“There is no plan in place to fund the Ukrainian budget after 2025. Even if the war ends by the summer of 2025, it will take some time to reduce military expenditures, leaving European nations on the hook. It’s not clear that European elites have fully understood the political costs, however much longer the war continues. With intensive, U.S.-brokered negotiations ongoing in Saudi Arabia involving separate Ukrainian and Russian delegations, hopes are rising that the Trump administration will finally be able to bring an end to the war. But even if the war ends tomorrow, it would be unwise to assume that Ukraine could reduce military spending close to prewar levels.” (03/26/25)
“[T]here’s a reason why the Enemy Aliens Act has only been used — and abused — during declared wars. If you’re not troubled by the idea that a president — any president — can simply assert that we’re in a war — without much evidence — and start deporting or imprisoning people, possibly including American citizens, without due process, I question your dedication to the Constitution and even your patriotism. But that doesn’t automatically mean the judiciary is the right institution to stop him — or empower him. That’s Congress’[s] job. Congress doesn’t have to rely on the last surviving relic of a package of laws that were reviled by Jefferson and Madison and discredited. It could write new ones. It could clarify what the president can or can’t do. It could even declare war on Venezuela or Tren de Aragua — that would clear things up in a hurry.” (03/26/25)
“President Donald Trump appears set to repeat one of the worst mistakes of his first administration: fighting an unwinnable war in Yemen. This time, it could be far worse as Trump has sent two aircraft carrier strike groups to the Red Sea, meaning Americans will be doing the fighting, not the Saudis. While the Yemeni people will bear most of the suffering from Trump’s escalation, the needless war will further bleed the American treasury and deplete our arms depots.” (03/26/25)
“It’s not surprising that key members of Donald Trump’s administration would decide to sketch out bombing plans via group chat. It’s not surprising that they would use a third-party platform (Signal) to hold this chat, bypassing 100% secure internal platforms that already exist. It’s also not surprising that a group of people this bad at their respective jobs would somehow accidentally tag in the editor of the fucking Atlantic to that chat, allowing a major press outlet to eavesdrop on their planning and then report on it. You and I have been dealing with Trumpism for a decade now. We know these people don’t give a shit. But let’s talk about the man who broke this story, because I’m not terribly certain he gives a shit, either. The man in question is Jeffrey Goldberg, who is editor-in-chief of the Atlantic and who broke the news under his own byline on Monday.” (03/25/25)
“University of California-Berkeley economic historian J. Bradford DeLong’s Slouching Toward Utopia tells the story of the breathtaking economic growth the world experienced between 1870 and 2010. While he sets his ‘grand narrative’ against the twentieth century’s not-so-brilliant political (and military) history, it is the ‘forced marriage’ of Friedrich Hayek’s free markets and Karl Polanyi’s social democracy that, for Delong, accounted for the progress of this century. Yet for Delong there’s a Hayekian serpent lurking in the Edenic garden: The neo-liberal turn in the 1980s and 1990s unhitched the ruthless logic of the market system from its social democratic buffers. This, in turn, reestablished parallel conditions for a repeat of the nationalist (and fascist) ‘countermovement’ Polanyi identified as the populist reaction to the anti-human logic of the nineteenth century’s ‘autonomous’ market system. Paradise lost. Again.” (03/26/25)
Source: The American Conservative
by W James Antle III
“It’s far from the only issue raised by the group chat seen ’round the world, but it is an extremely important one. President Donald Trump’s national-security team may have the most consequential splits on foreign policy of any Republican administration since George H.W. Bush’s a generation ago. No, the public should not have seen the entirety of that Signal communication. The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg should not have entered, or more precisely been invited into, the chat. But the substance of that conversation, and the differences of opinion displayed by different Trump principals participating, is of utmost public importance.” (03/26/25)
“People like me — small-government types who were once considered on ‘the right’ but have never reconciled ourselves to supporting Donald Trump — are often asked by our old conservative friends, ‘What happened to you? Why did you change?’ The question invites a grim chuckle, because of course we did not really change; the questioners did. They’re the ones who flipped on free trade, on the separation of powers, on Russia, for crying out loud, and a great deal else. When everyone else is shifting their convictions, it’s amazing how fast you can move just by standing still. Yet it would be strange if the big and unexpected events of the day did not cause us to rethink at least a few things. One way I have changed is that despite always believing in a small and limited government, I have become much more sympathetic to the need for building ‘state capacity.'” (03/25/25)
“For years, the Democratic political figures, liberal activists, and the resistance movement writ large have drawn morbid comfort from the fact that Donald Trump’s supporters were, frankly, quite old. The Trump phenomenon, they believed, had an expiration date sometime in the near future: Young voters would replace their parents and grandparents as demographics shifted, and all would be right — or rather, left — with the world. The 2024 election has shattered these hopes. Trump’s gains with young people are so massive that Gen Z might as well be called Gen Trump. Data guru David Shor laid bare this stark reality in an interview with The New York Times’ Ezra Klein last week; Shor walked Klein through the ramifications of his polling insights and voter analyses, which reveal a historically unprecedented rightward shift among young people, particularly young males.” (03/25/25)
Source: David Friedman’s Substack
by David Friedman
“What I am currently worried about is the potential for the present political situation to make America a much worse place, in any of several different directions. The obvious is the one that the left has been crying wolf on for a long time, development of a right wing dictatorship. The present administration claims the right to deport people into a foreign prison with no need to demonstrate that they are guilty of anything, even illegal immigration, based on a very stretched interpretation of an 18th century law. They are, sensibly, starting with the most unsympathetic victims they could find, but nothing in their interpretation of the law would prevent them from doing it to anyone else — at no point, in their view, are they required to demonstrate that their claims about the victims are true.” (03/25/25)
“Cosmopolitanism is the idea that all people on the planet are part of a global community. The philosophy of cosmopolitanism is very broad, sometimes advocating universal rules, or that we should all have the same partiality to people far away than we do closer to us. By appending the modifier ‘methodological’ to ‘cosmopolitanism,’ I mean to invoke a meaning similar to the philosophical one, but more limited to just one’s analytical method. In short, I am using the phrase ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’ simply to mean that when examining the economic effects of something, the costs and benefits to all parties affected must be taken into account. Arbitrary distinctions like race, nationality, gender, wealth, class, etc., do not determine whose costs matter and whose do not. Methodological cosmopolitanism is necessary to economic understanding.” (03/25/25)
