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IRAN WARU.S. Is Less Prone to Oil Price Shocks Than in Past Decades
Oil is a global market, so when prices rise in one place, they rise everywhere. The current war against Iran has already raised oil prices significantly. Now, however, the United States is a major producer and exporter of oil and refined petroleum products. In addition to being less dependent on imports, the U.S. economy is much less oil-intensive than it used to be, producing more economic value with far less oil use today than in the past.
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IRAN WARTrump Should Aim to Neutralize the Iran Regime, Not Destroy It
A grassroots revolution in Iran sounds attractive, but it is far too risky. The likely outcome of dismantling the Islamic Republic is not stable democracy, but state fracture, political chaos, and radiating instability. Washington should instead aim for a defanged Islamic Republic.
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DEPORTATIONSThe Illusion of Reform: Why DHS Restraints Fail Without a Path to the Courthouse
Correcting DHS’s deplorable behavior will not be accomplished by a small tweak to the specific ways in which agents target civilians, but rather by a strong deterrent. Now is the time to demand systemic reform. We must ensure that no government agent is above the law or cloaked in immunity.
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IMMIGRATIONStudy: Texas’ Controversial Migrant Busing Program Helped Trump in 2024 Election
Texas busing programs that transported newly-arrived immigrants to Democratic-led cities boosted President Donald Trump’s vote share in affected counties during the 2024 election.
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DEMOCRACY WATCHHow to Prevent Elections from Being Stolen − Lessons from Around the World for the U.S.
President Donald Trump in his State of the Union address doubled down on his false claims that the U.S. elections system is compromised. His persistent effort to denigrate and spread distrust in the U.S. electoral process has led to speculation about how much further he might go to tilt the 2026 midterm and 2028 presidential elections in favor of candidates he supports.
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CHINA WATCHAI Governance Is not Just Top-Down in China, Research Finds
Political scientist Xuechen Chen said traditional Chinese values and market driven factors have also driven moves to regulate generative AI platforms.
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DEMOCRACY WATCHBlue States Push to Ban ICE at the Polls Amid Federal Voter Intimidation Fears
Several Democratic states are moving to bar federal immigration agents from being near polling places and other election sites, amid persistent worries that President Donald Trump will use federal law enforcement or the military to disrupt the midterm elections. DHS says it has no plans to target voting locations.
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IRAN WARCIA Agents Successfully Executed a Plan for Regime Change in Iran in 1953 – but Trump Hasn’t Revealed Any Signs of a Plan
There are lessons in effecting political change in Iran that can be taken, ironically, from the very U.S.- and British-led clandestine campaign in the mid-20th century that set Iran on the road to the intense anti-Western and anti-American sentiment that has characterized its government policy for decades.
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WAR RHETORICI’ve Studied MAGA Rhetoric for a Decade, and This Is What I See in Hegseth’s Boasts, Action‑Movie One‑Liners and Gloating Over Dominance
When Trump’s first Secretary of Defense, James Mattis, spoke, his professional tone and demeanor were a stark contrast to Secretary Pete Hegseth’s remarks on U.S.-Israeli combat operations in Iran. Hegseth not only deviated from the measured tone expected from high-ranking military officials. He flippantly employed villainous colloquialism, delivered with a combative and haughty tone, hypermasculine preoccupation with domination, giddiness about violence, and casual attitude toward death.
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THE DOLLARBookshelf: The Waning Dominance of U.S. Dollar
Perhaps the greatest threat to the dominance of the dollar may come from the US itself. US government debt is basically ‘out of control’, representing 120 percent of GDP, and neither political party has a serious plan to bring it back under control.
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PLUM ISLANDPlum Island, 1954-2026: A Requiem
Plum Island is an 840-acre island in the Long Island Sound, just off Long Island’s North Fork (New York), a short distance from Connecticut. It has been federally owned since the 19th century and was long home to the Plum Island Animal Disease Center (PIADC), a research laboratory focused on foreign animal diseases such as foot-and-mouth disease.
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PLUM ISLANDPlum Island: A History
The history of Plum Island is rich and varied, with changing times, historical context, and national challenges changing the use of the island and its purpose.
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DISASTER RESPONSEKristi Noem All but Killed FEMA. Will Her Departure Save It?
Before she was fired by President Trump, Noem raised eyebrows for an unprecedented degree of control over staffing and spending at FEMA. A growing number of critics and experts believe that Noem’s interference with FEMA may well have been illegal.
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DEMOCRACY WATCHAs Trump Pushes Voting Restrictions, States Have a Rarely Used Option to Push Back
President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress try to impose a proof-of-citizenship voter registration requirement nationwide through a long-shot proposal called the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act or SAVE America Act. Blue states would have a major tool — having separate rules for non-federal elections –with which to push back. Whether they would use it is less clear.
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THE WESTERN HEMISPHEREU.S. Supreme Court Appears Skeptical of Cuban Land Claims
Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court appeared skeptical of Cuban claims to land during two oral arguments last week in which U.S. companies were seeking to recover decades-old losses under a law targeting Cuba’s communist government.
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The long view
UNILATERAL WITHDRAWALHybrid Risks Rise as U.S. Withdraws from International Organizations
The United States’ decision to withdraw from many international organizations risks allowing Beijing and Moscow to further advance their undermining of global stability.
COMMON-SENSE NOTES // By Idris B. OdunewuThe Legacy of the Arab Spring, to Date
The Arab Spring did not simply unsettle Arab regimes. It disrupted an entire geopolitical equilibrium that had been quietly accepted for decades. What appeared at first as a series of domestic uprisings ultimately rewired regional alignments, altered great-power postures, normalized intervention, and reshaped how instability itself is managed and exploited.
NUCLEAR WEAPONSBookshelf: Why the U.S. Failed to Contain North Korea’s Nuclear Threat
Joel Wit’s new book details the failure of the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations to contain and limit North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. Wit writes that Trump had an opportunity to roll back the North Korean program, but Trump’s personal characteristics and governing style doomed the effort. Wit credits Trump’s unorthodox approach for setting the stage for the unprecedented Hanoi summit withKim Jong Un, but blames his short attention span – John Bolton said that Trump “has the attention span of a fruit fly” — for its breakdown. “The president couldn’t sit still long enough to close the deal,” Wit writes.
NUCLEAR RISKSSmall Modular Reactors and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) are widely heralded as the next major leap in civilian nuclear energy. Beneath this optimism, however, lies a growing unease within the nuclear policy community relating to the nuclear weapons proliferation and safeguards challenges that SMRs pose to the existing global nuclear governance system.
CHINA WATCH“DeepSeek Is in the Driver’s Seat. That’s a Big Security Problem”
Democratic countries have a smart-car problem. For those that don’t act quickly and decisively, it’s about to become a severe national security headache.
WAR ON VACCINESVaccine Myths That Won't Die and How to Counter Them—Part 1
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, has spent decades promoting vaccine skepticism. He has replaced scientists at different HHS such as CDC and NIH with vaccine skeptics and anti-vaccine activists. They have polluted the information environment with, and base their policy changes on, myths about the supposed risks of vaccines. Each of these myths has been studied extensively. Each has been refuted. And yet each persists, because misinformation travels faster than correction and because these myths tap into fears that are genuinely human.