Behind Japan’s pacifism hides a nuclear escape hatch



Japan transformed from an expansionist military power to a pacifist state within a decade after World War II, adopting a firmly non-nuclear posture after suffering atomic bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet Japan possesses one of the most advanced civilian nuclear infrastructures in the world, technically capable of creating nuclear weapons.

As debates in the United States intensify over alliance commitments and burden-sharing, questions about the credibility of America’s extended deterrence are growing. If that credibility weakens, Japan may find itself increasingly alone in deterring China, North Korea, and Russia.

As Japan becomes more militarized, nuclear pacifism may begin to be replaced with nuclear realism.

Japan is already reinterpreting elements of its postwar restraint, evident in the modernization of the Japan Self-Defense Forces and the acquisition of long-range counterstrike capabilities for “deterrence by punishment.” Will Japan do the same with nuclear weapons?

The nuclear threshold is near

Japan lacks nuclear warhead expertise, dedicated delivery systems, and secure nuclear testing infrastructure, but it does have the industrial, material, and financial resources to begin a nuclear weapons program.

Japan possesses full-scale nuclear fuel cycle facilities, accumulating over 45 metric tons of separated plutonium, enough to make thousands of nuclear weapons. Japan is projected to increase reliance on fast breeder reactors; these reactors produce more plutonium than they consume.

Japan is also building facilities that eliminate the need to outsource its spent fuel for reprocessing, allowing Japan to domestically produce separated plutonium. Some analysts estimate that Japan could develop a small nuclear arsenal within a year.

Despite Japan’s nuclear latency, it has not crossed the nuclear threshold. Other than public consensus and constitutional restraints, Japan is held back by technical and financial costs. Japan needs to develop nuclear weapons design expertise, delivery systems, and secure infrastructure, all financially and politically costly endeavors.

Furthermore, Japan’s civilian nuclear facilities operate under International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards. That makes it difficult to run a clandestine nuclear weapons program. While the costs are substantial, they are not prohibitive for a country with Japan’s industrial and technological capacity. Given its advanced nuclear power program and infrastructure and increasingly sophisticated military, Japan can develop the technical requirements for a nuclear weapons program in short order.

Hedging nuclear bets

Japan is a nuclear latent power, so the central issue is intent. Japan adopted what strategists call “insurance hedging,” entailing a cost-benefit analysis of U.S. extended deterrence to determine whether relying on U.S. nuclear weapons is worth the risk of Japan not having its own. Should U.S. extended deterrence fail or be perceived as too weak, Japan will claim insurance by developing nuclear weapons for its own protection.

Japan became an insurance hedger for two reasons: It wants the option to develop nuclear weapons and does not want to forgo U.S. extended deterrence. Japan relies on U.S. extended deterrence for security, but pursuing nuclear weapons could remove Japan from America’s nuclear umbrella.

RELATED: Trump’s Iran gamble: Peace Prize or Persian Gulf firestorm

Photo by Tajh Payne/US Navy via Getty Images

Insurance hedging allows Japan to stay within U.S. extended deterrence while preparing for the possibility of abandonment or failure by the United States. Nuclear latency serves as leverage. If U.S. security guarantees weaken, Japan would retain the ability to respond independently.

Nuclear latency was always the plan

Japan’s nuclear latency is not an accident. As early as the 1950s, Japan deliberately preserved nuclear latency while relying on the United States for deterrence. Japan understood the deterrence value of nuclear weapons, especially in a security environment surrounded by nuclear powers and potential nuclear powers.

For Japan, the United States would serve as its nuclear deterrent, which allowed Japan to maintain its pacifist posture. Nuclear pacifism is still dominant in Japanese strategic culture, but as Japan becomes more militarized, nuclear pacifism may begin to be replaced with nuclear realism.

If U.S. extended deterrence no longer offers Japan the protection it needs, and domestic consensus against nuclear weapons is resolved, Japan could shift in favor of nuclear weapons. To create the JSDF, Japan reinterpreted Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution; Article 9 is an explicit “Renunciation of War” mandating that Japan never maintain “war potential.” Japan once reinterpreted Article 9 to build the Self-Defense Forces. Reinterpreting nuclear pacifism would be far more controversial, but not unprecedented.

Editor's note: This article was originally published by RealClearDefense and made available via RealClearWire.

Iran, China, and Trump’s ‘art of the squeal’



The combined bombing campaign that began in Iran Saturday morning, decapitating senior leadership and hammering military targets across the map, may look like a massive undertaking.

And it is — for Israel.

Iran looks like an existential threat.

It is — for Israel.

An invasion does not run on slogans. It runs on fuel.

For the United States, the existential threat sits elsewhere. Iran has financed and fueled anti-American violence for 47 years — from the 1979 hostage crisis to the Beirut barracks bombing in 1983, from Hezbollah and the Houthis to the IED pipeline that chewed up Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan. President Trump on Saturday morning laid out a clean rationale for turning the mullahs’ war machine into mulch and ending, once and for all, Tehran’s nuclear obsession.

Still, the bigger strategic picture points east — to China.

Beijing’s global ambitions rise and fall on one commodity that keeps modern economies alive and modern militaries moving: oil. If you want to understand why pressure on Iran matters beyond the Middle East, start with the tankers.

Xi Jinping has ordered the People’s Liberation Army to be ready for Taiwan by 2027. Call it an invasion timeline or call it a readiness deadline — the intent reads the same.

China has spent years preparing the battlefield: artificial islands to extend maritime control, relentless air and naval exercises that rehearse the encirclement of Taiwan, and a missile force built to hunt U.S. ships and push America back behind the horizon.

That missile layer — DF-21s and DF-26s — supports the bigger concept: anti-access/area denial. China wants to make U.S. intervention costly, slow, and uncertain. It wants American commanders staring at a clock they cannot beat.

Washington answered with its own doctrine and its own race against time. The U.S. built concepts like AirSea Battle doctrine and pushed Agile Combat Employment — a dispersed, resilient approach designed to survive missile salvos and keep aircraft flying. The Air Force started rehabilitating old Pacific airfields and expanding access across Guam, Saipan, and especially Tinian, because the next war in the Pacific will punish concentration.

Then Orange Man Bad made two moves in two months that hit Xi exactly where he lives. Not more nasty rhetoric on Truth Social or posturing. Logistics.

First, the United States seized Nicolás Maduro and dumped him in a Brooklyn jail. That operation did more than embarrass a dictator. It jolted the real-world flow of Venezuelan crude — and with it, a slice of China’s import stream that Beijing prefers to keep quiet, rebranded, and discounted. Analysts peg Venezuela’s contribution to China’s seaborne crude imports in the low single digits, roughly 3% to 5% depending on the year and the counting method. In Beijing’s world, even “small” percentages matter when the margin for error narrows.

Second, the joint strike campaign against Iran instantly put a hand on another lever: Iranian exports.

RELATED: Israeli officials say Khamenei is dead. Update: Trump confirms.

Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images

China buys the bulk of Iran’s shipped oil. Various trackers place Iranian barrels at roughly 10% to 15% of China’s seaborne crude imports in recent years. Tehran sells because it needs the cash. Beijing buys because it wants the discount. Trump’s move did not need to “block” every barrel to land the message. It only needed to introduce uncertainty, disruption, rerouting, insurance spikes, interdiction risk, and political friction. Oil markets react to fear faster than to facts.

Put the two together, and the math starts to hurt: a meaningful share of China’s oil — not symbolic, not academic — now sits under pressure from U.S. action in Venezuela and Iran.

That creates a Taiwan problem.

An invasion does not run on slogans. It runs on fuel. It runs on shipping. It runs on industrial output. It runs on a domestic economy that stays stable while the military gambles. Xi can build missiles all day long, but he cannot launch an island war on an economy gasping for discounted crude.

So yes, the current Iran campaign matters for the obvious reasons: international terrorism, Hezbollah, the Houthis, the nuclear program. Those are legitimate reasons for “Epic Fury.”

Trump’s larger play hits the supply lines that make China’s invasion timetable plausible.

In only two months, Trump has put Xi in the position of a man getting a testicular palpation from a recalcitrant physician in a hurry.

Do not distract him. He might clench.

I think Trump wrote a book about it, or he should. Call it “The Art of the Squeal.”

The common-sense case for nationalizing US elections



I did not arrive at this argument as a theorist or as a commentator looking for a clever angle. I arrived at it through the wreckage of 2020.

After I investigated the November 2020 election in Arizona and Nevada, the Department of Justice subpoenaed me. In February 2023, I spent six and a half hours testifying before a federal grand jury in Washington, D.C. That experience did not change my political outlook. It changed my sense of how exposed the country has become — and how unwilling key institutions have been to confront the exposure directly.

Do Americans still govern themselves, or do we merely perform self-government while hostile forces — foreign and domestic — shape outcomes behind a screen?

The debate returned with new urgency this week. The Washington Post reported Thursday that election integrity activists are urging the Trump administration to issue an executive order on elections. It’s about time. Executive action has become the only plausible instrument for a rapid national response, because the states have entrenched incentives to resist meaningful reform and foreign enemies have worked diligently to undermine and defeat us.

For anyone with eyes to see, war has come. It has not arrived in the form Americans expect when they hear the word. It does not always appear wearing uniforms, wielding declarations, or mobilizing divisions. It arrives through political warfare, cyber capabilities, influence operations, and domestic agitation. It arrives through a border that stops functioning, a culture that stops teaching civic loyalty, and an election system that produces outcomes a large share of the country considers illegitimate.

A global conflict now runs through the heart of America’s public life. Communist China and other hostile regimes mean the destruction of the United States, and they pursue that goal with patience, strategy, and resources.

Alongside that global conflict, a domestic conflict has hardened into something close to open civil war, with one side committed to sovereignty, law, and national continuity, and the other side increasingly willing to use institutional leverage, street agitation, and demographic transformation to break the existing order.

This domestic conflict matters for a practical reason: It makes free and fair elections difficult if not impossible to conduct in 2026 and 2028 absent radical steps to secure them.

Can America have a fair election in 2026?

Three fronts define the challenge. First, the United States must conduct elections that Americans can recognize as legitimate. Second, Immigration and Customs Enforcement must regain the ability to deport the millions of illegal aliens who entered the country during the Biden years, despite organized resistance. Third, foreign enemies must be denied the ability to wage war on America through cyber sabotage, influence operations, and electoral interference.

These fronts converge on one question: Do Americans still govern themselves, or do we merely perform self-government while hostile forces — foreign and domestic — shape outcomes behind a screen?

Start with elections, because everything else depends on them.

Self-government requires two things that cannot be faked. First, a border defines citizenship. Second, an election defines consent.

A republic cannot survive without both. Yet Americans now live under conditions that invite doubt about each: a border that failed catastrophically, and an election system that many citizens no longer trust.

Fair elections demand friction. They demand procedures that annoy activists and frustrate bureaucrats. They demand a system that ordinary citizens can understand. A voter should show identification, vote on a paper ballot, and watch that ballot be counted by human beings under observation by other human beings.

Perfection will never exist. The point is not perfection. The point is transparency, auditability, and public confidence grounded in procedures citizens can see and grasp.

For most of American history, paper ballots provided that confidence. Americans knew what happened in the counting room because the counting room did not function like a proprietary black box. Election modernizers sold the country a different idea: Computers make things fast, efficient, and secure. The experience of the last decade, culminating in 2020, has left that promise in ruins.

RELATED: ‘Dead on arrival’: Chuck Schumer says Dems will ‘go all out’ to defeat voter ID bill

Photo by Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Getty Images

A massive intelligence failure

Since November 2020, the corporate legacy media has insisted that the U.S. election system operates as “absolutely secure” and that widespread fraud does not exist. That claim collides with common sense.

The vast majority of Americans now vote through an election ecosystem built on machines, scanners, tabulators, centralized databases, and software layers that few officials can explain and fewer citizens can independently audit. This ecosystem does not eliminate fraud. It relocates fraud into places the public cannot easily see.

Electronic voting systems invite manipulation because they rely on computers. Computers obey code. Code gets written, altered, updated, patched, and maintained by people with incentives, biases, and vulnerabilities. Any system dependent on code and opaque tabulation invites distrust — and it invites actors with resources to exploit it.

Hardware alone raises the first national security issue. Election machines rely on electronic components manufactured in communist China or Taiwan. China is an enemy nation. A hostile regime’s manufacturing ecosystem should not sit inside critical infrastructure, and elections sit at the heart of critical infrastructure. When Americans hear that the parts driving their voting system originate in China, many react with disbelief. That reaction is rational.

Software raises a second issue. Major election technology has been developed, maintained, or designed across foreign jurisdictions — Venezuela, Canada, Serbia — with American developers in the mix. Even when parts of that reporting prove disputed or exaggerated in public debate, the broader fact remains: A modern electronic election system creates a sprawling supply chain of hardware and software dependencies that pushes election integrity far outside the direct control of any voter, precinct worker, or local official.

An enemy regime does not need to ‘flip votes’ to win. It can accomplish its goals by shredding trust, delegitimizing outcomes, and pushing Americans toward internal conflict.

Ownership and investment raise a third issue. The purchase and financing structures surrounding major election vendors have generated persistent public questions, including questions about foreign investment exposure and the presence of overseas investors with legal obligations to their own regimes. The press largely refused to investigate those questions in any serious way after 2020. Instead, it treated the questions themselves as illegitimate — which encouraged distrust rather than resolving it.

How did such systems enter American elections in the first place?

The answer points to intelligence and counterintelligence failure.

Modern warfare is not limited to bombs and bullets. Modern warfare includes political warfare, cyber operations, influence campaigns, and the exploitation of social fractures. Any hostile regime with the ability to damage American legitimacy has an interest in doing so. An enemy regime does not need to “flip votes” to win. It can accomplish its goals by shredding trust, delegitimizing outcomes, and pushing Americans toward internal conflict.

U.S. counterintelligence should treat election seasons as high-value windows for hostile activity, because elections present the most valuable target in American political life. Yet the United States behaved as if such threats belonged in the realm of conspiracy rather than standard national-security planning.

Warnings existed before 2020. HBO’s 2020 documentary “Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America’s Elections,” produced primarily in 2019 by Finnish computer programmer and documentarian Harri Hursti, laid out vulnerabilities in electronic voting systems.

The film included Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), each of whom criticized election technology and raised concerns about trust, auditability, and system integrity. The documentary’s premise focused on the fear that Russia would steal the election for Donald Trump. In other words, prominent Democrats publicly argued that electronic systems could not be trusted — right up until those arguments became politically inconvenient.

The documentary’s partisan framing does not matter. The underlying point does: A computer-based system can be manipulated, and the mere possibility of manipulation creates a legitimacy crisis for any contested outcome. A republic cannot function when half the country believes the outcome was engineered by an opaque system.

The ‘most secure election’ canard

So did the 2020 election turn on electronic manipulation?

Many Americans concluded that it did, and they did so because 2020 produced anomalies too glaring to ignore. Yet a thorough federal investigation never followed.

The federal government had rightful authority to investigate election-system vulnerabilities. The FBI could have pursued fraud and foreign interference. The DHS, through its Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, treated election systems as critical infrastructure. Yet a week after the election — during a national outcry over procedures, chain of custody, observation access, and statistical anomalies — CISA Director Chris Krebs declared 2020 “the most secure election in American history.” Even granting him good faith, that claim outpaced what any official could responsibly know so soon.

Other institutions looked away. Attorney General Bill Barr declined to pursue serious claims. Trump’s White House lawyers and advisers, even those acting in good faith, lacked the expertise and institutional leverage needed to conduct a forensic inquiry across multiple states with complex systems. Many figures around Trump seemed unwilling to risk their careers or reputations on a fight that would trigger institutional retaliation. Conventional thinking did the rest: Americans struggle to imagine a national election stolen in plain sight, so they default to official assurances.

That vacuum created a predictable outcome: Private citizens stepped in.

Some acted from patriotic concern for the republic and a desire to find the truth. Others took advantage of the crisis. Some appeared to function as disinformation agents — whether knowingly or not — by flooding the public with claims so sensational that they discredited serious inquiry. The “satellite” stories and overseas melodrama that circulated after 2020 served that function. They distracted from real questions and gave the establishment an easy excuse to dismiss anyone demanding transparency as a crank.

RELATED: 3 debunked Democrat claims about the SAVE America Act

Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

Private efforts did surface real issues, and three of those deserve attention because they remain unresolved and because they point to reforms that do not depend on proving any single theory about 2020.

First, Americans learned how foreign-linked, opaque, computer-based voting systems had become standard. Citizens do not need a technical degree to grasp the problem. A system that depends on foreign supply chains, foreign-linked software development, and proprietary tabulation cannot command broad public trust. That fact alone constitutes a crisis for a republic.

Second, the 2020 election demonstrated how mail voting can be exploited at scale. Universal mail ballots moved through broken voter rolls, weak chain-of-custody practices, and uneven signature verification. COVID became an excuse for suspending or weakening procedures that existed for a reason: they protect legitimacy.

Clark County, Nevada, offers an example. Under normal settings, its signature-verification system rejected large numbers of ballots. Election officials reportedly lowered the resolution settings, contrary to accepted procedures, until nearly any signature could pass. That decision converted signature verification into a formality. Officials then treated this relaxation as a practical necessity. Citizens experienced it as a violation of the rules.

Third, private investigators in several states identified batches of paper ballots that did not match standard stock or standard folding patterns consistent with mailed ballots. Ballots that arrive flat, unfolded, and printed on different paper invite suspicion of outside mass printing. Even when officials insist on benign explanations, the failure to address the optics and the forensics with urgency undermines trust.

Taken together, these issues required an information campaign to persuade Americans that 2020 was conducted fairly. That campaign did not succeed. Large numbers of Americans believed the election was stolen or unfair. The Biden administration governed under a cloud of contested legitimacy, and the country absorbed four years of anger, cynicism, and institutional fracture.

That experience leads to a basic conclusion: An election system that requires a nationwide propaganda effort to sustain credibility is not a healthy system.

‘Too big to rig’

A common retort now surfaces: If the system was rigged in 2020, how could Trump possibly have won in 2024?

Two explanations fit what Americans saw.

First, a second theft risked systemic crisis. The country watched what happened after 2020. Many Americans believed the election had been stolen. They watched the anger. They watched the institutional crackdown. A repeat in 2024 could have produced a political breakdown that would have paralyzed governance across the country. Even actors with capacity to manipulate outcomes would have had to consider the consequences.

Americans should not have to live in a state of permanent suspicion, asking whether unseen forces fought over tabulation pipelines and database integrity.

Second, unprecedented monitoring and deterrence efforts likely raised the costs of misconduct. Trump predicted a victory “too big to rig.” That line became a strategy: Overwhelm the system with turnout, recruit and train observers, litigate in advance, pressure states for reforms, and limit the number of ballots floating through the mail. Even if 2020 did not turn on cyber manipulation, the mere perception that it might have done so forced new defensive measures in 2024.

Either way, the central point stands: Americans should not have to live in a state of permanent suspicion, asking whether unseen forces fought over tabulation pipelines and database integrity. A free people deserves an election system that does not invite that question.

The Constitution assumes a union of one people with a functioning constitutional order. That assumption is now strained. Progressive states increasingly treat federal authority as illegitimate on immigration and law enforcement. Elected officials in California, Illinois, New York, Washington, Oregon, and other states have signaled hostility toward the Trump government and toward the idea of enforcing border sovereignty. Those attitudes bleed into election administration, because election administration has become another front in political warfare.

Congress has taken partial steps. The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, requiring proof of citizenship, and the Make Elections Great Again Act, mandating voter ID, move in the right direction. Yet those steps do not remove the core vulnerability: electronic voting systems and electronic tabulation.

A system without electronics removes entire classes of risk. It also restores something modern reformers discount: visible legitimacy.

RELATED: Running out the clock won’t save the majority

stuartmiles99 via iStock/Getty Images

A common-sense proposal

The country needs a clean national standard for federal elections: paper ballots, Election Day voting, transparent counting, and credible oversight.

Congress could impose such a standard. Congress likely will not, at least not in time for 2026. That reality pushes attention toward executive action.

One option is direct and blunt: The president should prohibit electronic voting machines and electronic tabulation in federal elections, invoking national security and foreign-interference risk.

President Trump already recognized the danger of foreign interference. Executive Order 13848, issued Sept. 12, 2018, declared a national emergency with respect to foreign interference in U.S. elections and authorized sanctions. That framework is triggered after an election. Americans learned in 2020 that post hoc remedies come too late. The country needs preventive action before the next vote.

A new executive order should declare that foreign supply-chain exposure and the risk of foreign cyber and influence operations make electronic voting systems unacceptable for federal elections. The goal is not to accuse every state of corruption. The goal is to remove the tool that makes corruption scalable and invisible.

A second executive action should mandate a uniform protocol for federal elections across the states:

  • Paper ballots, printed and secured under strict chain-of-custody rules.
  • Photo identification for in-person voting.
  • Voter rolls audited and cleaned to reflect real voters.
  • Election Day voting as the norm.
  • Absentee ballots limited to military voters and genuinely confined citizens.
  • Counting conducted by humans under observation by credentialed observers.
  • Transparent reporting at the precinct level in real time.
  • Livestreamed counting wherever feasible to increase confidence and deter misconduct.

This system is not fancy. That’s part of its appeal. It replaces complexity with clarity. It makes manipulation difficult because manipulation requires people, presence, and risk.

Blue states will resist. Some on the left and right might scream about “states’ rights.” The very idea that states have rights has lingered far too long in American politics.

Election integrity cannot be separated from immigration enforcement. Both turn on the same principle: citizenship and sovereignty.

States do not have rights. Natural rights belong to citizens, not state governments. State governments hold delegated powers and duties. When state systems undermine citizens’ rights — including the right to participate in a credible election — the federal government has a duty to protect the constitutional order.

Article I, Section 4 assigns states authority over the “times, places and manner” of congressional elections, subject to congressional alteration. That clause presumes good-faith administration inside a stable union. It did not anticipate election systems dependent on foreign-linked technology, hostile supply chains, and opaque software. Remember: The Constitution is not a suicide pact.

A third, indispensable step must follow: federal oversight.

State election boards disqualified themselves in 2020 by treating citizen observation as illegitimate and by creating closed systems that blocked transparency. Americans watched officials cover windows during counting in Philadelphia. That image damaged confidence more than any argument could repair. When officials treat observation as an enemy, they signal that legitimacy is negotiable.

Federal oversight should include well-constituted teams of observers with legal authority to monitor chain of custody, ballot handling, and counting procedures. Those teams should include lawyers, trained observers, and experienced election administrators. Federalized law enforcement can provide security and enforce access rules.

One drastic but increasingly necessary option is the federalization of each state’s National Guard during federal elections, with a narrow and disciplined mission: secure facilities, protect chain of custody, enforce lawful observer access, and deter intimidation or obstruction by any side. The goal is not militarization. The goal is legitimacy in a period when legitimacy has become a target.

Critics will call this authoritarian. Critics will say it overrides federalism. Critics will claim it inflames tension. Those critics miss the current reality: The existing system inflames tension precisely because it generates doubt.

Paper ballots counted in public calm tension. Electronic systems managed behind bureaucratic walls inflame tension.

RELATED: ‘Prove it’ isn’t an insult. It’s a standard.

Photo by David Williams/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Why this is absolutely necessary

Election integrity cannot be separated from immigration enforcement. Both turn on the same principle: citizenship and sovereignty.

Over four years, the Biden administration facilitated an invasion of the United States by an estimated 15 to 25 million illegal immigrants. Blue-state governors aided and abetted this effort through sanctuary policies and open defiance of federal enforcement. This was not a routine policy dispute. It was a deliberate attempt to transform the country politically and culturally. The strategy had a clear political logic: create a new demographic reality, then use that reality to entrench power.

No serious person doubts the long-term plan behind mass illegal migration: regularize the status, grant legal residency, and push toward citizenship. Even if that path takes time, the political intent is obvious. A massive new voting population would permanently alter the political balance of power in favor of open borders and against national continuity.

If the illegal immigrants are not made citizens, the next phase follows: turn deportation into a trigger for civil conflict. That conflict is already taking shape in the resistance to ICE operations. Activists and political officials treat immigration enforcement as illegitimate. They mobilize street pressure to block lawful federal action. They use the language of “human rights” to justify lawlessness.

In parallel, American culture has produced generations of citizens who no longer see themselves as heirs of a constitutional republic. Many now see themselves as political actors engaged in permanent struggle against “systems.” They do not treat citizenship as a loyalty. They treat it as a tool. When pop figures declare that no illegal immigrants exist on “stolen land,” they echo a narrative taught for decades: America is an illegitimate country that must be dismantled or reduced.

This ideology fuels the street-level insurrection now forming around immigration enforcement. Add professional agitators — Antifa networks, hard-left organizations, Islamist activist groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and communist organizations — and the result is predictable: chaos, intimidation, and violence in major cities.

Americans can argue about policy outcomes for the rest of their lives. They cannot argue forever about whether votes were counted honestly and still remain one country.

ICE faces a logistical reality. Deporting tens of millions requires manpower, detention capacity, transport capacity, and employer enforcement that makes illegal employment untenable. The current number of ICE agents cannot accomplish this alone. Even if the administration doubles agent capacity to 44,000, success depends on collapsing the job market for illegal labor. Without employer enforcement, millions of illegal immigrants will bet on survival in the underground economy until 2028, hoping for amnesty under the next Democrat administration.

This reality intersects with elections. A country cannot run a credible election while tens of millions of illegal immigrants remain embedded in communities — including key swing congressional districts — while activists and elected officials defy enforcement, and while the meaning of citizenship erodes. Election integrity becomes a secondary casualty of a deeper sovereignty crisis.

National security magnifies the urgency further.

At minimum, roughly 200,000 Chinese nationals entered the country during the Biden-era migration surge. The vast majority of them were military-age men. Some of these men have the appearance of members of a military force. Communist China has declared political warfare against the United States and has the capability to sabotage critical infrastructure, from power grids to water systems. If hostile operatives sit inside the country at scale, what stops them from targeting soft points in civil life: malls, theme parks, public events, transport nodes?

A nation cannot treat this as a hypothetical. America must treat this as an operational planning problem.

A lack of decisive action sends signals. It signals to illegal immigrants that they can wait out enforcement. It signals to the insurrectionist left that street violence will succeed. It signals to hostile states that the United States lacks the will to defend its own sovereignty.

In this environment, President Trump’s insight that elections may need to be “nationalized” deserves serious consideration.

RELATED: If Fulton County ran clean elections in Georgia, it should welcome sunlight

Yuri Gripas/CNP/Bloomberg via Getty Images

A final consideration

Communist China spends tens of billions annually on intelligence and influence operations inside the United States. It has declared a people’s war against the United States and has built a cyber force tied to the People’s Liberation Army that approaches 1 million personnel. It operates through partners and proxies — including cyber-capable regimes such as Iran — and it has relationships with authoritarian governments that have served as nodes in the election-technology ecosystem, including Venezuela.

Even if every component of the U.S. election system were designed and built inside the United States, electronic systems would still carry unacceptable vulnerabilities. Any networked system can be penetrated. Any tabulation system can be targeted. Any system that produces outcomes through proprietary code and opaque databases invites distrust — and provides adversaries with leverage.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has taken a keen interest in election vulnerability, including the ongoing investigation in Georgia. Her mandate includes preventing foreign intelligence services from influencing American elections. Her recommendations will matter. So will the willingness of the administration to act on the principle that legitimacy is not a public-relations problem. It is a national security problem.

America’s enemies wage political warfare to undermine confidence in the U.S. political system. America must respond with counter-political warfare and with reforms that deny adversaries their most useful tool: doubt.

This returns us to the war framing because the war framing describes the stakes without exaggeration.

The United States is not drifting through a normal partisan season. The United States is fighting for continuity as a sovereign republic. Foreign enemies want Americans to lose confidence in their own system. Domestic radicals want Americans to lose confidence in their own inheritance. Both sides benefit when elections produce outcomes that half the country cannot accept.

A republic cannot survive repeated legitimacy collapse.

The remedy is not complicated. It is common sense.

Paper ballots. Election Day, not week. Photo ID. Clean voter rolls. Human counting under observation. Transparent reporting that citizens can verify. Federal oversight strong enough to deter obstruction and fraud. An executive posture that treats election integrity as national defense, not as a procedural hobby left to 50 different bureaucracies.

Americans can argue about policy outcomes for the rest of their lives. They cannot argue forever about whether votes were counted honestly and still remain one country.

It is clear that our enemies engage in political warfare to undermine the confidence Americans have in our political system. We must wage a robust counter-political warfare campaign to thwart our enemies. This has not been a consideration of American policymakers in the past. No large-scale challenge such as the vulnerability of our voting system existed during the Cold War. This challenge exists now, and how America addresses it over the coming months may well decide the future of our republic. Let us pray that common sense prevails.

The next fight over freedom will run through AI models



When it comes to artificial intelligence, the Trump administration has made its position clear: America will not choke innovation with red tape.

That instinct is understandable and, in many ways, correct. AI is moving fast, and heavy-handed regulation could do real damage. If the United States cripples its own companies, China will gladly take the advantage. And no one on the right wants blue-state politicians using AI rules to smuggle “woke” ideology into the next generation of powerful models.

The goal should be straightforward: Build an American AI future in which freedom is embedded from the start, and constitutional guardrails shape the systems that will increasingly shape us.

As White House AI adviser David Sacks recently put it, “We don’t like seeing blue states trying to insert their woke ideology in AI models, and we really want to try and stop that.”

Fair enough.

But what happens when resistance to bad regulation hardens into resistance to any regulation at all?

That question is now surfacing in Utah, where the White House is reportedly opposing a Republican-sponsored AI transparency bill. The fight may sound parochial, but it raises a much larger question: Do conservatives have the discipline to protect constitutional liberty in the AI age?

Utah isn’t California

The Utah proposal is not a European-style crackdown. It would not impose speech codes, mandate ideological compliance, or try to centrally plan the AI economy.

At its core, the bill focuses on transparency and accountability. It would require frontier AI companies to disclose serious risks, plan for safety in advance, report major problems, and protect whistleblowers who raise alarms.

That’s far from radical.

If the administration’s AI strategy is to stop progressive states from embedding political orthodoxy into algorithms, Utah’s bill does not belong in that category. The measure is about making sure the companies building extraordinarily powerful systems acknowledge the risks up front and take responsibility when things go wrong.

Treating that effort as if it were blue-state social engineering confuses two very different problems. There is a real difference between using AI regulation to enforce ideology and asking powerful firms to level with the public about systems that could reshape society.

The myth of an ‘unregulated’ AI market

Another uncomfortable truth lurks beneath this debate: AI is not operating in anything like a free-market vacuum.

The European Union has already enacted its sweeping AI Act. That regulatory regime will not stop at Europe’s borders. American companies that operate globally will feel its force, and American users will feel the downstream effects.

If the United States adopts a posture of total federal non-engagement, it will not preserve a neutral market. It will hand the regulatory initiative to Brussels.

That would be a serious mistake. Europe does not regulate with American constitutional principles in mind. It regulates through a bureaucratic worldview that prizes centralized control over freedom. If Washington refuses to establish clear guardrails rooted in our own constitutional tradition, foreign regulators and multinational firms will fill the void.

Power without constitutional guardrails

AI is quickly becoming part of the infrastructure of modern life. These systems increasingly shape how information flows, how public opinion forms, and how daily choices get nudged.

That is power.

We have already watched major corporations use private power to shape public life. Social-media companies moderated, suppressed, and curated speech in ways that tilted public debate. Large firms adopted ESG frameworks that embedded political priorities into lending, hiring, and investment. In both cases, powerful institutions pushed ideological outcomes without a vote being cast or a law being passed.

Nothing suggests AI will escape those pressures.

RELATED: If AI isn’t built for freedom, it will be programmed for control

gorodenkoff / Getty Images

The companies building frontier systems carry their own assumptions, incentives, and cultural biases. If those assumptions get baked into foundational models — and those models then get integrated into education, finance, media, hiring, and governance — ideological influence will move from the margins to the infrastructure of society.

Yes, clumsy central planning would hurt innovation and weaken America’s position against China. But the answer cannot be blind faith that market incentives alone will protect liberty. That asks a great deal of institutions that have already shown a willingness to steer political and cultural outcomes in their preferred direction.

The real challenge is making sure extraordinary technological power develops inside a framework that respects constitutional rights, individual liberty, and personal autonomy.

A pro-liberty AI framework

The Trump administration is right to resist ideological manipulation in AI models and to oppose sweeping regimes that would handicap American innovation while China races ahead.

But someone will shape the boundaries of this technology. The only real question is whether those boundaries reflect American constitutional principles or the preferences of foreign regulators and corporate boards.

Red states such as Utah should be treated as allies in that effort, not obstacles. They can serve as proving ground for approaches that protect transparency, due process, free expression, and individual autonomy without strangling innovation.

Artificial intelligence will shape the next century more than any single statute. Total non-engagement may sound pro-growth, but in practice it leaves the foundational rules of the AI era to someone else.

The goal should be straightforward: Build an American AI future in which freedom is embedded from the start, and constitutional guardrails shape the systems that will increasingly shape us.

Trump Avoids Drama To Focus on Foreign Imminent Threats

State of the Union addresses are usually sedate affairs, but the Supreme Court turned this year’s into must-see TV. The 6-3 decision invalidating the Liberation Day tariffs landed like a bomb last Friday. Many expected President Trump to train his ire on Chief Justice John Roberts and his colleagues on Tuesday night, especially after his post-ruling outbursts.

The post Trump Avoids Drama To Focus on Foreign Imminent Threats appeared first on .

Liberal Media Gushes Over American Competing For China, Bashes US Men’s Hockey Team

Simply have a sense of humor

Government can’t keep the lights on. Americans can.



Winter storms this year didn’t just freeze roads. They exposed a harder truth: Government can no longer reliably perform the most basic functions of a modern society.

Across the country, public systems failed under predictable stress. In New York, snowstorms everyone saw coming left streets impassable for weeks. In Nashville, an ice storm knocked out power and left more than 100,000 people in the dark for days. In Washington, D.C., officials are still scrambling to contain the largest wastewater spill in city history, with repairs expected to take months.

The resilience America needs will not come from another government task force. It will come from policies that empower Americans to secure their own energy future.

These are not isolated mishaps. They are recurring failures — signs of national decay.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Americans endured an average of 11 hours of power outages in 2024. Eleven hours in the dark in the wealthiest, most technologically advanced country on Earth. Reliability is slipping while electricity prices climb. Families pay more and get less, even as utility companies demand higher rates.

That path is unsustainable for families already stretched thin. It is dangerous for small businesses operating on razor-thin margins. And it is a strategic liability for a country competing with communist China in the AI race.

Artificial intelligence data centers consume electricity on a staggering scale. A single data center campus under construction in Texas is expected to use more power than the city of Chicago. If America intends to lead the world in AI — and defeat China in the defining competition of this century — it first must lead in energy production.

Yet Americans are asking an obvious question: If government can’t plow streets or keep a sewer system running, why should anyone trust it to keep the lights on?

The Trump administration is right to pursue an all-of-the-above energy strategy. We have no choice but to build nuclear, expand natural gas, and unleash domestic production across the board. But large power plants take years — sometimes decades — to come online.

America needs more energy now.

The fastest, cheapest way to add flexible capacity is battery storage.

Home batteries can be bought off the shelf and installed in days. They can be charged by rooftop solar, small-scale generators, or power from the local utility. They store energy when supply is strong and release it when demand spikes. They keep homes running when the grid fails. And when thousands of them are networked together, they can function like a virtual power plant — pushing electricity back onto the grid to stabilize it during emergencies.

RELATED: How Americans can prepare for the worst — before it’s too late

Photo by Brett Carlsen/Getty Images

Instead of relying entirely on aging transmission lines and centralized monopoly utilities that repeatedly fail, Americans can build resilience at home and in their neighborhoods. Power generated and stored closer to where it is used means fewer cascading failures, less strain on fragile infrastructure, and a more reliable grid for everyone.

In other words, instead of waiting on distant bureaucracies, Americans can take ownership of their own energy security.

If government can no longer guarantee basic services, it should at least stop blocking the people who can help provide them. Regulators should remove barriers to battery deployment. Market rules that sideline distributed energy should be updated. And Big Tech companies demanding enormous new power loads should help fund home battery programs instead of shifting those costs onto working families.

The resilience America needs will not come from another government task force. It will come from policies that empower the people to secure their own energy future.

This winter delivered the warning. We cannot assume someone else will keep the lights on. But with the right policies, the American people can.

What will replace the old world order?



The pivotal question of what will follow the crack-up of the liberal international order dominated the highest levels of European politics at the recent 2026 Munich Security Conference.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave his own forceful answer, following Vice President JD Vance’s provocative speech last year. Rubio delivered an equally spirited address that issued an ultimatum: Rationalizing collapse and weakness is no longer the policy of the United States — and it should no longer be Europe’s policy either. America has no “interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline,” he said.

Alliances should be made, renewed, or even disbanded depending on whether they help secure America’s interests in the present.

Instead, Rubio urged a reformation of the “global institutions of the old order” to defend and strengthen the key pillars of Western civilization.

The problem in Rubio’s mind was that the 20th-century web of international alliances, designed to counter the Soviets in the wake of two devastating world wars, took on a life of its own. Its keepers began putting the preservation of their supranational relations “above the vital interests of our people and our nations.”

Institutions such as the United Nations have utterly failed to protect national interests, and they simply have no answers to the most pressing problems in international affairs today. Instead, they actively encourage deindustrialization, mass migration, and shortsighted climate policies, causing a loss of confidence in the very sources that have supplied the West’s vitality for centuries.

To counter this, Rubio proposed that the U.S. partner with Europe to lead a “reinvigorated alliance … that boldly races into the future.” It will focus on “advancing our mutual interests and new frontiers, unshackling our ingenuity, our creativity, and the dynamic spirit to build a new Western century.” If the West wants to safeguard and promote its historic ways of life, then an international realignment is inescapably necessary.

The themes Rubio articulated were also the subject of this year’s “Budapest Global Dialogue,” an annual conference put on by the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs and the Observer Research Foundation. This year’s gathering focused on what HIIA President Gladden Pappin presented as the choices currently before the world: endless conflict that’s likely to spin out of control or the emergence of a foundation for long-term security, peace, and prosperity.

Keynote speakers and panelists agreed that continuing to prop up a decaying international order was not a viable option. Though necessary for its time, it is clearly inadequate in a world that looks far different from the one that featured creeping death in the form of the USSR. As Rubio recently told a gaggle of reporters before his address in Munich, “The old world is gone.” He noted that nations must re-examine their roles in our “new era in geopolitics.”

RELATED: What’s Greenland to us?

Photo by Alessandro Rampazzo/AFP via Getty Images

The urgency of this project has been amplified by the European Union’s various machinations against popular government. Its censorship machine is attempting to export the EU’s liberty-denying laws to America and other Western nations. Unsurprisingly, the problem of censorship, which has been a chief focus of Vice President Vance, took up much of the conversation of the opening-night panel.

Headlined by Sarah B. Rogers, the U.S. undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, and Balázs Orbán, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s political director, panelists discussed the countless issues stemming from the EU’s Digital Services Act. It uses “trusted flaggers” like HateAid — an organization funded by the German government — to censor online speech, including that of Americans.

Pappin and other participants also noted the myriad problems stemming from unchecked globalization. Nations happily traded away the most basic elements of sovereignty for a mess of pottage in the form of lower prices on select goods. This was justified using free-market language, in which attaining the highest GDP possible seemingly became the summum bonum of political life. Former Trump administration official Andrew Peek termed this problem “economics without politics.”

In the United States in particular, key supply chains were mostly shipped out of the country, the folly of which was fully exposed during the COVID debacle. The U.S. essentially followed a systematic deindustrialization plan as we helped build up other countries, especially China.

China’s rise didn’t happen solely due to its sheer geographic size or population. It occurred because the Clinton administration and Western leaders decided the best way to fend it off was by inviting the Chinese into the heart of the world’s economic system. This was a catastrophic choice that helped hasten the collapse of the old order.

Now, China is by far the world leader in many positive economic indicators. The country is also looking to become the world’s first electrostate, adding another gigawatt of capacity to its grid every year.

Meanwhile, the United States is facing mounting problems with our electric grid, which will be further exacerbated by the construction of data centers and older plants going offline. No nuclear power plants were built in the U.S. between 1996 and 2016. Additionally, as noted in a Department of Energy report last year, utopian green energy mandates have helped bring the U.S. closer to the brink of a full-blown energy crisis.

RELATED: America won’t beat China without Alaska

Photo by Simon Bruty/Anychance/Getty Images

Though the conference featured discussions on other pivotal topics — especially the promise and peril of artificial general intelligence — there wasn’t a dedicated panel on immigration. But that didn’t stop speakers from addressing the topic. Alexandre del Valle, a professor at France’s IPAG, called mass Islamic immigration to Europe a long-term bomb. And in a keynote address that served as a campaign speech of sorts, Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Péter Szijjártó celebrated the fact that illegal migration to Hungary is nonexistent.

Szijjártó also devoted time to underscoring the stakes of the upcoming Hungarian parliamentary elections. The April 12 contest will feature a rather personal battle between current Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Péter Magyar, who resigned from Fidesz in 2024 and then joined TISZA, the Respect and Freedom Party. The campaign billboards and posters I saw plastered around Budapest, which were nearly all pro-Orbán, showed Magyar gladly acquiescing to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s insistence to send Hungarian armaments to Ukraine.

Fidesz is asking voters if they want to keep Orbán’s government in power or elect those who would sacrifice the country’s blood and treasure in war. President Trump clearly wants the former. During Rubio’s trip to Budapest after his Munich speech, he said that the American president is “deeply committed” to Orbán’s victory in April.

As the Trump administration sees it, the path forward is clear: maintaining alliances when political goals and traditions are shared, as is the case between Hungary and the United States. And as Rubio was careful to point out in Munich, when alliances become strained, renewal through strategic thinking that connects means and ends is essential. One such example is Elbridge Colby’s recent discussion of the creation of NATO 3.0, in which U.S. allies bear more of the financial burden.

What won’t work, however, is elevating prudential considerations to the level of principle, as world leaders and bureaucrats have done far too often in recent decades. They have frozen in amber the specific circumstances of the second half of the 20th century, thinking that those paradigms must forever dictate how nations should act. But as Dhruva Jaishankar, the executive director of the Observer Research Foundation America, pointed out, the ballroom in which the 2026 Budapest Global Dialogue was held was built in 1896. Five international orders have come and gone in that time.

Contrary to the Anne Applebaums of our foreign policy elite class, who have helped drive the West into a ditch, the Nazis aren’t marching just over the horizon, and Vladimir Putin isn’t the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler. Alliances should be made, renewed, or even disbanded depending on whether they help secure America’s interests in the present. As Daniel J. Mahoney is fond of saying, it isn’t always Munich 1938. Serious leaders acknowledge current realities and marry their rhetoric to actions that will lead to peace, prosperity, and the good of the West — and the good of America above all.

Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared originally at the American Mind.

There's More at Stake Than Just Medals

While most viewers tune in to cheer on the U.S. hockey teams, see great athletes like skiing sensation Mikaela Shiffrin, or watch death-defying stunts in competitions like the big air jumps, the machinations that happen around the Olympics reveal quite a lot about how international politics work.

The post There's More at Stake Than Just Medals appeared first on .

'Even stronger': President Trump optimistic even after SCOTUS strikes down tariffs



Mere hours after the Supreme Court handed down its decision on Trump's tariffs under the authority of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, President Trump responded with a lengthy Truth Social post. Though the court ruled against him, Trump was not nearly as angry with the decision as might be expected.

On Friday afternoon, President Trump posted an unexpectedly optimistic message in the wake of SCOTUS' decision. Trump's layered response, which echoed very closely his live reaction in a press conference, spilled into two separate posts.

'Today I will sign an Order to impose a 10% GLOBAL TARIFF, under Section 122, over and above our normal TARIFFS already being charged.'

Trump began by praising the "Strength, Wisdom, and Love of our Country" exhibited by dissenting Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh before attacking those in the majority:

"The Democrats on the Court are thrilled, but they will automatically vote 'NO' against ANYTHING that makes America Strong and Healthy Again. They, also, are a Disgrace to our Nation. Others think they’re being 'politically correct,' which has happened before, far too often, with certain Members of this Court when, in fact, they’re just FOOLS and 'LAPDOGS' for the RINOS and Radical Left Democrats and, not that this should have anything to do with it, very unpatriotic, and disloyal to the Constitution."

RELATED: Trump finally gets his answer on legality of tariffs in new SCOTUS decision

Trump then suggested that the court "has been swayed by foreign interests" who are "dancing in the streets" as a result of the ruling.

However, Trump then said that the decision was largely a positive development because it clarified the president's authority under the IEEPA only, while leaving open several other avenues for imposing tariffs: "All of those TARIFFS remain, but other alternatives will now be used to replace the ones that the Court incorrectly rejected."

He drew from Justice Kavanaugh's dissenting opinion to illustrate the "different direction" that he will pursue, "which is even stronger than our original choice." As Trump noted, Kavanaugh wrote,

Although I firmly disagree with the Court's holding today, the decision might not substantially constrain a President's ability to order tariffs going forward. That is because numerous other federal statutes authorize the President to impose tariffs and might justify most (if not all) of the tariffs issued in this case. ... Those statutes include, for example, the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 (Section 232); the Trade Act of 1974 (Sections 122, 201, and 301); and the Tariff Act of 1930 (Section 338).

Trump omitted Kavanaugh's mention of "a few procedural steps" that may be required with these other avenues for tariffs that the IEEPA does not require.

Nearing the end of his post, Trump argued that the Supreme Court had unintentionally made the president's "ability to both regulate TRADE, and impost TARIFFS, more powerful and crystal clear, rather than less."

As a result, Trump issued several orders at the end of his post, indicating his intention to continue the tariffs, including a "10% GLOBAL TARIFF," under the existing statutory authorities cited earlier in the post:

"Therefore, effective immediately, all National Security TARIFFS, Section 232 and existing Section 301 TARIFFS, remain in place, and in full force and effect. Today I will sign an Order to impose a 10% GLOBAL TARIFF, under Section 122, over and above our normal TARIFFS already being charged, and we are also initiating several Section 301 and other Investigations to protect our Country from unfair Trading practices," Trump wrote.

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!