Dear Weekend Jolter,
What will be the toll from President Trump’s purely transactional approach to geopolitics?
It has long been observed that the president applies a real-estate developer’s tactics to dealmaking in office. But the costs of his methods must be piling up after six nonconsecutive years, as one alliance after another is put to the test of Trump’s capricious trials by ire.
In this week’s episode, the U.S. president surprised officials in South Korea by telling the Pentagon to “substantially reduce” their joint military exercises — while talking up his relationship with Kim Jong-un and fretting that the exercises “send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile” toward his hermit kingdom.
Not even between the lines but right in the Truth Social post, Trump tied the order to frustration over a lack of cooperation on Iran. He later told reporters that South Korea’s president had rebuffed his request for help in the Strait of Hormuz: “We have 39,000 soldiers over there guarding you from Kim Jong Un, your next-door neighbor, and you’re not going to help us on a very easy military operation in Iran? . . . Well, why are we involved in helping you?”
As Noah Rothman writes, “Perhaps the president’s bullying will shake something loose in Seoul.” Trump has a time-honored practice of picking fights and then ending them, if temporarily, with the announcement of concessions, real or imagined (see the ongoing dance with Canada over tariffs).
But it would be delusional to think that America’s alliances are so resilient as to be unaffected by such repeated breaking and mending. The president’s latest outburst sends a signal, yet again, “that he is easily disenchanted with longtime allies whose friendship should be considered a strategic boon to the United States,” Rich Lowry writes:
Whether musing about making Canada the 51st state, briefly campaigning to take control of Greenland, imposing tariffs on friend and foe alike, or hammering NATO, Trump has been careless of the goodwill of our allies.
They need us more than we need them, which means they are willing to put up with a lot, but sowing dissension unnecessarily is a foolhardy game at a time of growing international threats.
South Korea has been a treaty ally since 1953 and is a wealthy, technologically advanced democracy that occupies strategically important ground in Northeast Asia. It is obviously both threatened by and a bulwark against potential North Korean adventurism.
South Korea is only the latest friendly nation to face retaliation from the Trump administration in connection with its stance on the Iran war. NATO allies are facing renewed pressure to back Trump’s foreign policies, while the president recently told Fox News he’d “bomb the sh**” out of Oman if the country gets in the way of efforts to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz. (A quick fact check from Jeff Blehar: “Don’t worry, Trump won’t.”)
As for the “pivot from Asia,” specifically, Noah writes,
Combined with the president’s decision to leave the Western Pacific without a deployed U.S. aircraft carrier group (the USS George Washington has been tasked with relieving the long-deployed USS Abraham Lincoln in the Middle East), some fear a breakdown of deterrence in the far East. “Anyone that says this whole package of steps is a net positive for deterrence is deluded,” said one George W. Bush-era State Department official. “We’ve gone from a stillborn ‘pivot to Asia’ to a reverse pivot from Asia.”
On the other side of the ledger, Trump continues to — in public, anyway — blur the lines between historical friends and foes. Aside from Trump’s conciliatory language toward Kim, Elliott Abrams points out that as part of Gaza talks, Jared Kushner met with Hamas leader Khalil al-Hayya. He writes,
The excuses for the meeting are simple to imagine, but none are persuasive. Al-Hayya is an old-timer and a survivor as a Hamas leader and is in that sense up to his neck in blood. He will not give Kushner concessions he would otherwise refuse, and he will never abandon Hamas’s goal of destroying Israel nor its commitment to violence to get there.
Just because America is pushing allies away doesn’t mean her enemies can be converted.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
More on the Korean war of words: Trump Is Choosing the Wrong Korea
A grim milestone: America’s $40 Trillion Nightmare
The trend is real: The Decline in Violent Crime Is Worth Celebrating
Well, this was unexpected: Democrats Choose Socialism in the Sunshine State
ARTICLES
Christopher J. Scalia: One Crazy Summer
Stanley Kurtz: Colleges Against Books
Inez Feltscher Stepman: The Myth of the Miserable Housewife
Becket Adams: ‘Woke One’ Wasn’t Just Crazy — It Was Destructive
Noah Rothman: Trump’s Iran Strategy May Actually Be Working
Noah Rothman: Florida Democrats Just Made the GOP’s Case for Them
Brittany Bernstein: Scientist Behind Wuhan Bat Research Thanked Fauci Aide for Helping Shut Down Lab-Leak Theory
Mark Jamison: Adam Smith’s Warning for America’s New Socialists
John Gustavsson: Why Andy Burnham’s Redistribution of Migrants Won’t Work
Kaitlyn Kiepert: Examining RFK Jr.’s Role in the Measles Outbreak
Elliott Abrams: Kushner Legitimizes Hamas
Abigail Anthony: U.K. Government Issues Guidance Warning Asylum Seekers Not to Rape or Perform Female Genital Mutilation
Raleigh Adams: The Right Has Forgotten What Beauty Is For
Philip Klein: Among Republicans, Anti-Zionism Remains Very Online
Christian Schneider: A Different Kind of Identity Theft
CAPITAL MATTERS
John Puri reports on the disappearing teenage part-time job: What Happens When Teens Stop Working, but Keep Spending
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Come for the Rockwell, stay for the lessons on granite. From Brian Allen: Norman Rockwell, from New Rochelle to Vermont to the Hereafter
Armond White contrasts the “meta cruelty” of this Pattinson–Zendaya project with a Japanese classic: Cruel Stories of Youth
FROM THE NEW, OCTOBER 2026 ISSUE OF NR
Frederick M. Hess: Have We Turned the Corner on Higher Ed?
Guy Denton: Smart Phones or Smart Kids: Pick One
Spencer A. Klavan: Learning Ancient Languages in the Age of AI
Lauren Veldhuizen: Confessions of a Campus Conservative
Becket Adams: Hollywood: Where Creativity Went to Die
Charles C. W. Cooke: Chasing Lost Edens
Sarah Schutte: Best Western: A Road Trip from Ohio to the Pacific
Luther Ray Abel: The New Generation of Defense Wizards
Ross Douthat: Reflecting on 20 Years as NR’s Film Critic
Rob Long: A Day in the Life of First Lady Donald J. Trump
EXCERPTS, DELIVERED TO YOUR DOORSTEP
The new issue of NR is out, and it’s a back-to-school edition. We cover the waterfront — you’ll see I’ve included more than the usual share of linkage above — but let’s start with a personal story. From one of the newest members of the NR team, Lauren Veldhuizen writes about her campus coming-out (as a conservative):
In college, I was a conservative theater student; very few still exist. As such, I spent the majority of my time at Wake Forest in the Scales Fine Arts Center, rehearsing alongside my dearest friends who, by the end of our time together, considered many of my beliefs to be in direct opposition to their mental and physical safety, and my opinions a threat to their very existence.
Having been in the theater world for 15 years, I understood that many of its inhabitants did not take kindly to conservatives, let alone Republicans. Over the years, I learned to keep my thoughts to myself. I kept my head down and offered my political opinion only when it was asked for. Even then, I coated my answers with language acceptable to my liberal peers because I thought it was silly to let something as trivial as differing beliefs stand in the way of presenting a story onstage.
Then, at the tail end of my senior year, I attended an event with virtually the entire theater student body in which I explained — now looking back on it, rather loudly — that I didn’t necessarily disagree with the political beliefs of one of our Republican peers who had graduated the year before. The room went quiet. Eyes widened. I heard a girl whisper in the back, “Did she just come out as a conservative?” Snide laughs, gasps, and side glances rippled throughout the room. My face reddened to, I am sure, the color of a ripe tomato. It finally happened — I had officially outed myself.
The funny thing is that I had never actually thought about it in that way. It wasn’t a secret that I was conservative; I was rather open about my beliefs when people asked, and I had become more outspoken in my writing throughout my senior year, particularly after the assassination of Charlie Kirk. However, conservatism certainly wasn’t something I openly discussed with most of my theatrical peers. I knew that if I did, most of my ideas would not be welcomed. I was right, but that should not have stopped me.
The national debt is an ever-growing catastrophe in the making that will be ignored until it can’t be. From NR’s editorial:
It was only four years ago when the national debt surpassed $30 trillion. This week, for the first time in history, the national debt reached $40 trillion — and counting. Time flies when you’re running gargantuan deficits year after year.
The benchmark is somewhat symbolic, as our $40 trillion total debt includes liabilities owned by parts of the federal government, such as retirement trust funds. Economists prefer to measure debt held by the public, or external creditors, which stands at $32.27 trillion. Still, that true debt is roughly equal to the entire annual output of the U.S. economy — or more than triple what it was at the start of the century.
Over the next decade, public debt is expected to balloon by tens of trillions more under current law as annual deficits — the gap between federal spending and revenues — surge past $2 trillion, then past $3 trillion. By 2055, projections indicate that debt will reach 175 percent of national income, far higher than the country’s historical peak after World War II. Actual debt will almost certainly be much higher, as current projections assume no future wars, recessions, tax cuts, or new spending programs.
Exploding national debt doesn’t feel costly to Americans today, but the price is paid in annual interest expenses. The government is set to spend more than $1 trillion on interest payments alone to current debt holders, making it the third-largest spending item in the budget behind Social Security and Medicare.
Growing interest costs — resulting from both a larger debt and higher interest rates on Treasury bonds — produce a vicious fiscal cycle. They go directly on the national credit card, incurring even greater interest costs the next year, which again add to the national debt, and so on. An enormous baseline debt also makes interest rates the most dangerous variable on future spending. Although projections assume that rates remain moderate forever, a single percentage-point increase would be the fiscal equivalent of adding a second military. And, as debt accumulates and financial markets grow wary, higher interest rates become all the more likely.
Soon enough, the bill will come due, and the fiscal treadmill may break.
The Democratic primaries have seesawed this year between devastating losses and triumphs for the party’s socialists. With another, frankly surprising win for the movement in Florida this week, Noah Rothman sees advantage GOP:
The Democratic Socialists of America scored their biggest victory last night. But it’s also likely to be their most pyrrhic victory.
As I told my fellow CNN guests on Tuesday night, there are two things I would not want to be if I were running a statewide race in Florida: anti-Israel and communist-curious. The Democratic nominee for Senate, Angie Nixon, is both.
Within one month of the October 7 massacre, Nixon introduced legislation calling for Israel to back down from its military campaigns in “occupied Palestine.” Her colleagues turned their backs on her as she spoke. Her fellow Democrats tried to persuade her to withdraw the bill. She would not, and it went down to a dramatic defeat (104–2 in the Florida House).
Nixon has a demonstrated penchant for performative politics, but she’s a true believer when it comes to her Democratic Socialist–standard anti-Zionism. That will complicate her pathway to victory in a state in which more than 60 percent of every age cohort over the age of 35 views Israel more favorably than the “Palestinians.”
But being anti-Zionist in what is arguably the most Zionist state in the Union is only the beginning of Nixon’s troubles. The nominee joined the DSA recently, but her platform suggests she’s been on board for a while. It includes Medicare for All, “free” childcare as well as family and sick leave, a national rent freeze and a moratorium on evictions, and a “universal jobs program with inflation-adjusted wages.”
Translated from DSA-speak, what she means is: nationalize the health insurance industry, collectivize the family services industry, abrogate property owners’ rights in advance of a massive public takeover of private property holdings (see Zohran Mamdani’s New York City), and create a bunch of taxpayer-funded make-work jobs — presumably, only to sever the worker’s relationship with the private sector. The Soviet constitution wasn’t so ambitious.
Returning to the university theme, Stanley Kurtz calls out another troubling trend in higher education:
Colleges are increasingly forcing students to swap out physical books for digital texts.
There’s a whole bunch of problems with digital textbooks. For starters, there’s a solid consensus among researchers that physical books are superior to digital texts for learning, particularly when it comes to long-form exposition and argument — exactly what’s needed in college. For another thing, in the new dispensation, students lose access to their digital textbooks when the course is over. Imagine an economics major who can’t refer back to his Econ 101 tome, or an English major who loses notes and markings she’s made in her sophomore copy of Shakespeare — not to mention the copy itself. Meanwhile, those with less interest in retaining their textbooks — or of greater financial need — can’t sell their digital texts on the secondary market, like they can their physical books. Then there are the privacy issues. Professors and publishing companies can tell whether you’ve cracked your digital textbooks, for how long, and even what passages you’ve highlighted. There’s also evidence that publishers are collecting personal information, even when they say they’re not.
So, why are America’s colleges and universities leading the charge away from physical books? And what can be done to stop what I and a great many students and professors think is a bad idea? Let’s see.
Our story begins in the early 2000s when publishers encountered growing competition from an expanding secondary marketplace for textbooks. Increasingly, students were buying, selling, and renting textbooks — at both online sites and traditional storefront sellers — for prices dramatically lower than new versions. And although campus bookstores did sell used, as well as new, textbooks, they too faced stiff competition in the used-textbook market from off-campus and online sellers.
Beginning around 2013 through 2015, publishers responded with a “digital first strategy” aimed at reducing the secondary market by squeezing out physical textbooks. This led to a program called “Inclusive Access,” in which professor-designated textbooks were offered to students in digital format, yet only for the duration of the course.
It’s true that digital textbooks are significantly cheaper than physical textbooks. Yet they are decidedly less effective for coursework than hardcopy books. And this is not to mention the problems of temporary access and privacy. Importantly, digital textbooks are by no means necessarily cheaper than the used hardcopy books sold on the secondary market. In any case, for whatever combination of reasons, early experiments in Inclusive Access saw few takers.
All that changed in early 2016, however, when the Obama Department of Education (DOE) promulgated what is commonly known as Rule 164.
CODA
I made an unhealthy number of music purchases when I was away in Asheville last week (rest assured, I’m getting the help I need). Among them was a semi-recent album from a band I just stumbled across, the Red Clay Strays. Soulful stuff, which nourished us on the long drive home.
Hope you enjoy. (Thanks to John Puri for filling in.)