For fans of “Game of Thrones” dismayed by the expository second season of “House of the Dragon,” the spinoff’s third and penultimate season has just wrapped with a great deal more drama. Though this latest season, and the series more broadly, has never soared in the same rarefied air as its predecessor, even in its middling moments, “House of the Dragon” boasts a sense of scale and escapism that dwarfs most of what is on television.
We return to an unstable Westeros, ravaged by the whims of rival claimants to the crown. Bolstered by her new dragon riders and having dispensed with delusions of a pacifist ascent to power, Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy) swiftly takes King’s Landing and finally assumes the Iron Throne.
Among my gripes with this franchise is its broad lack of favorable characters to root for. Daemon Targaryen (Matt Smith) remains an obvious favorite antihero, though this is more a testament to Smith’s arresting charisma than to anything the screenwriters have given him.
The series also has a curious knack for pushing women into positions of immense power only to have the weight of the crown scramble their senses — Daenerys, Cersei, now Rhaenyra — much like whoever runs the WNBA.
And Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke) is somehow even more vexing. Even from captivity, she continues playing her own children like pieces on a chessboard, though her motivations become increasingly difficult to follow. Early in the season — slight spoiler — she helps engineer Rhaenyra’s capture of King’s Landing, manipulating Aemond Targaryen (Ewan Mitchell) into flying to Harrenhal and leaving the capital vulnerable. She presents the betrayal as an attempt to avert further bloodshed and salvage what remains of her family, only to spend much of the season thereafter conspiring against the very children she professes to protect.
The prevailing wisdom that proximity to power maddens and corrupts continues to writhe through the series. In business school, we had a popular elective called “Power and Influence,” devoted to understanding organizational structures, individual motivations, and how people accumulate enough leverage to get their way. Westeros would make for a fine case study. Authority here is almost entirely relational: kings depend on dragons, dragon riders depend on armies, armies depend on lords, and every alliance lasts precisely as long as the incentives holding it together.
Late in the season, one of Rhaenyra’s powerful new allies is wooed by the enemy after discovering that, under her rule, he cannot simply wander off to the pub for a pint during work hours. The particulars of his 401(k) are not discussed onscreen. The show is set in a fantasy realm a thousand years in the past, but competitive benefits remain an unwavering means of poaching talent.
The season’s most intriguing practitioner of this game is Ormund Hightower (James Norton), portrayed with chilling psychopathy as he grooms the young Daeron Targaryen (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) into a pliable Hightower claimant to the Iron Throne. After conquering Tumbleton, a trading town loyal to Rhaenyra, Ormund strategically embeds his forces among the civilian population, effectively daring the queen to unleash dragon fire and massacre scores of innocents along with his army.
It is only reasonable to assume that Hightower’s great military inspiration is Yasser Arafat. I will spare the particulars for those who have yet to watch, but to drive the point home, the culminating battle finds bound and captive children lining the fortress walls as human shields.
This also underscores the folly of Rhaenyra’s reluctance to intervene decisively once the Hightower incursion becomes clear. Throughout the season, Ormund orchestrates stabbings and murders among Rhaenyra’s command in King’s Landing. Even when Daemon captures one of his operatives, the prisoner apathetically invites Daemon to kill him, warning that they “will never stop.” Ormund’s strategy is simple: keep escalating until Rhaenyra either responds on his terms or loses control altogether. A “Hightower Intifada,” if you will.
This is also where “House of the Dragon” can become maddening. Otherwise clever characters periodically lose all strategic sense when the screenplay needs another reversal. Rhaenyra repeatedly ignores obvious opportunities to exploit her overwhelming advantage in dragons, while supposedly seasoned political operators make decisions whose principal justification appears to be that another episode remains.
Despite her intentions, Rhaenyra’s restraint does not prevent bloodshed; it merely postpones it, while allowing her enemies to make the eventual confrontation considerably worse. By the time she acts, Ormund has entrenched himself among civilians and transformed Tumbleton into precisely the humanitarian catastrophe she hoped to avoid.
Here, George R. R. Martin’s fantasy politics become remarkably grounded in reality. Foreign policy rarely affords leaders the luxury of choosing between violence and peace; more often, the choice is between exercising force now and confronting considerably greater violence later. Deterrence works only when an adversary believes there are consequences for crossing the line.
Rhaenyra approaches her foes with something of Neville Chamberlain’s logic that restraint today might purchase peace tomorrow. Instead, her adversaries treat every hesitation as permission to escalate — a timely lesson in geopolitics she will have to carry into the fourth and final season of &#8220;House of the Dragon.&#8221;
Peace is not always preserved by the ruler most reluctant to fight. Sometimes it is preserved by making it sufficiently clear that the fight will not end well — or, in more contemporary parlance, would-be assailants can “f— around and find out.”
***
Harry Khachatrian (<a href="https://x.com/harry1t6">@Harry1T6</a>) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at <a href="https://www.betweenbottles.com/">BetweenBottles.com</a>.
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream</a>, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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‘House Of The Dragon’ Proves Appeasement Always Fails

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arts

foreign policy

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President Donald Trump on Monday brushed aside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu&#8217;s objections to selling F-35 fighter jets to Turkey, saying the United States alone will decide what weapons it exports. 
Speaking aboard Air Force One ahead of Netanyahu&#8217;s White House visit, Trump praised Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan while making clear that foreign leaders would not dictate U.S. arms sales.
&#8220;Nobody tells me what we should be selling,&#8221; Trump said. &#8220;Turkey has been a tremendous ally for me.&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-media-max-width="560">
&#8220;Prime Minister Netanyahu opposes sending the F-35s to Turkey&#8230;&#8221;<a href="https://x.com/POTUS?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@POTUS</a>: &#8220;Nobody tells me what we should be selling or not. Turkey has been a tremendous ally.&#8221; <a href="https://t.co/8gSzavJ6Ce">pic.twitter.com/8gSzavJ6Ce</a>
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) <a href="https://x.com/RapidResponse47/status/2081797692389286004?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 27, 2026</a></blockquote>
Trump&#8217;s remarks came just weeks after Netanyahu urged Washington not to approve a sale, arguing Turkey&#8217;s increasingly hostile posture toward Israel makes transferring the stealth fighters too risky. 
&#8220;I don&#8217;t think they should be given F-35s or engines for their fighter jets,&#8221; Netanyahu said in an interview with <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/video/6400346259112">Fox News</a>. 
In the same interview, Netanyahu described Turkey as &#8220;a regime infected by the Muslim Brotherhood&#8221; and warned that it posed a growing regional threat to both Israel and the United States.
Trump, however, dismissed the notion that Israel&#8217;s concerns should determine American policy. 
&#8220;Turkey&#8217;s not a big fan of Israel. You know that, right? They&#8217;re not a big fan of Bibi,&#8221; Trump said. &#8220;But they&#8217;ve been great for me.&#8221; He went on to praise Turkey&#8217;s military capabilities. &#8220;Very powerful country, by the way. Tremendous military. Very big military. Very powerful military. Has a lot of great equipment.&#8221;
The exchange highlighted one of the few areas where Trump has publicly broken with Netanyahu, continuing to pursue closer ties with Turkey despite Israeli objections. 
The proposed sale remains complicated, and certainly not final. Trump indicated during a July meeting with Erdogan that he favored moving forward, but the State Department recently <a href="https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-903578">informed</a> Congress that Turkey still does not meet the legal requirements necessary to rejoin the F-35 program.
Turkey was removed from the multinational F-35 program in 2020 after purchasing Russia&#8217;s S-400 air defense system, triggering sanctions under the Countering America&#8217;s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA). The State Department told Congress that American policy &#8220;remains unchanged&#8221; and that Turkey must resolve the S-400 issue before any sale can proceed.
The F-35 is widely regarded as the world&#8217;s most advanced operational fighter jet, and Israel is currently the only country in the Middle East to operate the aircraft. Israeli leaders have long sought to preserve that military edge by opposing sales of the jets to neighboring countries.
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U.S. President Trump Arrives In Ankara, Turkey For NATO Summit

Trump Won’t Budge For Netanyahu: ‘Nobody Tells Me What We Should Be Selling’

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donald trump

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In a cold, sterile room, officials at two long tables, separated by a wide divide, sat, staring. On one end, Team USA was represented by the Biden administration. On the other end, Team China. As U.S. officials slowly rolled out each scripted word, they informed the People’s Republic of China of their modern-day human rights abuses. <a href="https://nypost.com/2021/03/26/china-defends-itself-on-human-rights-by-pointing-to-history-of-slavery-in-us/">Then came China’s turn</a>. Staring down the barrel of the divide, right into the eyes of America’s top diplomat, the Chinese leader spat out, unscripted, that the U.S. no longer spoke from a position of strength; it had no authority to lecture on human rights abuses.
They painted the picture of America’s human rights abuses as “deep-seated … they did not just emerge over the past four years, such as Black Lives Matter.” On the issue of forced labor, Chinese officials rebuked the U.S., saying it had no moral authority to judge. They then proceeded to show pictures of their machine cotton production versus America’s historical production through slavery.
Even through a screen, you could feel the air sucked out of the room.
And that’s when I realized, as a public relations professional, China was officially on track to win the PR war. Just a few short years later, it looks like they’ve done just that.
This month, the Pew Research Center <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2026/07/15/people-in-many-countries-now-view-china-more-positively-than-the-u-s/">released a blockbuster report</a> showing that more nations had a favorable view of China than the U.S. The data also pointed to an indisputable trend: most countries still believe America respects its citizens’ freedom more than China does, but that gap is rapidly shrinking. Across the board, global sentiment toward China trended up. Pakistan topped as China’s biggest fan. But most telling, the countries with the highest regard for the U.S. were those in China’s crosshairs: Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and, most interestingly, India.
I can attest to this. As someone who grew up in Taiwan, the closer you are geographically to China, the more acutely aware you are of its striking capabilities. Literally. The <a href="https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/nwc-review/vol52/iss3/2/">mid-90s Chinese missile attacks on Taiwan</a> are seared in my mind, as my school operated daily air raid simulations. The people who live closest to China’s power often have the least romanticized view of it.
But lest you think this positive shift is just a global phenomenon, it’s not. We’re seeing the same trend here in America.
Pew also noted <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/04/14/americans-views-of-china-have-grown-somewhat-more-positive-in-recent-years/">Americans are steadily warming to China.</a> Today, over a quarter of Americans have a positive view of China, doubling over the last three years. Just like the global data, 2023 seems to be a pivotal year, with the graphs showing, pretty much across the board, most countries softening their views on the PRC. Why is that? I’m not sure anyone knows for sure. But as a PR professional, I’m convinced it is in part due to China’s refreshed messaging.
Every PR practitioner knows that two of the biggest PR metrics are message pull-through and audience sentiment. China appears to be excelling at both. The ultimate victory isn’t when someone repeats a paid message but when they repeat it organically, in their own words, believing it’s their own conclusion. Scroll through TikTok, and you’ll see videos of young influencers comparing the human rights abuses of America vs. China, debating who is more “imperialistic.”
Look at top streamer and socialist political commentator Hasan Piker. His recent trip to China was viewed millions of times as he stood in Tiananmen Square, not mentioning the atrocities but rather holding a Chinese flag, stating he had <a href="https://thehill.com/video/hasan-piker-blasted-for-china-livestream-i-dont-have-any-patriotism-for-america/11256155/">“no patriotism in his heart for America.”</a> Later, he showed reverence for former communist dictator Mao Zedong by claiming he would never criticize him. In an interview with a <a href="https://www.scmp.com/news/us/diplomacy/article/3343845/hasan-piker-talks-about-his-controversial-china-trip-and-thinking-chinese-thoughts">Chinese news outlet</a>, Piker said that China&#8217;s social contract outperforms America&#8217;s, emphasizing the country’s perceived achievements.
When it comes to positive sentiment, it’s not just Piker; we can also look at social media to reflect the patterns found in the Pew data. Social media accounts share “Chinamaxxing” content: A social trend where Gen Z romanticizes the communist nation and adopts Chinese aesthetics. For years, experts <a href="https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/5432077-tiktok-china-influence-us/">recognized the significant impact</a> China’s use of TikTok can have on its 170 million U.S. users. Even <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/19/the-guardian-view-on-perceptions-of-superpowers-the-world-isnt-chinamaxxing-its-america-avoidant">The Guardian points out</a>, “China is increasingly investing in overseas influence operations, including working with or amplifying local social media content creators.” It appears that the CCP understands a critical point of PR sentiment: You don’t have to win complete adoration; sometimes reducing opposition is victory enough.
I see this in my personal interactions as well. Because I grew up in Taiwan, many people share their thoughts with me about China. And what I’ve heard is a definite softening on <a href="https://freedomhouse.org/country/china">China’s human rights abuses</a>. “They just want to be left alone” or “They only want to operate in their sphere.” They paint China as some geopolitical Greta Garbo, when that’s just not the case.
It’s why Chinese President Xi Jinping recently described U.S.-China relations through the framework of the <a href="https://gsas.harvard.edu/news/discussing-thucydides-trap">Thucydides Trap</a>, wishcasting his nation to surpass the U.S. as the global superpower. It’s why <a href="https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1630978524684413">U.S. farmers are alarmed at American farmland being sold</a>. Even Hollywood can’t produce some American movies without agreeing to zero mentions of the <a href="https://www.heritage.org/china/heritage-explains/how-china-taking-control-hollywood">“Three Ts”</a>: Taiwan, Tibet, or Tiananmen Square.
China doesn’t need to convince Americans that it’s good. It just needs to convince us we’re hypocritical. Make us feel its ambitions are harmless. The latest Pew data confirms China’s global sentiment is improving, while its talking points are increasingly repeated by Americans themselves. By the two measures I know best, sentiment and message pull-through, the country appears to be gaining. Regrettably, China has been waging the PR war for years — and it appears to be winning.
***
Emily Osment Davis is a writer and communicator with a background in non-profits and politics and a not-so-secret love of celebrity gossip. She covers the space where Hollywood meets D.C. — because sometimes the two aren’t so different. You may have read her work in Newsweek, USA Today, Fox News and more.

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Is China Winning The PR War?

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hasan piker

hollywood

Public relations

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Thucydides Trap

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Last night, President Trump gave a prime time address. On its face, the president&#8217;s speech was about election meddling.
In general, of course, he&#8217;s right. We do need to pass the SAVE America Act and secure our elections. It’s not Jim Crow 2.0 to require ID to vote or to show proof of citizenship to register to vote.
But beneath the president&#8217;s big speech last night lurked a threat far greater than the question of election interference or election security.
No one seems particularly interested in covering that threat, and it is the greatest external threat our country has ever faced.
That threat is China.
They&#8217;re a threat to America. They have many allies here in the United States. Bernie Sanders does open events with the Chinese. Hassan Piker has an actual Chinese flag in the background. Zohran Mamdani, China-friendly Democratic Socialists of America, and many big corporations that want to do business over there are all a part of this.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-show-ep-2466?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-981859" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif" alt="" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-768x128.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
China must be defeated.
China is not a strategic opponent. They&#8217;re not a country with whom we should seek a conciliatory relationship.
They are an enemy, period. They are the most insidious and dangerous enemy we have ever faced.
Nazi Germany never put phones with their propaganda in the hands of your children. The Soviet Union didn&#8217;t own trillions of dollars of American bonds.
China is not only a country that has murdered tens of millions of its own citizens, that supports literally all of our enemies abroad, that unleashed a global pandemic that killed millions of people and shut down the entire Western economy, and that wants to develop artificial intelligence to take over our minds and outcompete our military; they&#8217;re a country with global ambitions, and their ambition runs right up against the United States.
President Trump stated:
<blockquote>Over a period of years, starting during the 2020 election cycle, the People&#8217;s Republic of China carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history, resulting in China&#8217;s illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files. That information includes names, addresses, phone numbers, political party preferences, and other sensitive data that would be needed to register to vote and engage in other nefarious activities, which is exactly what was happening.</blockquote>
The accusation is not that China hacked voting machines or changed voter tabulation outcomes; it’s that they gained access to hundreds of millions of voter records.
Some of that is public information. You or I could gain access to voter records because voter registration is, in many states, public information.
The question is why China was doing that. Answer: They were doing that in order to manipulate American citizens. They were going to do a deep dive into the registration status of Americans and then use that information in order to target Americans.
The president contended last night that there were members of the Deep State — people who are career appointees in the executive branch — who spent the year 2020 suppressing information about China meddling, essentially on behalf of Democrats.
One declassified document, which appears to be from the national intelligence wing, said, “Ahead of the 2020 presidential elections, China had extensive plans to utilize potential (blacked out) and cyber operations to sway public opinion against the Trump administration and international opinion against the U.S. government. The China plans were designed to exploit U.S. societal fissures and vulnerabilities, to influence U.S. and other audiences, and, by extension, U.S. government decision-making. The plans addressed several scenarios, including military conflict between the United States and China, as well as other potential crises.”
China was attempting to exploit U.S. fissures and vulnerabilities, perceived or real, including racial tensions. They would allege that white people hate black people, incite demonstrations and marches as evidence of racial divides, increase the level of conflict between police and anti-racism activists, and feed any sense that U.S. law enforcement resents people of color.
Did that stuff materialize in 2020? Of course it did. They wanted to ramp up political party disagreements and disagreements between Congress and the Trump administration. They wanted to ramp up international propaganda. The intelligence stated, “China had developed capabilities to project themes on these topics into social media (TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and others) as well as mainstream media, through a variety of overt and hidden influencers and media contributors. One of the options included gathering information on senior U.S. government officials to influence public opinion on those officials.”
We should have suspected all of this. These subversion operations, demoralization operations, really, have been long-time communist policy dating back to the Soviet Union.
Former Fox News reporter Catherine Herridge published a report in April that addressed this. She reported that the CIA, led by Director Gina Haspel, would not document the Chinese influence operations formally, out of concern that President Trump would use the intelligence to his advantage.
This, presumably, was the sort of Deep State Trump was talking about.
If you actually would like to end the threat to the United States, you have to contain and strangle Chinese power. You must. China is not a strategic opponent. They are an enemy.
Here are some things we should do.
First, we need to economically wreck them. That means, yes, tariffs. It means we need to crack down on our trade with China. But to do that, we have to strike better trade deals with our allies in the region. If you&#8217;re going to make people choose between China and us, we have to offer a carrot to our friends and a stick to our enemies.
It also means we have to radically lower our spending. We can&#8217;t just keep selling our bonds to China. We cannot make the future of the country dependent on China holding our debt, because that means any time they want to hurt us, they just sell our debt into the open market and destroy our capacity to borrow.
It means that we do have to restore important manufacturing in countries other than China. That doesn&#8217;t mean all the way back home, which is very expensive sometimes. It means you have to go to allies. Sometimes you have to manufacture in India, for example. We need to draw closer to India.
We need to go after the countries that trade in necessary valuables with China. We need to secure our supply lines for rare earth minerals.
The United States is the economic gorilla on planet Earth, and we ought to throw our weight around. With regard to China, this notion that we thrive and China thrives, China has played the markets against us. China has used a certain opening of its economy in order to maximize its own leverage and power. We need to reverse that.
Second, we must rebuild the American military. This is not optional. This is necessary. The president has called for a significant upgrade in our military capacity, including for things like Patriot missiles and THAADs. Democrats are stalling this on the basis that they&#8217;re angry about the Iran war.
We should point out that Iran does not exist as a baseline military power without Chinese and Russian help. These are people who could not construct an IKEA box, but somehow they have fairly sophisticated weaponry courtesy of the Chinese.
We need to build up our military, and that means getting sophisticated about it. China is building a massive drone capacity. We need to work with firms to develop sophisticated weaponry to stall out the Chinese threat. There is no excuse for the American government purposely handicapping and kneecapping our own military capacity.
Third, we have to crack down on China&#8217;s technological infiltration of American society. That means we need to crack down on their information operations. It also means cracking down on nonprofits that act essentially as pass-throughs for the Chinese Communist government. We need to end the practice of people dropping babies from China. We need to end student visas from China. Why are we educating hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens who go back to China and bring stolen IP and knowledge back to our enemies?
There are a ton of people in positions of power who want to keep making nice with the Chinese. Bernie Sanders has been doing a full-on propaganda effort on behalf of the Chinese to undermine our AI industries. Believe me, the Chinese want nothing more than to destroy our forward capacity with AI. They want us to destroy the lead that we currently hold in AI, and they are succeeding because they are spreading a bunch of nonsense about data centers and how they&#8217;re going to wreck our industrial farmlands.
There are 875 million acres of farmland in the United States. If we were to build all of the data centers you could possibly want in the United States, four or five million acres out of 875 million acres, and it&#8217;s not all going to be built on farmland — what are we talking about here?
Some large-scale businesses are trying to do business in China. This was the problem with Apple.
Very few politicians are willing to stand up and say the truth, but President Trump is one of them. He has reoriented the political landscape regarding China. Until President Trump took office, most American politicians were still preaching the idea that China was a strategic partner. Trump largely moved them from strategic partners to strategic opponents.
In 2014, after Xi Jinping became the Chinese dictator, he wrote, “The battle for mind control happens on a smokeless battlefield. It happens inside the domain of ideology. Whoever controls this battlefield can win hearts. They&#8217;ll have the initiative throughout the competition in combat. When it comes to combat in the ideology domain, we don&#8217;t have any room for compromise or retreat. We must achieve total victory.”
These are our enemies, and we need to fight them using all the means at our disposal.

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The Conversation America Needs To Have

Ben Shapiro

Data Centers

opinion

Trade War

Vice President JD Vance&#8217;s decision to spend nearly three hours chatting with Joe Rogan on his podcast is the type of choice that drives consultants to drink more heavily than they do on a normal Wednesday. Devoting that amount of time to open questioning and long-winded theorizing about politics, culture, and conspiracy theories is a minefield for any elected politician, and one where it&#8217;s easy to create clips that will be edited and used to make half-baked arguments or warp what&#8217;s said into an unintended context.
Unfortunately for Vance, despite his well-known and much-admired communication prowess, that&#8217;s exactly what happened. On Iran, Israel, Jeffrey Epstein, and more, the vice president came across as far more interested in defending his own personal opinions than fulfilling the task of representing the Trump administration. Taken as a whole, the interview reads as if he&#8217;s already the 2028 nominee, speaking for the Republican Party he wants to manifest, not the one that currently exists under President Trump.
Time and again, the knock on this VP has been simple: He&#8217;s too online. He pays far too much attention to random social media accounts criticizing his tireless advocacy for a bad deal with Iran than he does to the possibility that the deal is, well, bad. He complained vociferously to Rogan that Israel is apparently funding some of the same people who are criticizing his deal online. But given that polls show the deal is unpopular with a significant portion of Republicans, and that only a small minority of voters think it&#8217;s a better deal for America than it is for Iran, Vance seems to be investing a gargantuan belief in the effectiveness of pro-Israel propaganda to move the needle.
Conservative Fox viewers and Daily Wire readers have never been sold on this deal, and now that it&#8217;s fallen apart, it&#8217;s something he should be eager to put in the rearview mirror — a collapse he should understand is the fault of Iran doing what Iran always does, not something he should blame on foreign manipulators. The sooner voters forget about Vance&#8217;s cheerleading for a doomed plan as his first major foray into foreign policy, the better it is for him.
For a vice president who seems to view the world more through the lens of podcasters than real life, the prescription is clear. The biggest viral trend over the past few months for American parents is in favor of giving kids a &#8220;nineties summer&#8221; — minimal screen time, maximum outdoor time, a throwback to the America where the rare moment of connecting to the internet came with the crackling sound of AOL dial-up and people focused on the real world of their neighbors and friends, long before the word &#8220;podcast&#8221; even existed. Perhaps that&#8217;s the recipe the vice president needs to reset, and get back to being the effective voice for this administration he was in its first year. Let the podcasts roll on. Everybody needs a break sometimes.

US-POLITICS-TRUMP

JD Vance Is In Desperate Need Of A Nineties Summer

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Four House Democrats — Reps. Mark Pocan (D-WI), Teresa Leger Fernández (D-NM), Maxine Dexter (D-OR), and Delia Ramírez (D-IL) — spent four days in Cuba meeting with communist President Miguel Díaz-Canel, government ministers, medical officials, business leaders, and other groups before concluding that President Donald Trump&#8217;s energy sanctions had transformed the island into what they described as a &#8220;silent Gaza.&#8221;
The congressional delegation made the trip after the Trump administration imposed a de facto fuel embargo on Cuba earlier this year following the capture of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, tightening pressure on Havana by threatening penalties against countries that continue supplying fuel to the island.
<a href="https://apnews.com/article/cuba-embargo-congress-pocan-legerfernandez-dexter-ramirez-e369a23097dcf104d424af88cdc2134a">Speaking to reporters</a> after the trip, Pocan said someone he met in Cuba described the island as a &#8220;silent Gaza” — a comparison he said was &#8220;apt.&#8221; 
&#8220;There may not be bombings, but there are certainly conditions that prevent people from going about their daily lives,&#8221; Pocan said. &#8220;They can&#8217;t go to work, they can&#8217;t preserve their food, they can&#8217;t access medical supplies, or live as they did before.&#8221; The comparison comes as left-wing lawmakers have repeatedly invoked Gaza in debates over seemingly unrelated domestic and foreign policy issues.
The delegation also directed criticism at Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose family fled communist Cuba. &#8220;I think Marco Rubio is making this personal and not professional,&#8221; Pocan said. 
Ramírez went considerably further, accusing the United States of pursuing &#8220;60-year-long imperialistic policies&#8221; against Cuba and blaming Trump and Rubio for worsening what she called a humanitarian crisis.
&#8220;Plain and simple, our 60-year-long imperialistic policies, including an immoral, inexcusable, cruel blockade, have contributed to the dire conditions facing Cubans who yearn to be free,&#8221; Ramírez said in a <a href="https://ramirez.house.gov/media/press-releases/ramirez-statement-oversight-visit-cuba-and-humanitarian-crisis-island">statement</a> released after returning from Havana.
She also claimed Trump was advancing a &#8220;white nationalist agenda&#8221; through his immigration policies and argued the United States must end the blockade, end the sanctions, and dismantle policies she said violate international law.
In a joint <a href="https://pocan.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/reps-pocan-dexter-leger-fernandez-and-ramirez-return-cuba-fact-finding">statement</a>, the four lawmakers claimed the Trump administration&#8217;s policies were &#8220;strangling&#8221; Cuba and warned that sanctions were &#8220;killing everyday Cuban citizens.&#8221;
Dexter, a physician, praised Cuba&#8217;s government-run healthcare system, saying, &#8220;Cuba created a free, universal healthcare system that millions of Cubans and others around the world have come to expect and depend on.&#8221;
Léger Fernández likewise condemned U.S. policy, saying, &#8220;What the United States is doing to this island is a siege.&#8221; 
Cuba&#8217;s communist government quickly embraced the Democrats&#8217; comments.
Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla celebrated the delegation on <a href="https://x.com/BrunoRguezP/status/2077046192857350539">X</a>, writing that the lawmakers had confirmed through &#8220;firsthand exchanges&#8221; the &#8220;collective punishment&#8221; imposed by the United States and the &#8220;inhuman impact&#8221; of what he called a &#8220;genocidal policy designed in South Florida.&#8221; Rodríguez also promoted the slogan &#8220;Cuba is not a threat,” a phrase frequently used by the Cuban government in international campaigns against U.S. sanctions.
The Trump administration has <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/trump-targets-cubas-power-structure-in-sweeping-blow-to-communist-elites">defended</a> its Cuba policy as an effort to weaken the communist regime rather than to punish the Cuban people. The White House has argued that Havana&#8217;s decades of economic mismanagement, combined with authoritarian rule, bear primary responsibility for the island&#8217;s ongoing shortages and rolling blackouts.
Rubio, whose parents emigrated from Cuba before Fidel Castro consolidated power, has long supported maintaining pressure on the communist government and has argued that sanctions should remain in place until meaningful democratic reforms occur.

CUBA-US-SANCTIONS-ENERGY

After Cuba Trip, Dems Blame U.S. For Turning Communist Island Into ‘Silent Gaza’

communism

cuba

united states

For the first time in decades, peace between Lebanon and Israel is becoming a reality. In June, Lebanese and Israeli officials signed a U.S.-brokered framework in Washington, marking their first direct talks since 1983. This achievement was personally facilitated by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, with key diplomats — Lebanon&#8217;s Nada Hamadeh Moawad and Israel&#8217;s Yechiel Leiter — engaged in direct negotiations, alongside Ambassadors Mike Huckabee and Mike Waltz, longstanding advocates for the region&#8217;s Christian communities. When Aoun meets President Trump at the White House on July 21, these dedicated individuals are prepared to turn this fragile opening into a lasting peace.
Lebanon&#8217;s president, Joseph Aoun, is a leader, and this is a critical moment.
Aoun is a president who says out loud what timid men whisper. When Iran&#8217;s Revolutionary Guard presumed to dictate the terms of Lebanon&#8217;s peace, Aoun answered them to their faces, on television, with Christiane Amanpour: &#8220;It&#8217;s not your country, it&#8217;s our country.&#8221;
Everyone understood he was speaking about Hezbollah — the militia contrived and funded by Iran to build a colony inside Lebanon, an armed state within a state that has fomented only war, at home and across every border. The words were so plainly true they should have been unremarkable. Yet no Lebanese leader of Aoun&#8217;s stature had ever dared to say them quite so clearly on a platform quite so public. His predecessors were frightened, bought, or weak.
This is why the United States should give President Aoun his due. He inherited a state hollowed out by corruption, a currency turned to paper, a port turned to rubble, and a militia that answered to Tehran, not Beirut. A weaker leader would manage the decline and scrape what personal gains he could for himself. Instead, Aoun leads.
&#8220;I will not let my people die,&#8221; he says. But keeping people alive is the bare minimum. The harder task now is to help them thrive again — and that he cannot do alone.
If America truly has the partner in Beirut it appears to have, it should validate him with substance, not sentiment: far greater support for the Lebanese army as it meets its commitments, the Gulf mobilized to underwrite reconstruction, and Europe and the wider world rallied behind Aoun — first to deny Hezbollah the power to steal any more of Lebanon&#8217;s future, and then to speed regional peace.
Lebanon is worth it.
If Hezbollah, an enemy of Lebanon, of America, and of Israel, is no longer able to deny the Lebanese government a monopoly on force, then regional peace will be inevitable.
The geostrategic arithmetic is simple. A country cannot have two armies. A state cannot be sovereign while a foreign-funded militia holds a veto over war and peace. Disarming Hezbollah is not an obstacle to Lebanon&#8217;s freedom; it is the precondition. A majority of Lebanese now say so. The only party still betting on rockets and ruin is the one that dragged Lebanon into catastrophe again and again — and would gladly do it once more.
Now the test: words have carried Aoun to the White House, but only deeds can carry Lebanon the rest of the way. President Trump&#8217;s terms should be just as plain: disarm Hezbollah and choose peace with your neighbors, Israel among them, and the United States will be no less a friend to this new Lebanon.
Lebanon’s cedars raised Solomon&#8217;s Temple; its shores gave the world its alphabet. It remains the only Arab nation with a Christian head of state, and Christians are still nearly a third of its people, the largest such community left in the region.
St. John Paul II called Lebanon &#8220;more than a country; it is a message.&#8221; Pope Leo XIV carried that word onto Lebanese soil last winter, preaching &#8220;Blessed are the peacemakers&#8221; while calling on Hezbollah to lay down its weapons.
To achieve this would rank among the great achievements of any American president in modern history. President Trump would help restore Lebanon and finish off Iran&#8217;s most prized proxy, and the price of it all would be peace with Israel.
I can already see the Lebanon that waits on the other side of this decision. I see a Lebanon of open borders and open markets, where a young professional eats lunch in Haifa and dinner in Beirut. I see Beirut restored to its place as the jewel of the Mediterranean, a rival to Dubai and Tel Aviv. I see ancient Christian communities no longer fleeing westward but flourishing in their land. I see the cedars standing tall again — just as the Psalmist promised, &#8220;The righteous shall flourish like the palm tree: he shall grow like a cedar in Lebanon.&#8221;
This Lebanon is waiting for leadership.
***
Reverend Johnnie Moore, PhD, is Vice Chancellor and the head of Middle East studies at Pepperdine University. Moore was twice appointed by President Donald J. Trump to the U.S. Commission for International Religious Freedom. The views expressed in this piece are his own.

LEBANON-VATICAN-RELIGION-DIPLOMACY-POPE

Lebanon’s Peace Means Middle East Peace – And Trump Holds The Key

Joseph Aoun

Lebanon

middle east

Senator Lindsey Graham died Sunday morning, hours after landing back in Washington from his tenth wartime trip to Kyiv, where he&#8217;d spent the week pushing a new Russia sanctions package and meeting twice with Volodymyr Zelenskyy. In our era of social media-driven cognitive impairment, the hot takes came quickly and focused on how Graham had changed from a searing critic of Donald Trump in the 2016 cycle to one of Trump’s closest Senate allies. But there was little mystery to Graham’s evolution: he did us the favor of both saying explicitly what he was doing and — rarer for politicians — actually following through. In plain sight, Graham changed his means but not his ends; that combination is rare enough that pundits’ confusion is understandable. But accuracy is important, even online. Graham’s legacy is as one of the most inconsistent men in Washington in his approach towards Donald Trump — no small feat when J.D. Vance is Trump’s own vice president — but as one of the most consistent men in his principles. That combination confuses more people than it should.
Chris Cillizza and the quote that confuses those who do not wish to see
Chris Cillizza&#8217;s <a href="https://chriscillizza.substack.com/p/the-one-lindsey-graham-quote-that">post on the morning of Graham’s death</a> reaches for <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/25/magazine/lindsey-graham-what-happened-trump.html">Mark Leibovich&#8217;s 2019 profile of Graham</a> to argue that he was a mere weathervane, pursuing relevance by any means necessary. Asked what had happened to him, Graham told Leibovich: “ ‘This,’ ” Graham said, “is to try to be relevant.” Politics, he explained, was the art of what works and what brings desired outcomes. “‘I’ve got an opportunity up here working with the president to get some really good outcomes for the country,’ he told me.”
Cillizza focuses on the first part of the quote: “This is to try to be relevant,” and stops there. But Cillizza not only ignores the second part of the quote about “working with the president to get some really good outcomes for the country,” but he also ignores Graham’s actual record, which belies Cillizza’s accusation of Graham as a man who &#8220;held policy positions lightly and a desire to matter tightly.&#8221; Graham did throw in wholly with Trump, but it was always in the service of his long-standing policy preferences for American leadership and an interventionist foreign policy. You can oppose those goals — plenty of people do, not all of whom are Democrats, liberals, or media members (I repeat myself) — but Graham always advocated for them, regardless of how cringe-inducing his public devotion to Trump could get. Even Will Saletan of the Bulwark, in his <a href="https://specialto.thebulwark.com/p/the-corruption-of-lindsey-graham">interminable 2023 series</a> excoriating Graham for his surrender to Trump, <a href="https://specialto.thebulwark.com/p/trumps-best-friend">noted</a> that when Graham was defending Trump most fiercely, “he was simultaneously lobbying Trump to adopt, or at least not to abandon, hawkish foreign policies.”
Anne Applebaum and the case of the missing Ukraine support
Anne Applebaum acknowledged Graham’s death by resurfacing her 2020 Atlantic cover story, &#8220;<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/07/trumps-collaborators/612250/?gift=hVZeG3M9DnxL4CekrWGK3_RouLwI10rEYFfGKtdXD1Y&amp;utm_source=copy-link&amp;utm_medium=social&amp;utm_campaign=share">The Collaborators</a>,&#8221; in which she cited Graham as the marquee American example of a Republican who&#8217;d abandoned his convictions to accommodate a leader he privately despised — the domestic analog, in her telling, to the Eastern European and Vichy French officials who made their peace with regimes they knew were rotten.
Aside from the indecency of re-publicizing those accusations the day of Graham’s death and the questionable arguments made in the piece itself, what made Applebaum’s choice even more bizarre was her own body of work since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Few writers in America have made a more forceful, sustained case that Ukraine is, in her words, the front line of the entire contest between democracy and autocracy — that what happens there determines whether the free world holds. With that record, one would think she would have noticed Graham’s robust record of support for Ukraine. He visited Kyiv 10 times since the invasion. He co-sponsored the toughest sanctions package on Russia&#8217;s oil trade to move through Congress. He spent his final week alive lobbying the Trump administration for Tomahawks and locking down a bipartisan sanctions deal with the White House&#8217;s sign-off — the deal he announced, with evident pride, half a day before he died. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, NATO&#8217;s Secretary General Mark Rutte, and Ukraine&#8217;s own prime minister all said as much in their tributes Sunday. In other words, Graham&#8217;s record on Ukraine was the opposite of collaboration with authoritarianism: Applebaum&#8217;s silence on that record, even in a post marking his death, only shows her own inability to recognize reality.
Graham understood “The Room Where It Happens.” His critics don’t
Cillizza isn&#8217;t alone in reaching for the Broadway musical Hamilton song &#8220;The Room Where It Happens&#8221; as shorthand for what happened to Graham, and to Washington, D.C. more broadly. It&#8217;s an understandable reflex. Aaron Burr, as Lin-Manuel Miranda writes him, is the purest portrait we have in American pop culture of a politician who wants access for its own sake — envious of a compromise he had no hand in, chasing a seat at the table with no fixed idea of what he&#8217;d do once he got there. When Hamilton needles him about what he actually stands for, Burr not only has no answer but embraces, at the song’s close, the path of doing whatever he has to do to get into that room.
Miranda&#8217;s Burr accurately describes far too many Washington politicians, before and after the age of Trump. In fact, it is a better description of many of Graham’s most searing critics: the conservatives who spent many years advocating the same foreign policy goals as Graham and then renounced those beliefs, and all others that were connected to conservatism or the Republican Party, once Trump won in 2016. But it never accurately described Graham: he was closer to Hamilton, who fervently pursues his ambition and relevance but in the service of his long-standing goals to “build something that’s gonna outlive me,” like the national bank and the nation’s financial system. Graham has, to pick just one example, advocated for military action to end Iran’s nuclear ambitions and capabilities for many years, and died having seen his advocacy play at least some role in bringing President Trump around to making that happen.
The weekend of Graham’s death, we saw a different example of Miranda’s Aaron Burr reincarnated: Congressman Ro Khanna went to Israel to provoke an international incident in an effort to revive his fledgling 2028 presidential campaign and distract from his fervent support for a Nazi tattooed-Senate candidate in Maine who was forced to withdraw after a World Cup capacity crowd’s number of scandals. This culminated in a period of drastic principle reversals by this formerly respected Congressman, who has combined a newfound distaste for Israel worthy of Tucker Carlson and other formerly conservative podcasters with advocacy of a wealth tax, which would destroy the economy of Silicon Valley — a region that is not only the greatest wealth generator of the world but also based in his own district. As cringeworthy as Lindsey Graham’s devotion to Donald Trump could get, it’s worth contrasting him with Khanna to see what true surrender to illiberalism looks like. Graham may as well have been Alexander Hamilton by comparison.
Graham was a typical politician, and there are worse things to be
Graham was a politician and never pretended otherwise. In the Leibovich profile from 2019, Graham responds to Leibovich’s “what happened to you?” question with “Well, O.K., from my point of view, if you know anything about me, it’d be odd not to do this,” continuing with his quest to be relevant to help bring about his preferred policy outcomes. Many more conventional Republican politicians could not accommodate themselves to Trump’s way of doing business and left office; some chose the path of more consistent “#Resistance” and, mostly, failed. The best thing that can be said about Graham’s legacy is that he accepted the trade of making himself look ridiculous (as he often did) to help advance his long-standing principles – and the country was (I strongly believe) better off for that trade. Graham was emblematic of the politician who said, “A man never stands taller than when he is on his knees kissing someone’s ass,” only he never lost sight of why he was compromising his approach. Most politicians – before or after the age of Trump – pursue relevance for its own sake, and make themselves look just as ridiculous in doing so. If Lindsey Graham is to be remembered for his approach to Trump, those memories should accurately reflect what he did. And that is enough to make him stand out as a Hamilton in a town of Burrs.
***
Jeremy Senderowicz is a lawyer in New York City.

Senator Lindsey Graham Speaks On President Trump’s Announcement Of Troop Withdrawal In Syria

Lindsey Graham: A Hamilton, Not A Burr

Aaron Burr

Alexander Hamilton

Hamilton

lindsey graham

Ukraine-Russia War

Zohran Mamdani has decided that Italians are not real New Yorkers.
Real New Yorkers are from Pakistan or from Bangladesh. There&#8217;s “Little Palestine” as well.
Little Palestine, by the way, sounds really terrible if in any way it mirrors the Palestinian areas in Israel.
Mayor Mamdani released a map showing immigrant enclaves, but they missed one called Little Italy, which, of course, is probably the most historically important enclave in New York City.
Instead, Mamdani put out a bunch of neighborhoods that he invented: “Little Pakistan,” “Little Senegal,&#8221; or “Little Yemen.”
Who’s in Little Yemen, the Houthis? Anyone want to visit?
These are not real names of neighborhoods. Of course, there’s no labeling of Jewish areas in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, or Borough Park.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-show-ep-2462?elementPosition=0&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-981859" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif" alt="" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-768x128.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
In a statement, a City Hall spokesperson said the map was not designed to highlight religious enclaves in the Big Apple. Instead, they said it highlights New York City neighborhoods with substantial foreign-born populations from regions and countries around the world.
Great job. You ignored Little Italy.
And the Italians are angry.
This is where we need to insert the clip of Tony Soprano explaining that Columbus was an American hero.
Remember, Zohran Mamdani is the guy who took a picture of himself and posted it on social media in the Black Lives Matter summer of 2020, flipping off a statue of Columbus with the caption, “Take it down.”
It turns out that the inanimate statue didn&#8217;t care.
So Columbus needs to go, but we must, must, must inform visitors to New York where Little Yemen is, where Little Pakistan and Little “Palestine” are.
Sounds awesome.
Mamdani is trying to run the city of New York as though it were its own little polity — its own country. Today, City-Journal <a href="https://www.city-journal.org/article/city-journal-daily-newsletter-jul-10-2026#:~:text=Earlier%20this%20week%2C%20Ana%20Mar%C3%ADa,was%20directed%20to%20cancel%20it.">reported</a> that a top Mamdani official tried to meet with the Iranian government:
<blockquote>Earlier this week, Ana María Archila, commissioner of New York City’s Office for International Affairs, was scheduled to meet with Iran’s ambassador and permanent representative to the United Nations, Amir-Saeid Iravani. Archila allegedly did not inform Mayor Zohran Mamdani of the meeting and was directed to cancel it.</blockquote>
The State Department instead met with Mamdani and his administration to say, “Guys, you are not allowed to do that. You don&#8217;t run your own foreign policy with regard to Iran, as much as Mamdani would like to think that he does.”
City-Journal noted:
<blockquote>On April 16, a message seen by City Journal was sent to staff within the Mayor’s Office for International Affairs asking them to prioritize diplomatic engagement in part based on whether foreign officials “are . . . in political alignment/leftist.&#8221;</blockquote>
So they wanted to engage diplomatically only with regimes that agree with them, and the first place they tried was Iran.
I can&#8217;t imagine why.
You mean that Zohran Mamdani and his priorities match the priorities of the Iranian ayatollahs?
That’s shocking. I just can&#8217;t believe it.
This is where the Democrats have gone at this point.
City Journal continued:
<blockquote>The administration’s international ambitions have not been limited to public comments. Last month, Mamdani <a href="https://english.elpais.com/international/2026-05-29/gustavo-petro-to-travel-to-new-york-to-meet-mayor-zohran-mamdani.html">intended</a> to meet with leftist Colombian President Gustavo Petro. The meeting was <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/06/10/mamdani-was-meet-with-colombias-leader-trump-made-sure-it-didnt-happen">called off</a> after the State Department declined to issue a visa following Petro’s attendance at a rally hosted by Mamdani in September. Archila’s international meetings include a two-day trip to Barcelona in April to participate in a <a href="https://www.pes.cor.europa.eu/event/local-progressive-mobilisation">conference</a> hosted by the Party of European Socialists.</blockquote>
Mamdani doesn’t need to be president. He thinks that New York is his flagship city, that he is going to run his own foreign policy, and he&#8217;s going to make it unlivable for people he doesn&#8217;t like.
I know there are a lot of Democrats saying, “He talks a big game, but he&#8217;s not going to be able to do anything.”
Famous last words.
Real estate investors are already fleeing the city.
They should. Because the city that Mamdani runs is not a city that is great for people who traditionally like our country.
It is utterly unsurprising that the same Mamdani who was flipping off a statue of Columbus is perfectly happy meeting with Iran.
It is all the same thing forever and always: The red-green alliance — the Marxist-Islamist alliance — is alive and kicking.
It also has that horseshoe aspect where they have the sympathy of people like Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Thomas Massie.
Erasing Little Italy is just the start.

Tony Soprano

Why Tony Soprano Would Be Furious Right Now

christopher columbus

Little Italy

new york city

zohran mamdani

There is no greater disagreement within the Republican Party today than over what American foreign policy should be. Hawks want the United States to keep confronting its adversaries by force; restrainers want it out of the business of wars that do not end. President Donald Trump has been the glue holding together partisans on both sides of that debate into a single coalition. Now the rifts that he papered over are starting to show, and they will fully open when he eventually leaves the stage.
Trump ran in 2016 against “stupid wars” in the Middle East. Then he bombed Iran. Restrainers heard a promise to avoid open‑ended conflicts; hawks saw a president willing to use conventional force against a longstanding adversary. Both camps look at the same record and see an ally. Trump holds them together because a decade of getting big things right (the border) has earned him the benefit of the doubt. But that credibility is personal, not ideological, and the coalition of restrainers and hawks lasts only as long as Trump holds them together.
This is generational, and the fault line is most visible in how Republicans of different ages <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/organic-protests-that-come-with-price-tags?author=Alex+Tarascio&amp;category=News&amp;elementPosition=0&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;title=%E2%80%98Organic%E2%80%99+Protests+That+Come+With+Price+Tags">see Israel</a>. Among Republican men under 45, Israel and <a href="https://www.cygn.al/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/23738-Cygnal-National-Apr26-NVT-Deck-Public.pdf">Saudi Arabia</a> draw almost identical favorability, 34% and 33%, respectively. For anyone raised on the Reagan-era foreign policy consensus, that&#8217;s a different planet. That consensus held the party together for 40 years, but it no longer exists among the voters who will define the future.
The public did not turn against the war in Iran on principle. Support came with the expectation that it would be wrapped up fast. But while the American military has performed brilliantly to degrade Iran’s military capabilities, the regime&#8217;s will to fight has not been exhausted. The collapse of the latest ceasefire this week made that plain. For any president, expectations about timing are baked in, and the American people’s tolerance for protracted engagements is almost nonexistent.
In April, our national survey <a href="https://www.cygn.al/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/23738-Cygnal-National-Apr26-NVT-Deck-Public.pdf">found</a> that support for the Iran strikes tracked with how long people thought the war would last. Voters who expected it to end within three months backed the strikes by 57 points, while voters who expected it to drag past nine months opposed the strikes by 44 points. The largest single group, 27%, already expected it to run more than a year. Among Republicans, that group was even larger. As the conflict continues, it keeps running past the implied deadline voters set for it.
In our June survey, 74% of American likely voters said they want Trump to finalize a deal to end the war with Iran. That is one of the only positions right now that pulls Republicans and the persuadable middle in the same direction. The public wants force used swiftly and concluded on schedule. Republican restrainers have been arguing exactly that, and the broader electorate is with them. Each new round of strikes, ceasefires, or talks is being judged against that same expectation.
Which brings us to JD Vance. Trump sent the vice president to carry the peace, then joked on camera that if it worked, he’d take the credit, and if it failed, he’d blame Vance. The easy reading is that Vance got handed a poisoned chalice — the kind of impossible assignment presidents often give their number twos to keep their own hands clean. Joe Biden did something similar to Kamala Harris on the border, assigning her the problem and giving her none of the power to solve it.
Vance is in a different position. Rather than giving him a purely thankless job, Trump let him take the lead on advancing the argument he had articulated since he was <a href="https://ecfr.eu/article/j-d-vances-foreign-policy-when-restraint-meets-culture-war/">in the Senate</a>. So far, peace has eluded him. The ceasefire broke down this week, and the war keeps burning through every attempt to end it. Restrainers never trusted this war to stop on its own, and every collapsed truce vindicates their position. That puts Vance on the same side as the 74% of voters who want this conflict to end, and at the center of the fight the party is about to have with itself.
Far from a setup, this may be the clearest vantage point any 2028 contender has into where Republican foreign policy is headed.
No Republican has yet built a foreign policy that survives the absence of a singular figure who can simply tell both tribes in his camp to trust him. Trump has been that figure, but his credibility has never been transferable.
This new fight is coming to the GOP, whether the party wants it or not. The public wants American power used decisively, kept limited, and brought to a clear end on time. Iran is the latest in a series of Middle East antagonists that have dragged America back to the region for decades. And how the war ends will define the shape of the post‑Trump Republican Party.
***
Alex Tarascio is a Pollster and Principal at Cygnal.

Donald Trump Campaigns For President In Georgia Ahead Of November Election

The Issue Determining The Future Of The Republican Party And Why Trump Is The Key

Isolationists

republican party

In contrast to the opening meeting in Ankara, yesterday was a good — even excellent — day for President Donald Trump and NATO. And that means a bad day for Russia’s warmongering Vladimir Putin. Despite Trump’s prior criticism of some NATO nations’ “loyalty” when the U.S. and Israel initiated the war against Iran, he touted solidarity with, and commitment to, a more muscular alliance.
Some NATO nations have spent far too long refusing to invest sufficiently in defense, preferring to break the bank on entitlements. The Baltic countries and Poland are exceptions. They saw the threat from Russia much sooner than Germany, for example. But the tide has turned. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, in stark contrast to former Chancellor Angela Merkel, readily admitted that Trump was right about Europe’s failures. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has repeatedly said, and continues to emphasize, that Europe and Canada have increased their defense spending, with investments averaging <a href="https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nato.int%2Fen%2Fnews-and-events%2Farticles%2Fnews%2F2026%2F07%2F08%2Fsecretary-general-on-the-ankara-summit-nato-delivers&amp;data=05%7C02%7Csdecosta%40hudson.org%7Cb00222ce57b94edfc0d508deddd3fb71%7Cce09670944264cb5b16053660d5b80e8%7C0%7C0%7C639192099693444347%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&amp;sdata=5MRgOMuaPMLgdDgDvRjxMpWa6zDp6o6Qom7hEUAmbao%3D&amp;reserved=0">nearly 4%</a> of GDP. This progress has been made within a year of their initiative to reach Trump’s 5% GDP demand. This commitment has materialized in a range of defense weapons deals. And despite the president’s indefensible warnings about wanting to own Greenland, Denmark stands out as a strong ally, reaching nearly 4% of GDP and signing new weapons procurement <a href="https://www.nato.int/en/news-and-events/articles/news/2026/07/07/nato-expands-its-intelligence-surveillance-and-reconnaissance-fleet-with-the-purchase-of-triton-aircraft">agreements</a>.
European NATO nations have also stepped up and strengthened support for Ukraine’s war effort against Russia, easing the U.S.’s burden. Trump <a href="https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bloomberg.com%2Fnews%2Farticles%2F2026-07-08%2Ftrump-says-he-will-give-ukraine-license-to-make-patriot-missiles&amp;data=05%7C02%7Csdecosta%40hudson.org%7Cb00222ce57b94edfc0d508deddd3fb71%7Cce09670944264cb5b16053660d5b80e8%7C0%7C0%7C639192099693515987%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&amp;sdata=S8UOjRMA%2BE63ovvgfMOMl%2FPz6N46M02NpMn0JFt1Er8%3D&amp;reserved=0">agreed</a> yesterday to authorize a license for Ukraine to manufacture Patriot interceptors, giving Ukraine the ability to restore its critical air defense in light of increased Russian <a href="https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/07/06/ukraines-air-defences-failed-to-intercept-any-russian-ballistic-missiles-air-force-says">attacks</a> on Kyiv — a huge boost for the country. The authorization not only strengthens Ukraine’s war effort but also expands Patriot production for the United States following a period of rapid depletion in the war against Iran. Outside of the U.S. authorization, Ukraine managed to reach nine drone <a href="https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/2074543396996161846">deals</a> total with various European allies as well as Gulf partners as efforts to increase assistance and cooperation continue to develop. Allies further reaffirmed their united support with a pledge to provide at least <a href="https://www.nato.int/en/news-and-events/articles/news/2026/07/08/secretary-general-on-the-ankara-summit-nato-delivers">70</a> billion euros in military equipment, aid, and training for Ukraine this year and again next year.
Despite Trump’s claim that Europeans haven’t been loyal to the United States during Operation Epic Fury, they were vital to the U.S. operation. True, the U.K. initially denied U.S. use of the joint base at Diego Garcia, but this was brief. Throughout Epic Fury, the U.S. operated consistently from bases across the U.K., and the Brits helped with intelligence, logistics, and air defense for the Gulf States. As did the French. The U.S. had a tanker bridge, deploying nearly 100 tankers across eight allied nations. European politicians did not advertise the extent of aid because of how unpopular the United States is with their domestic audiences, especially after Trump’s threats to Greenland. Europe’s most conservative politicians — who are most amenable to American conservatives — even condemned Trump’s threats.
Still, Europe benefits from the U.S.-Israeli military operations to significantly weaken the Iranian regime, so leaders quietly authorized support. At the NATO summit, Trump and other NATO leaders have strengthened ties to openly facilitate cooperation on missions, including the safe movement of oil in the Strait of Hormuz. They agreed to facilitate a <a href="https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.foxnews.com%2Flive-news%2Ftrump-iran-war-peace-ended-israel-hormuz-july-8%3Fmsockid%3D3e644995a539652200c65a01a438644d%23post-426db1f&amp;data=05%7C02%7Csdecosta%40hudson.org%7Cb00222ce57b94edfc0d508deddd3fb71%7Cce09670944264cb5b16053660d5b80e8%7C0%7C0%7C639192099693566475%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&amp;sdata=vfIPfmpF5bQ%2B8PFu9KDvPvL57W%2B0YE9ueg5XlPFdiVI%3D&amp;reserved=0">joint operation</a> of minesweepers to de-mine the Strait in anticipation of Iranian efforts to deploy more mines (as the MOU continues to be tested and is on the brink of collapse). In response to Iranian violations in the Strait, NATO allies have expressed support for the United States’ action against Iran. Rutte <a href="https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cbsnews.com%2Flive-updates%2Fus-iran-war-trump-says-ceasefire-over%2F%23post-update-89bf45c1&amp;data=05%7C02%7Csdecosta%40hudson.org%7Cb00222ce57b94edfc0d508deddd3fb71%7Cce09670944264cb5b16053660d5b80e8%7C0%7C0%7C639192099693578060%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&amp;sdata=IOMyX6x8UDVKFDFAsYCRV1f201bTqm6%2F1uYZX82GJZM%3D&amp;reserved=0">defended</a> U.S. strikes against Iran last night with the following statement: “I think it was absolutely necessary because when you have a ceasefire and Iran is basically violating the ceasefire. . . I think it is totally crucial that the U.S. forcefully react.”
This good news does not mean there are no challenges ahead. The president should let Secretary of State Marco Rubio work with the Kingdom of Denmark privately to ensure U.S. security concerns are addressed in Greenland. The Danes have been entirely cooperative and continue to stand out as reliable allies willing to do their part to enforce sanctions and keep the Chinese Communists from embedding in the High North. Ridiculing Denmark and threatening to take its territory only hurts Trump’s success in injecting energy and real, no-kidding defenses in Europe. Still, the summit was a success, and Trump does deserve credit for getting Europeans to take their defense seriously, which goes a long way for the president who wishes to be hailed for making peace.
***
Rebeccah L. Heinrichs is a senior fellow at Hudson Institute and director of the Keystone Defense Initiative. She specializes in U.S. national defense policy with a focus on strategic deterrence.

2026 NATO Leaders Summit In Ankara

Trump’s Hardball With NATO Gets Results In Ankara

Ankara Summit

Defense Spending

President Trump

The earthquakes in Venezuela were a natural disaster, but corruption is the fault line that turned them into a man-made catastrophe. With <a href="https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/06/1167837">thousands dead</a> and tens of thousands missing, it is now tragically clear that Delcy Rodriguez is not the answer for a still failing Venezuela. If Venezuela is to be rebuilt — physically, economically, and politically — it must be as a democracy.
As decades of <a href="https://ve.usembassy.gov/treasury-disrupts-corruption-network-stealing-from-venezuelas-food-distribution-program-clap/">bribes and kickbacks</a> filled the pockets of Hugo Chavez, Nicolás Maduro, and their cronies, corruption was simultaneously being built into the <a href="https://transparenciave.org/project/la-gran-mision-vivienda-venezuela-riesgo-la-corrupcion/">substandard buildings</a> these earthquakes destroyed. Construction contracts went to whoever paid the largest bribe, not to whoever would <a href="https://www.newsnationnow.com/world/poor-construction-weak-soil-blamed-as-1400-dead-in-venezuela-earthquake/">build to code</a>. <a href="https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-15936335/Venezuela-earthquake-styrofoam-buildings-rescuer-video-death-toll.html">Shoddy materials</a> were used in housing developments built on unstable ground in <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/engineers-urge-venezuela-audit-state-housing-after-deadly-quake-2026-06-29/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">known high-risk</a><a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/engineers-urge-venezuela-audit-state-housing-after-deadly-quake-2026-06-29/"> areas</a>. When the earthquake hit on June 24, many of the <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/venezuela-earthquake-death-toll-satellite-images-buildings-damaged/">58,000 destroyed buildings</a> were already hollowed out by decades of graft.
That corruption did not end with the Trump administration’s arrest of Maduro. Delcy Rodriguez, Maduro’s former vice president, has kept most of the corrupt officials from the Maduro era in place. Many of these holdovers have known ties to cartels and terror groups that are making billions of dollars from human trafficking, <a href="https://nypost.com/2026/06/17/opinion/us-must-halt-the-terror-driven-gold-rush-looting-venezuela/">illegal gold mining</a>, and drugs. Instead of developing government capacity over the last six months, officials filled their offshore bank accounts.
The earthquake made the failures of the Rodriguez administration painfully clear, with the government <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Fk3DIXXNI">largely absent</a>, <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/venezuela-future-earthquake-9.7252201">ineffective</a>, <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yzd18dxzxo">standing idly by</a>, or <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/news/world/articles/rescuers-volunteers-report-obstacles-rescue-182509614.html">actively interfering</a> with relief efforts. Six of the senior officials leading the earthquake response are <a href="https://www.occrp.org/en/news/cabinet-of-the-blacklisted-sanctioned-loyalists-take-charge-of-venezuelas-quake-relief">currently sanctioned</a> for corruption, money laundering, drug trafficking, and repression.
Diosdado Cabello — Minister of Interior, Justice and Peace and the target of a $25 million U.S. <a href="https://www.state.gov/diosdado-cabello-rondon">bounty</a> for cocaine trafficking and selling rocket launchers to a U.S.-designated terrorist organization — stood next to the Venezuelan president as she addressed the nation about the earthquake response plan. Rodriguez encouraged Cabello to continue “<a href="https://www.occrp.org/en/news/cabinet-of-the-blacklisted-sanctioned-loyalists-take-charge-of-venezuelas-quake-relief">working and inspecting</a>” incoming humanitarian supplies. The next day, Cabello was <a href="https://www.aol.com/articles/venezuelan-official-caught-sabotaging-american-195800000.html">caught on video</a> blocking the truck of American rescue workers and interfering with their delivery of aid.
Rodriguez appointed Governor Rafael Lacava to her reconstruction commission, despite U.S. sanctions against him for “<a href="https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sm616">blocking the delivery of critical humanitarian aid</a>” at the same time he funneled corrupt proceeds to secret accounts in Switzerland and Andorra.
Rodriguez’s brother, National Assembly President Jorge Rodriguez, will be leading a commission to build camps and housing for the displaced, despite <a href="https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sm495">U.S. sanctions</a> for helping Maduro “solidify his hold on the military and the government while the Venezuelan people suffer.”
Even the runways meant to deliver relief suffered from both the earthquake and corruption. U.S. military personnel needed to repair damaged runways at Caracas’ main airport before relief flights could land, while between 2006 and 2015, Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht paid <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/business/stalled-brazilian-odebrecht-projects-decay-in-venezuela-idUSKBN18R2N0/">$98 million</a> in bribes to Venezuelan officials to, among other things, <a href="https://armando.info/lo-que-odebrecht-hizo-y-dejo-de-hacer/">overhaul the airport</a> and its runways — a project that was <a href="https://transparenciave.org/obrasinconclusas/obras_inconclusas/modernizacion-del-aeropuerto-internacional-de-maiquetia-simon-bolivar/">never completed</a>.
This is not a government capable of rebuilding Venezuela, and the people know it. When Rodriguez visited a neighborhood at the center of the disaster, the residents <a href="https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/u-s-quake-relief-efforts-collide-with-anger-at-venezuelas-government-4bc71afc?st=8dgZmW&amp;mod=e2tw">chanted</a>, “Get out! Get out!” Trump’s popularity in the country is plummeting as well, with <a href="https://www.wlrn.org/americas/2026-04-29/poll-venezuela-trump-delcy-rodriguez">90% of Venezuelans disapproving</a> of his support for the current government.
The United States still has major interests in the country, first and foremost, the interest in helping people suffering from a traumatic event. The U.S. has pledged <a href="https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2026/06/update-on-the-trump-administrations-robust-and-rapid-delivery-of-life-saving-u-s-assistance-to-venezuela">$300 million</a> in disaster relief, but without major changes and strong oversight, those funds will inevitably be stolen by corrupt officials as displaced Venezuelans are left out in the cold.
Such corruption risks fueling a renewed migration crisis. And surging migration will, in turn, benefit <a href="https://insightcrime.org/venezuela-organized-crime-news/tren-de-aragua/">human trafficking cartels</a>, like Tren de Aragua, the U.S.-designated terrorist organization that formed a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/04/maduro-indictment-trump-tren-de-aragua">core rationale</a> for overthrowing Maduro.
Cartels and terror groups given protection by corrupt officials in Venezuela could bleed over borders, undermining critical political transformations that are taking place in Colombia and Peru, or impact substantial U.S. investments in <a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/exxon-mobil-approves-127-billion-oil-project-guyana-2023-04-27/">neighboring Guyana</a>.
Even cold calculations of profit must recognize the wasted private sector opportunities if this government remains in power. This is not a country that is currently capable of attracting significant <a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/venezuelas-trump-backed-reforms-have-yet-draw-investors-wary-legal-system-2026-06-03/">U.S. investment</a> or acting as a regional ally.
America’s leverage to force a change of government, however, is limited. In the wake of major operations in Venezuela and Iran and with midterm elections looming, a return of substantial military pressure is unlikely. Fortunately, corruption itself provides another pathway.
As corrupt Venezuelan officials demand bribes from visiting U.S. investors, businesses, or government counterparts, they bring themselves under the criminal jurisdiction of U.S. courts. The Foreign Extortion Prevention Act, enacted in 2024, provides for sentences of up to <a href="https://www.justice.gov/criminal/criminal-fraud/foreign-corrupt-practices-act">15 years</a> for bribery demands of U.S. persons by foreign officials. Using the gavel instead of the gunship, the Trump administration might have the legal ammunition to incentivize the regime to establish a short timetable for a fair and free election.
It is time for the U.S. to listen to the chants of the people and deliver what this moment demands: democracy, freedom, and a path for Venezuelans to determine their own future.
***
Josh Birenbaum is deputy director of the Center on Economic and Financial Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Carrie Filipetti is the Executive Director of the Vandenberg Coalition and the former Deputy Special Representative for Venezuela at the U.S. Department of State.

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