households in the United States.

Devin Freedman, Young’s lawyer, excoriated the network in his closing argument. “CNN is so arrogant, they are so used to getting whatever they want without [being held] to account, that they stand up here and they talk down to us with bold-faced lies about what the segment’s gist really is, and they expect you to believe it,” he said. “I mean, do they think we’re all stupid?”

Follow Erik Wemple

Follow

It’s unclear precisely what CNN was thinking, to judge from the baffling testimony of its employees. David Axelrod, the Ballard Spahr attorney who represented the network at trial, seized on the factual record in his closing argument. “The segment and the article were true. Read them, look at them,” Axelrod said. “Look at the way they describe Zachary Young. Look at the way they use his own words. There’s nothing false in the stories.”

Opinions on the media

Next

CNN settles defamation lawsuit over Afghanistan report

Rashida Jones stepping down as president of MSNBC

CNN reporter defends Afghanistan story that led to defamation lawsuit

In trial testimony, contractor says CNN story ruined his career

How should the news industry cover Trump? Ten top journalists weigh in.

A Florida jury will decide if CNN defamed security contractor

Man yelled ‘This is Trump’s America’ and choked reporter, court filings say

Justin Baldoni files $250 million libel lawsuit against New York Times

Political cartoons reveal the evolution of Jimmy Carter’s legacy

They wrote obituaries about Jimmy Carter — but died before he did

At CNN, lower TV ratings and heightened anxieties about what’s ahead

Trump sues Des Moines Register and Iowa pollster, escalating attacks on med...

CNN says it was misled by man freed in Syria report with Clarissa Ward

Ozy Media co-founder Carlos Watson sentenced to almost 10 years in prison

ABC News to pay $15 million in Trump defamation suit settlement

New York Times Tech Guild reaches contract agreement with company

Fox News and the blurred lines of covering Pete Hegseth

A reporter covered United Healthcare. TMZ thought he might be a killer.

Bill to protect journalists from revealing sources is ‘on life support’

Judge rejects sale of Infowars to satirical news site the Onion

Like any major defamation case, Young v. CNN had several moving parts. The segment, which was reported by CNN correspondent Alex Marquardt with assistance from Lillis, discussed the plight of Afghans attempting to exit their country after the U.S. withdrawal and the Taliban’s speedy takeover. It went into detail on the business of Young, who focused on helping companies evacuate their personnel from a dangerous environment. Freedman said that his client — working through corporate sponsors — had helped evacuate 22 women and a baby from Afghanistan.

Yet CNN broadcast a segment claiming that desperate Afghans were being “preyed upon” in a “black market,” and it discussed Young’s business against that backdrop. A chyron with the story read, “Afghans trying to flee Taliban face black markets, exorbitant fees, no guarantee of safety or success.”

In the aftermath of the story, Young testified, his professional and personal lives cratered. “I’ve always been the rock, and now I’m not,” he said in testimony last week.

Following a letter from Freedman, CNN in March 2022 interrupted its coverage to revisit the Afghanistan story. Host Pamela Brown said the network erred in using the term “black market.” “We did not intend to suggest that Mr. Young participated in a black market,” Brown said. “We regret the error, and to Mr. Young, we apologize.”

Who’s “we”? That’s a question that stems from testimony at trial, in which several CNN staffers testified that they disagreed with the network’s correction-cum-apology. Asked in her deposition whether she agreed with the mea culpa, CNN Executive Editor Virginia Moseley responded, “I can’t remember every word of it, but in general, I don’t.” Fuzz Hogan, an editor who fact-checked the piece, said, “I didn’t think the correction was necessary.”

Though dictionaries say that “black market” conveys illegality, CNN journalists repeatedly claimed they thought it meant merely an “unregulated” market. In his closing remarks, Freedman slammed “seven witnesses, all testifying to a uniform, non-dictionary definition” of a word.

Adam Levine, a top editorial executive at CNN, testified that the apology-correction came at the insistence of the network’s legal department. Fair enough: In any news organization, opinions will vary about any editorial decision, especially an apology-correction.

When confronted about whether Young deserved the apology, Levine said: “From his perspective and what he felt, I think that apology was apt. Editorially, no.” Young’s attorney told Levine he wasn’t interested in hearing about what Young might have felt. He wanted to know whether Levine, speaking as a corporate representative, believed Young deserved the apology. “As a way to resolve the legal matter, yes,” Levine responded.

Meaning: What we have here is corporate expediency, not an authentic expression of regret.

Consider what one juror took away from the exchange, as evidenced in a question for Levine that was passed along via Judge William S. Henry: “Do you think an organization that issues a disingenuous apology is discredited by that?”

At least one media critic is performing their civic duty in Bay County.

Look, Young’s case is no slam dunk. CNN’s lawyers did good work in arguing that the broadcast mostly used Young’s own words to detail his actions; that CNN did tons of reporting and vetting; that CNN omitted true and damaging material from the broadcast; and that Young’s claims of reputational harm lacked substance.

Yet CNN left a lengthy trail of non sequiturs and other brands of illogic. In one telling exchange, a member of Young’s legal team asked producer Michael Conte about the power of CNN:

Lawyer: Did you expect this story to have an effect on Mr. Young once it aired?

Conte: I have no idea.

Lawyer: Having watched the story today, is it reasonable to think that it would have some effect on Mr. Young?

Conte: Maybe. I don’t know.

Lawyer: Did you ever consider the possibility it might hurt his business?

Conte: It potentially might — I don’t know.

Consider the impression of such remarks before a jury in a county that voted 3-1 in favor of Donald Trump in November’s election. In his closing remarks to the jury, Freedman made reference to a broader context: “This case is about sending a message. … We ask you to send that message loud and clear. End this madness. Bring American journalism back to the center.”

That’s a cynical and destructive appeal in a case with no partisan dimension. And it worked.

Share

700

Comments

By Erik Wemple

Erik Wemple, The Washington Post's media critic, focuses on the cable-news industry. follow on X@ErikWemple

13. Ahead of dreaded TikTok ban, US ‘refugees’ flee to China’s Xiaohongshu app but not all are welcoming

2d and 3d order effects for everyone.

Ahead of dreaded TikTok ban, US ‘refugees’ flee to China’s Xiaohongshu app but not all are welcoming

Chinese users are responding with a mix of enthusiasm for cultural exchange and frustration over altered algorithms.

Lakeisha Leo

18 Jan 2025 07:55PM

channelnewsasia.com

SINGAPORE: The clock is ticking as a growing number of young “TikTok refugees” in the United States flock to Chinese social media app Xiaohongshu, also called RedNote, in search of an alternative ahead of the dreaded TikTok ban on Sunday (Jan 19).

TikTok said on Friday, after the US Supreme Court upheld the ban, that it would go dark on Sunday, unless there is assurance from the outgoing President Joe Biden administration.

Not good news for its 170 million American users, but some have decided to take matters into their own hands.

Arcadia Labonte, a 36-year-old homemaker from the US state of Oregon who has been on TikTok since 2022, signed up for a Xiaohongshu account just this week.

She says she knew of Xiaohongshu long before news of the ban was announced. But hearing that it was a good alternative to TikTok made her sign up.

“Having a social media platform that fills the niche of ‘endless video scrolling’ was something I needed and Xiaohongshu seemed like a good fit from what people (online) were saying,” Labonte told CNA.

Xiaohongshu has seen a surge in new sign-ups from the US of more than 200 per cent year-on-year this week, and 194 per cent from the week before, according to estimates from app data research firm Sensor Tower.

In only two days, more than 700,000 new US users had joined the app, Reuters reported, citing a source close to the company.

This has sparked a series of rare cross-cultural exchanges between American "refugees" and Chinese users who have been mostly welcoming. However, some complain about altered algorithms sending them content in English.

WHY XIAOHONGSHU?

A new user by the handle of JulietteReads said American users were signing up for Xiaohongshu accounts “as a form of protest” to the US Supreme Court’s decision to ban one of the world’s most popular and widely-used apps.

US officials and lawmakers have argued that TikTok, owned by Chinese internet company ByteDance, threatens US national security and has ties to the Chinese government - claims which TikTok’s Singaporean CEO and ByteDance have denied.

“While I understand the concerns (about data and privacy threats), a number of us disagree,” she told CNA, noting the irony of selling TikTok to an American company. It would mean “having the same government-controlled censorship” as other social media platforms like Meta, she adds.

“For these TikTok refugees, they want to find an alternative platform that is owned by a Chinese company, (that) is more Chinese than TikTok,” said Meng Ziying, a PhD researcher from Australia’s University of Melbourne.

For overseas users, Xiaohongshu is also more accessible, compared to others like Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, which requires a Chinese mobile number to register for an account.

Like TikTok, part of Xiaohongshu’s appeal is in its algorithm’s ability to push traffic to a creator’s content regardless of the number of followers.

“The platform is supporting ordinary users to grow their account,” said Meng.

Professor Min Ye from Boston University's Pardee School of Global Studies said she was “surprised” by the “speed and scale” of migration of TikTok users to Xiaohongshu.

“It serves as a humbling reminder, even for a long-term observer of US-China relations, that when we see no viable alternative but to accept an unwelcome or discriminatory outcome, young users often find innovative ways to adapt and voice their perspectives. They may shape changes in both America and China.”

Known as RedNote in English, the app is often hailed as China’s answer to Instagram and has been the go-to online space for Chinese social media users for watching and resharing short videos. It is also used by brands and businesses to host shopping videos and livestreams.

It is highly popular among Chinese tourists, with many travel influencers sharing food, accommodation and tourist hot spot recommendations around the world.

Because of its primarily female user base, makeup tutorials and womenswear tips are also popular on the app.

Urban “white-collar” women between the ages of 25 and 34, make up close to 70 per cent of the app’s users, said Jeffrey Hau, co-founder and director of Prizm Group, a digital marketing agency.

It has gained huge followings in other countries like Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia, particularly with Chinese speaking communities.

“Xiaohongshu’s international user base mostly relies on Chinese people living overseas,” Hau said. “We believe it is due to the nature of the content, which is mainly (hosted) in the Chinese language.”

CROSS-CULTURAL EXCHANGE

Native Xiaohongshu users have largely been welcoming of the “TikTok refugees”.

“Hi! TikTok refugee. Welcome,” said Chinese user Sara627 in a post sharing basic tips on using the social media platform.

With the influx of new US users into Xiaohongshu, observers say it has opened a rare window for Americans to learn more about China, and vice versa, through direct exchanges and interactions.

Posting selfies and videos, new Xiaohongshu users began introducing themselves to Chinese users. Using the search term “TikTok refugee”, many shared videos documenting their experience on the app and what convinced them to make the change.

“Hi! I am new here, this is my art! I would like to make friends here,” one user from the US, splatcube, wrote. The note, posted on Thursday afternoon, has garnered almost 38,000 likes and more than 5,400 comments as Chinese users flocked to say hello and leave comments.

“Your handwriting is very beautiful! Your paintings are also very nice! It’s art!” one user, shi liu, praised.

To navigate the language barrier, many non-Mandarin speakers use online translation tools to make sense of the comments and also translate their own content for Chinese users.

Following in the footsteps of their new friends, some Chinese users on Xiaohongshu have also posted questions in both Chinese and English using machine translation tools.

“I’m a birder in China, show me some strange birds in America!” one birdwatching account, Life House, wrote.

“There are so many warm or fun interactions between Chinese users and American users on the platform these days,” observed University of Sydney’s Dr Jia Guo.

Prof Ye said that Chinese users “are generally excited to have this rare opportunity to interact with Americans directly”.

“They are also likely captivated by the dramatic unfolding of domestic politics and social activism in the US, especially during the early days of Trump 2.0.”

Well-known TikTok influencers and official accounts such as those of Chinese state media outlets and major brands like the Luckin Coffee mega chain, have also hopped on the trend of welcoming the new American users, posting and advertising their products and services in English.

“240-hour visa free policy, China is waiting for you!” a police spokeswoman said in a video explaining the country’s new 240-hour visa free policy for foreign visitors.

The official newspaper of China's Ministry of Public Security, China Police Daily, has also released a video explainer in English about the country's new 240-hour visa free policy for foreign visitors. (Image: Xiaohongshu/China Police Daily)

“Yo China! Did I miss the party or what,” US basketball player Ja Morant wrote on his newly registered official red-tick account.

Chinese American comedian Jimmy O Yang, who starred in HBO’s Silicon Valley and Netflix’s Space Force, announced in a video on Instagram that he was joining Xiaohongshu.

However, there are also non-Chinese public figures “native” to Xiaohongshu. Norwegian DJ Alan Walker, who has more than 240,000 followers on the app, said he received many messages welcoming him to Xiaohongshu.

“I’ve received many DMs welcoming me these few days, but … I’m a RedNote native!” the DJ posted on his account. “TikTok refugee? Feel free to ask me anything!”

Stars like Hollywood actor Orlando Bloom and female rapper Cardi B have had official Xiaohongshu accounts for over a year, sharing posts that include captions in Chinese.

“GIVE ME BACK MY XIAOHONGSHU”

But not everyone is pleased about the growing western presence on the app. Some unhappy Chinese users shared their complaints, wishing for things to return to the way they were.

“I beg you, please stop using your machine translated English to reply to the foreigners,” said a user named Mi Zai, who added: “Give me back my original Xiaohongshu.”

His post was one of hundreds complaining about the influx of western “refugees” on the platform, which some say was affecting their search algorithms filtering results with English posts.

Norwegian DJ Alan Walker, Hollywood actor Orlando Bloom and female rapper Cardi B are some of the overseas celebrities who have had official Xiaohongshu accounts for over a year, sharing posts that include captions in Chinese. (Images: Xiaohongshu/Alan Walker, Cardi B, Orlando Bloom)

Some Chinese content creators also complained about the lack of engagement on their accounts, in contrast to new American users who are able to see thousands of likes and comments on posts in addition to garnering many new followers.

“They question the Western privileges US users have on a Chinese platform,” said Dr Guo, adding that this might be especially unpalatable for Chinese who have experienced racism overseas.

“I think for a lot of young Chinese studying or working in Western countries, they are likely to experience racism and social exclusion in their everyday lives, so some of them tend to hold a negative attitude towards this.”

On the other hand, “TikTok refugees” would have to get used to content moderation on Xiaohongshu, which follows strict guidelines in accordance with China’s regulatory laws.

“Xiaohongshu follows the party-state’s general censorship, for example, discussions about sensitive political issues or Chinese political leaders are not allowed,” said Dr Guo.

“There will be more TikTok users who experience such content moderation. And then I guess that's also adding to part of the culture shock,” added Meng.

The Chinese government is likely treading carefully, said Prof Ye.

“While it may welcome this challenge to the TikTok ban, it is undoubtedly concerned about the potential fallout for its information control. It is a delicate balance for the CCP elites.”

channelnewsasia.com

14. Apple suspends iPhone AI news summaries due to errors

And we fear TikTok influencing the news?

But at least Apple is recognizing the problem and stopping it.

Would you rather be manipulated deliberately by a foreign power or would you rather be manipulated inadvertently by error?

Apple suspends iPhone AI news summaries due to errors

18 Jan 2025 09:37AM

channelnewsasia.com

Read a summary of this article on FAST.

Get bite-sized news via a new

cards interface. Give it a try.

Click here to return to FAST Tap here to return to FAST

FAST

SAN FRANCISCO: Apple pushed out a software update on Thursday (Jan 16) that disabled news headlines and summaries generated using artificial intelligence that were lambasted for getting facts wrong.

The move by the tech titan comes as it enhances its latest lineup of devices with "Apple Intelligence" in a market keen for assurance that the iPhone maker is a contender in the AI race.

Apple's decision to temporarily disable the recently launched AI feature comes after the BBC and other news organisations complained that users were getting mistake-riddled or outright wrong headlines or news summary alerts.

Apple deployed the update to developers working with a beta version of its software, sidelining the AI feature for news headlines.

The tech giant plans to restore the feature when it is working properly and eventually roll it out to all users.

Apple in June of last year unveiled new iPhones built with generative AI as it seeks to boost sales and show it is keeping up in the technological arms race.

The company has a lot riding on the new iPhone 16 and hopes that customers are attracted to buy the latest models by its new AI powers.

"We are thrilled to introduce the first iPhones designed from the ground up for Apple Intelligence and its breakthrough capabilities," Apple chief executive Tim Cook said at an event at the iPhone maker's Silicon Valley headquarters.

"Apple Intelligence" is a new suite of software features for all devices that was announced at the company's annual developers conference, where it also announced a partnership with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI.

In the short-term, the new powers include AI-infused image editing, translation, and small, creative touches in messaging, but not more ambitious breakthroughs promised by other AI players, such as OpenAI or Google.

The features are similar to tools recently released by Meta, Microsoft and Google, which can produce well-crafted content simply by querying in everyday language.

Google last year released AI-infused Pixel 9 smartphones, its challenge to the iPhone.

Pixel phones account for a tiny sliver of the global smartphone market dominated by Samsung and Apple, but Google argued its new line is a chance to answer what - after all the hype - AI can actually do for customers.

Samsung has also showcased AI across its line and is expected to unveil a new flagship Galaxy smartphone at an event next week in Silicon Valley.

Source: AFP/gs

15. How resistance to Trump may look different in his second administration

Resistance? Do not misuse the word. Do not incite actions that are counter to our democracy. Make American democracy work.

When I hear resistance my knee jerk reaction is this - "activities to enable a resistance movement or insurgency to coerce, disrupt or overthrow a government or occupying power." This NOT what we want to do in America (though we certainly want to help the oppressed people in totalitarian dictatorships to exercise their universal human right of self determination of government and free themselves. But I digress.)

Peaceably assemble, express your views. Use the free press. And influence political leaders to take stands for or against specific policies not people (Anton Scalia - "attack ideas not people")..

Do not taint the political leaders in Congress with the resistance moniker. We do not want their opposition to policies to be touted as resistance. We want all political leaders to take principled stands, and for political leaders to respect the different and diverse views of politicians and the public.

Rather than resistance, those who are opposed to the policies and views of the incoming administration or the majority party should be stressing to make the democratic process work. And all sides should (must) always respect the outcome of elections and votes in Congress.

Pretty naive I know I am. But one can hope.

How resistance to Trump may look different in his second administration

Inauguration protests are expected to draw fewer people than in 2017, but activists say they are gearing up to oppose the new president with a movement that goes beyond marches.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/01/17/women-peoples-march-trump-inauguration-protests/

January 17, 2025 at 6:00 a.m. ESTYesterday at 6:00 a.m. EST

A crowd fills the streets during a Women's March in D.C. in 2019, during an era of massive, sustained protest movements sparked by Donald Trump's first term. (Evelyn Hockstein for The Washington Post)

By Ellie Silverman and Tim Craig

Fanell Sawyer keeps replaying in her head the morning she learned Donald Trump had won the election. She was at home in Georgia, ready to start another day working remotely in customer service for an insurance company, when her teenage daughter turned to her and uttered seven words that felt like a gut punch.

Get the latest election news and results

“Mom,” she said, “This country doesn’t care about women.”

The mother of three hates that her daughter Nyah feels that way, but she doesn’t know how to convince her otherwise. She has been mulling whether to take her to one of the pre-inauguration protests this weekend, but she isn’t sure it would be safe — or even worthwhile.

“I’m very outraged, and I want to do something. I’m just like, what can I do to make a difference?” said Sawyer, 40. “That makes me feel deflated.”

That feeling of resignation in the lead-up to Trump’s second administration is a stark departure from 2017, when more than 1 million people took to the streets, knitted pink hats and traveled to cities across the world to turn their rage into a forceful opposition to the new president.

This weekend, demonstrators will travel to D.C. and cities across the country for the People’s March, organized by leading civil rights, racial justice and reproductive health organizations. Thousands are expected to participate, though the number of protesters is unlikely to be anywhere near the historic turnout seen eight years ago. Many would-be activists say they are fatigued after a contentious election, and others question whether marches are an effective way of manifesting their discontent.

Skip to end of carouselTrump presidential transition

Follow live updates on the transition to Trump’s second presidency. We’re tracking the people Trump has picked for key positions in his administration.

End of carousel

“A lot of people don’t believe that a march is going to solve the problem. And they’re right. A march, in and of itself, is not going to solve the problem. But that doesn’t mean the resistance won’t exist,” said Dana Fisher, an American University professor and the author of “American Resistance: From the Women’s March to the Blue Wave.” “The resistance will rise again, but it’s going to look really different.”

After taking time to process Trump’s win, some people are now shifting into action. Activists are forming coalitions, launching community service initiatives or getting involved in local politics. One D.C.-based group will hold an “Anti-Inauguration Ball” at a live music venue to bring people together with food and dance.

Sawyer plans to continue volunteering at a reproductive health clinic in Georgia, where a six-week abortion ban is in place.

Follow Politics

Follow

But late last week, she was still weighing whether to take her daughter to a pre-inauguration protest, trying to balance her own disillusionment with wanting to show her daughter that her voice means something.

“You matter in a world that is mainly masculine,” she said, describing the message she wants to teach her daughter. “No matter what, always stand up for what you believe in and for your morals, even if it’s not the popular opinion.”

‘Temporary pessimism’

Trump’s first presidency ushered in an era of massive, sustained protest movements.

Demonstrations began even before he had taken office and erupted again a year later with the student-led March for Our Lives demonstration for gun control in the aftermath of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High massacre in Parkland, Florida. Thousands also took to the streets in 2020 to protest the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd.

The Women’s March itself drew more than 1 million people to protest in Washington and elsewhere the day after Trump’s first inauguration. That demonstration eight years ago is widely considered the country’s largest single-day protest.

Leaders say that since that protest, they have expanded their bases and infrastructure and are more prepared to mobilize the masses for Trump 2.0. The march inspired people to run for public office, lobby officials and become activists. But there have also been public controversies. The Women’s March organization has faced allegations of antisemitism, secretive financial dealings and infighting that resulted in founders leaving the group.

“Difficult times inside of movements is not specific to Women’s March. It’s actually the norm, not the exception,” said Rachel O’Leary Carmona, the executive director of the Women’s March. “What works is doing the work, and so we’ve done the work, and we’ve built the organization over seven years.”

But after campaigning for Vice President Kamala Harris, some demonstrators are sticking to the sidelines. Some are fatigued, while others are questioning how best to be effective. Political experts note there isn’t the same level of shock that pushed many people to march in 2017.

Donald Trump's second inauguration

Next

Here’s who is skipping Donald Trump’s inauguration on Monday

How moving Trump’s inauguration inside spurred an all-out scramble

Coldest inauguration forecast since Reagan’s in 1985 forces Trump’s indoors

Schedule of events for Trump inauguration weekend

What you need to know about Inauguration Day in D.C.

How to navigate D.C. during Donald Trump’s inauguration

Here’s who is performing at Trump’s inauguration

As Trump returns, a weary D.C. braces for a president it didn’t want

Thousands expected at People’s March in D.C. to protest Trump

TikTok CEO to rally with Trump before inauguration as ban looms

Accumulating snow could fall Sunday before brutal cold on Inauguration Day

Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg to attend Trump’s inauguration

Michelle Obama to skip Trump’s inauguration, breaking with tradition

Protest crowd estimates down, ticket demand high for Trump inauguration

Trump’s first presidential victory was considered a stunning upset. Though he clinched the electoral college, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. Eight years later, Trump and his MAGA movement are a solidified force in Republican politics. He won the electoral college comfortably and defeated Harris by more than 2 million votes.

Jeremy Pressman, a political science professor of the University of Connecticut, said there is a split among activists over how best to speak up about Trump’s presidency.

Free DC members paint a sign Wednesday in preparation for the People’s March. (Allison Robbert for The Washington Post)

Some believe marches haven’t accomplished enough and want to work on new tactics, like investing more in grassroots political organizations. Others believe large-scale demonstrations are still effective because they bring together veteran organizers and newcomers to a movement.

“The one thing I am waiting, not just for this one particular march [on Saturday], but over these first few months, is how these schools of thought develop, and where people put their energy,” Pressman said.

Pro-Palestinian protesters who rocked U.S. college campuses this past year could quickly shift their attention to Trump, but experts doubt they would be able to form effective coalitions with other liberal organizations because of concerns about antisemitism. Pro-Palestinian organizations will participate in a protest planned for Inauguration Day.

Some fear that whatever protests do emerge could be even more disruptive and potentially violent than they were during Trump’s first term. Danya L. Cunningham, dean of the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University, noted that during his campaign, Trump vowed to quash dissent, going as far as saying he would consider deploying the U.S. military against demonstrators.

“I don’t think people will stay home, because I think some of this stuff is going to be too catastrophic to not have a public display of protest,” Cunningham said. “It’s in our tradition in the country, and much of the world, to do that but I think it will be more dangerous than it has been.”

Trump's second presidency

Next

Trump’s inauguration to be moved indoors due to extreme cold in Washington

Tracking who Trump is appointing to fill key administration roles

What Trump has promised to do in his second term

Ohio Lt. Gov. Jon Husted is tapped to fill JD Vance’s Senate seat in Ohio

Vivek Ramaswamy plans to announce Ohio gubernatorial run

IRS commissioner to resign as Trump eyes replacement

Gay couples race to the altar before Trump takes office

Meet Trump’s leading pick to oversee Wall Street regulation at the Fed

Trump selections for top jobs advance, despite initial controversy

AG pick Bondi says no ‘enemies list,’ won’t rule out probes of Trump foes

Senate holds confirmation hearings for Treasury, EPA, other Trump Cabinet p...

Rubio details what Trump’s ‘America First’ foreign policy will entail

The House Democrat who wants Trump to go big on tariffs

Biden touts accomplishments, warns of ‘oligarchy’ in farewell address

Deportation at ‘light speed’: How Trump’s crackdown could unfold

John Ratcliffe, Trump’s CIA pick, pledges not to politicize spy agency

TikTok races toward a ban as Supreme Court — and Trump — weigh its fate

4 takeaways from Pam Bondi’s confirmation hearing

Throughout history, large protest movements have tended to be cyclical. Political experts said the United States still appears to be in an era where large protest movements can easily form.

“It’s premature to call an end to this global age of protests that started in 2011,” said Lisa Mueller, who has studied activist movements and chairs the political science department of Macalester College. “In the scale of years, we might be in a lull, but in the scale of decades, it’s still quite active.”

Brian Becker, the executive director of the ANSWER Coalition, a far-left-leaning group that has organized several large pro-Palestinian protests in D.C., described the emotions people are grappling with as a “sort of temporary pessimism.”

“This moment is really a moment,” said Becker, whose coalition is one of the groups behind this year’s Inauguration Day protest. “It’s not a devastating setback for people who want social change.”

A new activism

In interviews, liberal activists around the country said they are preparing to stay involved, even as many say they have no plans to march this weekend.

Melinda Moulton, who led a women’s march in Vermont in 2017, plans to go skiing or meditate this weekend. Once Trump is officially in office, she plans to redouble her support for organizations such as Planned Parenthood. Moulton expects many of her friends and neighbors will do the same.

“People are going to get involved and engaged because it’s going to go so far off the rails they are going to have to be active,” Moulton said.

In Washington state, activists with the Okanogan County Action Coalition in the Methow Valley are also considering how they will respond to Trump’s reemergence in the White House. Eight years ago, more than 800 people crammed into downtown Twisp on a snowy day to demonstrate against Trump’s presidency.

Patricia Leigh, a leader of the group, said no marches are planned this year because local activists now question their effectiveness.

“I think people want to focus their energy on things that make a difference, and that comes down to supporting candidates and representatives who share our values,” said Leigh, who added that future actions are “going to depend entirely on the potential impact of whatever the Trump administration comes up with.”

During Trump’s campaign against Harris, scores of grassroots groups organized through social media to back the Democratic campaign. Now, some of those organizations are strategizing over whether and how to stay involved.

In Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, a group called Blue Storm Action formed in the summer of 2022 to oppose conservative candidates for public office. The group grew out of a small book club and swelled to 400 members during the presidential campaign.

Angela Sontheimer, a leader of the group, said there remains high interest in organizing against Trump’s policies. But she expects much of the group’s focus and outrage will be focused on local matters like school board races or helping undocumented farm workers who may be targeted for deportation.

The group decided against organizing buses to attend the People’s March on Saturday.

“We have tried some of those things in the past, and I think they make a splash in the headlines for the moment,” Sontheimer said. “But I am not convinced that that is the best use of our time.”

In Washington, locals formed a broader coalition called Defend DC, focused on building the foundation to push back against Trump’s agenda.

“People are ready to be in community, be in solidarity and they’re ready for action, and that might look quite different than what it looked like in the past,” said Keya Chatterjee, executive director of Free DC, a movement to protect home rule and advocate for statehood as part of the Defend DC coalition. “That might be less about protest and more about not complying and intervening if somebody is trying to cause harm.”

Fanell Sawyer debated whether to take her daughter Nyah Sawyer to a pre-inauguration protest. (David Walter Banks for The Washington Post)

For those reasons, experts said, the crowd size this weekend at the People’s March or among those protesting on Inauguration Day won’t tell the full scope or scale of the masses of people still energized to push back.

“We’re not marching to just have a visual,” said O’Leary Carmona, the Women’s March leader. “We are working to get the hundreds of thousands of people that load into marches across the country moved into political homes.”

In Georgia, Sawyer has lived with the uncertainty of what comes next. She voted for Harris, and she said she’s grappling with how to regain faith in the country, especially as a Black woman.

On Wednesday morning, she decided to sign up for a march in Atlanta this weekend in hopes of showing her daughter that other people feel the same way they do. She plans to continue volunteering — and perhaps protesting — during Trump’s presidency.

“I don’t know what that entails yet,” she said. “I don’t really feel like I’m part of the movement yet, but I’m making my own little movement.”

How resistance to Trump may look different in his second administration

Inauguration protests are expected to draw fewer people than in 2017, but activists say they are gearing up to oppose the new president with a movement that goes beyond marches.

January 17, 2025 at 6:00 a.m. ESTYesterday at 6:00 a.m. EST

10 min

1335

A crowd fills the streets during a Women's March in D.C. in 2019, during an era of massive, sustained protest movements sparked by Donald Trump's first term. (Evelyn Hockstein for The Washington Post)

By Ellie Silverman and Tim Craig

Fanell Sawyer keeps replaying in her head the morning she learned Donald Trump had won the election. She was at home in Georgia, ready to start another day working remotely in customer service for an insurance company, when her teenage daughter turned to her and uttered seven words that felt like a gut punch.

Get the latest election news and results

“Mom,” she said, “This country doesn’t care about women.”

The mother of three hates that her daughter Nyah feels that way, but she doesn’t know how to convince her otherwise. She has been mulling whether to take her to one of the pre-inauguration protests this weekend, but she isn’t sure it would be safe — or even worthwhile.

“I’m very outraged, and I want to do something. I’m just like, what can I do to make a difference?” said Sawyer, 40. “That makes me feel deflated.”

That feeling of resignation in the lead-up to Trump’s second administration is a stark departure from 2017, when more than 1 million people took to the streets, knitted pink hats and traveled to cities across the world to turn their rage into a forceful opposition to the new president.

This weekend, demonstrators will travel to D.C. and cities across the country for the People’s March, organized by leading civil rights, racial justice and reproductive health organizations. Thousands are expected to participate, though the number of protesters is unlikely to be anywhere near the historic turnout seen eight years ago. Many would-be activists say they are fatigued after a contentious election, and others question whether marches are an effective way of manifesting their discontent.

Skip to end of carouselTrump presidential transition

Follow live updates on the transition to Trump’s second presidency. We’re tracking the people Trump has picked for key positions in his administration.

End of carousel

“A lot of people don’t believe that a march is going to solve the problem. And they’re right. A march, in and of itself, is not going to solve the problem. But that doesn’t mean the resistance won’t exist,” said Dana Fisher, an American University professor and the author of “American Resistance: From the Women’s March to the Blue Wave.” “The resistance will rise again, but it’s going to look really different.”

After taking time to process Trump’s win, some people are now shifting into action. Activists are forming coalitions, launching community service initiatives or getting involved in local politics. One D.C.-based group will hold an “Anti-Inauguration Ball” at a live music venue to bring people together with food and dance.

Sawyer plans to continue volunteering at a reproductive health clinic in Georgia, where a six-week abortion ban is in place.

Follow Politics

Follow

But late last week, she was still weighing whether to take her daughter to a pre-inauguration protest, trying to balance her own disillusionment with wanting to show her daughter that her voice means something.

“You matter in a world that is mainly masculine,” she said, describing the message she wants to teach her daughter. “No matter what, always stand up for what you believe in and for your morals, even if it’s not the popular opinion.”

‘Temporary pessimism’

Trump’s first presidency ushered in an era of massive, sustained protest movements.

Demonstrations began even before he had taken office and erupted again a year later with the student-led March for Our Lives demonstration for gun control in the aftermath of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High massacre in Parkland, Florida. Thousands also took to the streets in 2020 to protest the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd.

The Women’s March itself drew more than 1 million people to protest in Washington and elsewhere the day after Trump’s first inauguration. That demonstration eight years ago is widely considered the country’s largest single-day protest.

Leaders say that since that protest, they have expanded their bases and infrastructure and are more prepared to mobilize the masses for Trump 2.0. The march inspired people to run for public office, lobby officials and become activists. But there have also been public controversies. The Women’s March organization has faced allegations of antisemitism, secretive financial dealings and infighting that resulted in founders leaving the group.

“Difficult times inside of movements is not specific to Women’s March. It’s actually the norm, not the exception,” said Rachel O’Leary Carmona, the executive director of the Women’s March. “What works is doing the work, and so we’ve done the work, and we’ve built the organization over seven years.”

But after campaigning for Vice President Kamala Harris, some demonstrators are sticking to the sidelines. Some are fatigued, while others are questioning how best to be effective. Political experts note there isn’t the same level of shock that pushed many people to march in 2017.

Donald Trump's second inauguration

Next

Here’s who is skipping Donald Trump’s inauguration on Monday

How moving Trump’s inauguration inside spurred an all-out scramble

Coldest inauguration forecast since Reagan’s in 1985 forces Trump’s indoors

Schedule of events for Trump inauguration weekend

What you need to know about Inauguration Day in D.C.

How to navigate D.C. during Donald Trump’s inauguration

Here’s who is performing at Trump’s inauguration

As Trump returns, a weary D.C. braces for a president it didn’t want

Thousands expected at People’s March in D.C. to protest Trump

TikTok CEO to rally with Trump before inauguration as ban looms

Accumulating snow could fall Sunday before brutal cold on Inauguration Day

Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg to attend Trump’s inauguration

Michelle Obama to skip Trump’s inauguration, breaking with tradition

Protest crowd estimates down, ticket demand high for Trump inauguration

Trump’s first presidential victory was considered a stunning upset. Though he clinched the electoral college, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. Eight years later, Trump and his MAGA movement are a solidified force in Republican politics. He won the electoral college comfortably and defeated Harris by more than 2 million votes.

Jeremy Pressman, a political science professor of the University of Connecticut, said there is a split among activists over how best to speak up about Trump’s presidency.

Free DC members paint a sign Wednesday in preparation for the People’s March. (Allison Robbert for The Washington Post)

Some believe marches haven’t accomplished enough and want to work on new tactics, like investing more in grassroots political organizations. Others believe large-scale demonstrations are still effective because they bring together veteran organizers and newcomers to a movement.

“The one thing I am waiting, not just for this one particular march [on Saturday], but over these first few months, is how these schools of thought develop, and where people put their energy,” Pressman said.

Pro-Palestinian protesters who rocked U.S. college campuses this past year could quickly shift their attention to Trump, but experts doubt they would be able to form effective coalitions with other liberal organizations because of concerns about antisemitism. Pro-Palestinian organizations will participate in a protest planned for Inauguration Day.

Some fear that whatever protests do emerge could be even more disruptive and potentially violent than they were during Trump’s first term. Danya L. Cunningham, dean of the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University, noted that during his campaign, Trump vowed to quash dissent, going as far as saying he would consider deploying the U.S. military against demonstrators.

“I don’t think people will stay home, because I think some of this stuff is going to be too catastrophic to not have a public display of protest,” Cunningham said. “It’s in our tradition in the country, and much of the world, to do that but I think it will be more dangerous than it has been.”

Trump's second presidency

Next

Trump’s inauguration to be moved indoors due to extreme cold in Washington

Tracking who Trump is appointing to fill key administration roles

What Trump has promised to do in his second term

Ohio Lt. Gov. Jon Husted is tapped to fill JD Vance’s Senate seat in Ohio

Vivek Ramaswamy plans to announce Ohio gubernatorial run

IRS commissioner to resign as Trump eyes replacement

Gay couples race to the altar before Trump takes office

Meet Trump’s leading pick to oversee Wall Street regulation at the Fed

Trump selections for top jobs advance, despite initial controversy

AG pick Bondi says no ‘enemies list,’ won’t rule out probes of Trump foes

Senate holds confirmation hearings for Treasury, EPA, other Trump Cabinet p...

Rubio details what Trump’s ‘America First’ foreign policy will entail

The House Democrat who wants Trump to go big on tariffs

Biden touts accomplishments, warns of ‘oligarchy’ in farewell address

Deportation at ‘light speed’: How Trump’s crackdown could unfold

John Ratcliffe, Trump’s CIA pick, pledges not to politicize spy agency

TikTok races toward a ban as Supreme Court — and Trump — weigh its fate

4 takeaways from Pam Bondi’s confirmation hearing

Throughout history, large protest movements have tended to be cyclical. Political experts said the United States still appears to be in an era where large protest movements can easily form.

“It’s premature to call an end to this global age of protests that started in 2011,” said Lisa Mueller, who has studied activist movements and chairs the political science department of Macalester College. “In the scale of years, we might be in a lull, but in the scale of decades, it’s still quite active.”

Brian Becker, the executive director of the ANSWER Coalition, a far-left-leaning group that has organized several large pro-Palestinian protests in D.C., described the emotions people are grappling with as a “sort of temporary pessimism.”

“This moment is really a moment,” said Becker, whose coalition is one of the groups behind this year’s Inauguration Day protest. “It’s not a devastating setback for people who want social change.”

A new activism

In interviews, liberal activists around the country said they are preparing to stay involved, even as many say they have no plans to march this weekend.

Melinda Moulton, who led a women’s march in Vermont in 2017, plans to go skiing or meditate this weekend. Once Trump is officially in office, she plans to redouble her support for organizations such as Planned Parenthood. Moulton expects many of her friends and neighbors will do the same.

“People are going to get involved and engaged because it’s going to go so far off the rails they are going to have to be active,” Moulton said.

In Washington state, activists with the Okanogan County Action Coalition in the Methow Valley are also considering how they will respond to Trump’s reemergence in the White House. Eight years ago, more than 800 people crammed into downtown Twisp on a snowy day to demonstrate against Trump’s presidency.

Patricia Leigh, a leader of the group, said no marches are planned this year because local activists now question their effectiveness.

“I think people want to focus their energy on things that make a difference, and that comes down to supporting candidates and representatives who share our values,” said Leigh, who added that future actions are “going to depend entirely on the potential impact of whatever the Trump administration comes up with.”

During Trump’s campaign against Harris, scores of grassroots groups organized through social media to back the Democratic campaign. Now, some of those organizations are strategizing over whether and how to stay involved.

In Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, a group called Blue Storm Action formed in the summer of 2022 to oppose conservative candidates for public office. The group grew out of a small book club and swelled to 400 members during the presidential campaign.

Angela Sontheimer, a leader of the group, said there remains high interest in organizing against Trump’s policies. But she expects much of the group’s focus and outrage will be focused on local matters like school board races or helping undocumented farm workers who may be targeted for deportation.

The group decided against organizing buses to attend the People’s March on Saturday.

“We have tried some of those things in the past, and I think they make a splash in the headlines for the moment,” Sontheimer said. “But I am not convinced that that is the best use of our time.”

In Washington, locals formed a broader coalition called Defend DC, focused on building the foundation to push back against Trump’s agenda.

“People are ready to be in community, be in solidarity and they’re ready for action, and that might look quite different than what it looked like in the past,” said Keya Chatterjee, executive director of Free DC, a movement to protect home rule and advocate for statehood as part of the Defend DC coalition. “That might be less about protest and more about not complying and intervening if somebody is trying to cause harm.”

Fanell Sawyer debated whether to take her daughter Nyah Sawyer to a pre-inauguration protest. (David Walter Banks for The Washington Post)

For those reasons, experts said, the crowd size this weekend at the People’s March or among those protesting on Inauguration Day won’t tell the full scope or scale of the masses of people still energized to push back.

“We’re not marching to just have a visual,” said O’Leary Carmona, the Women’s March leader. “We are working to get the hundreds of thousands of people that load into marches across the country moved into political homes.”

In Georgia, Sawyer has lived with the uncertainty of what comes next. She voted for Harris, and she said she’s grappling with how to regain faith in the country, especially as a Black woman.

On Wednesday morning, she decided to sign up for a march in Atlanta this weekend in hopes of showing her daughter that other people feel the same way they do. She plans to continue volunteering — and perhaps protesting — during Trump’s presidency.

“I don’t know what that entails yet,” she said. “I don’t really feel like I’m part of the movement yet, but I’m making my own little movement.”

16. Behind the Curtain: A chilling, "catastrophic" warning

This complements Colin Kahl's Foreign Affairs article this week.

3 hours ago -

Technology

Column / Behind the Curtain

Behind the Curtain: A chilling, "catastrophic" warning

• Jim VandeHei
• ,
• Mike Allen
• 
  

Illustration: Allie Carl/Axios

Jake Sullivan — with three days left as White House national security adviser, with wide access to the world's secrets — called us to deliver a chilling, "catastrophic" warning for America and the incoming administration:

• The next few years will determine whether artificial intelligence leads to catastrophe — and whether China or America prevails in the AI arms race.

Why it matters: Sullivan said in our phone interview that unlike previous dramatic technology advancements (atomic weapons, space, the internet), AI development sits outside of government and security clearances, and in the hands of private companies with the power of nation-states.

• Underscoring the gravity of his message, Sullivan spoke with an urgency and directness that were rarely heard during his decade-plus in public life.

Somehow, government will have to join forces with these companies to nurture and protect America's early AI edge, and shape the global rules for using potentially God-like powers, he says.

• U.S. failure to get this right, Sullivan warns, could be "dramatic, and dramatically negative — to include the democratization of extremely powerful and lethal weapons; massive disruption and dislocation of jobs; an avalanche of misinformation."

Staying ahead in the AI arms race makes the Manhattan Project during World War II seem tiny, and conventional national security debates small. It's potentially existential with implications for every nation and company.

• To distill Sullivan: America must quickly perfect a technology that many believe will be smarter and more capable than humans. We need to do this without decimating U.S. jobs, and inadvertently unleashing something with capabilities we didn't anticipate or prepare for. We need to both beat China on the technology and in shaping and setting global usage and monitoring of it, so bad actors don't use it catastrophically. Oh, and it can only be done with unprecedented government-private sector collaboration — and probably difficult, but vital, cooperation with China.

"There's going to have to be a new model of relationship because of just the sheer capability in the hands of a private actor," Sullivan says.

• "What exactly that model looks like, whether it takes more the form of guardrails and regulation, and some forms of support from the government — or whether it involves something more ambitious than that — I will tell you that some of the smartest people I know who sit at the intersection of policy and technology are working through the answer to that question right now."
• This is beyond uncharted waters. It's an unexplored galaxy — "a new frontier," in his words. And one, he warns, where progress routinely exceeds projections in advancement. Progress is now pulsing in months, not years.

Between the lines: Sullivan leaves government believing this can be done well — and wants to work on this very problem in the private sector.

• "I personally am not an AI doomer," he says. "I am a person who believes that we can seize the opportunities of AI. But to do so, we've got to manage the downside risks, and we have to be clear-eyed and real about those risks."

The big picture: There's no person we know in a position of power in AI or governance who doesn't share Sullivan's broad belief in the stakes ahead.

• Regardless of what was said in public, every background conversation we had with President Biden's high command came back to China. Yes, they had concerns about the ethics, misinformation and job loss of AI. They talked about that. But they were unusually blunt in private: Every move, every risk was calculated to keep China from beating us to the AI punch. Nothing else matters, they basically said.
• That's why they applied export controls on the top-of-the-line semiconductors needed to power AI development — including in Biden's final days in office — and cut off supply of the hyper-sophisticated tools Chinese firms need to make such chips themselves.

That said, AI is like the climate: America could do everything right — but if China refuses to do the same, the problem persists and metastasizes fast. Sullivan said Trump, like Biden, should try to work with Chinese leader Xi Jinping on a global AI framework, much like the world did with nuclear weapons.

• There won't be one winner in this AI race. Both China and the U.S. are going to have very advanced AI. There'll be tons of open-source AI that many other nations will build on, too. Once one country has made a huge advance, others will match it soon after. What they can't get from their own research or work, they'll get from hacking and spying. (It didn't take long for Russia to match the A-bomb and then the H-bomb.)

• Marc Andreessen, who's intimately involved in the Trump transition and AI policy, told Bari Weiss of The Free Press his discussions with the Biden administration this past year were "absolutely horrifying," and said he feared the officials might strangle AI startups if left in power. His chief concern: Biden would assert government control by keeping AI power in the hands of a few big players, suffocating innovation.

Sullivan says a conversation he had with Andreessen struck a very different tone.

• "The point he was trying to register with me, which I thought was actually a very fair point, is: I think about downside risk; that's my job," Sullivan told us. "His point was: It should also be my job as national security adviser to think about how AI applications running on American rails globally is better than AI applications running on some other country's rails globally."

What's next: Trump seems to be full speed ahead on AI development. Unlike Biden, he plans to work in deep partnership with AI and tech CEOs at a very personal level. Biden talked to some tech CEOs; Trump is letting them help staff his government. The MAGA-tech merger is among the most important shifts of the past year.

• The super-VIP section of Monday's inauguration will be one for a time capsule: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Sam Altman, Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg — who's attending his first inauguration, and is co-hosting a black-tie reception Monday night. The godfathers of tech are all desperate for access, a say, a partnership.
• Also in a spot of honor: TikTok CEO Shou Chew.

A fight might await: Steve Bannon and other MAGA originals believe AI is evil at scale — a job-killer for the very people who elected Trump. But for now, Bannon is a fairly lonely voice shouting against AI velocity. Trump and the AI gods hold the stage.

The bottom line: There's a reason our Behind the Curtain column writes obsessively about AI and its collision with government. We believe, based on conversations with AI's creators and experts, this dynamic will reshape politics, business and culture beyond most imaginations.

17. Military hopes new helmet will protect special forces from traumatic brain injuries

A view from Canada.

Military hopes new helmet will protect special forces from traumatic brain injuries

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/health/other/military-hopes-new-helmet-will-protect-special-forces-from-traumatic-brain-injuries/ar-AA1xmupB

Story by David Pugliese, Ottawa Citizen • 1d • 3 min read

A soldier with the Canadian Special Operations Regiment participates in a shooting competition in the U.S. The Canadian military is funding the development of a new helmet for special forces to help prevent traumatic brain injuries.

The Canadian military is funding the development of a new helmet designed to prevent traumatic brain injuries that have been affecting some special forces personnel and other soldiers.

The Canadian Special Operations Forces Command in Ottawa is working with Defence Research and Development Canada in Valcartier, Que., as well as a U.S. company on the new equipment.

Department of National Defence spokesperson Alex Tétreault told the Ottawa Citizen that DND expected the first of the helmets would be ready in 2026 or early 2027.

Militaries around the world have been becoming increasingly concerned about traumatic brain injuries , which can be caused by an external force strong enough to move the brain within the skull. In military service, that can involve repeated exposure to artillery fire and anti-tank weapons, controlled explosions such as the use of stun grenades, and gunfire or explosions in enclosed areas. The Pentagon has labelled traumatic brain injuries as one of the invisible wounds of war and an issue that has affected troops who served in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It is also problem affecting special forces in particular because of their repeated exposure to large numbers of explosions and other blasts on various missions and during high-intensity training.

The Canadian research into the new helmet started in 2022 and was scheduled at that point to continue for a decade.

The research is being divided into two phases. One will produce a helmet to provide protection for mild traumatic brain injuries and can be used with certain types of night vision equipment. The second phase will look to improve the protection the helmet provides.

DND awarded the contract for the initiative to Gentex, a U.S. firm in 2022. The contract included $4.1 million for the first five years, with extension options covering a total of 10 years. The entire contract could be worth $8.1 million.

“The contract includes both the research and development of the helmet plus the acquisition, if we are satisfied with the final product,” DND spokesperson Kened Sadiku said. “The price of the purchase option remains to be negotiated.”

DND did not provide details on how many helmets could be ordered.

The contract is only for helmets for those serving with the Canadian Special Operations Forces Command. “The helmets will be available for other elements of the CAF to procure should they wish to do so and would be procured through a separate acquisition process,” Sadiku said.

He added that the starting point for the development of the new equipment is the existing Future Assault Shell Technology (FAST) Helmet developed by the U.S. and currently issued to troops. “As part of the research and development of the new helmet, extensive impact and blast testing has occurred which has not been done before to this extent,” Sadiku added. “Initial testing used the FAST helmet as a baseline, and since then several helmet shapes with different attachments have been tested in different orientation using advanced instrumentation that can measure brain pressure.”

He noted that the results of the tests had guided further changes to the development of the new helmet.

Sadiku said the process of developing a new helmet took time because of the research needed. ”Significant changes to the impact mitigation requirements for the new helmet has also required the contractor to re-think the liner and suspension systems,” he said. “In particular, the new helmet will offer a higher level of protection against (mild traumatic brain injuries) from high velocity impacts and rotational loads.”

Further testing is still on-going and is not expected to be complete until later this year.

The U.S. Department of Defense has tracked the number of its soldiers who have been diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries and more than 500,000 personnel have received such a diagnosis since 2000.

Canada’s Department of National Defence could not provide figures on the number of its personnel who have been diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries.

David Pugliese is an award-winning journalist covering Canadian Forces and military issues in Canada. To support his work, including exclusive content for subscribers only, sign up here: ottawacitizen.com/subscribe

18. Nobody is talking about Trump’s biggest foreign challenge (ISIS)

Nobody is talking about Trump’s biggest foreign challenge

While the world’s attention is on the ceasefire in Gaza, the re-emergence of ISIS is flying under the radar

openDemocracy · by Paul Rogers

While the world’s media is focused on whether the Gaza ceasefire will succeed, another development in the region is receiving very little attention: the strength and potential of ISIS, after nearly a decade of apparent marginalisation.

Back in 2018, at the end of the intense US-led air war in Syria, staff from the US’s Special Operations Command staff reported that ISIS had taken huge casualties, losing as many as 60,000 of its supporters, leading directly to the collapse of the caliphate.

Then the group appeared to suddenly come back from nowhere at the start of 2025. A US army veteran, Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar, killed 14 people in New Orleans early on New Year’s Day, claiming to have joined ISIS. Though the organisation later avoided claiming responsibility for the attack (while still praising Jabbar for carrying it out), military bases across the US were put on alert for possible further attacks.

While the New Orleans massacre did return some attention to the wider movement, the slow reforming of ISIS as an Islamist movement of substantial potential has been happening for many months and quite possibly years.

Indeed, ISIS’s re-emergence is one of the main reasons the US has maintained around 3,500 troops and many more civilian contractors in Iraq and Syria, the group’s power showing in attacks on US troops.

ISIS also maintains influence and connections with Islamist paramilitary movements across the Sahel and even down the East Africa coast to northern Mozambique, but its main centre of strength is still in the heart of the Middle East, with small groups of fighters operating in northern Syria and Iraq.

It is telling that in the week of the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria last month, US Central Command staged repeated airstrikes against 75 presumed ISIS targets in Syria, including with B-52 strategic heavy bombers. Just last week, the newly reformed post-Assad Syrian intelligence organisation was reported to have disrupted an ISIS attempt to bomb a Shi’a shrine in Sayyida Zeinab, a suburb of Damascus that had been targeted in the past.

ISIS’s attacks on US troops in recent months are not minor inconveniences, and there has been a notable upsurge in the number carried out since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza in October 2023. In November, the Pentagon reported there had been 79 attacks in Iraq and 129 in Syria since then.

Just last week, US defence secretary Lloyd Austin stated that US soldiers would be staying in Syria in the long term, with a source suggesting the number of troops in the region had recently doubled, taking the combined US total for Iraq and Syria to around 4,500, including the reinforced 101st airborne brigade, which has up to 2,000 troops designed to move rapidly to counter ISIS actions.

The problem for US forces in the region is that ISIS does not just have isolated groups of supporters but some large and committed concentrations. When the caliphate finally collapsed in 2018, many ISIS paramilitaries dispersed across Syria and Iraq and today they form the basis of current active fighters.

Far more still were taken into custody, along with their families, by Kurdish forces allied with the US. Seven years on, between 8,000 and 10,000 are still detained – including around 2,000 regarded as especially dangerous – as well as around 30,000 members of their families. The US fears tensions between Turkey and the US-backed Kurds could lead to their release.

In the wake of the collapse of the Assad regime, five countries are competing for influence: Russia, Iran, the US, Israel and Turkey. The latter has been backing one of Syria’s armed groups, the Syrian National Army, using it to put huge pressure on the Kurdish-controlled part of northern Syria, commonly known as Rojava, which is a place of relative calm and order in the country. The Kurds, meanwhile, have two powerful paramilitary groups, the People’s Protection Units and the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, as I outlined in a recent column.

These Turkish-backed forces and the Kurds have been involved in sustained fighting over the strategically important Tishrin Dam on the Euphrates River. The concern of informed US State Department analysts is that the Kurdish forces opposing Turkey will become so pressurised that they will not also be able to maintain the prison camps housing those many thousands of ISIS followers, enabling them to disperse and then do much to speed up the whole process of an ISIS new age.

During his first term in the White House, Donald Trump made much of his claim that he had reduced US involvement in “foreign wars”. That may have been a bold claim and certainly not supported by the chaos in Afghanistan, but the signs are that he will push that line even more the second time around.

The focus of the Trump White House may well be on Israel and Gaza, but given what is unfolding in Syria his first major foreign military challenge may turn out to be ISIS, not Hamas.

openDemocracy · by Paul Rogers

19. For the Incoming Administration: Remember Before Relegating or Dismissing NATO

Excerpts:

To prevent the uprisings that lead to war, there is a calming effect when North Americans are engaged in Europe – perhaps simply because of signaled commitment by the leader of the free world. As NATO was created, “the allies believed that by signing the North Atlantic Treaty and maintaining NATO … they were insulating themselves, and their citizens, from appeasement and ultimately a war that no one, on either side of the Iron Curtain, wanted.” In other words, NATO is as important in protecting the citizens of its nations from Russia’s threats of war as much as it is from war itself. 

Given the above, Ismay’s bluntness in 1949 might translate today to “keep the Russians out, the Americans and Canadians in, and European nationalism down.” American leadership in NATO and presence in Europe is essential to these ends. 

The two historical points on NATO’s response to 9-11 and their reasons for existence – as well as the specter of counterarguments to continued U.S. commitment – laid out above highlight how NATO, to Americans as well as Europeans, is more than a matter of monetary cost, geographic priority, or even security against a resurgent Russian threat. It is those things and much more, based on principles and relations which are more enduring and significant when compared to the historical folly of near-term cost savings and short-sighted national interests. U.S. presence, engagement, and commitment to Europe remain as important today as it did in 1949. Security responsibilities should not be relegated and divided to the extent that Europe is left on its own – only for the U.S. to have to expend the blood of its sons and daughters for a third great war. American commitment to Europe and leadership within NATO must be maintained to spare us that expense. 

For the Incoming Administration: Remember Before Relegating or Dismissing NATO

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/01/17/for-the-incoming-administration-remember-before-relegating-or-dismissing-nato/

by Commander John Montonye, USN (Ret.)

|

01.17.2025 at 03:25pm

When it comes to the next U.S. administration’s approach to security matters in Europe, the tea leaves don’t appear to bode well for those who consider transatlantic relations a bedrock of world peace and prosperity. Within days of a meeting between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Secretary General Mark Rutte and U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, Rutte implored “citizens living in NATO countries, especially in Europe and Canada, it’s you I’m talking to. It’s your support I need,” and added that “the security situation is ‘undoubtedly the worst’ in his lifetime.” The absence of the U.S. in his mention is what grabbed my attention, seeming to confirm the “America First” movement’s vanguard voices of Vivek Ramaswamy, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump Jr. as harbingers of what is to come. 

With that said, perhaps this is all just part of Trump’s approach to broker favorable near-term deals. As former (and respected) Ambassador James Jeffrey recently cautioned, “no one can predict how any president is going to act in the future.” He then conveyed the need to confront “these various threats [namely, those led by Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping that] are ever more integrated and coalescing to form a basic global threat to the international order based on peace, prosperity and the promotion of democratic and international values we have been leading since the 1940s” – seeming to imply hope for continued commitment by the next administration. But regardless, the chatter is hard to ignore, especially as one of those strategic adversaries continues to wreak havoc in Ukraine, violating every conceivable international rule upon which the credibility of the order relies. There exists much uncertainty about U.S. intentions during this chaotic period, the likes of which, in the past, were successfully navigated thanks in large part to stalwart leadership of the U.S. on the world stage. 

Therefore, in an attempt to bridge the gap between the crazy talk of U.S. disengagement from Europe and the importance of American leadership among NATO allies in the face of aggressors hell-bent on the free world’s demise, I think some historical context might serve us well. At its core, NATO is about much more than money, or even about deterrence. While those are important considerations, I’d like to remind Americans of two other historical points that are often lost in today’s conversations. 

9-11 

The first involves U.S. security directly, and the demonstrated commitment of our allies to it. “NATO solidarity remains the essence of our alliance. Our message to the people of the United States is that we are with you. Our message to those who perpetrated these unspeakable crimes is equally clear: you will not get away with it.” These were the words spoken by Lord Robertson, NATO’s Secretary General on 9-11. The next day, the North Atlantic Council invoked Article 5 of the Washington Treaty for the first time in the history of the Alliance, treating the terrorist attacks against the U.S. as an attack upon all of the [then] 19 member nations, and committing themselves towards its defense. Within weeks, NATO deployed naval assets to the Eastern Mediterranean, acted to prevent terrorist activity in the Balkans, and directly assisted the U.S. in patrolling its own airspace with seven Airborne Early Warning and Control Systems Aircraft. Then, over the next 20 years, NATO allies slugged it out alongside American servicemen in Afghanistan to ensure no terrorist safe haven there, and led the UN-mandated International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) from 2003 to 2014.  

I personally can attest to the credible solidarity provided by U.S. alliance structures in the wake of the terrorist attacks. Deploying forward as a young Navy lieutenant to work fleet operations with Commander, Fifth Fleet in Bahrain following the 9-11 attacks, I witnessed firsthand the resolve of NATO and other allies in combatting a shared adversary. Tasked with maintaining situational awareness of coalition surface operations of naval vessels from the UK, Canada, Italy, Germany, and France, among others, I also recall Japan eagerly sending fleet oilers to aid in the response. I worked with each country’s liaisons as the fleet built up into to a massive armada spanning across the Red Sea, North Arabian Sea, and Persian Gulf. The commitment of each nation’s ships and crews to the forward fight was matched in every respect by the culturally diverse set of officers I worked with to coordinate their movements. 

It will be right for the cooler heads in the next administration’s cabinet to remember the immediate support the U.S. received from its allies in the wake of 9-11. Or as Senator Mitch McConnell reminded us all in a recent Foreign Affairs article warning about the perils of isolationism, we may want to remember that “the enemy gets a vote, too, and may decide to confront the United States simultaneously on multiple fronts, at which point allies become more valuable than ever.”  

NATO’s finer and forgotten points 

The second involves the reasons for NATO’s existence, which remain relevant today. 

NATO’s first Secretary General, Lord Ismay, stated that “the paramount, the permanent, the all absorbing business at NATO is to avoid war.” Ismay is also known for stating, rather bluntly, that NATO’s methods for ensuring this peace were “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” At the time, this rough caricature may have been appropriate. But to translate its relevance to today requires a glimpse into the context of the period, followed by a review of its finer points that still apply to America’s responsibility in NATO and Europe. 

First and for historical context, before NATO’s establishment the U.S. as a nation was beginning to comprehend the necessity of its leadership role in the post-war world. In 1947, Secretary of State George C. Marshall addressed the economic fallout in Europe following WWII, eliciting American support for aid to the continent as being in America’s direct interest. He stated that “it is logical that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace.” Clear about the stakes, he famously continued, “the whole world hangs in the balance.” With his speech on world economics and its role in forging peace, Marshall ushered in a new global perspective for America. It would carry forth two years later in the U.S.’s proactive approach to security in Europe which resulted in the formation of NATO. 

Next come the finer, often forgotten points about NATO’s reasons for existence. 

Most recognized of the original purposes for forming NATO, of course, was deterring the threat of Soviet expansion. The alliance’s founding in 1949 coincided with the evolution of their nuclear threat as well as a deterioration in diplomatic trust between the Western powers and the Soviet Union as Stalin violated every one of 48 signed agreements made at the 1945 Potsdam Agreements. This combination of threats and broken agreements was enough to spur the creation of an alliance against a menacing neighbor. 

Decades later, the cycle of broken agreements and threats were repeated as Russia inserted “little green men” into Crimea and Eastern Ukraine in 2014 and again when they launched their full-scale invasion in 2022, violating the 1994 Budapest Agreement which had ensured the security of a sovereign Ukraine. With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the invasion of Georgia in 2008, followed by endless threats and warnings against NATO nations (both conventional and nuclear), they also broke Article 2, Section 4 of the United Nations Charter, which states that “all members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” In short, “keeping the Russians out” remains as relevant to NATO’s purpose in preserving peace and prosperity today as it did 75 years ago. 

But deterrence is only part of NATO’s reason for existence. Often forgotten are the other two inducements for North American presence on the European continent. Namely, these included: [second] “to reconcile Germany’s legitimate aspirations to regain its sovereignty with Europe’s legitimate desires to regain its security; [and third] to forge a transatlantic link binding the U.S. to Europe in a durable partnership.” The matter of balancing Germany’s sovereignty with Europe’s desire for security (i.e., Ismay’s “keeping Germany down”) was immediately relevant to American assurance in the aftermath of two world wars; but decades later as the Cold War drew to a close with the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, many European and American officials remembered the concern not just about nationalist movements in Germany, but in Europe as a whole. According to Dr. Timothy Andrews Sayle, 

When American officials considered their response to changes in Europe, they looked to Europe’s past. And the past was not promising. [President H.W. Bush’s National Security Advisor Brent] Scowcroft saw no reason to believe that Europeans could avoid war on their continent without an American presence. NSC staffers agreed with columnist Steve Rosenfeld’s December 1989 piece in the Washington Post contrasting 1930s Europe with that of the 1990s: the only difference, but all the difference, was that ‘the United States was in, not out.’  

Applied more broadly today (and less crassly than Ismay conjured them), NATO’s reasons for existence remain relevant in the broader desire to guard against the threat of nationalist and extremist movements writ large. The matter of Germany, I think, may be NATO’s greatest achievement, namely in serving its reunification and inclusion into a broader European Union as a democratic nation – and American presence created the space for it. According to Peter Rodman, “Ismay was not wrong to associate the three central elements of NATO’s geopolitical purpose: to ensure the American military presence in Europe as a counterweight to Russian power and as the guarantor of the framework for Germany’s reintegration into the European system.”  

The informed counterargument 

Still, some might point to the immediate, tangible benefits of isolationism. In breaking from the day-to-day grind of 24/7 military and diplomatic engagement to maintain forward presence and keep sea lines of communication open – while ensuring peace and stability the world over – it logically follows that near-term cost savings would be realized in dropping some or all of it. It also follows that with the reduction in self-imposed demands for U.S. engagement abroad, the cash saved in operational and deployment costs might notionally be returned to the pockets of the American taxpayer. But what are the mid- to long-term costs in ceding the strategic space to aggressors who have demonstrated they are ready to fill the voids left by U.S. absence? What about the economic impacts of turning inward, when trade is no longer free – whether as the result of regional hegemons exacting tribute from merchants passing through, or the rise in piracy in unpatrolled waters? In our transatlantic alliance, what will be the costs of failing to deter an expansionist Russia, or tempering the nationalist movements NATO was intended to pre-empt by way of its “binding, durable partnership” between North American and European democracies? Such questions must be asked when considering the allure of isolationism, for history teaches the answers are both in blood and treasure. 

The next administration might also consider something less drastic, staying committed to NATO but dealing heavy-handedly with allies not pulling their “fair share” to meet minimum GDP thresholds – whether the current two percent GDP threshold or the five percent suggested by the president-elect. Spain, for example, might be a prime target given its place at the bottom of NATO contributions by in terms of percentage of GDP. Playing tough, the new administration could press the alliance to ouster Spain as a member. But for the cost savings of a few million, the U.S. and NATO in turn would conceivably lose access (which we currently enjoy at Spain’s invitation) to the naval base in Rota – a strategically valuable port guarding the entrance to the Mediterranean. Dissolving the military alliance might reasonably deteriorate diplomatic and trade relations, as well – with an ally that has been stalwart in its bi-lateral support to Ukraine, and an active, leading participant in exercises from the Baltics to the Mediterranean. Haggling over percentage points as the sole metric of contribution is dangerous business, and it ignores the strategic value NATO members like Spain deliver in their own ways. Why would we create such a void – trading stability and friendship on account of percentages – as aggressive adversaries lie in wait to fill it? 

As a final counterargument, some might point out that by leaving Europe to Europe, the U.S. would finally heed the words of America’s beloved first president, George Washington, who, having navigated the young, fragile nation under his charge as chaos and power struggles erupted from France’s revolution abroad, warned of becoming entangled in European affairs and permanent alliances. But as transportation and technological advances have created the conditions for a more connected world, the two oceans that once buffered the U.S. from it aren’t the barriers they once were. Nor should they be. Hugo Grotius’s 17th Century idea of freedom of the sea became a foundation for responsible interaction between the democratic nations which emerged in the 19th and 20th centuries as the most successful and most powerful – with the U.S. a primary beneficiary. Returning to its isolationist-leaning origins for periods during the latter did not further advance America’s rise as a world power; instead, neo-isolationist foreign policies contributed to the world’s unravelling with two world wars originated in Europe. 

In conclusion 

To prevent the uprisings that lead to war, there is a calming effect when North Americans are engaged in Europe – perhaps simply because of signaled commitment by the leader of the free world. As NATO was created, “the allies believed that by signing the North Atlantic Treaty and maintaining NATO … they were insulating themselves, and their citizens, from appeasement and ultimately a war that no one, on either side of the Iron Curtain, wanted.” In other words, NATO is as important in protecting the citizens of its nations from Russia’s threats of war as much as it is from war itself. 

Given the above, Ismay’s bluntness in 1949 might translate today to “keep the Russians out, the Americans and Canadians in, and European nationalism down.” American leadership in NATO and presence in Europe is essential to these ends. 

The two historical points on NATO’s response to 9-11 and their reasons for existence – as well as the specter of counterarguments to continued U.S. commitment – laid out above highlight how NATO, to Americans as well as Europeans, is more than a matter of monetary cost, geographic priority, or even security against a resurgent Russian threat. It is those things and much more, based on principles and relations which are more enduring and significant when compared to the historical folly of near-term cost savings and short-sighted national interests. U.S. presence, engagement, and commitment to Europe remain as important today as it did in 1949. Security responsibilities should not be relegated and divided to the extent that Europe is left on its own – only for the U.S. to have to expend the blood of its sons and daughters for a third great war. American commitment to Europe and leadership within NATO must be maintained to spare us that expense. 

The views expressed by the author are his alone, and do not represent those of the U.S. government or any organization. 

Tags: 9-11, Allies, America First, American leadership, coalition, engagement, European continent, Foreign Policy, forward presence, free world, freedom of the sea, global threats, ideals, International Law, isolationism, Nationalism, NATO, Russian threats, strategic, trade, Transatlantic

About The Author

• 
  
• Commander John Montonye, USN (Ret.)
• John Montonye is a veteran of the U.S. Navy, having served 25 years in active-duty assignments as a Surface Warfare Officer and Naval Strategist.

20. Federal employees quietly edit job descriptions to protect roles from DOGE scrutiny

Of course people want to keep their jobs. I think their actions are futile.

But this also might be a demonstration of a practical willingness to execute whatever policies are established. (they see the writing on the wall). 

What we should expect from the civil service is that they will execute the policies established by the administration regardless of personal political beliefs. Just because someone was executing the policies of the previous administration does not necessarily mean they are wedded to those policies and will not execute new policies that are established.

The new Trump administration should come into office realizing that it is now in charge and the ship of state is going to move in the direction the president orders. They should focus on implementing and executing policies and not on some vendetta to root out political opposition. Both the amsintration and the civil service should focus on professionalism and not partisanship. The administration no longer needs to use the idea of beating up on the civil service to motivate its political base. it has won the election and is in power (on Monday) and shifts from campaign mode to governing mode. There is no need for vindictive actions against the professional civil service corps.

The question is do you want to govern effectively for the good of the nation or do you just want to solve some perceived personal scores and eliminate those you hate?

Again I demonstrate my personal naivete. 

Federal employees quietly edit job descriptions to protect roles from DOGE scrutiny | CNN Politics

CNN · by Hadas Gold, Rene Marsh · January 17, 2025

Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk.

Getty Images

New York CNN —

As President-elect Donald Trump’s administration prepares to take over Washington, some federal employees are quietly changing the language of job descriptions and performance reviews in an effort to protect roles and critical government functions in the face of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

Tech billionaire Elon Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who Trump tapped to lead the outside initiative, have said they plan to recommend slashing the federal workforce, cutting the government’s annual budget by at least $1 trillion, and curbing regulations.

Ahead of the initiative’s deployment, five sources familiar with the effort, including senior staffers from multiple agencies, told CNN that some workers are removing mentions of “policy” decision-making and terms related to diversity programs from written job descriptions, duties, and performance reviews to protect the roles from possible cuts.

“People are definitely reimagining how to communicate what they’ve done and do to try and escape scrutiny,” one federal employee told CNN.

Even among those who support efforts to streamline the government and make it more efficient, some fear the effort will be ham-handed. One concern among federal workers is that DOGE will suggest cuts using a “hatchet not a scalpel” and utilize artificial intelligence to target buzzwords in job descriptions without carefully studying the roles, some said.

DOGE does not have any direct power to make spending cuts, regulatory changes or other moves —– that authority belongs to Congress — though Musk’s comments have been shown to carry weight with lawmakers. While the DOGE effort exists outside of the government and will likely provide recommendations, Musk is reportedly set to have an office inside the White House.

Representatives for DOGE, Musk and Ramaswamy did not respond to CNN requests for comment.

The employees CNN spoke with said the moves were not part of a larger, coordinated effort across agencies. Instead, managers in some agencies are taking it upon themselves — some under the directive of the agency’s top appointees — to safeguard positions and policies. While some are concerned about losing their jobs and livelihoods, multiple employees told CNN they were also trying to protect roles critical to an agency’s function.

Elon Musk, with his son on his shoulders, and Vivek Ramaswamy walk on Capitol Hill in Washington DC on December 5, 2024.

Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Sipa/AP

Schedule F set to return

President-elect Donald Trump, who has derided civil servants as agents of the “deep state,” promised on the campaign trail to reinstate a 2020 executive order known as Schedule F which created a new job category for federal employees in policy-related positions. The order removed much of the federal protections for civil servants, making it easier to fire workers. President Joe Biden has later cancelled the order shortly after taking office.

Ahead of the order’s possible reinstatement, one senior staffer said they were advised by their agency’s “front office” to edit “any job description that mentioned policy.”

“Managers could elect to just quietly tweak a career officials’ job description so that the functionality of the job stayed the same but would say ‘provide guidance’ instead of ‘provide policy guidance’,” the staffer told CNN. “It makes their role seem less policy and political orientated.”

Targeting DEI

Other federal employees said there was more of a focus on editing out anything related to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs (DEI) efforts that have become a right-wing bogeyman Musk has vowed to purge from the government.

Another staffer at a different agency said that since Election Day, more people have stopped the use of DEI terms in performance appraisals and in hiring processes.

One person familiar with the effort said some federal employees fear that could mean roles that have nothing to do with DEI policies will be targeted as well. As one example, the person said employees may edit job descriptions for finance roles that use the words “equity” or “diversification,” even though they have nothing to do with DEI programs. The fear, the person said, is the incoming administration will attempt to cut anything with these buzzwords without looking closely at the context.

Jason Briefel, head of policy and legislative affairs at the Senior Executive Association, which represents thousands of the most senior career members of the federal government, confirmed to CNN some individuals at federal agencies are making edits around issues like DEI policies.

“It’s in line with what lots of organizations and the private sector are doing, changing the words they use,” Briefel said.

CNN · by Hadas Gold, Rene Marsh · January 17, 2025

21. Modernizing and Simplifying Defense Resourcing: Updated and Expanded PPBE Reform Report Released

The 46 page report can be accessed here: https://media.defense.gov/2025/Jan/17/2003629812/-1/-1/1/DOD-PPBE-REFORM-IMPLEMENTATION-PLAN.PDF

The question is can this process really be reformed?

Modernizing and Simplifying Defense Resourcing: Updated and Expanded PPBE Reform Report Released

defense.gov

An official website of the United States Government

Here's how you know

Official websites use .gov

A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS

A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Release

Immediate Release

Jan. 17, 2025 |×

Share

The Department has released an updated and expanded Department of Defense: Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution Reform Implementation Report, which replaces the DoD's March 2024 Implementation Plan for the Recommendations from the Commission on PPBE Reform's Interim Report.

The future of the Department lies in the continued ability to outpace global competitors and the flexibility to deliver results at the speed of relevance. The Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution (PPBE) process has been a cornerstone of the Department for over 60 years. However, in response to the evolving geopolitical and national security landscape, the Department must continue to enhance the PPBE process through improving agility, flexibility, and responsiveness, to better support the National Defense Strategy, defend the nation and its interests, and improve capability delivery to the warfighter.

This report provides an overview of the implementation of 26 PPBE reform initiatives from the Commission on PPBE Reform. These efforts will have far reaching impact and are designed to be implemented in a phased and iterative manner, with regular assessments and progress updates to ensure the reforms are achieving their intended goals by 2028.

The success of PPBE reform relies on sustained cooperation and transparency with all stakeholders, including Congress. The Department is committed to collaborating with Congress to address legislative barriers and looking forward to the coming conversations to ensure that the PPBE process is modernized and simplified to meet the demands of the 21st century.

Read the Department's full PPBE reform implementation report here. To learn more about our vision for a modernized PPBE system and how we're working to maintain U.S. military superiority in a rapidly changing world visit the PPBE Reform webpage here. The Commission on PPBE Reform's final report can be found here.

PPBE reform

22. The 20th Century’s Lessons for Our New Era of War

What if the American people are no longer willing to pay the price for peace?

We must ask the fundamental question of what kind of world we want to live in and what are we willing to do to achieve that vision?

Excerpts:

There’s no inherent reason that they can’t find the winning formula. Eurasia’s revisionist powers are already running into resistance; they are suffering from the pathologies of their rulers and regimes. The prospect that these countries may be traveling a road that ends in encirclement and exhaustion isn’t lost on shrewd observers in autocratic capitals. Even Chinese military analysts admit that countries that take on America and its many allies typically pay an awful price. “Don’t think of Imperial America as a ‘paper tiger,’” wrote Dai Xu, a senior People’s Liberation Army officer, in 2020. “It’s a ‘real tiger’ that kills people.”

If Washington and its friends can consistently stymie this set of Eurasian ambitions, if they can bolster the order their enemies aim to weaken, if they can show that rivalry brings more pain than profit for revisionist regimes, then perhaps policies or politics in Moscow, Tehran, and Beijing will eventually mellow. As the resolution of the Cold War reminds us, countries—even ideologically radical ones—do sometimes reconcile themselves to realities they cannot change.

But don’t take anything for granted. Outlasting the Soviet Union required a 40-year struggle pervaded by threats of Armageddon. Other aspiring hegemons did dreadful damage before they fell. Today’s Eurasian powers will try to smash, subvert, or seduce the countries around them. They will hope an overseas superpower that has settled three prior confrontations stumbles in a fourth.

History suggests the odds are against them. But history also shows that surprises happen and democratic dominance is not assured. Geography shapes but strategy decides: That’s the most crucial insight the Eurasian century offers.

The 20th Century’s Lessons for Our New Era of War

Once again, Eurasian autocracies seek to upend the balance of power.

January 17, 2025, 2:30 PM View Comments (0)

By Hal Brands, a professor of global affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Foreign Policy · by Hal Brands

• U.S. Foreign Policy
• Geopolitics
• United States
• China
• Russia

America must “pay the price for peace,” said President Harry Truman in 1948, or it would “pay the price of war.” The ghastliest moments of the 20th century came when autocratic aggressors ruptured the Eurasian balance of power. Standards of morality went by the wayside in conquered regions. Autocratic spheres of influence became platforms for further predation. Countervailing coalitions, thrown together under dire circumstances, had to claw their way back into hostile continents at horrid cost. This is why Truman’s America, having paid the price of war twice in a quarter century, chose to continuously bolster the peace after 1945.

The book cover for Eurasian Century by Hal Brands

This article is an excerpt from The Eurasian Century: Hot Wars, Cold Wars, and the Making of the Modern World by Hal Brands (W. W. Norton, 320 pp., $29.99, January 2025).

There was nothing simple about this. Preventing global war was arduous, morally troubling work. It required learning the apocalyptic absurdities of nuclear deterrence. It involved fighting bloody “limited” conflicts, going to the brink over Cuba and Berlin, and preparing incessantly for a confrontation the United States and its allies hoped never to fight. The long great-power peace of the postwar era didn’t just happen; it was the payoff of a decades-long effort to make the military balance favor the free world. An important lesson, then, is that a cold war is the reward for deterring a hot one.

As the citizens of Ukraine can attest, high-intensity warfare is not some artifact of a receding past. As Israel has rediscovered, technological superiority is no guarantee against the most lethal forms of military surprise. In a Western Pacific menaced by Chinese power, the peace grows fragile. Don’t assume that revisionist states won’t simply try to seize their objectives—or that democracies must always prevail in tests of strength. The price of peace, in the present era, will be another long military competition.

Deterrence on NATO’s eastern front will require well-armed frontline states that can put up a real fight, forward-deployed alliance forces that can slow a Russian onslaught, and a NATO that can surge power into hard-to-access areas while keeping the Kremlin from using nuclear coercion to impose a settlement on its terms. That’s difficult but doable for the mightiest, most experienced alliance. The situation is more daunting in the Pacific, where the United States has no region-wide alliance, and where China’s buildup is threatening to confront America with a choice between fighting and losing a war to save Taiwan, and simply not fighting at all.

“Taiwan is like two feet from China,” President-elect Donald Trump remarked during his first term in 2019. “If they invade, there isn’t a fucking thing we can do about it.” Fortunately, securing the peace in East Asia isn’t as hopeless as the map might make it seem. The fundamental asymmetry favoring China is proximity. The fundamental asymmetry favoring its enemies is that denial is easier than control, especially when control means projecting power over large bodies of water. Forcibly seizing Taiwan, with its oceanic moat and rugged terrain, would take one of the most complex military operations in history. The outlines of a strategy for defeating—or better yet, deterring—such an assault are readily apparent.

They include turning Taiwan into a prickly porcupine, bristling with arms and ready to fight until the end; flipping geography against Beijing by making the first island chain a series of strongpoints stocked with anti-ship missiles and patrolled by lethal attack submarines, backed by a second island chain studded with U.S. air power, logistical capabilities, and long-range precision-strike aircraft; ensuring that the Pentagon has ample magazines of the torpedoes, missiles, and other munitions needed to decimate a blockade squadron or invasion fleet; and preparing to cut off China’s imports of energy and other key materials through a blockade centered on distant chokepoints that the U.S. Navy can control.

Two people are seem from behind as they are silhouetted on the beach. The sun sets on the horizon over a city skyline. Three rows of fortifications are embedded around the men in the sand along the beach.

A man stands at the edge of anti-tank fortifications in Kinmen, Taiwan, on April 9, 2023, as he takes photos of the sunset over the Chinese city of Xiamen, which is located less than three miles away. Chris McGrath/Getty Images

They include, also, knitting Washington’s regional relationships into something more capable of, and explicitly committed to, a coalition defense; readying, with other advanced democracies, severe economic and technological punishments should Beijing attack; and integrating allied defense industrial bases into a 21st-century arsenal of democracy that can sustain a long conflict. Finally, and most uncomfortably, deterrence requires possessing a credible ability to fight a limited nuclear war in the Western Pacific, if only so that China doesn’t feel emboldened, as its own arsenal matures, to use nuclear coercion to prevent the United States from intervening at all.

This formula can deny China an easy victory, while exploiting U.S. advantages—alliances, global power-projection, economic and technological leverage—to make the conflict devastating, destabilizing, and existentially dangerous for the regime of Chinese President Xi Jinping. It all sounds awful, but preparing for the unthinkable is the best way of ensuring it never occurs. It is heartening, then, that Washington and other countries are making real, in some ways historic, progress in all these areas—and terrifying that they often seem to be moving in slow motion as Beijing races to ready for a fight. “For almost 20 years we had all of the time and almost none of the money,” U.S. Army Chief of Staff George Marshall wrote as Adolf Hitler steamrolled Europe. “Today we have all of the money and no time.” The United States will eventually pay to keep key regions out of hostile hands. Far better to balance early than to balance late.

Any balancing effort begins at home, so it has become obligatory, in discussions of foreign policy, to say that America must get its own house in order. Like most clichés, it’s partly true. One thing the anti-interventionists of earlier eras got right is that America’s power is no greater than the vibrancy of its economy, society, and democracy. The twist is that if the United States had insisted on perfecting itself before going abroad to fight two world wars and a cold war in the 20th century, the world would be run by regimes less paralyzed by their imperfections. Global involvement can, in fact, be an impetus to domestic renewal: Having enemies at the gates concentrates the mind on weaknesses within the walls.

This effect endures. Washington’s turn toward great-power competition has already produced historic outlays in semiconductor manufacturing and other strategic priorities with domestic payoffs.

There is, however, a less-noticed aspect of the notion that foreign policy begins at home: The Western Hemisphere is the forgotten, vital theater of Eurasian competition. Alfred Thayer Mahan, the great American naval strategist, understood that the United States had to secure the Panama Canal and the Caribbean before it could patrol the oceans. Or, as international relations scholar Nicholas Spykman put it, the United States eventually accrued “power to spare” for intervention in distant theaters because it was supreme within its own. Hemispheric immunity and global activism went hand in hand. America’s enemies understood this, too; from the Zimmermann telegram that offered Imperial Germany’s support for a Mexican invasion of the United States in 1917 to the Cuban missile crisis, every struggle of the last century saw Eurasian powers stir the pot of political instability and anti-Americanism in Latin America, in hopes of putting Washington off-balance by putting it on the defensive in its own backyard.

A black and white photo shows people standing under large missiles on a beach.

U.S. missiles stand ready for action on George Smathers Beach in Key West, Florida, on Oct. 28, 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis. Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

Today’s Eurasian powers know the playbook. Russia and Iran have supported illiberal populists around the Caribbean basin. China is inserting itself into Latin American economies, infrastructure, and technological networks, while laying the groundwork for a larger security presence from Argentina to Cuba. One doesn’t have to think it is October 1962 all over again to understand the implications. Just as countries that dominate their home regions will have greater scope to reach into the Western Hemisphere, a presence in that hemisphere can distract and hobble a superpower used to ranging overseas. The logic of the Monroe Doctrine—the idea that the United States cannot let hostile powers or hostile ideologies hold sway in the Western Hemisphere—remains as valid as ever, even if the language needlessly offends sovereign states to Washington’s south.

Another epoch of competition foretells another effort to keep U.S. rivals from setting up shop there. Don’t be shocked if Washington eventually uses some of the same sharp-edged tools, from economic coercion to covert intervention, that it deployed in the Cold War; even enlightened democracies resort to hard measures in hard times. Yet the more the United States can pursue a negative objective—strategic denial of the Western Hemisphere to its adversaries—with a positive program of regional cooperation, the more effective it will be.

A degree of deglobalization vis-à-vis China creates opportunities for deeper regionalization of trade and manufacturing in the Western Hemisphere. Investments in sustaining the region’s strained democracies and rebuilding long-neglected relations with its militaries are good value amid intensifying international tensions. Most ambitiously, a stronger North American community—in which the United States, Canada, and Mexico are increasingly fused together economically and technologically—can counterbalance China’s forbidding heft. That’s an imposing and politically challenging agenda. But the tighter the bonds of integration within the Americas, the greater the power Washington can wield in a fragmenting world.

Much of this paints a grim portrait of the future—a future of high-octane rivalry as far as the eye can see. The Eurasian supercontinent’s vital regions and adjoining seas will see contests in “containment and counter-containment,” as China’s defense minister said in 2021. The global economy will be reshaped by the threat of war and the pressures of competition. Proxy conflicts and crises will become more common; the United States and other defenders of the prevailing order will look to punish their rivals’ missteps. Foreign policy will become a starker, more remorseless enterprise, as democratic societies rediscover that the only way to preserve a system that is liberated from the worst patterns of geopolitics is to master the ruthless practice of geopolitics in dealing with those who would bring about its demise. That may not sound appealing. But remember: Eurasian struggles are opportunities for creation.

The 20th century was a monument to humanity’s worst impulses. It was also the cradle of the freest, most flourishing age humanity has known. The worst of times led directly to the best of times; the creation of the liberal order was how a global superpower and its allies wrenched history off its destructive path. Today, old dangers are reappearing in new forms. The world no longer seems so safe from great-power war, autocratic ascendancy, the deliberate and large-scale victimization of civilians, and other scourges that characterized a long era of conflict. Keeping these specters at bay will demand another era of creation.

Most international orders are “orders of exclusion”; they suppress those on the outside by building norms, institutions, and architectures of cooperation among those within. Whether the problem is deterring aggression, defeating political warfare, or foreclosing a future in which technology entrenches and empowers tyranny, the solution involves adapting and improving the existing system that has served so many countries so well.

Parachutists are seen against a cloudy sky. Three soldiers are silhouetted against clouds tinted orange by the sunset at lower left.

U.S. soldiers watch as NATO paratroopers drop from a U.S. Air Force Hercules during a joint exercise at Bezmer airfield in Germany on July 18, 2017. Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty Images

A coalition that holds the line in crucial theaters will be one in which a globe-spanning group of countries has buttressed the norm against territorial conquest by pulling itself together—militarily, economically, diplomatically—as never before. A free-world alliance that outpaces its enemies technologically will be one that has reached new frontiers of innovation by pooling its resources and creativity in unprecedented ways. A group of democracies that defends its values will be one that has forged better methods for tackling transnational corruption and repression. A coalition that has competed effectively for global influence will be one that has embraced innovative forms of institution-building—of the sort seen with the Quad, AUKUS, and other initiatives—that adapt the architecture of international cooperation to match the most pressing modern challenges. The presence of enemies, as the British geographer Halford Mackinder once wrote, can ultimately have “stimulative” effects. The proper response to a world riven by conflict is not to junk the liberal order. It is to strengthen that order against the actors trying to bring it down.

Achieving any of this means heeding a final lesson: There is no such thing as destiny. The history of the modern era might make one think Eurasian gambits are doomed to fail—that seeking hegemony is tantamount to committing strategic suicide. After all, from Mackinder’s time onward, every Eurasian challenger was defeated, because every challenger provoked a pack of enemies that killed its prey. The 20th century led not, as Mackinder worried, to a nightmarish “empire of the world” but to a brighter existence for much of humanity. The moral arc of the universe may be long, the saying goes, but perhaps it does bend toward justice.

It’s a pleasing and profoundly dangerous notion. Each fight for Eurasia could have gone differently; the good guys didn’t have to come out on top. In World War I, a determined German Empire might plausibly have defeated the Allies and remade the system. In World War II, there were many moments when a different decision or personality might have changed the course of events. In the early Cold War, it wasn’t fate but urgent, improvised policies that saved the day. There is no law of nature that expansion must fail and tyranny must be vanquished. There is no guarantee that history takes the path of progress.

Indeed, the idea of progress would have seemed absurd for much of the last century, when it appeared that modernity had produced ever worse forms of warfare and ever more toxic types of tyranny. Progress is the product of power, deployed for constructive purposes. The moral arc of the universe was exactly what America and its allies made of it—just as the outcome of the current Eurasian struggle will hinge on their choices and commitment in years ahead.

There’s no inherent reason that they can’t find the winning formula. Eurasia’s revisionist powers are already running into resistance; they are suffering from the pathologies of their rulers and regimes. The prospect that these countries may be traveling a road that ends in encirclement and exhaustion isn’t lost on shrewd observers in autocratic capitals. Even Chinese military analysts admit that countries that take on America and its many allies typically pay an awful price. “Don’t think of Imperial America as a ‘paper tiger,’” wrote Dai Xu, a senior People’s Liberation Army officer, in 2020. “It’s a ‘real tiger’ that kills people.”

If Washington and its friends can consistently stymie this set of Eurasian ambitions, if they can bolster the order their enemies aim to weaken, if they can show that rivalry brings more pain than profit for revisionist regimes, then perhaps policies or politics in Moscow, Tehran, and Beijing will eventually mellow. As the resolution of the Cold War reminds us, countries—even ideologically radical ones—do sometimes reconcile themselves to realities they cannot change.

But don’t take anything for granted. Outlasting the Soviet Union required a 40-year struggle pervaded by threats of Armageddon. Other aspiring hegemons did dreadful damage before they fell. Today’s Eurasian powers will try to smash, subvert, or seduce the countries around them. They will hope an overseas superpower that has settled three prior confrontations stumbles in a fourth.

History suggests the odds are against them. But history also shows that surprises happen and democratic dominance is not assured. Geography shapes but strategy decides: That’s the most crucial insight the Eurasian century offers.

Books are independently selected by FP editors. FP earns an affiliate commission on anything purchased through links to Amazon.com on this page.

My FP: Follow topics and authors to get straight to what you like. Exclusively for FP subscribers. Subscribe Now | Log In

Hal Brands is the Henry A. Kissinger distinguished professor of global affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the author, most recently, of  The Eurasian Century: Hot Wars, Cold Wars, and the Making of the Modern World. X: @HalBrands

Foreign Policy · by Hal Brands

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com