On the menu today: Today could turn out to be one of the most consequential days in the history of Ukraine. Or it could be seen as just another day in the unprovoked, unjustifiable, and brutal Russian invasion of that country, now in its 1,268th day. Elsewhere, the U.S. government contemplates taking an ownership share in the chipmaker Intel corporation. Relax, everyone, this is nothing like Zohran Mamdani’s nonsense, this is just the government seizing a small share of the means of production. U.S. businesses of the world, unite! You’ve got nothing to lose but your international supply chains! Meanwhile, some corners of the Washington press corps are extremely excited about the prospect of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. running for president in 2028, because apparently, they have the memory of a goldfish. And finally, for a country run by a party that has “socialist” in its title, Spain has a pretty good economy.
Waiting and Seeing What’s Baking in Alaska
We won’t know how the Alaska summit went until later today. The editors of National Review laid out what an acceptable deal might look like, while Noah Rothman warned that recent history illustrates how big, elaborate U.S. summits with the Russians tend to not live up to the hype.
There are some reassuring signs, like the reports that the Trump administration and European leaders are in agreement over the “red lines” of any potential deal, and the report that Trump will threaten Putin with “very severe consequences” if the Russian president refuses a cease-fire in the meeting.
And there are some not-so-reassuring signs, like the precedent of the summits with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un in Trump’s first term. Warm interactions and elaborate ceremonies are nice, but in the end, national interests are intractable and when they don’t align, progress is just about impossible, as Daniel R. DePetris writes in our August issue:
Much like the presidential diplomacy of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, which took a more bottom-up approach to the North Korean nuclear problem, Trump’s top-level interaction with a North Korean leader, which included two summits and a historic step into the Hermit Kingdom by a sitting U.S. president, couldn’t produce a comprehensive deal. Although Kim agreed to suspend nuclear and long-range missile tests as long as talks were progressing, the negotiations ultimately ran into the same big obstruction that prior efforts met with: The positions of the two sides were irreconcilable, and neither man was willing to walk away with half a loaf. Trump wanted North Korea to hand over its nuclear warheads for destruction, and Kim wanted to keep his warheads and have a blossoming bilateral relationship with the United States at the same time. Working-level discussions collapsed in October 2019, turning the joint garden strolls and cordial photo opportunities into an odd interlude.
And President Trump has sounded a bit more cautious this week, telling Fox News Radio’s Brian Kilmeade there’s a 25 percent chance he could leave the summit with a sense that meeting with Putin was not worth it.
I will take a wait-and-see attitude, wish the president the best of luck, hope for the best, and prepare for the worst. When it comes to the Russian government, doveryay, no proveryay, or “trust, but verify,” as former President Ronald Reagan used to say. In the not-so-distant past of February 2021, Joe Biden and his administration were convinced they had secured a major diplomatic accomplishment by getting Vladimir Putin to extend the New START Treaty for five years, repeatedly boasting about it and citing it as evidence they could get Putin to see reason. And then Putin tossed the agreement aside the moment it became inconvenient.
What Vladimir Putin says he is going to do and what he actually does are rarely more than distant cousins.
The Trump Administration’s Now Not-So-Light Communism
A recurring theme in my writing this year is the irony of 2025 — that the Republican Party is (justifiably) up in arms about the likely election of Zohran Mamdani as the next mayor of New York City over his accurately labeled Communist worldview, while the Trump administration keeps announcing new arrangements giving the federal government financial and management roles in particular U.S. companies.
We’ve already seen the U.S. government claim for itself a “golden share” in the stock and management decisions of U.S. Steel, and the U.S. Department of Defense using $400 million in taxpayer money to purchase a 15 percent stake in MP Materials and become the company’s largest shareholder. Then there was the announcement that Nvidia and AMD would be allowed to sell advanced chips to Chinese companies, as long as 15 percent of the money from those sales goes to the federal government.
Now, according to Bloomberg, the “Trump administration is in talks with Intel Corp. to have the US government take a stake in the beleaguered chipmaker, according to people familiar with the plan, in the latest sign of the White House’s willingness to blur the lines between state and industry.”
This is not the job of the federal government. Yes, you can make an argument that the United States has a national-security interest in the continued healthy operation of particular companies vital to national defense and infrastructure. But without any limiting principle, a creative mind could justify a federal government role in just about any major U.S. private company, in the name of national security.
The Wall Street Journal reports:
Some industry analysts think Intel might eventually need government assistance if Tan and other executives can’t turn around the business.
Analysts have said it could be difficult for Intel to increase its U.S. capital spending given its business challenges. The company’s loss widened to $2.9 billion in the second quarter. Government funding alone also wouldn’t address all of Intel’s problems, which investors say include an outdated business model and a product lineup poorly suited to applications in artificial intelligence.
I thought we hated bailouts! I thought we hated “too big to fail”!
If the Republican Party no longer stands for that, and now stands for a unified form of the federal government and large corporations, can someone point me in the direction of a major U.S. political party that does believe in the free market and the separation of big government and big business? (I said “major,” Libertarians.)
What is the point of defeating Democrats who believe in an unlimited role for government in controlling and directing the private sector, if we’re just going to have a bunch of Republicans who believe in an unlimited role for government in controlling and directing the private sector?
Speaking of diehard left-wingers who have somehow wiggled their way into positions of power and influence in a Republican administration . . .
No, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Should Not Run for President in 2028
Politico and Axios are talking up the prospects of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. running for president in 2028. Charlie Mahtesian, Politico’s senior politics editor, seeming quite enthusiastic about the prospect:
RFK Jr. would be a far more formidable candidate in 2028 than in 2024, when his campaign fell apart. As HHS secretary, he has built a portfolio marked by bashing regulatory agencies, the media, mainstream medicine, and taking on foes like Big Pharma, Big Ag, Big Food, and the baby formula industry. By honing an anti-establishment message, RFK Jr. is gaining traction in an increasingly populist Republican Party. Parts of his MAHA agenda are already resonating in state capitals — particularly, but not exclusively, in red states.
It’s why even if he doesn’t really rate in the constellation of MAGA stars — Kennedy exists in his own adjacent universe, which he oversees from his perch as secretary of Health and Human Services — he has just enough celebrity, name recognition and appeal to elements of Trump’s winning 2024 coalition that he can’t be easily dismissed. Those same coalition politics that boosted Trump’s White House comeback bid also may have blurred traditional primary lanes ahead of 2028.
The headline on that Politico report is, “Don’t knock RFK Jr.’s presidential bid just yet.” Well, as a famous New Mexican once said, “I am the one who knocks.”
Who is Kennedy’s natural voter base for a 2028 presidential bid, besides Olivia Nuzzi and the brain-worm-afflicted-American community?
Think Kennedy’s going to run as a Republican? Sure, GOP voters like what he’s doing now, but that’s because they’re extremely reluctant to criticize anybody on the Trump team. But this man was a Democratic presidential candidate until October 2023. The Republican Party is really going to choose this guy, who’s been a down-the-line liberal progressive on every major issue, including abortion, his entire life? Republican primary voters are going to pick him over every other option including likely candidates such as JD Vance or Marco Rubio or maybe a Brian Kemp or a Glenn Youngkin? In this envisioned scenario, has Trump turned against everyone else in the party or something?
Oh, and you know what else Kennedy used to do? Ride on Jeffrey Epstein’s plane and hang out with him at charitable events, although the HHS secretary insists, “Other than that, I had no relationship with him.” (Hey, has anybody ever offered you a ride on their private plane? To hear Epstein’s former friends tell it, the notorious sex trafficker offered more rides than Uber on an infamous plane that got nicknamed “the Lolita Express,” but no one ever saw anything unusual.)
Think Kennedy’s going to run as a Democrat? That party hates his guts. Not a single Democrat voted to confirm him as HHS Secretary. According to the Pew Research survey, whopping 72 percent of Democrats disapprove of the job he’s doing.
Think Kennedy’s going to run as an independent again? When he withdrew from the race in August 2024, he was hanging around 7 percent in the polls.
As I noted, Kennedy couldn’t be bothered to familiarize himself with which one was Medicare and which one was Medicaid before his confirmation hearing. He believes that different races should get different vaccines, in defiance of all available evidence. He squeaked through his confirmation process by lying through his teeth to GOP Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana about what he intended to do on vaccines. (He’s completely wrong on mRNA vaccines.)
Once he was appointed, he forgot all about his previous promises about “medical freedom” and humility in making judgements. His much-hyped “Make America Healthy Again” Report was full of AI-written slop, referring to studies that never existed.
And on Election Day 2028, Kennedy will be 74 years old. Sure, that seems young by Biden (and Trump!) standards, but I’d love for America to someday have a commander in chief who hasn’t been collecting Social Security for a while.
ADDENDUM: Over in that other publication I write for, my recent trip to Spain gave me a firsthand look at a generally left-wing (or at least left-of-center) European country where the economy is . . . generally doing pretty well?
I wanted to start this column by joking that Spain is the land of the two-hour breakfast, the three-hour lunch and the four-hour dinner, where everyone sits around eating and drinking terrific food and wine and leisurely lamenting that the economy is growing so slowly.
But that joke doesn’t quite work anymore, because the economic analysts at the investment bank Goldman Sachs has crowned Spain “Europe’s fastest growing major economy.” And that’s after the Economist magazine ranked Spain’s economy the best in the world in 2024, when it grew 3.5 percent on the year.