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‘Iran has to take a decision whether it wants to be a nation or a cause,” Henry Kissinger once said. For 47 years, the Iranian regime has answered “cause”—Islamic revolution. The Trump Administration is now paying for the privilege of asking the question anew.

Vice President JD Vance said it on CNN: “What the agreement does is fundamentally set up a structure whereby if the Iranians behave like a normal country, then we want to treat them like a normal country and welcome them to the world economy.”

Mr. Vance is using that term, “normal country,” on network after network as he tries to sell the agreement. But the regime in Iran has never shown over 47 years that it wants to build a normal country or “join the international community.” At every turn it has banked U.S. relief and concessions and used them to promote terrorism and spread its Shiite revolution.

“What the President is trying to do is actually extend the hand of peace,” Mr. Vance said on Fox. In that he echoes Barack Obama, who in 2009 told Iran’s regime, “We will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” The reply was a clenched fist.

Every U.S. President since 1979 has had the same wish, only to discover the regime had other plans. After the fall of the Shah, Jimmy Carter wanted to open a diplomatic channel with Ayatollah Khomeini’s regime and embrace it as the true voice of the people. He was rebuffed and his Presidency sunk by Iran’s seizure of the U.S. Embassy, with 52 U.S. diplomats held hostage for 444 days.

Ronald Reagan tried as well, and the Iran-Contra affair sprung from misguided hopes of getting the regime to free other U.S. hostages, and from there move past hostility. Iran had taken the hostages via the terror groups it stood up in Lebanon to spread its revolution. These proxies murdered hundreds of Americans in suicide bombings and became the template for the Iran-backed militias that sow war across the region.

George H.W. Bush tried to reach out to Tehran immediately with his inaugural address. Speaking of Americans held hostage, he told Iran, “goodwill begets goodwill.” But the regime wasn’t looking for goodwill.

Iran was responsible for terror attacks across the region, including the Khobar Towers bombing that killed 19 U.S. servicemen and injured 400 in 1996. Bill Clinton then chased the “reformist” President Mohammed Khatami with gestures and concessions in the late 1990s only to discover the real power lay with the Ayatollah, who had no interest.

George W. Bush included Iran in his “axis of evil” but declined to confront it, even as the Pentagon found it responsible for killing hundreds of U.S. soldiers in Iraq. Iran broke its nuclear program into pieces in those years but kept advancing it, lying and covering up evidence.

Next up was Barack Obama, who muted his disapproval when Iran stole the 2009 election and murdered protesters. He did the same as Iran took over in Syria by massacring Assad regime opponents. A nuclear deal was said to be a path to a wider rapprochement. Iran signed in 2015 only when it could keep its nuclear facilities, continue enriching uranium and receive cash and sanctions relief. The regime then ramped up its intervention in Syria, its missile program and its support for proxy terrorism.

Joe Biden came into office pledging to return to the nuclear deal after Donald Trump withdrew. Mr. Biden gave Iran billions of dollars and stopped enforcing oil sanctions. Iran responded with nuclear acceleration and a major war with Israel waged via proxies and then directly.

Will all of this finally change after the Israeli and U.S. bombing campaigns? Mr. Vance insisted on CNN that Iran’s regime is “a much different group of people” for whom “something has fundamentally transformed.” That’s the gamble, but there’s scant evidence for it.

The story of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s rule (1989-2026) was the devouring of the state by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. His son, Iran’s new Supreme Leader, says the only place for Americans in the Persian Gulf is “at the bottom of its waters.” The new regime clique of IRGC leaders and mullahs has fired on Gulf neighbors, U.S. forces and commercial ships throughout the cease-fire and even after this deal was announced.

But on CNBC Mr. Vance said, “you see people, both the hard-liners but also the more political people, saying ‘our relationship with the U.S. over the past 47 years has been a mistake, let’s turn over a new leaf.’” We promise that wasn’t Mr. Obama or John Kerry speaking. Like so many before it, the Trump Administration wants to believe this regime is other than what it has shown itself to be.

Sometimes miracles happen, or leaders drag their regimes in a different direction. Anwar Sadat gave his life to carry Egypt to peace with Israel. Mikhail Gorbachev forced the Soviet Union to reform. Who is the comparable new leader in Iran? No matter what was intimated in back-channel talks, the unwillingness of Iran’s regime to put substantive nuclear commitments in the memorandum of understanding is a warning.

Mr. Vance and the President seem to believe that the lure of gleaming hotels and $300 billion in investment is enough for the regime to abandon its revolutionary cause. It could have had those hotels and prosperity for decades but always chose revolution and terror. If Iran really is committed to a new direction, it shouldn’t take 60 days to find out. If the regime won’t abandon its nuclear program, it prefers revolution.

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To answer that, we need to go behind the price inflation (a rise in the average price of goods and services) to its cause: monetary inflation (the government’s expansion of its fiat currency).

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Aside from wars or natural disasters temporarily reducing supply, the only thing that can raise prices is government debasing its own money supply.

Why does everything cost 10 to 30 times more than it did when I grew up in the 1950s? That’s a huge rise, not a minor fluctuation.

Why does the hamburger that back then cost 25¢ hamburger now cost $2.50 to $3.00 at McDonald’s?

Why does the gallon of gas that cost 33¢then cost $4.00 today? And why is it that in 25 years, gas has not been below $1.00?

Why does a men’s white dress shirt that cost $5.00 in the 1950s cost $20 on clearance and $96 at Brooks Brothers?

Why is it that I had to go to Insert Symbols to find a “¢” symbol?

It’s not because the quantity of goods and services has dropped by a factor of 10 or 20. No, obviously the quantity of hamburgers, gasoline, shirts, and just about everything has not dropped but risen.

Is it the greed of businesses? Then greed is something added since the 1950s? And it’s capable of raising prices 20-fold? And the average family can and does pay twenty times more, simply because businesses demand it? Where do they get the money to pay 20 times more? What were they doing with all that money in the 1950s? Sitting on it?

Greed counts for nothing. The greed of the buyer is matched by the greed of the seller. Both want to get more for less. Both are limited by the law of supply and demand.

Here’s the key: in 1955, the median family income in the U.S. was $4,400.

Today those figures are $85,000 (Census bureau) to $103,000 (HUD).

Hugely more families have two wage-earners today, but so what? Cut the numbers in half and the growth in nominal income is still tenfold or more.

In 1955, there were only 267 individual tax returns filed in the United States with an Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) of $1 million or more. Today, 360,000 to 370,000 Americans made $1 million or more.

What percent of the US population earned less than $20,000 in 1955? 99%.

Only 1 in 100 were able to achieve the stratospheric income of $20,000.

What was the gold price in 1955? $35 per ounce. Today, it is over 100 times that ($4,215 to $4,233)

Prices are cheaper now than in 1955—in terms of gold.

An ounce of gold in 1955 would buy about 100 gallons of gas; today that selfsame ounce will buy 1,000 gallons.

In 1955, 500 ounces of gold bought an average middle-class house. Today, 500 ounces will buy four half-million dollar houses, And the houses will be bigger, and will have air conditioning and a two-car garage.

Paper money prices are about 20 times higher and gold prices are about 4 to 10 times lower.

The problem is with the government’s paper money.

Prices go up because the public, having ever more fiat money, bids them up.

So, who is “struggling” financially, due to price inflation? Those who don’t get the newly injected money fast enough–i.e., before other people who have the new money sooner bid up prices. (This is known as “the Cantillon effect,” after early 18th century economist Richard Cantillon.)

And, in the current inflation, the losers are those who didn’t buy hard assets early enough.



I said to Claude (Opus 4.8):

Inflation helps those who get the new money first and hurts those who get it last. So perhaps the complaints come from those late in getting the new money.

Claude responded:

The Cantillon effect is sound, and you’ve put your finger on a real channel. But I’d push on which version of “late” actually fits this episode, because the simplest reading — wage earners are last because wages adjust slowly — doesn’t match the 2020–2022 data, and the version that does fit is more interesting for your thesis.

Here’s the complication for the simple version. This monetary expansion was atypical. Normally new money enters through the financial system — banks, bond dealers, asset markets — and only later reaches wage earners, which is the classic case where workers are the late losers. But in 2020–21 a large share of the injection was fiscal and went straight to households: stimulus checks, expanded unemployment, the child credit. Money entered near the bottom, not only at the top. And the bottom of the wage distribution then did relatively well — that CAP piece concedes the lowest earners saw wages accelerate, and the broader research on the period documented real wage compression, with the bottom quartile gaining in real terms while the middle lagged. So “wage earners got the money last” is the part that fits worst. If anything the low-wage worker was unusually early this time.

The version that fits beautifully is the asset-price channel. Cheap money and suppressed rates inflated home and equity prices first — that’s pure Cantillon, the earliest recipients being those who already held the assets. Existing homeowners and stockholders captured the gains before consumer prices fully caught up. The people “late” in that chain aren’t wage earners generically; they’re the asset-less: renters, and the young who hadn’t bought in yet. They now face the inflated price level without ever having captured the asset gains that the early recipients pocketed. That maps precisely onto the two facts from before — housing is the loudest complaint, and the under-30s report the worst squeeze. They’re paying yesterday’s monetary expansion forward in the form of a home-price and rent level set by it.

And the textbook Cantillon loser — the saver on a fixed income holding cash, whose claim on goods is silently diluted — fits cleanly too. Retirees and savers got nothing early and absorbed the dilution. They’re genuinely “last,” in the strict sense that they never received new money at all; it just devalued what they held.

Two caveats so the framework doesn’t overreach. First, the current (2026) squeeze isn’t purely monetary anymore. Tariffs are a real relative-price shock layered on top — that’s a tax incidence story, not a money-injection-timing story, even if the felt experience is identical. Second, some of the constraint is physical, as we covered: housing supply genuinely lagged for structural reasons independent of the money. So I’d say your hypothesis is largely right but more precisely stated as: the complaints cluster among those late in the asset-price propagation and among fixed-income holders — not wage earners as such — with a non-monetary tariff-and-supply overlay that the Cantillon lens alone won’t.

The inflation is real. The struggles of the sacrificed portion of the population are real. And the cause is anti-capitalism: anti-capitalist ideas, leading to anti-capitalist opinion-leaders, leading to anti-capitalist government policies.

The solution? I can’t imagine.

Unless it’s capitalism. A system that takes the money supply out of the hands of the government.

​​​​​​​De-socializing money? Letting prices be determined by voluntary consent on a free market? Limiting government to protecting rights?

It can’t be that simple.

Or can it?

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Comment by Rick Sanders

It doesn't matter whether or not you are an American, this is your business too. The Declaration of Independence was the first time Empire (with its evil, ugly, demeaning, paying Indians for scalps of women and children; paying certain tribes to kill members of other tribes, and to bring back the foot as proof (Belgian Congo), murdering millions by famine (the British were the experts), was successfully challenged by a dignified and superior concept of mankind, with inalienable rights, creative in coherence with the creative principle in the universe! Much of the world helped the Americans defeat the British Empire (Catherine the Great, with the League of Armed Neutrality; John Paul Jones with his unparalleled and bold naval combat; the King and Queen of France with their navy, and granting Ben Franklin to set up his fundraising and Intelligence office in Paris; Spain with financial and other help; the Dutch with provision of goods via the island of St. Eustatius in the Caribbean, and became the first foreign country to salute the American flag; individual Italians played important roles, including in the language of the Declaration. Why did they all do that? Because the Declaration of Independence belongs to all of mankind, those not yet born, because it is a universal principle, or as John Keats would say, Beauty is Truth and Truth is Beauty.

So please act on this whatever way you can, wherever you are, to change the world for the better, and to assert that every human life is sacred.

Article by Dennis and Elizabeth Kucinich

The United States Congress, on the very eve of the 250th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence from Great Britain, is preparing to formally diminish American independence and sovereignty through a proposed merger and long-term integration of executive functions throughout the government, coordinated by the Department of Defense.

Treacherous provisions in the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) mandate that the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Commerce Department, and the heads of other relevant Federal departments and agencies cooperate with their Israeli counterparts for the purpose of consolidating U.S. and Israeli military activities in order to align efforts and avoid duplication.

The greatest threat to American sovereignty rarely arrives wearing the uniform of a foreign army. It often arrives through the complacency, expediency, or poor judgment of elected officials who fail to recognize the long-term consequences of the powers they surrender.

Whether motivated by political convenience, misplaced loyalty, or simple inattention, such actions can erode constitutional self-government just as surely as deliberate acts of betrayal.

No foreign nation, regardless of whether it is Israel, Britain, Canada, France, or Japan, should be integrated into permanent executive, military, technological, intelligence, and research structures in a manner that diminishes American sovereignty and democratic accountability.

The Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) recently identified Israel as a counterintelligence threat.

Under ordinary circumstances, such a finding would prompt heightened scrutiny, caution, and congressional oversight. Instead, Congress has continued advancing provisions in the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that would deepen military, technological, and strategic integration between the United States and Israel.

The legislation specifies Israel-U.S. coordination with America’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Missile Defense Agency, including the Golden Dome initiative, the United States Space Command, directed energy programs, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and other critical technologies that will shape the future distribution of power.

Of all the areas mentioned, artificial intelligence and biotechnology may have the greatest long term implications. These technologies will shape privacy, surveillance, predictive policing, digital identity systems, biosecurity, human enhancement technologies, and information control.

The Founders could never have imagined artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, or biotechnology directed by algorithms. Yet they understood a timeless truth: power must remain accountable to the people. The danger of our age is not merely that authority may concentrate in governments, corporations, or military institutions. It is that decisions of profound consequence may increasingly be delegated to technological systems that operate beyond the understanding and oversight of those whom the Constitution entrusts with governing.

The highly structured Israel-U.S. merger is included in the $1.5 trillion NDAA, in Section 219, formerly Section 224, in the House version and Section 1217 in the Senate version. It puts in place policies which will bind future Administrations.

Democracy depends on elected officials being able to alter policy. Permanent structures can make that increasingly difficult. Democracies function because citizens can change policy through elections. When military, intelligence, and technological institutions become permanently integrated across governments and bureaucracies, decision making can drift beyond the reach of voters.

The issue is not cooperation with perceived allies. The issue is whether future Americans retain the practical ability to change course through democratic means. The democratic question, regardless of the technology involved, is simple: Who governs these technologies, and for what purpose?

Will decisions remain accountable to elected representatives and the American people, or will authority increasingly reside within security agencies, military institutions, and specialized technical bureaucracies beyond meaningful democratic oversight?

The U.S.-Israel military-executive merger provisions in the NDAA advance military influence across civilian government and create precisely the conditions the Constitution was designed to prevent.

Our Declaration of Independence condemned King George III for having rendered the military independent of and superior to the Civil power and for having combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws.

The concern is not just military and executive integration with any foreign nation. It is the gradual expansion of military institutions into civilian domains including technology, biotechnology, commerce, communications, and artificial intelligence and the effect on our Republic and our freedom.

As national security priorities become embedded throughout government, civilian decision making becomes subordinate to military logic. Policies that should be determined through democratic debate become the province of security institutions, technical experts, and permanent bureaucracies.

The Founders repeatedly warned against permanent ‘s because they understood the motivations of leaders of other countries may be inconsistent with American ideals or interests. The Founders structured the government of the United States so that future Administrations would not be locked into foreign alliances which became vexatious.

If cooperation evolves into integration, future administrations will have less freedom to pursue independent diplomatic, military, technological, and economic policies. Decisions made in the name of efficiency today may limit the choices available to Americans tomorrow.

Congress is constitutionally responsible for oversight of the executive branch.

A key question is whether the military and executive merger provisions in the 2027 NDAA create new arrangements that are sufficiently transparent and reviewable by Congress. If significant military, intelligence, technological, or strategic decisions become embedded within joint frameworks, legislators may find themselves attempting to oversee systems that have acquired their own institutional momentum.

Ironclad collaborative provisions uniting Israel and the United States in the 2027 NDAA are being advanced on the basis of current political relationships and short-term strategic considerations rather than a careful assessment of their long -term institutional consequences. Congress has devoted remarkably little attention to how such an arrangement could affect American sovereignty, constitutional accountability, civilian control of the government of the United States, and the ability of future generations to alter policy through democratic means.

The question before Congress is not whether Israel is a friend today. The question is whether the permanent integration of military, technological, intelligence, research, and governmental functions with any foreign nation serves the long-term interests of the United States.

The Declaration of Independence and our constitutional system has been entrusted to our care. Aliances between nations may change. Governments change. Political leaders come and go, friendships change. Yet the structures established by law can endure for generations.

The Constitution was designed to preserve the sovereignty of the American Republic through democratic accountability, separation of powers, and civilian control of government. Any arrangement that permanently embeds foreign influence within executive, military, intelligence, technological, or research institutions will not stand once it receives the highest degree of constitutional scrutiny.

Congress has already struggled to reclaim its constitutionally based war powers. The military establishment has steadily accumulated influence across multiple domains of public policy. These provisions move further in that direction by embedding foreign military and security priorities. throughout the machinery of government.

Members of Congress swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. That oath is a sacred trust and does not abide treachery. Any measure that diminishes American sovereignty, weakens constitutional self-government, or places the powers of this Republic in alignment with a foreign authority violates both the spirit of that oath and the duty owed to every American citizen.

As America approaches the 250th anniversary of our Independence, Congress is poised to bind future generations through strategic commitments made to a foreign power today. These provisions reflect a profound failure of constitutional judgment. They elevate short term political and military considerations above the enduring duty to preserve the sovereignty, independence, and freedom of action of the United States.

The Founders warned repeatedly against arrangements that would entangle future generations in obligations they neither chose nor approved. Yet Congress now stands on the threshold of embracing precisely such an arrangement, limiting the freedom of future American leaders to chart an independent course in diplomacy, technology, security, and national defense.

Whether driven by political expediency, misplaced loyalties, institutional inertia, or a failure to grasp the long-term consequences of their actions, the result is the same: a diminished capacity for self-government and a dangerous departure from the constitutional principles that have safeguarded American independence for two and a half centuries.

On the eve of America 250th year, every citizen must decide whether independence is merely a memory to celebrate or a responsibility to defend.

Please now circulate this article to your friends and network and ask them to take urgently action

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Dennis J. Kucinich served in the United States House of Representatives from 1997 to 2013. He led efforts against wars in Serbia, Iraq, Iran, Libya, and Syria under the banner of Strength Through Peace. He was a Democratic presidential candidate in 2004 and 2008.

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The Oxford Institute for Energy Studies (OIES) is one of the world’s most respected institutions in applied energy economics. Its researchers have produced decades of authoritative work on oil and gas markets, LNG pricing and the geopolitics of energy supply. For oil and gas industry analysts, the OIES offers keen insights.

Which makes it all the more telling — and dispiriting — that OIES has chosen to hitch its wagon so firmly to the ‘energy transition’ bandwagon. The institute’s recent special edition of the Oxford Energy Forum on the Hormuz Crisis, published in late May 2026 and posted on LinkedIn on Tuesday, illustrates this contradiction. Here is an institute that simultaneously commands respect for its empirical rigour on fossil fuel markets and yet, when it comes to the ‘energy transition’, reliably produces analysis shaped by the prevailing academic and institutional orthodoxy rather than by hard-nosed economic analysis.

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This is of course no surprise. Oxford University boasts the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment which is explicitly committed to “the green transition to achieve Net Zero emissions and sustainable development”. The school’s ‘experts’ recently came out with a report that found it a “sheer fantasy” that utilising the remaining North Sea reserves of oil and gas would make UK energy more secure or that it would make valuable contribution to the economy and its households. It also claimed that renewables have become cheaper than natural gas-fired generation.

The contrast with what an independent Oxford mind can do when liberated from institutional groupthink is instructive. Sir Dieter Helm, Professor of Economic Policy at Oxford and one of Britain’s foremost energy economists, has spent years making the unfashionable but essential point that the costs of Net Zero are steep. In a recent podcast discussion and on his own website, Helm has repeatedly argued that “it is important to tell the public the truth, that it’s going to cost you” to decarbonise. An individual of Helm’s stature can afford intellectual honesty. An institution with funding streams, conference participation and reputational stakes in the ‘Net Zero consensus’ is in a far more constrained position.

The Hormuz crisis: what it actually reveals

The US-Israeli attacks on Iran in late February 2026 and the subsequent disruption of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz have generated what OIES itself describes as “one of the most severe energy shocks in modern history”. Daily transit through the strait has largely ground to a halt. Global LNG supply has been cut by around 20%. Gulf crude and liquids production losses have been estimated at close to 12-15 million barrels per day. Asian governments have scrambled to conserve fuel, release strategic reserves and secure alternative supplies from the United States and West Africa.

As an aside, it is now emerging that the lost Gulf oil exports are far smaller than thought, according to traders and shippers speaking to Reuters. Current disruptions could be as small as five to six million barrels per day as logistics adjust and different routes and means of transport alleviate scarcity.

The Hormuz crisis is, above all, a sharp reminder that the world still runs on fossil fuels — and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. The Strait of Hormuz is barely 21 miles wide at its narrowest point, yet it carries approximately one-fifth of the world’s oil consumption and a similar share of global LNG trade. When crisis strikes, governments do not reach for intermittent renewable power. They rely on alternative sources of oil and gas and reducing consumption where possible. They release strategic petroleum reserves. They negotiate emergency LNG cargoes. They did not, it bears pointing out, plug in a few extra solar panels or go on a hurried campaign to build wind farms in the expectation that this would bail their economies out.

This is not a peripheral observation. It reflects the current state of global energy security. The OIES Hormuz special report treats the issue rather awkwardly — acknowledging the severity of the shock on one hand, while on the other nudging readers toward the conclusion that the crisis accelerates the case for energy transition.

The persistence of institutional groupthink

The OIES, to its credit, has done serious applied economic work on the mechanics of the Hormuz shock — the effects on refinery runs, crude trade flows, product markets and freight. Bassam Fattouh and his colleagues at the Oil and Middle East Programme have produced genuinely useful analysis. But the institute cannot help itself when it comes to the wider policy framing. The energy transition narrative is embedded in the DNA of how OIES frames its work, from its Energy Transition Research Programme to the recurring suggestion that crises like Hormuz should prompt a faster shift toward renewables.

Here one is reminded of a broader phenomenon in academic institutions. Even after the IPCC quietly abandoned its own extreme RCP8.5 scenario as “implausible”, most academic institutions have failed to reset their Net Zero advocacy. This despite the fact that this doomsday “business-as-usual” emissions pathway has underpinned thousands of alarming climate projections and much of the justification for urgency around the ‘energy transition’. It would seem, to turn the tables here, the “new deniers” are those who persist in ignoring what the IPCC’s own retraction of its most extreme scenario means for the cost-benefit calculus of aggressive decarbonisation policies. Roger Pielke Jr. has documented this with characteristic rigour, noting that “the policy machinery built on RCP8.5 and other implausible scenarios is systemic”. Institutional inertia, in other words, outlives the ‘scientific’ basis that once seemingly justified it.

OIES is not immune to this inertia. An Oxford institution with the OIES’s profile simply cannot afford, in the current academic and funding environment, to adopt a posture that the energy transition narrative is bereft of economic logic. Independent scholars like Prof. Helm can afford heterodox conclusions. Institutions with stakeholder relationships across governments, international agencies, and ESG-sensitive corporate partners cannot — at least not easily.

The developing world has made its choice

Perhaps the most egregious analytical failing in the energy transition orthodoxy that the OIES report implicitly endorses is the claim that developing countries are now embracing intermittent renewables as a route to reducing their exposure to oil and gas geopolitical disruptions — such as the Hormuz closure. This is not borne out by the evidence.

The reality is that we are seeing precisely the opposite response. Many Asian countries most exposed to the Hormuz shock are doubling down on coal as the reliable, dispatchable foundation of their energy systems. Authorities in South Korea have, among other immediate actions such as price caps, lifted restrictions on coal-fired generation. India has directed coal plants to operate at maximum capacity, leveraging domestic reserves to stabilise electricity supply. Bangladesh, Thailand and Vietnam have also increased coal outputs as energy security concerns mount. China appears to have been be somewhat shielded from Middle East conflict-driven price shocks by its significant energy reserves and diversified energy supply. Policymakers in these countries, in the main, realise the need for greater dispatchable generation capacity, more storage of fossil fuels and a diversified supplier portfolio.

Why? Because no country has ever successfully industrialised on the basis of non-dispatchable, intermittent wind and solar power. Not one. The historical record is unambiguous, as Vaclav Smil’s monumental work attests to. Every nation that has achieved sustained economic development has done so on the back of reliable, affordable, continuous energy — coal, oil, gas, hydro, nuclear. Given prohibitively expensive battery storage, wind and solar with their requirement for dispatchable backup power generation cannot fill that role at scale.

The empirical picture is consistent: the global energy system is not transitioning away from fossil fuels on any timescale relevant to current policy debates. Demand for oil, gas, and coal continues to grow in the developing world, even as Western nations (minus Trump’s America) add renewable capacity at enormous cost to their consumers and to grid stability.

The myth of cheap renewables

Central to the energy transition narrative — and one that pervades the policy framing OIES adopts — is the false claim that solar and wind are now cheaper than fossil fuels. This claim deserves to be demolished clearly and firmly, because it rests on a fundamental confusion between marginal costs and system costs. The Levelised Cost of Energy (LCOE) — the misleading metric used to declare renewables the cheapest option — captures only the costs of generating a unit of electricity from a wind farm or solar panel in isolation. It entirely ignores the system costs imposed on the wider grid by intermittent generators. It is indeed time to stop pretending that renewables are cheap.

These system costs are substantial. They include the cost of backup generation (gas peakers, typically) that must be kept on standby for when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine; the cost of grid balancing and frequency regulation; the cost of transmission infrastructure to connect remote wind and solar sites to load centres; and the cost of battery or pumped hydro storage. When these system costs are properly accounted for, the ‘cheap renewables’ claim collapses. Prof Helm makes essentially the same point on his website, noting that renewables are “capital-intensive” as they share the economics of utilities — large fixed and sunk costs — not the zero-marginal-cost miracle that their promoters claim.

It would be unfair to single out OIES as uniquely captured by energy transition orthodoxy. The same institutional pressures operate on virtually every major academic energy research centre in the Western world. The European University Institute, the International Energy Agency, Imperial College London’s Energy Futures Lab, UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose — all operate within a funding and reputational environment that makes heterodox conclusions about energy transition punitively costly to publish and defend.

The OIES has done important work on the mechanics of the Hormuz shock. It has tracked the effects on refining runs, crude trade flows and product markets with characteristic professionalism. The institute’s Bassam Fattouh and colleagues at the Gas Programme have produced genuinely useful analysis on what the LNG market disruption means for Europe and Asia. None of this is in question. The issue is the policy framing that surrounds and shapes this otherwise solid empirical work — a framing that consistently tilts toward energy transition conclusions that the institution’s own market analysis does not support.

Reality has not read the transition roadmap

The Hormuz crisis of 2026 has delivered the most powerful empirical rebuke to energy transition orthodoxy in a generation. When the chips are down — when a military conflict significantly reduces global oil and LNG supply — every government on the planet responds with the same toolkit: strategic petroleum reserves, emergency fossil fuel procurement and access to alternative oil and gas suppliers. Not a single country activated its ‘renewable resilience strategy’. Not because the idea of wind and solar power is wrong in principle, but because the physical reality of intermittent, weather-dependent energy makes it unsuitable for crisis management or for long-run development.

Respected institutions like OIES do their best work when they apply rigorous economic analysis to energy markets without fear of where it leads. The Hormuz crisis has given them — and us — a vivid, real-world experiment in what the global economy actually runs on. The honest conclusion from that experiment is not that we need to accelerate the energy transition on the basis of some presumed ‘climate crisis’. It is that the world’s dependence on oil, gas and coal is profound, structural and not going anywhere soon. A world-class research institution ought to be able to say so without the ‘energy transition’ hedge.

This article was first published in the Daily Sceptic [https://dailysceptic.org/2026/06/21/the-oxford-institute-letting-climate-ideology-bias-its-research/]

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Last week, I wrote about I wrote about Tessa Khan, funded by European and American philanthropists, who uses the courts to impose Net Zero policies voters have rejected at the ballot box. She spoke at an invitation-only gathering of politicians, journalists and policy figures assembled at Westminster Central Hall last November.

This week, I turn my attention to one of her colleagues who spoke to the same invitation-only gathering of over 1,200 politicians and business leaders for the so-called National Emergency Briefing (NEB) — supposedly an “expert-led” briefing to address the UK’s “climate and energy crisis”.

The “briefing” event was supported by an array of organisations ranging from the National Trust and WWF to the National Education Union and the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds). Of the 10 featured speakers, each introduced as a leading expert in their field, the slot for “economics” was given to Angela Francis, a self-styled “low carbon economist” and Director of Policy Solutions at WWF-UK. The audience, carefully selected, received her message with the reverence one might accord a scientific briefing.

This is a pattern that should by now be familiar to anyone who follows the climate-industrial complex in the United Kingdom. A convener with activist credentials assembles a sympathetic audience, presents a line-up of credentialled speakers and proceeds to make policy advocacy sound like dispassionate expert testimony. The format — emergency briefing, Westminster — is chosen for its associations with urgency and authority. What it actually delivers is something rather different: a well-rehearsed set of green talking points dressed in the language of economics, presented to people who will not ask inconvenient questions because they have not been invited to do so.

The accountant turned green economist

What are Francis’s qualifications? Her biography, as it appears on the NEB website and elsewhere, follows a well-trodden path. She began her career as an accountant in the energy industry before pivoting into what she describes as “economic development”, working for the East of England Development Agency and the consultancy SQW on productivity and “low-carbon growth”. She served as regional economist and climate attaché for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in the Caribbean. She then became chief economist at Green Alliance, a prominent environmental advocacy organisation, before moving to WWF, where she now leads on climate, trade and industrial policy. Francis – like her fellow travellers in the big government climate bandwagon Mariana Mazzucato and Thomas Picketty — operates in a familiar tradition: the economist-as-advocate whose output is less an analysis of trade-offs than a brief for a predetermined conclusion.

Several things are worth noting about Francis’s professional trajectory. First, the Green Alliance is not a research institution. It is a lobbying organisation whose explicit mission is to advocate green policies. Her title there was chief economist, but her role was to make “the economic case for a low carbon and circular economy” — that is, to produce analysis in support of a conclusion that had already been reached. This is a species of work that often travels under the name of economics but one searches in vain for the principles of economics at work. The same is true of her current position at WWF, which is, whatever one thinks of its conservationist work, an advocacy organisation with a defined mission to advance Net Zero and nature-positive policies.

Second, her public biography reference does not include any graduate training in economic theory or quantitative methods. She has, over a 20-year career, worked at the intersection of advocacy and policy, with little economics in between. This does not disqualify her views from consideration. But it is worth holding in mind when she is introduced — and when she introduces herself — as an “economics expert” giving a “briefing” to parliamentarians and business leaders at Westminster Central Hall.

The bad arguments, examined

Let us examine what Francis actually said at the NEB, drawing on the published transcript of her remarks.

Her first major claim is that markets are, in her words, “broken” because they “take for granted a stable climate, clean air, fresh water, pollinators” — and that fixing this requires government to “set new rules of the game”. This is, on the face of it, a version of the standard Pigouvian argument about negative externalities: that pollution imposes costs on third parties not captured in market prices, and that corrective taxes or regulation can in principle address this. The argument is not wrong as far as it goes. Mainstream economics has for a century recognised that pollution constitutes a market failure, and that governments can legitimately intervene to price it.

But Francis elides something important. The standard Pigouvian toolkit — targeted taxes on specific pollutants, tradeable emission permits, the correction of discrete negative externalities — is a very different thing from the wholesale rewriting of market rules to mandate a Net Zero economy. The former is orthodox economics; the latter is a dirigiste programme of industrial transformation whose costs and unintended consequences are, to put it mildly, not trivial. The rhetorical move — from ‘markets have failures’ to ‘therefore government must redesign the entire economy in line with green objectives’ — is not an exercise in economic analysis. It is a political programme dressed up as a logical deduction.

Furthermore, the claim that CO₂ is straightforwardly a ‘pollutant’ in the same category as sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides or particulate matter deserves more scrutiny than Francis gives it. As both the Princeton physicist William Happer and the CO₂ Coalition have extensively documented, carbon dioxide is not toxic, does not damage lung tissue, and is — as any plant biologist will confirm — an essential input to photosynthesis. The economic case for taxing or restricting CO₂ rests on its hypothesied effect on global mean temperature over decadal timescales — a genuinely complex, highly uncertain and contested matter — not on any direct toxicological harm. Treating it as analogous to lead or mercury in the air reflects advocacy framing, not careful economic reasoning.

On costs: the ‘affordable’ Net Zero

Francis devotes considerable energy to rebutting what she calls the “bad argument” that the UK cannot afford Net Zero. Her central claim is that the investment required to stay on the Climate Change Committee’s (CCC) balanced pathway amounts to approximately £4 billion per year — roughly 0.2% of GDP — and that this cost is modest, largely fundable by the private sector, and “pays back” from 2041 onward. She also cites research from the Oxford Martin School and the Smith School to the effect that a rapid energy transition saves $12 trillion globally compared to staying on fossil fuels.

These figures deserve serious scrutiny, because they are far more contested than Francis implies. The CCC’s own estimates of the cost of the Net Zero transition have been revised upward repeatedly. Analysis by David Turver and others such as Dieter Helms – often called Britain’s leading energy economist — have argued that the full system costs of replacing dispatchable fossil fuel generation with intermittent renewables, including the necessary grid upgrades, backup capacity, storage and demand management, are substantially higher than official figures suggest. Germany, Europe’s largest economy and the country that pursued the green transition most aggressively in the previous decade, has seen industrial electricity prices rise to levels that have driven major manufacturers to shift production abroad or close domestic operations entirely.

The Oxford-Smith claim that ‘faster is cheaper’ deserves particular scepticism. This is a modelling result, and models are, as Francis herself acknowledges in passing, “simplifications”. They help answer specific questions, but they do not include everything. The specific model behind the $12 trillion figure — the FAST-Transition model developed at Oxford — has been criticised for assuming away the system integration costs of a rapid renewable build-out: the costs of intermittency, of stranded assets, of supply chain bottlenecks, of the social disruption attendant on rapid structural change. The claim that faster transition is cheaper is precisely the kind of result that sounds counterintuitive — and that should therefore prompt the question: what has the model left out?

The contrast with the mainstream of academic climate economics is instructive. Bjorn Lomborg, drawing on the work of Nobel laureate William Nordhaus and the integrated assessment models that Nordhaus pioneered, has consistently argued that the costs of aggressive near-term decarbonisation — particularly the 1.5°C and 2°C targets championed by the UN and the UK’s CCC — substantially exceed the benefits when properly discounted over time. Nordhaus’s own “optimal” carbon tax trajectory implies warming of around 3.5°C by the end of the century — well above the targets that Francis and the NEB treat as non-negotiable constraints. This is not fringe opinion: Nordhaus shared the 2018 Nobel Prize in Economics precisely for this work. The point is not that Nordhaus is certainly right and Francis certainly wrong. The point is that the academic literature contains serious, rigorous work pointing in a very different direction from the one Francis confidently sets out — and that literature goes entirely unacknowledged in her briefing.

On inflation and living standards

Perhaps the most arresting claim in Francis’s NEB talk is her assertion that the UK’s post-2022 inflation crisis would have been significantly mitigated had the country decarbonised earlier. Specifically, she argues that inflation would have been 7% lower with earlier power sector decarbonisation, 9% lower without the fossil-fuel link in food prices via fertiliser, and 11% lower with earlier heat pump adoption.

These are extraordinary numbers. They would, if true, represent the most compelling argument for rapid decarbonisation imaginable: not merely that it is allegedly good for the environment in the long run, but that it would have saved ordinary British households from several years of real income decline. But the empirical record points the other way. The UK and Germany, which have invested most heavily in renewable energy, saw some of the sharpest energy price increases in Europe when Russian gas supplies were curtailed — not because they had too much fossil fuel in their systems, but because they had dismantled too much dispatchable backup capacity and remained, at the margin, dependent on the gas price to balance their grids. The high fixed costs of renewable systems do not insulate consumers from price shocks; they merely change the nature of the exposure. And the intermittency problem — which Francis does not address — means that as renewable penetration rises, so does the need for expensive grid balancing services, ultimately paid for by consumers.

The NEB: emergency format, activist content

The NEB itself merits a word. It was founded and is run by the brothers Simon and Nick Oldridge, whom the organisation’s website describes as “climate funders and communicators with a background in business”. It is supported by WWF — Angela Francis’s employer — as well as the RSPB, the National Trust and a host of other environmental and civil society organisations. Its stated aim is “to inform every MP about the crisis” and to persuade the Government to stage a primetime televised emergency briefing on climate. An Early Day Motion was tabled in the House of Commons in May 2026 endorsing the NEB’s findings.

This is not a research institution. It is a lobbying initiative with the trappings of an expert briefing. The invocation of “emergency” is not a scientific judgement but a rhetorical choice — one designed to foreclose debate by suggesting that questioning the analysis is tantamount to recklessness in the face of imminent catastrophe. The format — ten experts, Westminster Central Hall, invited audience of the great and good — is engineered to produce precisely the kind of impression that Francis’s economics slot is designed to reinforce: that the case for rapid, comprehensive, government-directed green transformation is so overwhelming that it requires only briefing, not debate.

It is always Government’s job, as Francis herself concedes, to distinguish between the overall public interest and the interests of those lobbying most loudly. The NEB is lobbying, done with considerable sophistication. Independent scrutiny of its economic claims — the kind of critical engagement that a genuine parliamentary or academic forum would provide — is notably absent from its format. This is a design choice, not an oversight.

A note on epistemic humility

What the NEB’s economics slot does not offer is a serious engagement with those trade-offs. Francis presents a series of large numbers — £4 billion per year, $12 trillion saved, 0.2% of GDP — as if they were established facts rather than modelling outputs that are driven by implausible assumptions. And now we learn that the IPCC itself has ditched its extreme scenario (cast as “business as usual”).

She dismisses the counterarguments — that Net Zero is unaffordable, that the UK cannot act alone, that transition costs will raise the cost of living — as “bad arguments” and dispenses with each in a few sentences, without engaging with the substantial body of academic work that supports them. The audience at Westminster Central Hall was not in a position to push back. Parliament, the media and the public should be. The UK has no shortage of genuine economic expertise. It is past time to insist that it be brought to bear.

A version of this article was published in the Daily Sceptic https://dailysceptic.org/2026/06/19/yet-another-climate-activist-masquerading-as-an-economist/

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Today is the federal holiday honoring Juneteenth, the celebration of the announcement in Texas on June 19th, 1865, that enslaved Americans were free.

That announcement came as late as it did because while General Robert E. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant of the U.S. Army on April 9, 1865, it was not until June 2 that General Edmund Kirby Smith surrendered the Trans-Mississippi Department, the last major army of the Confederacy, to the United States, in Galveston, Texas. Smith then fled to Mexico.

Seventeen days later, Major General Gordon Granger of the U.S. Army arrived to take charge of the soldiers stationed in Texas. On that day, June 19, he issued General Order Number 3. It read:

“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.”

Granger’s order referred to the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, which declared that Americans enslaved in states that were in rebellion against the United States “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons.” Granger was informing the people of Galveston that, Texas having been in rebellion on January 1, 1863, their world had changed. The federal government would see to it that, going forward, white people and Black people would be equal.

Black people in Galveston met the news Order No. 3 brought with celebrations in the streets, but emancipation was not a gift from white Americans. Black Americans had fought and died for the United States. They had worked as soldiers, as nurses, and as day laborers in the Union army. Those who could had demonstrated their hatred of enslavement and the Confederacy by leaving their homes for the northern lines, sometimes delivering valuable information or matériel to the Union, while those unable to leave had hidden wounded U.S. soldiers and helped them get back to Union lines.

But white former Confederates in Texas were demoralized and angered by the changes in their circumstances. “It looked like everything worth living for was gone,” Texas cattleman Charles Goodnight later recalled.

In summer 1865, white legislators in the states of the former Confederacy grudgingly ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished enslavement except as punishment for a crime. But they also passed laws to keep freedpeople subservient to their white neighbors. These laws, known as the Black Codes, varied by state, but they generally bound Black Americans to yearlong contracts working in fields owned by white men; prohibited Black people from meeting in groups, owning guns or property, or testifying in court; outlawed interracial marriage; and permitted white men to buy out the jail terms of Black people convicted of a wide swath of petty crimes and then to force those former prisoners into labor to pay off their debt.

Congress refused to readmit the southern states with the Black Codes in place, and in December 1865, Americans added the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Six months later, Texas freedpeople gathered on June 19, 1866, to celebrate the anniversary of the coming of their freedom with prayers, speeches, food, and socializing.

By then, congressmen had turned to guaranteeing that states could not pass discriminatory laws against citizens who lived in them, laws like the Black Codes. In 1866 they wrote and passed the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Its first section established that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” It went on: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

That was the whole ball game, the one that would put teeth behind the principles in the Emancipation Proclamation. The federal government had declared that a state legislature—no matter who elected it or what voters called for—could not discriminate against any of its citizens or arbitrarily take away any of a citizen’s rights. Then, like the Thirteenth Amendment before it, the Fourteenth declared that “Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article,” strengthening the federal government.

Rather than accept this new state of affairs, leading white southerners decided they would rather remain under military rule. So in March 1867, Congress passed the Military Reconstruction Act, calling for southern voters to elect delegates to new state constitutional conventions. And, for the first time in U.S. history, they mandated that Black men could vote in those elections.

Three months later the federal government, eager to explain to Black citizens their new voting rights, encouraged “Juneteenth” celebrations, and the tradition of Juneteenth began to spread to Black communities across the nation. The next year, the addition of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution remade the United States of America.

In 1865, Juneteenth was a celebration of freedom and the war’s end. In 1866 it was a celebration of the enshrinement of freedom in the U.S. Constitution after the Thirteenth Amendment had been ratified. In 1867, Juneteenth was a celebration of the freedom of Black men to vote, the very real power of having a say in the government under which they lived.

Celebrations of Juneteenth declined during the Jim Crow years of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but as Black Americans from the South spread across the country during and after World War II, they brought Juneteenth with them. By the 1980s, Texas had established Juneteenth as a state holiday. Other states followed, and in 2021, thanks in part to pressure from activist Opal Lee, Congress made Juneteenth a federal holiday and President Joe Biden signed the measure into law.

But throughout our history, those determined to preserve a government that discriminates between Americans according to race, gender, religion, ability, and so on, have embraced the idea that true democracy requires skewing the vote toward the wealthy and white men. They have also insisted, as former Confederates did in the late 1860s, that any laws protecting the equal rights of minorities discriminate against the white majority.

Today, those voices are, once again, gaining traction. One hundred and sixty-one years after Juneteenth was established, we are in danger of losing the new nation that it celebrated—one that would honor the equality of all Americans.

—

Notes:

https://www.archives.gov/news/articles/juneteenth-original-document

J. Evetts Haley, Charles Goodnight: Cowman and Plainsman (1949; rpt. University of Oklahoma Press, 1981).

https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/13th-amendment

https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/14th-amendment

https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp

https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/juneteenth

https://www.tsl.texas.gov/ref/abouttx/juneteenth

https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured-documents/emancipation-proclamation/transcript.html

https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/18/us/juneteenth-cancelations-trump-dei-rollbacks

https://apnews.com/article/juneteenth-trump-diversity-e441197492e4360f3b7a8cbbc00b5c79

https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/475

https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured-documents/emancipation-proclamation/transcript.html

https://www.npr.org/2021/06/15/1006934154/senate-unanimously-approves-a-bill-to-make-juneteenth-a-public-holiday

President Donald Trump speaks to the media upon arrival at Paris Orly airport, following the G7 Summit, in Orly, France, June 17, 2026. (Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters)

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The president abandoned his previous positions in favor of the Iranian position on all the key issues of contention going into the war.

It is impossible to describe President Trump’s deal as anything other than total humiliation.

You could argue that he had no choice, that it was in America’s best interest for him to cut his losses, and that he had to suck it up and do whatever it took to reopen the Strait of Hormuz (which, by the way, is only temporarily reopened under the current deal). But there is no credible way to argue that what has happened represents anything other than surrender.

To claim that this isn’t an embarrassment for the U.S. requires ignoring months of Trump statements before and during the war about his red lines and war aims. People are getting too focused on the text of the memorandum of understanding itself, when the text needs to be viewed with the added context of Trump’s public statements, in which he gave away the store on just about every major point of contention he claimed he had with Iran until very recently.

Trump, either in his words or in the MOU, abandoned his positions in favor of the Iranian position on: supporting anti-regime protesters; allowing the enrichment of uranium; removing Iran’s enriched uranium; and on its ballistic missile program.

To review:

• In January, Trump urged Iranian protesters to “keep protesting” and to “take over your institutions,” promising them “help is on its way.” He vowed “very strong action” if Iran executed its protesters. Iran then massacred 30,000 protesters. When Trump launched the war on February 28, he said, “To the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand. Stay sheltered. Don’t leave your home. It’s very dangerous outside. Bombs will be dropping everywhere. When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take.”

In the text of the MOU that he signed, the U.S. and Iran pledged to “refrain from interfering in each other’s internal affairs.” After agreeing to the Iran deal, Trump said, “I never really cared about regime change.” And he claimed the new leaders of Iran were “not radicalized.” Yet just this week, Iran executed two more protesters.

It is perfectly defensible for an American president to argue that democracy promotion shouldn’t be the job of the U.S. military. But Trump himself was the one who encouraged protesters to rise up, claiming he would help them.

• Trump negotiator Steve Witkoff said when talks broke down before the war that the major sticking point was that the Iranians asserted a right to enrich uranium and the Trump administration was insisting on no enrichment. Trump wrote on Truth Social in April that “there will be no enrichment of Uranium, and the United States will, working with Iran, dig up and remove all of the deeply buried (B-2 Bombers) Nuclear ‘Dust.’” Yet at the G-7, Trump said it would be unfair if other countries were able to enrich uranium and Iran was not. Furthermore, the MOU said instead of being removed, the enriched uranium would be downblended and remain in Iran — the same standard that existed in Barack Obama’s Iran deal.

• As I wrote in more detail yesterday, for nearly a decade, going back to his first term, Trump criticized Obama’s Iran deal on the basis that it allowed Iran to maintain its missile program and cited the missile threat as one of the primary reasons why he launched this war. And yet, at the G-7, Trump said it would be unfair to tell Iran it couldn’t have missiles if our ally Saudi Arabia also had missiles.

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Titles are generated by AI from Meta

The German officer came to the bakery every Thursday morning for almost a year.

The townspeople hated seeing him.

He arrived at exactly 8:15 a.m., removed his gloves with military precision, inspected the flour inventory, signed a requisition form, and left carrying a loaf of rye bread under his arm.

To everyone watching, he was just another occupier.

The baker knew better.

Because hidden beneath the bakery floor were seven people the officer could have had executed.

The baker’s name was Hendrik van Dalen.

He was forty-eight years old and owned a small bakery in the Dutch town of Zwolle.

Before the war, his life had been ordinary.

He woke before dawn.

He kneaded dough.

He argued about flour prices.

He worried about taxes.

Then the occupation came.

And ordinary life became impossible.

By 1943, Hendrik’s cellar was hiding three Jewish sisters, a schoolteacher whose underground newspaper had been discovered, an escaped labor conscript, and two British airmen shot down during a bombing raid.

Seven lives.

Seven death sentences if they were discovered.

The hiding place was ingenious.

The bakery’s coal storage room contained a false wall disguised by stacked sacks of flour.

Behind it lay a narrow chamber barely large enough for people to sit upright.

The air was stale.

The darkness constant.

But it was safer than the alternative.

In February 1944, a new German logistics officer arrived in the district.

His name was Captain Friedrich Keller.

He was forty-two.

A veteran.

Educated.

Quiet.

The kind of officer who rarely raised his voice.

Within days of arriving, Keller announced that he would personally inspect several food suppliers in the area.

Including Hendrik’s bakery.

The underground network panicked.

A German officer entering the building every week was a nightmare.

The first inspection lasted twenty minutes.

Keller checked paperwork.

Counted flour sacks.

Examined ovens.

Asked routine questions.

Then he left.

Nothing happened.

The second inspection came the following Thursday.

And the next.

And the next.

Always Thursday.

Always 8:15.

Always exactly the same.

Something strange began happening.

Whenever Keller arrived, no other German soldiers accompanied him.

Other inspectors often brought guards.

Keller never did.

Other officers occasionally wandered through buildings.

Keller never ventured beyond the same rooms.

His inspections became so predictable that the people in the hidden chamber could measure time by them.

Thursday.

Footsteps.

Ledger pages turning.

Then silence.

Another week survived.

In June 1944, everything nearly collapsed.

A Dutch collaborator informed German authorities that resistance activity was operating somewhere near the bakery district.

A large search operation was scheduled.

Entire blocks would be inspected.

Basements opened.

Walls tapped.

Floors dismantled.

The bakery was on the list.

Hendrik learned of the search only two days before it was due to begin.

There was no time to move everyone.

No alternative hiding place.

No escape route.

The seven people beneath the floor spent two sleepless nights waiting for the inevitable.

The search never came.

At least not to their street.

The operation occurred.

Dozens of buildings were examined.

Several arrests were made.

But the bakery district was removed from the schedule.

No explanation was given.

The paperwork simply vanished.

Years later, resistance records would reveal that somebody inside the occupation administration had altered the inspection maps shortly before final approval.

No name appeared beside the alteration.

Only initials.

F.K.

Keller continued visiting every Thursday.

The war dragged on.

Food grew scarce.

German authority weakened.

Allied forces pushed closer.

Still he came.

Still he inspected flour.

Still he carried away a loaf of rye bread.

Still seven people remained alive beneath his feet.

In April 1945, Canadian troops liberated Zwolle.

German units retreated overnight.

The occupation ended.

The hidden chamber was opened for the final time.

The seven survivors stepped into daylight.

For some, it was the first time they had stood fully upright in months.

The bakery filled with tears, laughter, and disbelief.

Everyone wanted to know how they had escaped discovery.

Nobody had an answer.

Years later, in 1968, Hendrik received a letter from West Germany.

Inside was a brief note from the daughter of a former Wehrmacht officer.

Her father had died the previous winter.

While sorting through his papers, the family had discovered an old leather notebook.

Most entries concerned logistics.

Supply figures.

Transport schedules.

Fuel shortages.

Nothing remarkable.

Until one page.

One sentence.

Written in neat handwriting.

Dated June 1944.

“The bakery inspection remains satisfactory. The people below are still alive.”

The notebook contained no further explanation.

No confession.

No justification.

Only that sentence.

And another written beneath it.

“If this war ends, perhaps that will be enough.”

No evidence ever emerged that Captain Friedrich Keller actively joined the resistance.

No evidence suggested he sabotaged military operations beyond what appeared in scattered administrative records.

Historians still debate how much he knew.

The notebook answered one question, however.

He knew exactly what was beneath the bakery.

He had known for months.

Every Thursday morning, he stood a few feet above seven people who would have been executed if he reported them.

Instead, he signed his forms.

Collected his loaf of bread.

And left.

When Hendrik died in 1983, one of the British airmen he had hidden traveled from England to attend the funeral.

After the service, someone asked him what he remembered most about the bakery.

The airman thought for a moment.

Then smiled.

“Every Thursday morning, we heard German boots overhead.”

He paused.

“For a long time, those boots terrified us.”

“Later, they sounded like another week of life.”

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Pope Leo XIV

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Comment by John Shanahan

Some Trump supporters claim Pope Leo XIV and Pope Francis are communists. May the world soon be free of this kind of thinking. Thanks to Pope Leo XIV, Helga Zepp-LaRouche and the Schiller Institute for their genuine efforts on behalf of humanity.

Article by Pope Leo XIV and Helga Zepp-LaRouche

Of all the important and urgent speeches delivered recently by politicians and experts from many countries with the aim of preventing the strategic situation from escalating into a catastrophe that would wipe out the human race, Pope Leo XIV’s intervention—with his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas (1) and the addresses he delivered during his recent trip to Spain (2)—is, in my best judgment, by far the most important. When historians later examine the question of what—hopefully—proved to be the decisive factor in bringing Western civilization, in the midst of a deep spiritual and cultural crisis, to change course, they will come upon the role played by the Pope, and the willingness of a sufficiently large number of believers and people of good will to take his words to heart and bring about a change in policy.

Without ever having to name the guilty parties, Pope Leo XIV defines with absolute clarity the structures of sin that today pose existential threats to humanity—structures whose concrete relevance everyone can recognize, and which must be urgently eliminated. At the same time, he indicates the way out of the crisis, which is within reach—namely, that people summon up the highest ideal of the Christian view of humanity, and put it into practice. Precisely because the mainstream media largely suppress these texts by the Pope, Christians and peace-loving people need to create a political climate in which no politician seeking re-election can afford to admit his or her ignorance of his writings and speeches. For that of course, as many people as possible must first not only read, but also study, this encyclical and these addresses.

At the very moment when the first multi-billionaire on the basis of an AI fiction declares himself the first trillionaire, this encyclical warns against a new Tower of Babel, in which a new form of idolatry pays homage to profit at the expense of the weak, a dehumanization that uses others as means, an age-old yet ever-renewed temptation that today comes cloaked in technology. And coinciding with the entry into force of the EU Migration Pact—which, as of June 12, will accelerate procedures for deporting refugees at the EU’s external borders and thus massively restrict the right to asylum—Pope Leo XIV counters with the Christian principles as to how the migration issue should be addressed.

When one considers the encyclical and the Popeʼs speeches in Spain together, they represent a complete reckoning with the entire political agenda of the liberal West, and do so with a clarity that should compel all politicians who have sworn an oath of office to serve the common good (above all, those whose parties bear the word “Christian” in their names) to completely reverse their policies.

Among the various aspects of these policies, all of which are building blocks of the new Tower of Babel, are the idolatry of profit at the expense of the poorest, the financial interests that fuel tensions and conflicts to keep the war industry up and running, and support for modern forms of slavery, where child labor is routine and the health of adolescents is sacrificed for the profit of an upper class whose consumption habits would once have been considered extravagant, while the poor lack the basic necessities. This also includes a new form of colonialism that enslaves not only people’s bodies, but also data and information about them—ranging from health records to epidemiological profiles, genetic charts, and demographic data.

In the encyclical, the Pope laments the “normalization of war” and recalls Pope Paul VI’s powerful 1965 address to the UN General Assembly: “Never again war! Never again war!” (3) Despite a deep desire for peace, Leo writes, the intervening 60 years have been marked by conflicts of astonishing brutality, claiming the lives of countless civilian and innocent victims, mass displacements, social destabilization, and long-lasting wounds. Today, he notes, we are witnessing an alarming paradigm shift in which rearmament and war are once again publicly promoted as instruments of international politics, while the ethical principles that would previously have opposed war are being systematically undermined. Desires for territorial expansion, which we thought had been overcome, are returning, and a disconcerting loss of historical memory is becoming apparent, as eyewitnesses to the Holocaust and World War II pass away. (No, this is not Russian President Vladimir Putin speaking, or Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, but Pope Leo XIV) And so, the Pope argues, war is being prepared for culturally through simplistic narratives and a “friend-or-foe” mindset, disinformation, and the instillation of fear.

Under the heading “Force without limits,” the Pope addresses the growth of the military-industrial complex: “The armaments industry, and countries that supply weapons, profit from a market that thrives precisely on conflicts. In this sense, there are also financial interests that contribute to fueling tensions in various regions of the world.” And further in section 194: “ In the past, recognition of the threat posed by weapons capable of destroying all of humanity had promoted paths toward détente and disarmament negotiations. Unfortunately, this approach has been left behind, and the evolution of nuclear arsenals—including the prospect of its “tactical” use—makes the use of such weapons seem less improbable.”

The encyclical observes that we live in a time of significant intellectual and cultural blindness, and that a form of historical nihilism fosters the illusion “that the atrocities of the 20th century cannot be repeated, that the atrocities of the twentieth century can never happen again. Yet, in reality, the same dynamics are re-emerging under new guises…. In many countries, including those in the Global South, increased military spending is presented as the only response to an uncertain future or perceived threats. Meanwhile, the real cost falls on the poorest, who see resources for healthcare, education and social services being reduced.”

Pope Leo quotes Pope Pius XI’s encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, which condemns the concentration of economic power in the hands of a few, and he refers to Pope Paul VI warning of the dangers of extraordinary scientific, technological, and economic progress if it is not does not go together with corresponding ethical and social progress.

This applies in particular to AI, whose assessment and critique is the main focus of the encyclical. Starting from the decades-long debate over whether computers might one day surpass human creativity, he explains the renewed discussion regarding AI:

“99. It is not possible to provide a single, comprehensive definition of AI. “What can be stated, however, is that we must avoid the misconception of equating this type of ‘intelligence’ with that of human beings. These systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence. In doing so, they often surpass human intelligence in speed and computational capacity, offering tangible benefits across many fields. Yet this power remains entirely tied to data processing. So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate language, behavior and analytical skills, or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom. Even when these tools are described as capable of ‘learning’, their way of doing so is different from that of a human person. It is not the experience of those who allow themselves to be shaped by life and grow over time through choices, mistakes, forgiveness and fidelity. Rather, it is a form of statistical adaptation based on data and feedback, which can be very effective, but does not imply inner growth.”

Pope Leo XIV argues from the perspective of the Augustinian tradition, according to which there need be no contradiction between faith and knowledge, and quotes Pope Francis, who “recognizes the importance of listening to scientific research and of encouraging a serious and honest debate among experts while welcoming a diversity of opinions.”

The Right To Not Have To Migrate

Less honest, however, according to the Italian newspaper La Veritá and the French Le Figaro, were the liberal media, which reportedly provided a rather incomplete account of the Pope’s speeches in Spain by only covering his calls to accept and integrate refugees, while omitting the parts where the Pope defended people’s right not to have to emigrate and emphasized the need to address the root causes of their fleeing.

In fact, Pope Leo XIV’s six-day trip to Spain, which took him to Madrid, Barcelona, Gran Canaria, and Tenerife, was an intervention of extraordinary historical significance. For even today, 87 years after the end of the Civil War, the political debate in Spain remains extremely polarized, and issues such as the role of the Church and migration are emotionally charged. In this context, the way in which Pope Leo elevated the migration issue to such a high level was very important in respect to Spain’s internal situation and also set a precedent for all of Europe. There could hardly be a greater contrast between the EU Migration Pact—which came into force on the very last day of the Pope’s trip—and the migration policy advocated by Pope Leo XIV. While the EU wants to get rid of people as quickly as possible and lock them up in so-called “reception camps”—which Pope Francis used to describe as “concentration camps” and which certainly resemble prisons—the Pope has a completely different, humane perspective on the problem. In his address to the Spanish Parliament, he emphasized:

“The affirmation of human dignity cannot remain abstract when so many people are forced to leave everything behind in search of peace, security, and a future. The tragic drama of migration also challenges the conscience of nations and the ethical foundation of the international order today. Numerous men, women, and children are forced, by often dramatic circumstances, to leave their communities and leave behind loved ones, histories, and ties. This reality goes beyond any purely demographic or economic analysis: it constitutes an eminently moral and legal issue. Wherever people are discriminated against because of their national, ethnic, religious or linguistic origin, or because of their economic or social status, the universal principle of the equal dignity of all human beings is seriously violated.” (4)

He then went on to quote from his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas:

“81. A litmus test for social justice today is the treatment of migrants, refugees and those forced to move due to poverty, violence, climate change and environmental disasters. The way a society treats them reveals whether its sense of justice is driven by fear or by the spirit of fraternity. Pope Francis urged us to see migrants not simply as a problem to be managed, but as a living image of the People of God on the move. [109] They are people with dignity, resources and dreams, who have the right to be treated with respect and to ask to become active members of the societies that welcome them. Social justice in this area entails at least two complementary commitments. On the one hand, this means protecting the rightful hopes of those forced to leave by ensuring safe and legal routes, dignified conditions for receiving them, and genuine pathways to integration. On the other hand, it means promoting the right to remain in one’s homeland in peace and security by addressing the root causes that force people to migrate, including those linked to economic injustices and the climate crisis. When these rights are respected, migration can become an opportunity for encounter and mutual enrichment among peoples.”

A Call to Action

Western governments are hereby called upon to take Pope Leo XIV’s urgent appeal as an opportunity to immediately undo the inhumane and, from an economic standpoint utterly incompetent, migration policy as formulated in the EU Migration Pact. Instead, cooperation on an equal footing with the nations of the Global South must be placed on the agenda, with a serious commitment to eliminating the root causes of migration.

The right “to remain in one’s own homeland in peace and security by addressing the root causes that force people to migrate” is relatively easy to implement if the political will is mustered to do so. What the nations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America need is a genuine industrial and agricultural development policy aimed at realizing their full potential for the benefit of their own populations. The Global South, which in reality represents the global majority of approximately 85 percent of humanity, is in the process of leaving behind 500 years of colonialism and implementing, above all in cooperation with China, infrastructure projects and investments in key technologies that will enable these nations to fully establish value chains within their own borders. Instead of clinging to an inhuman neo-colonialist mindset, the governments of Europe and the United States are called upon to immediately commit to international cooperation aimed at completely eradicating poverty and underdevelopment in all nations on this planet.

For example, by the year 2050, Africa will have a population of approximately 2.5 billion people—one billion more than today. This means that it is in the very best interest of both Africa and Europe to create one billion productive jobs on the African continent over the next 25 years. Even though most other regions of the world face negative demographic projections, effective programs to overcome poverty are necessary everywhere if social explosions between the billionaire class and the impoverished billions are to be prevented.

The Schiller Institute has worked out concrete development programs to this end as to how clearly defined investment programs in basic infrastructure, energy production and distribution, and communications can create the conditions necessary to industrialize the nations of the Global South, and how cooperation between the BRICS countries, the industrialized nations of the North, and developing countries with joint ventures can achieve the goal of addressing the root causes of migration. (5) (6)

This would fulfill the call of the encyclical Populorum Progressio, that true peace can only be achieved through social justice and the overcoming of global inequality, “whose injustice cries out to heaven.” This call by Pope Paul VI, in his encyclical—”Development is the new name for peace”—is the urgent imperative of the hour!

In his address to the Spanish Parliament, Pope Leo XIV called for precisely this form of international cooperation:

“No nation can face a challenge of this magnitude on its own. Therefore, a coordinated, supportive, and effective response is indispensable, one capable of guaranteeing protection, welcome, and real opportunities for integration to those who migrate. When the institutional response is accessible, just and coordinated, borders cease to be places of abandonment and can become spaces for the responsible protection of human dignity.” (4)

In his encyclical, which bears the title Magnifica Humanitas—”Magnificent Humanity”—a title that can certainly be regarded as programmatic, the Pope refers quite specifically to the highest ideal of classical Greek thought, thereby following the Augustinian idea that the harmony between that thought and Christian revelation means there need be no contradiction between faith and knowledge. “23. The Church regards all who sincerely seek “truth, goodness and beauty” as companions on the journey, and considers them as “precious allies” in defending the dignity of every person and in caring for creation,” he writes. In accordance with this ideal of “the True, the Good, and the Beautiful,” the encyclical defines art and culture—when they are authentic—as a protective wall against the “normalization of evil.” And how necessary this is for contemporary human society, in which phenomena that can ultimately only be described as satanic seem to dominate nearly the entire so-called entertainment world. Pope Leo attributes an “almost prophetic value” to certain works of art, such as Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, describing them as a “desire for unity.”

Perhaps the most important idea is that Pope Leo, in memory of Pope Paul VI, calls for the creation of a “civilization of love”:

“Today, we must resolutely recover this vision, for the civilization of love is no naïve utopia, but a demanding project, which consists in translating charity into structures of justice, giving institutional form to fraternity and regarding others—whether individuals or peoples—as allies necessary for building the common good. As the Encyclical Letter Fratelli tutti reminded us, only this social love is capable of becoming a culture and a norm, and thereby of bringing about a stable international order, transforming mere armed coexistence into a community with a shared future.” [186]

It should give pause to all people in the nations of the so-called Collective West—that is, people living in a system dominated by liberal values, which has produced both the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the EU Migration Pact as responses to the refugee crisis —that both the head of the Catholic Church and the Chinese government have reached essentially the same conclusion: that the only a conception of the One humanity as a community of shared destiny can be the basis for peace.

The encyclical Magnifica Humanitas is Pope Leo XIV’s urgent call for change. The Schiller Institute’s development programs show a concrete path to overcoming the refugee crisis. What humanity needs now is a movement to promote the idea: “Development is the new name for peace”!

Notes

1. https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html

2. Pope in Canary Islands: Remain united through the Cross and the Eucharist—Vatican News

3. https://holyseemission.org/contents/statements/address-of-the-holy-father-paul-vi-to-the-united-nations-organization.php; https://www.vaticannews.va/en/vatican-city/news/2025-10/never-again-war-pope-paul-vi-s-unheeded-but-ever-relevant-cry.html

4. https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/speeches/2026/giugno/documents/20260608-spagna-parlamento.html

5. https://cloud.schillermeet.de/s/BQZXjgHWf78MJW5?dir=/&editing=false&openfile=true;

6. https://schillerinstitute.com/blog/2024/11/24/report-development-drive-means-billions-of-new-jobs-no-refugees-no-war/

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The world today confronts us with what can only be called a dramatic picture—an extraordinary compression of catastrophic danger and genuine possibility, especially with regard to the conflicts unfolding around Iran and Ukraine. In remarks delivered to the International Peace Coalition (IPC) on June 12, the IPC’s initiator and the founder of the Schiller Institute, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, emphasized that there are “extremely good and bad developments occurring simultaneously, and it will depend to a very large extent upon our action, as to which of those tendencies will prevail.”

On the surface, the most dramatic news of the day is that U.S. President Donald Trump has declared the war with Iran over. “I have, as President of the United States of America, cancelled the scheduled strikes and bombings against Iran this evening,” Trump announced on June 11, and declared that Iran had agreed “never to have a nuclear weapon.” A possible signing ceremony in Europe within days is reportedly being prepared for Vice President JD Vance. Qatari mediator Ali Al-Thawadi allegedly brokered the tentative agreement with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, with U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner participating by phone. While details of the agreement remain scarce, and skepticism high, Araghchi confirmed June 12 that the U.S.-Iran MOU is indeed being finalized, claiming that “The Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding has never been closer.”

Whether this constitutes an actual peace—or merely a pause before the next escalation—is yet to be seen. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office was caught flat-footed by the announcement, with Israeli officials privately questioning whether Trump’s account was even accurate. More telling was the statement from Defense Minister Israel Katz, who made it clear that Israel “retains the ability to act independently” against Iran and intends to keep forces deployed across Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria—a condition wholly unacceptable to Iran. Indeed, the elephant in the room will continue to be Netanyahu and others of his radical ilk, who can blow up any arrangement if left unchecked.

Meanwhile, in Europe, a different kind of reckoning is underway. Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe, told a panel at the ILA Berlin Air Show on June 11 that “Russia is not looking for a conflict”—a remarkable public statement from the top U.S. official in NATO, and one that directly contradicts the drumbeat from European political leaders claiming the continent must be war-ready by 2029. On the same day, the ambassadors of France, Germany, and the UK requested a meeting with the Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Galuzin—an unprecedented move. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova dismissed their proposals as a rehash of Ukrainian Acting President Volodymyr “Zelensky’s dead-end formula.” But the visit itself is a signal that the political ground in Europe is shifting. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, addressing her parliament, called directly for opening a dialogue with Russian President Vladimir Putin and for building a new European security architecture—a formulation that the Chamber of Deputies subsequently endorsed in a formal motion, notably stripping any reference to Ukrainian “territorial integrity” from the original draft.

Against this murky, volatile backdrop—a war that may or may not be ending and a European political class sleepwalking toward an even bigger war—a development of a different and deeper order deserves to be named. Zepp-LaRouche brought up the recent interventions by Pope Leo XIV, saying that these are the most important strategic developments on the planet right now. In a world careening between catastrophe and possibility, it is the moral and philosophical interventions, not the military ones, that ultimately determine the shape of history. Ideas, she insisted, are, in moments like this, “the most important currency.”

She mentioned the release of Pope Leo’s new encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, referring to it as a frontal attack on the hubris of the current class of “billionaires trying to become trillionaires.” Leo himself condemned this as the attempt to build a modern “Tower of Babel,” arguing that the ideals of truth, goodness, and beauty that have always been the signature of genuine civilization are being corroded in its wake. Similarly, his recent visit to Spain, where he made a plea for the dignity of migrants and raised the concept of the “right not to have to migrate,” implicitly addressing the underlying economic and political issues at play. He is pointing to the principle of “harmonious development” for mankind as a whole, Zepp-LaRouche insisted.

It could not be clearer that the Epstein class’s Tower of Babel is collapsing—unable to maintain actual peace and unable to provide a real future for the world or even itself—and therefore is creating the conditions for an entirely new organizing principle to be cognized. So, take off your ideological spectacles, and think on the level of a poet. These are the stakes of the coming weeks. The path forward requires moral clarity, historical memory, and the courage to act on both.

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America’s push to rebuild its critical minerals capabilities has genuinely impressed me.

The scale and coordination are remarkable. Serious money is on the table. Federal agencies are aligned. Universities, private capital, allied governments and industry are pulling in the same direction. From mines and processing facilities to research consortia and supply chain partnerships, the United States is making a serious attempt to challenge China’s dominance.

And yet, progress remains painfully slow.

Projects take longer than expected. Plants struggle to achieve specification. Costs rise. Timelines slip. Politicians grow frustrated.

Why?

Because industrial capability isn’t something you buy.

It’s something you learn.

The uncomfortable reality is that the energy transition is not simply a race for breakthrough technologies. Increasingly, it looks like a race to rebuild industrial memory.

Rare earths happen to be the perfect case study.

Rare Earths Reveal Why Making Things Is Hard

On paper, rare earth separation looks straightforward.

Dig the ore.

Crush it.

Float it.

Leach it.

Separate it.

Precipitate it.

Calcine it.

The chemistry has been published for decades. The flowsheets are public. Universities teach the underlying science.

Yet only a handful of countries can consistently produce on-spec rare earth oxides and magnet materials at commercial scale.

Why?

Because technology is the easy part.

Industrial craft is the hard part.

Every ore body is different. Trace impurities behave differently. Grain sizes vary. Water chemistry changes. Reagents perform inconsistently.

The result is that operators are constantly making thousands of small adjustments: tweaking pH, changing phase ratios, altering residence times and modifying scrubbing stages.

The plant only works because people learn how that particular ore behaves in that particular circuit.

The real expertise often looks mundane.

Knowing that turbidity in one tank means something went wrong three stages upstream.

Recognising that a subtle colour change indicates an impurity breakthrough.

Understanding when to push a circuit harder and when to back off before product quality deteriorates.

None of this appears in a patent.

None of it can be downloaded from a journal article.

It exists as tacit knowledge.

It is the accumulated judgement of operators, engineers and technicians solving problems together, day after day.

The “art” isn’t mystical. It’s embedded competence.

Over time, this becomes organisational memory: standard operating procedures, unwritten rules, shortcuts and stories that begin with, “Don’t ever do that again unless you want to shut the whole plant down.”

Once you lose an industrial base, you don’t just lose equipment.

You lose memory.

This isn’t unique to rare earths.

Learning curves exist across industries. From aviation to semiconductors, industrial progress rarely arrives through sudden breakthroughs. It emerges through learning-by-doing: thousands of iterations, incremental improvements and experience accumulated over decades.

What America Actually Lost

In 1990, the United States was the world’s largest producer of rare earths.

When Mountain Pass shut down following environmental problems in the early 2000s, America didn’t simply lose a mine.

It unwound an ecosystem.

Process engineers moved into other sectors.

Operators retired.

Analytical laboratories disappeared.

Specialty chemical suppliers found new customers.

Universities stopped training students in relevant disciplines.

Customers adapted to overseas supply chains.

When production stopped, tacit knowledge dispersed.

Rebuilding means restarting the learning curve.

It means years of pilot plants.

Off-spec batches.

Rejected shipments.

Cost overruns.

Environmental compliance failures.

Customer qualification cycles.

It means accepting the discomfort of inefficiency at the beginning.

New facilities will often be sub-scale, expensive and imperfect.

The question is not whether America can access the technology.

The question is whether it is willing to pay the tuition required to relearn the craft.

Japan’s Lesson: Money Isn’t Enough

Japan learned this lesson the hard way.

Following the 2010 fishing boat dispute with China and the subsequent de facto export restrictions, Japan discovered that having world-class laboratories was not the same as having rare earth security.

It responded aggressively.

It diversified imports.

It invested overseas, most notably through Lynas.

It supported domestic processing initiatives.

It pursued deep-sea rare earth opportunities near Minamitorishima Island.

It strengthened partnerships with allies.

And yet, by 2025, Japan still accounted for only around 5% of global refined rare earth production.

Enough to provide a buffer against short-term disruption.

Nowhere near enough to independently supply its own industrial base.

Only this month, Shin-Etsu Chemical announced plans for a new government-supported refining facility focused on heavy rare earths such as dysprosium and terbium, alongside yttrium used in semiconductor manufacturing.

Even for Japan—with strong industrial firms, sophisticated customers and active government support—it has taken more than a decade to rebuild capability.

Industrial ecosystems operate on learning curves measured in years.

Sometimes decades.

How China Really Built Dominance

China did not wake up one morning and decide to dominate rare earths.

It built an industrial learning system over roughly sixty years.

Act I: Discovery and Early Learning

In the late 1950s, China began recovering rare earths from Bayan Obo in Inner Mongolia as a by-product of iron and steel production.

The initial objective was simple: extract more value from existing resources.

Engineers were assigned to improve recovery.

Technical expertise accumulated.

Problems were solved through repetition.

China learned by doing.

Act II: Strategic Specialisation

During the 1980s and 1990s, output expanded rapidly as global demand increased.

Beijing recognised rare earths as strategically important.

Universities and research institutes received funding.

Rare earth chemistry, separation technologies, phosphors and magnet applications became national priorities.

Industrial zones clustered laboratories alongside production facilities.

Chinese firms acquired overseas assets, technologies and expertise, including businesses such as Magnequench.

But buying technology was only the beginning.

Processes had to be transplanted.

Adapted.

Debugged.

Integrated into domestic supply chains.

China aligned cheap feedstock, industrial policy and export-led manufacturing to turn rare earths into a national comparative advantage.

Act III: Consolidation

By the late 1990s, Beijing recognised that uncontrolled mining and cheap exports were creating environmental damage while allowing others to capture downstream value.

Production quotas followed.

Export restrictions emerged.

Environmental standards tightened.

Downstream manufacturers relocated into China.

Illegal operators were closed.

The industry consolidated into the so-called “Big Six”.

At the same time, universities and specialised institutes embedded themselves within industrial clusters, training the next generation of engineers while solving plant-level problems.

China wasn’t simply building mines.

It was building institutions that accumulated industrial knowledge.

Act IV: Weaponisation

In 2010, export restrictions directed at Japan exposed just how dependent the rest of the world had become.

The strategy evolved.

Export controls expanded.

Technology restrictions emerged.

Security considerations entered industrial policy.

By the early 2020s, China controlled more than half of global rare earth mining and roughly 90% of separation and refining capacity, alongside dominant magnet manufacturing capabilities.

Today, Beijing protects more than physical production.

It protects accumulated know-how.

What China built wasn’t just an industry.

It was a learning system.

Ore bodies.

Pilot plants.

Industrial zones.

University departments.

National champions.

Government support.

And eventually, export controls designed to lock in the advantage.

What Making America Great Again Would Actually Require

If the United States wants resilient critical mineral supply chains, the challenge is not technological.

It is institutional.

First, financial capital is not industrial capability.

Financial capital is abstract, mobile and fast.

It moves through subsidies, bond markets and venture funds.

Industrial capability is concrete, place-bound and slow.

It is maintenance crews who understand a plant’s personality.

Suppliers who evolve alongside customers.

Operators who know how to respond when something goes wrong at three o’clock in the morning.

Finance can build facilities.

It cannot instantly create judgement.

Second, America must accept the tuition.

New mines and refineries will initially be inefficient.

Some products will fail qualification.

Plants will underperform.

China has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to flood markets and destroy emerging competitors.

Staying the course means tolerating ugly spreadsheets and short-term disappointment.

Early inefficiency is not failure.

It is tuition.

Third, policymakers must build ecosystems rather than projects.

Clusters matter.

Mines, refineries, laboratories, logistics providers and component manufacturers need to exist within each other’s orbit.

Long-term offtake agreements matter.

Patient capital matters.

Stable demand matters.

Fourth, the workforce must be rebuilt.

Technicians.

Process engineers.

Metallurgists.

Materials scientists.

Apprenticeships.

Immigration policies that attract expertise.

Universities aligned with industrial priorities.

Finally, societies must reward making things again.

For decades, financial engineering generated greater prestige and compensation than process engineering.

Too many of the brightest graduates were incentivised to structure deals rather than debug factories.

If industrial renewal is genuinely the objective, the people capable of building it must once again find status, purpose and prosperity in making things.

The Tesla Lesson

Elon Musk understood this instinctively.

Tesla’s advantage was never a single patented technology.

It was a culture of relentless iteration.

Batteries.

Manufacturing.

Software.

Supply chains.

All evolving together through continuous learning.

China effectively did something similar at national scale for rare earths.

Japan is doing it in carefully selected niches.

America is only beginning to rediscover that industrial ecosystems are built over time.

They cannot simply be purchased.

Conclusion

Rare earths teach an uncomfortable lesson.

Mines can be financed.

Technologies can be licensed.

Policies can be written.

But industrial capability cannot be summoned into existence by executive order.

It is built through years of experimentation, accumulated judgement and thousands of small problems solved by people learning together.

The countries that dominate the next industrial era will not necessarily be those with the best ideas.

They will be those willing to endure the messy, inefficient and often frustrating process of learning how to make things again.

The energy transition is often framed as a race for new technologies.

Increasingly, it looks like a race to rebuild industrial memory.

Comment by John Shanahan:

The same message applies to the loss of expertise and practical experience in nuclear power. The American anti- industry, anti-nuclear power, fear mongers about low-dose radiation, anti-fossil fuels alarmists have proven worse than all foreign enemies combined. Amanda van Dyke is an excellent analyst and writer.

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Unleash Prosperity - Mission

They were the two mega economics/finance stories of last week and we wonder if the political class can put two and two together.

The first: the Social Security “trust fund” is rapidly running out of money and will be exhausted in 2032 according to the latest Trustees Report. Because of its Ponzi scheme structure the red ink gets deeper every year and the government won’t even be able to pay the meager benefits promised.

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The second: SpaceX had its IPO with a valuation of over $2 trillion. Nearly 4,500 more Americans were made millionaires on Friday.

Twenty years ago, President George W. Bush suggested a plan to allow young people to have personal accounts for Social Security with the money invested in an index fund of stocks and bonds. Nearly every Democrat made crazed accusations that this “privatization” plan would be “too risky.” Uh huh!

Since then, stocks are only up 725% (including the reinvestment of dividends). Every young person in America would be on their way to being a pension millionaire if we had adopted personal accounts.

George W. Bush Was Right on Social Security

Couldn’t the liberals who killed Social Security reform at least say “I’m sorry” America?

Background from the 19th Century Gilded Age: Andrew Carnegie (l) and John D Rockefeller (r)

Foreground from the 21st Century Gilded Age: Mark Zuckerberg (l), Elon Musk (center), Jeff Bezos (r)

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Many people have compared our current era to the Gilded Age. But that analogy is deeply unfair to the Gilded Age. Like the robber barons of yore, today’s oligarchs are immensely wealthy — even wealthier, relative to the economy as a whole, than their predecessors. And extreme wealth corrupts our democracy. But the corruption is deeper and more destructive now than it was then: The mitigating factors that once put some brakes on the harm done by excessive wealth concentration are now mostly gone.

About wealth concentration: The standard source for information on extreme wealth is the Forbes 400 list. Forbes only began compiling that list in its current form in 1982, but it published its first listing of America’s top fortunes in 1918. The chart above compares the wealth of the richest 5 Americans in 1918 with that of the richest 15 in 2025 — 15, not 5, because the total U.S. population more than tripled over that period. I scale their wealth both as a percentage of total wealth and as a share of GDP.

Either way, the concentration of wealth at the very top is much higher now than it ever was during the Gilded Age. And these are numbers from last year, before the SpaceX IPO. The robber barons were pikers compared with today’s oligarchs.

This level of wealth brings with it immense political influence. A New York Times analysis found that 300 billionaires accounted for 19 percent of political contributions in the 2024 election. And since the election the power of money has grown even stronger.

In part this reflects the way great wealth has been used to corrupt the media. Elon Musk bought Twitter, not as a financial investment, but to turn it into the right-wing fever swamp it has now become. Larry Ellison, America’s second-richest man, purchased CBS basically to destroy it as an independent news source and convert it into Fox News 2.0, a goal he is achieving — and he is now on track to do the same to CNN.

On top of this, the presidency is now more or less openly for sale. “Donald Trump,” writes Forbes, “has presided over the most lucrative presidency in history,” adding $4.2 billion to his personal wealth since regaining the White House.

There were many corruption scandals during the Gilded Age, but none on this scale.

What do today’s uberrich do with their political power? Much of what they push for involves their own self-interest. In 2024 Mark Zuckerberg basically used his financial clout to kill bipartisan legislation that would have tried to protect children from psychological harm due to social media and, of course, put some restrictions on Meta. The Koch family has spent decades doing everything it can to prevent action against climate change and keep America burning fossil fuels.

Beyond this, some megabillionaires use their power to push political extremism.

True, Elon Musk is something of an outlier; you have to go some ways down the list to find someone comparably extreme (Peter Thiel is #40.) And he isn’t the first incredibly wealthy man to be deeply bigoted and an avid consumer of conspiracy theories: Henry Ford was a rabid anti-Semite who published and distributed The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forgery probably concocted by the Russian secret police.

Still, it’s remarkable that the world’s richest man has passionately embraced the “Great Replacement” theory of a sinister conspiracy to replace whites with nonwhite immigrants.

And it’s equally remarkable that our political system accepts it as a fact of life that such a person should command such power, even leaving on one side the dubious roots of his wealth. Where’s the outrage?

Obviously some Americans are outraged, but the backlash against a highly corrupt, rigged system is far weaker than one might have expected. Why?

I’ll return to this question in later posts, but it’s clear that modern America suffers from a combination of cynicism — “everybody does it” — and fatalism — “that’s just how the world works” — far worse than anything we experienced in the robber baron era.

You can see this moral malaise in the shrugs with which all too many politicians, especially but not only Republicans, greet each new revelation of presidential scandal. You can also see it in the behavior of the ultrawealthy themselves.

Make no mistake: the men on that 1918 Forbes list were, without exception, ruthless businessmen. The term “robber barons,” popularized in the 1930s by the historian Mattew Josephson, was apt. The great fortunes of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries were accumulated by men who functionally played the same role as feudal warlords extorting tolls from travelers passing their castles. In particular, John D. Rockefeller, the world’s richest man, in effect controlled an essential economic choke point, a sort of financial Strait of Hormuz, through his monopolization of oil refining.

Yet many of the robber barons also possessed a sense of noblesse oblige, believing that they should deploy some of their riches on behalf of the public good.

Many of the robber barons gave huge sums to philanthropy. These included large donations to cultural institutions, which continue to enrich our society to this day. Mention Andrew Carnegie or Henry Clay Frick to a modern New Yorker and the first things they think of will probably be Carnegie Hall and the Frick Collection of fine art.

No doubt this was in large part a public relations exercise, but the fact that the robber barons believed that this PR effort was necessary was itself a symptom of a society less cynical than it is today. And the Gilded Age wealthy left a lasting legacy of good deeds to set against the history of their ruthless business practices.

By contrast, today’s oligarchs spend very little on good works, according to Forbes. Musk and Ellison have both given away less than 1 percent of their fortunes.

And Musk in particular is the opposite of a philanthropist. Not only doesn’t he spend any of his own money to help others, he used his power when running DOGE to cut off aid to poor countries, condemning hundreds of thousands of children to avoidable death. And he was gleeful about it:

Again, where is the outrage?

So, are we living in a second Gilded Age? If only. We surpassed Gilded Age levels of income and wealth inequality decades ago. We’re now in an era of oligarchy in which the power of great wealth and the abuse of that power by a tiny elite eclipse anything we saw in the late 19^th and early 20^th century. And the super-wealthy themselves are far more lacking in redemptive qualities than their predecessors.

Meet the new bosses, worse than the old bosses.

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Elon Musk and Donald Trump

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Yesterday I took a short trip. I began with a ride on the local Hyperloop, which ran through a tunnel dug by Boring Company. Then I used my neural implant to summon a fully self-driving Tesla robotaxi. While enroute I read the latest news from the Mars colony.

OK, none of that actually happened, because those products don’t exist. There are no working Hyperloops. The Boring Company has not dug any commercial tunnels. Tesla has a few self-driving — though not fully self-driving — taxis in Austin and nowhere else. (Google’s Waymo driverless taxis are operational in several major hubs.) Neuralink, which is purportedly pioneering brain implants, has tested its products in a handful of patients but done no more than that. And of course there is no Mars colony: there have been no manned flights to Mars, nor the prospect of any for the foreseeable future.

Yet at various points over the past decade Elon Musk promised that each of these services would be available by 2025 if not sooner.

Granted, Musk has had some real successes. Tesla was ahead of the EV curve, and Starlink is a critically important service as well as a viable business.

But these achievements weren’t enough to make Musk the world’s richest man. His wealth has, instead, historically rested mainly on self-fulfilling faith — investors believing in Musk’s genius have piled into stocks in Musk-controlled companies, and the rising value of these companies has enhanced his reputation for genius.

We have a term for enterprises that look successful because they keep drawing in new investors and keep drawing in new investors because they look successful. They’re called Ponzi schemes. And Elon Musk is basically a human Ponzi scheme.

Furthermore, the SpaceX IPO now in progress makes it clearer than ever that Musk’s greatest skill isn’t developing futuristic products. It’s his mastery of financial shell games and his ability to leverage insider influence, especially his influence with the Trump administration.

To see what I mean, consider Musk’s 2022 purchase of Twitter, which he renamed X. To finance the deal, investment banks lent Musk $13 billion, debt they planned to quickly move off their books by selling it on to investors. But Musk proceeded to destroy X’s business model by turning it into an extreme-right, Nazi-friendly cesspool, prompting advertisers to flee. By the summer of 2024, X was valued at less than half of its purchase price. Faced with losses of 40 cents on the dollar if they sold the debt, his bankers were forced to hold the Twitter debt far longer than anticipated, prompting the August 2024 Wall Street Journal headline: “Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover Is Now the Worst Buyout for Banks Since the Financial Crisis”.

But then two things happened that bailed out the banks along with Musk’s future creditworthiness: the 2024 election of Donald Trump and the advent of AI. After Trump’s election, advertisers began returning to X, citing a need to appease Musk and Trump. And in March 2025, Musk merged his newly-founded AI company xAI with X, playing off the accelerating AI buzz to further prop up X’s valuation and his own personal balance sheet.

Unfortunately for Musk, xAI’s Grok is, by all accounts, much inferior to the AI models offered by Anthropic and OpenAI. It’s also widely considered unsafe and unreliable. At one point it began spewing racist and antisemitic comments, dubbing itself MechaHitler. Trump administration officials have pushed government agencies — including the Pentagon — to use Grok, but with little success.

So Musk, having bailed out X by rolling it into xAI, is now bailing out xAI by rolling it into SpaceX, which has a genuinely successful business in Starlink.

And today SpaceX is going public. Its initial public offering (IPO) debuts today on the Nasdaq at a price that implies a $1.77 trillion valuation for a company that had revenues of only $18.7 billion last year and lost money.

How can this, um, astronomical valuation be justified? The IPO is premised partly on the assumption that retail investors will buy in, not because they have made any rational assessment of SpaceX as a business, but because they believe that they are buying stakes in Elon Musk’s genius.

But the ranks of the faithful may not be enough to keep the shell game going. So Musk’s Wall Street allies are also rigging the game. Some of the major stock indexes, notably the Nasdaq 100 and FTSE Russell, have recently changed their rules in order to admit SpaceX almost immediately.

It’s important to understand that the inclusion of a company’s shares in a major stock index carries enormous financial rewards. A large share of stocks is held in “index funds,” mutual funds that hold portfolios designed to mimic the behavior of major indexes. Thus there is an immediate demand for the shares of a company when its shares are added to a major index because index funds must now add them to their portfolios.

Historically, the major indexes have waited at least a year after a company’s IPO before considering its inclusion in their market measures, to give the stock time to “mature”. The bending of the rules for SpaceX shows that Musk is again exerting his ability to co-opt and corrupt key institutions. (Notably, the S&P 500 has resisted the pressure and will wait a year before including SpaceX.)

Which brings me to my final point. The immense human Ponzi scheme that is Elon Musk will eventually collapse. But traditional Ponzi schemes only exploit investors who choose to participate. This time much of the money propping up Musk’s scam will come from ordinary Americans who have in effect been forced to buy in. Approximately 52% of mutual fund assets are now invested in index or index-based funds, and over 50% of American households are invested in mutual funds. Thanks to the collusion between Musk and Wall Street, enabled by the perception that the Trump administration has Musk’s back, many if not most of these small investors will be dragged, willy-nilly, into fueling the Musk juggernaut.

Should anyone in Trump’s America be surprised?

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Comment by John Shanahan

For Elon Musk to become the richest person in the world overnight through an Initial Public Offering, IPO of a company that is far from accomplishing much for the American people and the world, seems at odds with principles of America. Getting rich quick has happened before in the USA, but never on this scale.

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Elon Musk just became the first person in history to surpass a net worth of $1 trillion, thanks to a surge in the valuation of SpaceX, combined with his holdings in Tesla, xAI and X. (1)

“[Musk’s net worth] is more than the net worth of Larry Page, $294.1B, Sergey Brin, $271.3B, Jeff Bezos, $248.9B and Mark Zuckerberg, $194.8B, combined,” reads a viral X post (2).

That’s right. Musk makes the net worths of the world’s richest people (3) somehow seem small.

“The average American is now closer to Jeff Bezos in net worth than Jeff Bezos is to Elon Musk,” another viral X post (4) reads.

Putting Musk’s wealth into perspective

While it sounds absurd, since Bezos is one of the richest people on the planet, the numbers illustrate just how enormous the gap has become between Musk’s wealth and his billionaire counterparts.

Bezos’ fortune is currently estimated at just below $250 billion. That means that the difference between Bezos and Musk is over $750 billion. Meanwhile, according to recent estimates, the median American household (5) has a net worth of roughly $193,000. That means that the difference between the average American household and Bezos, while massive, is indeed smaller.

The difference between a billion and a trillion, after all, is far greater than you may think. To put it into perspective: A billion seconds equals almost 32 years. A trillion seconds? More than 31,000 years.

The same principle applies to wealth. Once fortunes reach the hundreds of billions, adding another several hundred billion creates a gap so large that those playing catch up appear relatively closer to ordinary households in terms of wealth — albeit no one is going to feel bad for them.

Important caveats and conversations

Of course, net worth figures come with key caveats. Musk’s fortune is largely tied to his ownership stakes in publicly traded and private companies. Because companies like xAI are privately held, their values are based on investor demand and funding rounds rather than public market prices. As a result, wealth estimates can fluctuate significantly.

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On Sunday the New York Times’ Neil MacFarquhar had an interesting essay comparing Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine folly with Donald Trump’s Iran folly, and what those two follies have in common — namely, piss-poor perceptions of their targets:

“Both conflicts have produced a similar outcome: a weaker power has trapped a stronger one in a costly confrontation,” Fiona Hill, who ran Russian and European affairs at the National Security Council during the first Trump administration, wrote in a policy paper for the Brookings Institution this week. “Like Putin, Trump did not have a plan for what would happen next.”

The root of the issue is that both presidents sparked wars with limited understanding of the opposing side, Ms. Hill said in an interview. “Both projected their own centralized views of their own roles onto Iran and Ukraine, so they thought if they could decapitate the system it would fall,” she said.

Mr. Putin did not anticipate fierce Ukrainian resistance, for example; Mr. Trump ignored admonitions that Iran could shut the Strait of Hormuz, and appeared to underestimate Iran’s capacity to retaliate and inflict damage on America’s allies in the region. Nor did the Iranian people rise up against their authoritarian leaders, as Israel and the United States had urged them to do.

While the bombing campaigns of the United States and Russia have had devastating effects, analysts noted, air power alone has not proved decisive….

Ultimately, analysts said, the lack of a resolution makes both the United States and Russia appear weak, and could hasten a more decentralized international order.

The rest of the article is well worth reading. I do think Hill is onto something when she notes that both Putin and Trump misperceptions of their adversaries led to their current imbroglios. The idea that both leaders have been too heavily insulated from critical voices is a solid observation. Vladimir Putin ostensibly has spent a generation trying to rebuild the Russian state, but he has exercised ever-greater control over the Russian government, sidelined his most competent advisors, and creating a culture of intimidation. As a result, Putin has plenty of loyalists but no one who can tell him when there is a problem. As for Trump, well, his hollowing out of state capacity and installation of an army of sycophants is well-trodden territory in this newsletter.

Drezner’s World is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

That said, the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World also believes that while Putin and Trump share some commonalities in how they view the world, launching misbegotten wars that turn into strategic quagmires is hardly unique to them. Indeed, this is a moment when Occam’s Razor should provide some useful guidance.

What does Occam’s Razor tell me? It is pretty simple: both Putin and Trump launched their wars of choice because their prior uses of military force had seemed to go well and they thought their past successes predicted future successes.

It is worth remembering that prior to Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, strategists were all a twitter about Russia’s success at gray zone warfare — what some called the Gerasimov Doctrine. Prior to 2022, the Russian military had successfully intervened in Georgia in 2009, Crimea in 2014, and Syria a year after that. In all three cases, Russia achieved its strategic goal without too much fuss or loss of life. With that kind of winning streak, it’s not surprising that Putin believed he could take all of Ukraine with a shock and awe campaign.

Similarly, Trump also became enamored of using military force to solve his problems based on his prior track record. In 2020 he approved the drone strike that assassinated Qassem Soleimani. In 2025, however, his lust for military action increased dramatically with each action. Operation Midnight Hammer in Iran clearly failed in its objective — otherwise Trump does not approve Epic Fury eight months later. But at the same time, Midnight Hammer did not trigger a large-scale Iranian response, further emboldening Trump. The Venezuela operation against Maduro was also a tactical success, one that took less time than Midnight Hammer no less. Little wonder that he thought attacking Iran would be a quick and painless affair.

Now both Putin and Trump are forced to adopt-second-best responses. For Putin, it means launching even more brutal airstrikes against Kyiv. For Trump, it means making a lot of concessions to obtain a regional cease-fire.

So where do thigs go from here? Unfortunately, if Fiona Hill’s Brookings paper is any guide, the short-term answer is grim:

Deadlock in Ukraine discredits Russia as a global military force. It corrodes Putin’s patina of indestructibility in the same way that the stalemate in the Persian Gulf undermines the United States and Trump….

So-called “second-rate powers” have diminished the standing of Putin and Trump, the men who started these ill-advised wars. Russia and the United States both have fewer means to exert power and influence than before. Their erstwhile allies—in places like the Caucasus and Central Asia in the case of Russia, and Europe in the case of the United States—are looking beyond them at new regional security options, hastening the development of a more decentralized international order.

Simply put, the perception of power is in and of itself a form of power. U.S. failures erode the utility of U.S. structural power. The most useful quality of structural power is securing concessions based merely at the possibility of its use. Even if non-compliance is costly for targets, the rest of the world notes the resistance more than the cost-benefit ratio. The more instances in which targets resist, the less efficient the exercise of structural power will be.

In other words, both Russia and the United States currently are in ragged strategic shape. And that does not seem to be changing anytime soon.

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The $345 million judgment against Greenpeace is not just a legal footnote; it is a long-overdue reckoning for an organization that lost its moral compass decades ago. For those of us who have watched the steady decline of the environmental movement from a pursuit of genuine conservation to a cynical machine of manufactured outrage, this verdict feels like a necessary correction.

When I consider how far Greenpeace has drifted, I often think of the perspective of its own co-founder, Dr. Patrick Moore. Moore, who helped launch the organization in 1971, eventually walked away precisely because he saw the rot setting in. He famously noted that while he was moving toward a path of “sensible environmentalism,” the organization he helped build was moving in the opposite direction: toward an agenda that he described as “anti-science, anti-business, and downright anti-human.”

The Evolution of Extremism

Moore’s observation perfectly captures the transition we’ve seen. In its early days, the movement focused on concrete issues—like stopping nuclear test and even save the whales—that resonated with a public seeking to preserve natural beauty. But over the years, that mission was displaced by a desire for perpetual conflict.

As Moore observed, the modern environmental movement has become addicted to “doom and gloom” scenarios, prioritizing fear-mongering over logic. They no longer want to solve problems; they want to sustain the appearance of a crisis, because a crisis is what keeps the Green donations flowing.

Accountability in the Courtroom

The Dakota Access Pipeline lawsuit, which led to this staggering $345 million judgment, wasn’t some “corporate attack” on free speech, as Greenpeace now frantically claims. It was a court of law responding to evidence of a coordinated effort to disrupt commerce and incite chaos. Their unlawful tactics were put on display in the DAPL trial.

The jury found that this was not a matter of a few passionate individuals standing on a hillside; they found Greenpeace liable for conspiracy, defamation, and tortious interference. This is the key that the “Green” propaganda machine tries to hide: the difference between protest and “lawfare.”

When an organization helps form professional protesters, provides training, shares sensitive operational intelligence, and equips activists with lockboxes to sabotage construction equipment, they have moved past the realm of “peaceful resistance.”

They transitioned into an active lawless participant in an economic attack. The legal system, in its wisdom, held them responsible for the consequences of their own actions. They wanted to play a high-stakes game of sabotage, and now they are discovering that the price of the ticket is their own financial viability.

The Shell Game of Victimhood

Greenpeace’s current strategy is as transparent as it is desperate. By labeling this a “SLAPP” (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) case and running to foreign courts to escape a U.S. judgment, they are attempting to engage in international forum shopping. They are hoping their membership base won’t look at the actual facts of the North Dakota trial—the conspiracy, the deceit, and the deliberate targeting of Energy Transfer’s infrastructure.

They are trying to spin a narrative that they are victims of “Big Oil.” But let’s be clear: this is about an organization that thought it could use its massive, tax-exempt platform to bypass the law whenever it found a project inconvenient to its ideological goals. They were caught red-handed.

A Necessary Return to Reality

The “Climate Truth Tellers” and other social media initiatives we see today are simply the frantic gasps of a movement that knows it has lost its grip on the truth. When you have to hire and train volunteers to “flood the zone” with pre-approved talking points, it is a glaring admission that you are no longer winning the debate on the merits of the anti-hydrocarbons gospel.

Patrick Moore’s departure was a canary in the coal mine that many environmental believers chose to ignore. He saw that the movement was shedding its scientific roots in favor of an ungainly political extremism.

Today, that extremism has a $345 million price tag. If this judgment forces the public to finally question the credibility and the methods of these professional agitators, then it will have served the environment far more than any of their staged protests ever did.

The era of unchecked “activism” that masks itself as science while practicing inhumane sabotage is reaching its end. We are witnessing the slow, painful process of reality catching up to the Greenpeace propaganda. And frankly, it’s about time.

A critical look at the history of Greenpeace from a co-founder’s perspective

This video provides a deep dive into Dr. Patrick Moore’s personal reflections on why he left Greenpeace and his critiques of the organization’s shift toward extreme, anti-scientific activism, which directly mirrors the concerns you have highlighted regarding their current trajectory.

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"Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy ... its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery." -- Sir Winston Churchill

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At the World Inequality Conference in Paris last week, Thomas Piketty and his colleagues at the World Inequality Lab unveiled their most ambitious intellectual product yet: the Global Justice Report. Billed as the first fully quantified framework for achieving global equality while averting an allegedly impending climate catastrophe, the report proposes that close to 90 per cent of humanity can double their incomes by 2100 while working roughly half as many hours, provided the world’s billionaires are taxed at confiscatory rates and a new Global Justice Fund is established to redistribute the proceeds across nations.

Piketty declared that “the current international order is plutocratic” and must be replaced by a democratic world order in which billionaires’ share of global wealth falls from six per cent today to just 0.05 per cent. One might observe that the current international order — messy, imperfect, and sovereign-state-based as it is — has lifted more people out of poverty in the past half-century than any redistributive programme in human history.

But no matter. The professors have a plan.

The centrepiece of the Report is a scenario in which all countries converge on a per capita monthly income of €5,000 by 2100, global working hours fall from today’s 2,100 per year to 1,000, and the energy system is entirely decarbonised. A new “Global Justice Platform“ would mobilise spending averaging 10.3 per cent of world GDP every year between 2030 and 2060 — for comparison, the combined budgets of the UN, IMF, and World Bank currently amount to less than 0.4 per cent of world GDP. This is not a serious economic plan but a form of technocratic millenarianism.

Why Piketty’s Work Deserves Critical Attention

Piketty commands extraordinary institutional reach: the World Inequality Lab’s databases are cited by the IMF, World Bank, and OECD, and his frameworks shape the distributional assumptions embedded in major policy documents. Errors or ideological distortions in his work propagate directly into the architecture of global economic governance. The Global Justice Report does not merely describe inequality but proposes a specific and radical reorganisation of the international order — confiscatory taxation, a new global bureaucracy spending over ten per cent of world GDP annually, and the sanctioning of non-compliant sovereign states — the stakes of uncritical acceptance are not academic but concretely political.

Let us begin with the numbers, since Piketty has always presented himself as an empiricist rather than an ideologue. The claim that a Global Justice Fund spending over ten per cent of world GDP annually is politically achievable requires either a degree of global governance that has never existed in the history of sovereign states, or coercion of a kind that the report’s democratic language carefully avoids naming.

Critics of Piketty have long noted the fragility of his empirical foundations, and the Global Justice Report does nothing to resolve those disputes. When Thomas Piketty burst onto the scene with Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013) he was hailed by the left as the economist who finally proved capitalism’s fatal flaw: r > g, the inexorable tendency of returns on capital to outpace economic growth, dooming us to ever-widening inequality.

Since the publication of his book in 2013, a succession of economists — from the Financial Times’s data team to Harvard’s Gerald Auten and David Splinter at the U.S. Treasury — have challenged Piketty’s central empirical claims. Auten and Splinter’s persistent back-and-forth with Piketty’s collaborators has shown that once taxes and transfers are properly accounted for, trends in U.S. income inequality are far less drastic than Piketty and his colleagues assert. The Institute for New Economic Thinking has argued that tax records are inferior to income surveys for measuring inequality — the very methodological basis on which Piketty’s entire research programme rests. Yet the report marches on, projecting distributional pathways out to 2100 on foundations that remain bitterly contested among specialists.

More telling still is the response of independent commentators who have examined Piketty’s work on its own terms. As the Chicago Booth Review noted in its assessment of Piketty’s framework, the mechanism he identifies — the persistent excess of the rate of return to capital over the rate of economic growth — is at best one part of a much more complex story.

Economists Kevin Murphy and Robert Topel at Chicago demonstrated that income inequality in the U.S. is better explained by the supply and demand for skills than by the blind compounding of inherited wealth that Piketty’s r > g formula implies. When Social Security is properly treated as wealth — which it is for the bottom ninety per cent of the population — top wealth shares show little change over the past three decades. Piketty’s dystopian forecast, as the City Journal has concluded, “remains highly speculative.”

Reparations by Another Name

Piketty fuses his inequality obsession with the “climate crisis.” The prescription? “Sustainable convergence”: slash global wealth and income gaps while staying within “planetary boundaries.” The Global Justice Report is, as Piketty readily confirmed to Outlook Business, a call for reparations. The billionaires of 2026, he argues, “would never have been able to accumulate so much wealth” without global greenhouse gas emissions since industrialisation, and it is therefore “perfectly legitimate” that they fund the redistribution now required.

This is an extraordinary claim dressed up as economic logic. It conflates the legal concept of reparations — grounded in specific historical wrongs committed by identifiable parties against identifiable victims — with a sweeping indictment of market capitalism and fossil-fuel energy as such.

Consider what this argument actually entails. Western entrepreneurs that built factories with powered machinery bear “a major historical responsibility” for emissions accumulated since the Industrial Revolution. The logic collapses on contact with any serious ethical analysis, yet it is stated in the Report with the confidence of a mathematical proof. It wraps envy and ex post “justice” in the seemingly objective garb of economic analysis. And this is not taking into account the serious debate over the alleged role of greenhouse gas emissions as the “control knob” of climate change.

Piketty’s proposed remedy — a global progressive wealth tax, a global income tax, a World Sovereign Fund, and a Global Justice Fund spending over ten per cent of world GDP — is, in effect, the permanent institutionalisation of this moral claim in an unelected, non-accountable global bureaucracy. It is the fantasy of every Fabian socialist since 1889, scaled to planetary dimensions and laundered through economic modelling.

Working Half as Much in a World Still Developing

The proposal to reduce global annual working hours from 2,100 to 1,000 by 2100 — roughly what a part-time worker in the Netherlands currently does — deserves particular scrutiny, since it is central to the model’s climate arithmetic. Piketty’s co-author Anmol Somanchi describes this as consistent with historical trends, invoking Keynes’s famous 1930 prediction that his grandchildren would work fifteen-hour weeks. Keynes was writing during the Great Depression, extrapolating from the productivity growth of the first industrial revolution. He was wrong for the same reason Piketty is wrong now: productivity growth does not automatically translate into leisure; it translates into higher consumption, better healthcare, longer lives, and new forms of work that did not previously exist.

More fundamentally, the global work reduction is not a projection in the Report — it is a policy requirement. The model needs people to work less in order to limit material throughput and thus keep warming below 1.8°C. Somanchi is candid that this “relies on very strong collective mobilisation, social struggles, and legislative action.” In other words, states must coerce workers out of paid employment to satisfy the model’s assumptions. For the credentialed Paris economist, a forty-hour week may seem like servitude. For a subsistence farmer in Bihar or a factory worker in Ho Chi Minh City, it represents escape from poverty.

The Planner’s Confidence

Piketty invokes the Nordic model repeatedly to reassure sceptics that compressed inequality is compatible with prosperity. It is a comparison that has been made so many times in left-progressive circles that it has acquired the status of axiomatic truth. But the Nordic economies developed their welfare states in the 1950s and 1960s on the back of highly open, export-competitive, market-based industrial economies with relatively homogeneous populations and strong pre-existing institutions of trust. They did not redistribute their way to productivity; they built productive economies first and then chose to compress some of the resulting income distribution through democratic deliberation.

In Sweden, for instance, the need for market-oriented reforms became acute in the early 1990s when the country faced its most severe economic crisis in the post-war period. Professor Assar Lindbeck was one of the most prominent advocates for efficiency-enhancing reforms. In response to that financial crisis, Sweden implemented a major structural reform package aimed at restoring macroeconomic stability and promoting growth — not only through macroeconomic policies but through microeconomic reforms intended to improve the functioning of markets. The sequence matters enormously. Piketty’s model inverts it entirely: redistribute first, grow later, assuming that the incentive effects of such state-directed degrowth are benign.

Piketty points to the high top marginal income tax rates in the United States between the 1930s and 1980s as proof that confiscatory taxation does not harm growth. This argument has been demolished so many times — by Robert Barro, by Greg Mankiw, by the empirical literature on dynamic scoring — that it is almost tedious to revisit. The U.S. growth performance of that era owed overwhelmingly to postwar reconstruction demand, the technology dividend from wartime military investment, cheap domestic energy, demographic tailwinds, and the absence of foreign competition in a war-devastated global economy. Attributing it to high marginal tax rates is an exercise in post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning that would not survive peer review in any serious economics department.

A World Without America and China

Perhaps the deepest flaw in the Global Justice Report is its treatment of political feasibility as an afterthought. Piketty claims that the platform “could proceed even without US or Chinese participation,” with non-participating countries subject to trade and financial sanctions. So the world’s two largest economies — accounting for nearly 40 per cent of global output — would be penalised by a self-appointed coalition of governments acting on the authority of... a conference paper from Paris. The political naivety on display here is extraordinary.

Piketty acknowledges that geopolitical rivalries will not solve today’s challenges — a statement with which no one disagrees — but then extrapolates from this observation to the conclusion that a global wealth tax administered by reformed multilateral institutions is therefore the correct solution. This is a non sequitur of considerable ambition. The absence of a world government is not an obstacle to be overcome by moral persuasion from Paris. It is a permanent feature of an Hobbesian international system composed of sovereign states with radically different interests, histories, and political cultures.

The Report proposes that the Global Justice Platform proceed even without Washington and Beijing, with non-participants subject to sanctions. Let us be precise about what this means: a coalition of countries, operating outside existing international law and treaty frameworks, would impose economic penalties on the United States and China for declining to submit their fiscal policies to an external redistributive authority.

It is a proposal for global coercion by the virtuous against the recalcitrant, with Piketty and colleagues presumably serving as the moral arbiters. This is possible only in a dream world ruled by Davos-appointed philosopher-kings of global governance where national borders no longer matter and where Trump’s ‘America First’ agenda and China’s communist party have ceased to exist.

There is also the small matter of China, which the Report treats as a potential participant. China is currently the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases by far; it is building coal-fired power stations at a furious pace and has shown no appetite for submitting its sovereign wealth or fiscal policy to external oversight. The Global Justice Platform, in the scenario where China cooperates, requires Beijing to agree to a permanent compression of its domestic wealth distribution and accept external auditing of its tax affairs. The scenario where China does not cooperate requires the rest of the world to sanction the country on which most global supply chains depend. Neither scenario is coherent nor faintly viable.

Development Denied

The Report’s treatment of the developing world is the most revealing aspect of the entire exercise. Piketty presents the convergence to €5,000 monthly per capita income as generous to nations like India, noting that this represents a four-to-fivefold rise in per capita material consumption. What he omits to mention is that his model achieves this by capping rich-country growth at near-zero, mandating a 43 per cent share of labour hours in education and health rather than in industry, agriculture, and manufacturing by 2100, and imposing a dramatic global reduction in material throughput.

The poor are to be raised up not by the unleashing of dispatchable energy — fossil fuels and nuclear — but by a managed, supervised, globally administered levelling process in which every nation’s consumption trajectory is determined by the modellers in Paris and their ideological allies such as the dirigiste economist Mariana Mazzucato.

This is not serious economics. It is a souped-up version of eco-Marxism: class warfare dressed in carbon accounting, with supranational central planning as the saviour. Piketty has always nodded to Marxist theory on capital accumulation; now he adds planetary limits and calls for overriding national sovereignty through global taxation and a “World Sovereign Fund”.

This represents the return of a very old idea: that development for the poor is best achieved not by allowing them access to cheap, reliable energy and open markets, but by transferring resources from rich countries under the supervision of international institutions. The postwar development aid experiment, running now for seven decades at a cost of trillions of dollars, has produced the persistent inequality Piketty himself documents.

What actually lifted hundreds of millions from poverty was export-oriented industrialisation in East Asia powered by fossil fuels — precisely the development model that the Global Justice Report’s degrowth assumptions would have foreclosed. South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, China, Indonesia, Vietnam: none of these economies achieved their transformative growth by reducing working hours and shifting labour into the public sector on the advice of French economists.

Grand Theory, Thin Reality

The Global Justice Report is, in the end, a document that reveals more about the sociology of contemporary leftist economists and their well-funded “social justice” NGOs allies than it does about the prospects for global prosperity. The report involves 200-odd researchers, its offers newly assembled global databases, it has interactive online tool for designing your own “preferred scenario”. This apparatus confers the appearance of scientific authority on what is, at its core, a set of political preferences for global government over national sovereignty; for managed degrowth over market-driven expansion; for redistributive transfer over productive investment; for a Paris consensus over the messy, contentious, democratic processes by which actual societies influence policy choices.

The paradox Piketty embodies is that the weaker the intellectual foundations of redistributive proposals, the more intensely it is promoted. This is because its function is not analytical but political. It tells the already convinced what they wish to hear, in the language of technocratic authority, and it frames all objection as the self-interest of the powerful such as the oil and gas companies, climate deniers and Trumpian populists.

The Piketty report argues that coercive global redistribution is both necessary and sufficient for climate stability. Yet it fails to engage with the extensive literature on aid ineffectiveness and institutional quality; it conflates market-generated wealth with colonial extraction; and it assumes that a Global Justice Fund administered by international bureaucrats would be immune to the corruption, rent-seeking, and political capture that have plagued every comparable institution from the World Bank to the IMF.

The anti-growth turn in climate circles is not new—it echoes Malthus, the Club of Rome, and Rousseau’s noble savage. But today’s version is more insidious: it masquerades as science while demanding totalitarian control over energy production, corporate behaviour and household decisions over diets and lifestyles.

The world’s poor deserve better than another utopia designed for them by the globalist intelligentsia. They deserve cheap energy, open markets, secure property rights, and the freedom to industrialise on terms they choose for themselves. That is what worked in East Asia. It is what will work in South Asia, Africa and Latin America. And it is precisely what the Global Justice Report, for all its mathematical sophistication, conspicuously fails to offer.

A version of this article was first published by RealClearEnergy https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2026/06/11/pikettys_eco-marxist_utopia_why_degrowth_and_global_redistribution_will_trap_the_poor_in_poverty_1187897.html

Dr. Tilak K. Doshi is an economist, a former contributor to Forbes, a member of the C0₂ Coalition and energy editor at the Daily Sceptic. Follow him on Substack and X.

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Will Donald Trump obtain a lasting peace with Iran over the Strait of Hormuz

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The war is still going.

President Donald Trump claims a US–Iran peace agreement is close at hand—something he has insisted many times in recent months. Now, Trump says the “final points” have been resolved.

In her Insight newsletter, Frida Ghitis writes of Trump’s “transparent desperation to get a deal to end the war”—seen on Monday, for instance, when Trump pressured Israel to stand down as it traded long-range missile strikes with Iran. The Islamic Republic isn’t so eager, Ghitis writes. The Economist suggests Tehran no longer fears war with the US or Israel.

Bloomberg columnist Andreas Kluth warns Trump will have a hard time securing any meaningful peace agreement: “Why would Iran’s leaders suddenly trust his assurances enough to make any deal, when the president twice (last June and this February) started bombing them while negotiations were ongoing?” The Economist argues Trump can “[f]orget about anything as good as the pre-war status quo, let alone the deal Barack Obama struck in 2015 to restrain Iran’s nuclear ambitions, which Mr Trump tore up. The best Mr Trump can hope for is a makeshift pact to reopen the [Strait of Hormuz] in exchange for an extended ceasefire that may, with luck, become permanent. Economic sweeteners will be necessary. … Haggling over Iran’s nuclear programme will have to come later. Such a deal would be unstable, and humiliating for America. Yet it would be less bad than any plausible alternative.”

That’s a problem for Trump as the midterm elections loom.

The US added jobs in May, but the main economic story is still inflation. On average, gasoline prices in the US are $1.19 higher now than when Trump launched this war, a 43% increase.

“I love the inflation” figures, Trump said yesterday after new official statistics showed US inflation jumping from a yearly rate of 3.8% in April to 4.2% in May. (Before Trump launched the war with Iran, the US inflation rate was 2.4%.) When the war is over, Trump said, prices will “come down like a rock.”

The Peterson Institute for International Economics warns the war will continue boosting US inflation—particularly in transportation, agriculture and manufacturing—and will knock a percentage point off US annual GDP. The world economy could grow half as fast this year if the war continues, per the World Bank. Economist Desmond Lachman writes for Project Syndicate: “It goes without saying that Trump will seek to shift blame for inflation away from himself. But this will be a tough sell. Aside from MAGA diehards, everyone knows that Trump’s fingerprints are all over the affordability problem. By aggressively raising import tariffs and pursuing mass deportations, he has single-handedly driven up the price of imported goods as well as many domestically produced goods and services. Similarly, by launching a war of choice against Iran, he caused sharp increases in gasoline, diesel, and fertilizer prices. These costs are sure to put him on the back foot even with his rural base, which has also suffered from reduced agricultural orders from China.”

In an interview with The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner, the Carnegie Endowment’s Peter Harrell says Trump’s main success has been in manipulating markets: “Trump goes out there and jawbones. He says that it’s ending soon, and the market buys it, and as a result the price impacts, though undeniably quite serious, really haven’t materialized as badly as most of us would have predicted.” Chotiner’s own response is telling: “you start to wonder if the people who are making markets move have paid attention to politics since 2015.”

The expected political consequences might be arriving. A June 3–8 Reuters/Ipsos poll shows only 29% approve of Trump’s handling of the economy. In Ohio—a traditional swing state that has turned redder since voting twice for Obama—Fox News polling shows the Senate race tilting toward Sherrod Brown, the Democratic former US senator who lost his seat in 2024. Venerated political prognosticator Charlie Cook argues this “could well be the canary in the midterm coal mine, suggesting far greater danger for Republicans in November than was previously evident.”

The Disturbing Scale of Africa’s Ebola Outbreak

Global health officials continue to sound the alarm over Africa’s Ebola outbreak. On Sunday’s GPS, Fareed talked with Dr. Ashish Jha, Covid-19 response coordinator in the Biden administration, about the scale of the outbreak and the extent to which Trump’s cuts to international aid might have worsened it.

Soccer Nation

The US isn’t really a soccer country. Here, basketball, American football, baseball and hockey dominate. But with the 2026 FIFA men’s World Cup kicking off today in the US, Canada and Mexico, The Wall Street Journal’s Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg point out that the US Men’s National Team—which is not nearly as competitive internationally as the US women—consistently ranks in the world’s top 15. America’s top men’s domestic league, MLS, is among the world’s best attended. Moreover, the US enjoys a “bubbling undercurrent” of soccer culture.

“How it got there is not a linear story,” the Journal’s Robinson and Clegg write. “The fits and starts of America’s complicated relationship with the world’s most popular game encompass a forgotten goal in the middle of Brazil, the 1990s invention of a sports league from scratch, the Hollywood arrival of an English Spice Boy, and a uniquely American brand of optimism. Now as more than 6 million fans prepare to attend the World Cup, the country that spent so long dismissing the sport finds itself proudly at the center of the soccer universe.”

In the US, soccer isn’t quite like other pro sports, Bloomberg columnist Adam Minter writes, noting a “strange outcome” of soccer’s journey toward, if not yet to, true sporting popularity in America. “It has become a major American sport without developing around a single organization or audience,” Minter writes. “Loyalties are scattered across foreign leagues, national teams and domestic competitions alike. That fracturing might have looked like failure a generation ago. In 2026, it’s what success looks like in a diverse, digital America.”

These days, few things are more American than having a strong opinion about Donald Trump. After discussing World Cup geopolitics on GPS recently with fill-in anchor Bianna Golodryga, The New Yorker’s Ishaan Tharoor asks if the tournament can overcome Trump’s involvement: “So far, Trump is dominating the buildup to the World Cup for all the wrong reasons. This is the first World Cup in which the host nation is at war with one of the tournament’s participants (Iran), and the U.S. also has sweeping travel bans or visa restrictions on a number of the participating countries.” Iranian players were allowed to enter the US, but Iran says some of its support staff have been barred. “Most egregious yet is the story of Omar Abdulkadir Artan, an up-and-coming referee from Somalia who was tapped by FIFA to officiate in this tournament,” Tharoor writes. “He was barred from entry after landing in Miami last week where he was detained and questioned for eleven hours, and was then put on a flight to Istanbul. Artan told the [New York] Times, ‘I had the right papers and everything. I had the right visa,’ but, he added, ‘I think that they have a problem with my country.’” US Customs and Border Protection told CNN that Artan was turned away “due to vetting concerns” following an additional entry inspection.

That said, Tharoor notes joyful encounters between local Americans and foreign fans, plus the enthusiasm of US-based diaspora communities. “That solidarity among strangers is the best thing that any World Cup has to offer,” Tharoor writes, “and even the President of the United States can’t ruin it.”

In rolling out a proposed EU sanctions package against Russia, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen this week noted: “We propose substantial restrictions on imports [from Russia] on some fish products, and a complete ban on others, including cod.” The package would also maintain Europe’s price cap on Russian oil, sanction more cargo vessels in Russia’s “shadow fleet,” ban transactions with some Russian banks, and restrict exports to Russia of metals and alloys that can be used to make weapons.

Foreign Policy’s Keith Johnson notes: “The latest sanctions package is especially important because Moscow has received a shot of relief this spring, thanks to the Iran war and the Trump administration’s easing of sanctions. Russian energy revenues are now at more than two-year highs.”

Lately, Europe has appeared to grow even more nervous about Moscow’s ambitions. The Wall Street Journal’s Yaroslav Trofimov wrote late last month: “In recent weeks, Russia has made increasingly bellicose statements against the Baltic states. It has threatened to bomb ‘decision-making centers’ in Latvia after accusing the country of hosting Ukrainian drone operators, an allegation denied by the Latvian authorities. Air-raid alarms were sounded in Lithuania last week, forcing the government into a bunker, after suspected Russian drones approached its airspace from Belarus. … While fears that Russia could expand the conflict to Europe aren’t new, recent developments have made them more urgent.”

Emma Rowena Gatewood

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Comment by John Shanahan

This Substack is about Energy And The Modern World. Energy and energy by-producs aren’t important, if they don’t serve a purpose for humanity. It is important to understand people and their place among all of creation.

Emma Rowena Gatewood

She told her children she was going for a walk.
She didn't mention the 2,000 miles.
Her name was Emma Rowena Gatewood. And on a quiet morning in 1955, she walked out of her farmhouse in Gallia County, Ohio, carrying a homemade denim bag slung over one shoulder, wearing a pair of Keds sneakers, and stepped onto a path that no woman had ever completed alone.
She was 67 years old.
But before the trail, before the history, before the headlines — there was the marriage.
Emma had married P.C. Gatewood in 1912 at the age of 19. Over the following decades, she bore him eleven children and endured beatings so severe that neighbors called the police and local newspapers reported the incidents. He broke her teeth. He left her unconscious in fields. On at least one occasion, she nearly didn't survive. She stayed — as women in rural Ohio in the 1920s and 30s stayed — because leaving meant poverty, meant losing her children, meant facing a world that had almost no infrastructure for women who walked away from violent husbands.
She finally divorced him in 1941. She was 53 years old.
What do you do with the years after surviving something like that? Some people shrink. Some people spend the rest of their lives simply recovering, grateful for the quiet.
Emma Gatewood started walking.
She had read a 1949 National Geographic article about the Appalachian Trail — 2,050 miles of wilderness stretching from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine, cutting through fourteen states, over some of the most unforgiving terrain in the eastern United States. The article made it sound adventurous. Challenging, certainly, but manageable.
The article, she would later say dryly, had left out quite a lot.
In 1954, she attempted the trail and got lost, injured, and turned back. Most people would have filed that under lessons learned and gone home permanently.
Emma went home, spent the winter preparing, and came back in 1955.
She told her adult children she was going for a walk. She did not tell them which walk. She understood, with the practical wisdom of a woman who had learned to navigate difficult terrain long before she ever touched a hiking trail, that they would try to stop her.
What she carried would have made any modern hiker wince. No frame pack. No hiking boots. No specialized gear of any kind. She had a homemade bag made from a denim shower curtain, containing a wool blanket, a raincoat, a plastic curtain that doubled as a ground cover, and some basic food supplies. She wore blue jeans and those Keds sneakers. She had $200.
The Appalachian Trail in 1955 was not what it is today. Large sections were poorly marked. Maps were unreliable. Shelters were sparse and often in disrepair. The trail crossed streams without bridges, climbed exposed ridgelines with no protection, and passed through stretches of genuine wilderness where help was simply not coming if something went wrong.
Emma walked through all of it.
She averaged seventeen miles a day. She slept in shelters when they existed, in barns when farmers offered, under trees when nothing else was available. She ate berries along the trail and accepted meals from strangers who took in the small, determined elderly woman moving through their mountain towns and felt compelled to feed her. She got lost. She got rained on for days at a time. Her feet blistered until they bled.
She kept walking.
She arrived at Mount Katahdin in Maine on September 25, 1955 — 146 days after she had started. She became the first woman to solo hike the entire Appalachian Trail, and at 67, the oldest person to have completed it at that point.
When reporters found her, they asked what had driven her to do it.
She said the woods were beautiful. She said she liked the quiet.
She did not talk about the marriage. She did not frame the journey as survival or reclamation or healing. She was matter-of-fact about it in the way that people are matter-of-fact about things they have fully processed and moved beyond. She had walked 2,000 miles through the American wilderness in canvas sneakers. She was not particularly interested in making it sound more dramatic than it was.
She went home.
Then, in 1957, she hiked it again.
In 1964, at the age of 75, she completed it a third time — section by section. She remains one of only a handful of people to have thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail three times, and she did it without a single piece of professional equipment.
Emma Gatewood died on June 4, 1973, at the age of 85. She had spent her final years still walking — local trails, state parks, paths through the Ohio countryside she had known her whole life.
The Appalachian Trail community never forgot her. A section of the trail in her home state of Ohio was officially named Grandma Gatewood's Walk in her honor. Her story was preserved in journalist Ben Montgomery's biography, Grandma Gatewood's Walk, published in 2014, which introduced her to a new generation of readers.
She is remembered as a pioneer of recreational hiking, a symbol of what ordinary people can endure and still become.
But the truest version of her story is simpler than any of that.
She survived something that would have ended most people. She waited until she was free. And then, at 67, in canvas sneakers with a shower curtain on her back, she walked 2,000 miles through mountains and storms and wilderness.
Not to prove anything. Not to make history.
Just because the woods were beautiful.
And she had been waiting a very long time to walk in peace.

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