Dear Weekend Jolter,
A telling moment occurred last week when Democratic Representative Adriano Espaillat and primary rival Darializa Avila Chevalier were asked on a New York news channel which country they were rooting for in the World Cup.
Mexico and Senegal, respectively.
What? Both politicians are Dominican American, so it’s not like they were honoring ancestral heritage. It evidently just didn’t occur to them to root for the country they live in and want to represent in Congress.
This, sadly, is an attitude that extends far beyond sports. Every year around this time, pollsters dutifully report new data illustrating how patriotism and affection for America is declining. So it is in 2026, as the nation turns 250. National pride among Democrats is plummeting. Especially on the left, but also on the right, the public arena is becoming populated with figures who root against America or who hold up [insert trending nation of the moment] as more desirable. Who want to ditch the precepts that underpin our system and rebuild. Who declare the country fundamentally — perhaps irredeemably — flawed, racist, unjust, unequal, and so on.
This is a failure to distinguish between problems common to most countries and problems so baked into a nation’s DNA as to be an essential part of it. At National Review, we unequivocally reject the notion that America’s flaws are inherent. We’re here, year-round, defending and advancing the American experiment, even when we don’t get everything we want — because genuine patriotism is not provisional. It’s certainly not inflexibly pessimistic. Will you help us continue this work as part of our “Defending America” webathon?
We’re not going to pretend all is hunky-dory. The left is drifting dangerously toward an anti-prosperity, antisemitic, resentment-fueled mindset that history has shown to be toxic to civilizations in every instance. The Trump administration is becoming consumed by the president’s vanity projects and revenge missions. But neither will we indulge the fiction that never before or elsewhere has humanity been so oppressed as it is in the United States of 2026, where the ease of starting a business, the quality of higher education, the economic opportunities, the national parks, the diversity of cultures, and the sheer overflowing creative energy of our people, among other things, are the envy of the world.
Gratitude is an abiding theme of this publication. It’s something that guides us as we make the affirmative case for the American project and shoot down the misguided ideas of those who would chip away at the features that define it. It’s at the heart of NR magazine’s monthly feature, “Our Spacious Skies,” for which we travel the country to share what we love about it.
Earlier this week, Noah Rothman cautioned Republicans against seeing the left’s disaffection as something merely to be exploited. Rather, “Republicans should do their utmost to make celebrating America an inviting prospect.”
That’s where National Review comes in. If you, too, are grateful for this country and would like to support NR’s work banging the drum for the Lockean ideals we hold dear, please consider a donation. After all, we’re all rooting for the same team. Most of us, anyway. Thank you.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
Once again, the Iranians refuse to lose a negotiation: A Lopsided Deal for Iran
A reality check: The Iranians Still Aren’t Our Friends
Don’t look away: The U.K.’s Horrific Rape Gangs
Congress must stop waiting to fix this: Social Security Insolvency Creeps Further Up
ARTICLES
Philip Klein: Trump’s Prompt and Utter Humiliation
Elliott Abrams: The Iranian People Are Forgotten
Andrew McCarthy: The Trump Administration Thinks We’re Imbeciles
Abigail Anthony: ‘Demonic Chapter’: How ‘Cultural Sensitivity’ Led to the Systematic Abuse of Thousands of British Girls
Rebecca Burgess: The Morale of Military Families Needs Our Attention
Noah Rothman: An Epochal Mass Casualty Attack Targeting ‘Capitalist Elites’ Thwarted
Will Swaim: In California, Organized Labor Might Just Defeat Itself
John Kennedy: Autism Centers Are Defrauding Medicaid to the Tune of Millions
Lauren Veldhuizen: The Other Side of Down Syndrome
Kaitlyn Kiepert: Coming Soon: Humanity’s First Outpost in Deep Space
Thérèse Shaheen: The Thucydides Trope: China Is No Match for America
John Yoo: Our Ability to Fight Foreign Terrorism Just Got Weaker
Jeff Blehar: The ‘Freedom 250’ Spectacle Can’t Distract from Trump’s Woes
Kamden Mulder: Blue-State Attorneys General Tilt the Playing Field to Gain Edge in Climate Change Litigation
Brittany Bernstein: FIFA Goes Looking for Discrimination in the Wrong Place
John R. Puri: Seeing America at 250
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Last week, Brian Allen reviewed the architecture of the new Obama center. This week, he moves from the exterior to the interior: Chicago’s New Museum to the Vain and Glorious
Armond White, on UFC Freedom 250: The Extravaganza Will Not Be Televised
THE EXCERPTS ARE A SAFE SPACE
From NR’s editorial on the Iran MOU:
The memorandum of understanding that both parties are signing is lopsided in Iran’s favor. The main concession from the Iranians is reopening the Strait of Hormuz, but the commercial artery won’t be returning to the status quo ante. The memorandum says that Tehran will not charge fees “for 60 days,” implying that Iran will begin extracting tolls thereafter. In exchange, the U.S. is lifting its blockade on Iranian ports and agreeing to let the Iranians sell oil, a source of revenue totaling tens of billions of dollars a year.
The memorandum also says that the U.S. will unfreeze Iranian assets — good for another roughly $24 billion — “upon the implementation of this M.O.U.”; in other words, perhaps within weeks. We wonder how many proverbial pallets will be needed to deliver this cash windfall to Iran.
The agreement also contemplates the lifting of all U.S. sanctions and delivery to Iran of a $300 billion reconstruction fund raised by its neighbors, dependent on a final agreement on Iran’s nuclear program. The terms are studiously vague, although there is a specific reference regarding the enriched uranium to “down-blending on site under the supervision of the I.A.E.A.” (which was a key part of Barack Obama’s Iran deal from which Trump rightfully withdrew in his first term). It’s all supposed to be worked out within 60 days, but that period is extendable.
This section also refers to Iran’s “nuclear needs,” presumably a euphemism for enrichment. In a lamentable press availability at the G-7 summit, President Trump explicitly said Iran should be able to enrich at low levels. This, coupled with Trump’s consistently dismissive remarks about obtaining Iran’s nuclear “dust,” suggests that Iran won’t give up enrichment or hand over its uranium, both of which have long been considered key benchmarks for setting back Iran’s program.
Meanwhile, there is no reference to Iran’s missiles, even though ending Iran’s missile threat was originally one of the U.S. war aims. At his presser, Trump pooh-poohed constraining Iran’s missile arsenal, arguing — incredibly enough — that any individual missile strike only causes limited damage. There’s similarly no direct mention of Iran’s support for regional proxies; that Obama’s JCPOA didn’t address this, either, was supposed to be one of the main criticisms of it.
Finally, the memorandum says the conflict will also end in Lebanon, an Iranian ploy to protect Hezbollah and drive a wedge between the U.S. and Israel.
For all the talk of Iran’s leadership being degraded by the attacks against its top ranks, it obviously still has adept negotiators.
Brian Allen reviews Chicago’s new monument to the Obamas:
The Obamas wanted a substantial, distinguished public-art component and got it. Mount Vernon and Monticello notwithstanding, the art bar at presidential sites has been low. How low can you go? Rhinestone campaign pins and Air Force One count as art. The Obama Center changes that for the better. I’ll start with Julie Mehretu’s 83-by-25 foot painted-glass window on the north façade that runs up the wall of the first few floors by the nicest escalators I’ve ever seen. It’s indoor/outdoor art in that it’s scrutable from the outside. The kind of granite is known as Tapestry because of its intricate patterns, like stone brocade, so Mehretu’s window works well with it. The title, Uprising of the Sun, makes me chuckle, given Obama’s pledge to lower the oceans and heal the planet. So he makes the sun uprise, too? . . .
Going through the museum, I experienced a woke megaphone and a degree of adulation and self-regard that ought to make all but the starstruck queasy. It’s relentless in advocating a hard-left, though sugar-coated, program and his version of his and Michelle’s journey, and I heard the pop word “journey” a hundred times. So Marco Polo. I have to hand it to them. The museum is full-blown and has depth and breadth, no fluff, all political muscle.
In the first gallery, it was funny and sad to see a dimly lit case displaying a copy of the Declaration of Independence, so dim that no one could read it without a flashlight. “Don’t look too closely” seems to be the message. Left-wingers don’t want we plebes to get too independent, putting them out of business. Obama’s ideological roots are identified in posters and banners promoting affirmative action, withdrawal from Iraq, an end to South African apartheid, the unilateral-disarmament group Teachers for Peace, which I suspect was a fifth column and a front group, anti-slavery, farm workers’ rights, and women’s rights. There’s his exotic, murky background — “I was from everywhere and nowhere at once,” reads a headline quote from Obama — and Michelle’s more prosaic one. She’s a whiner. How many times must her formidable, impressive mother have told her to “quit whinin’, girl” and show some gratitude?
There are spots where pop hits from the 1970s and ’80s play. Tunes including “I’ll Be There,” “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” Aretha’s “RESPECT,” and disco standards help set a mood. Music videos with dancing ASL interpreters were a fun touch, as were, unintentionally, wall panels like A Bright Idea — No Fossil Fuels. The center’s energy comes from sustainable sources, which means it has money to burn. Land acknowledgments always make me laugh, but the Obama Center bombs us with Hamas-speak about our role as settler-colonialist baddies, which isn’t funny.
The Obamas didn’t want a time capsule or a place that looked at them apart from their times or our times today. Leaving office in his mid-50s, he was too young and too political to walk away from his issues. After leaving office, Gerald Ford seemed to never not be playing golf. The center took no direct federal money, but infrastructure changes such as relocating roads and utilities and rebuilding the park drainage system cost about $140 million in city and state money, much reimbursed by the feds. The road to the center’s grand opening was painful, with many lawsuits seeking to stop it. Alas, no court in Illinois will rule against the Obamas.
Thérèse Shaheen achieves a bucket-list goal and gets Thucydides in a headline, then goes on to dismantle the modern-day geopolitical argument for which his name is often invoked:
For some time, it has been fashionable to discuss relations between the U.S. and China in the context of the “Thucydides Trap,” popularized by Harvard University’s Graham Allison. In a Financial Times column in 2012, Allison cited this line from Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War: “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this inspired in Sparta that made war inevitable.” He singled out “rise” and “fear” as the operative elements in determining whether war between China and the U.S. can be avoided. The analysis has been referenced countless times since, including last month when China’s President Xi Jinping welcomed President Trump by asking: “Can China and the United States transcend the so-called Thucydides Trap and forge a new paradigm for major-power relations?”
Allison’s framework reflected the elite consensus at the time that the People’s Republic of China was a nation on the rise. The PRC had joined the World Trade Organization in 2001 and had become one of the world’s low-cost manufacturers by simultaneously taking advantage of WTO membership to dump government-induced overproduced goods while violating WTO rules with import restrictions, ongoing government subsidies in every sector, and intellectual property theft. Chinese annual GDP growth since 2001 had averaged more than 10 percent.
Meanwhile, the U.S. was emerging from a financial crisis, with military forces entrenched in Iraq and Afghanistan. China was getting restive in the Pacific, challenging Japan and the Philippines with expansive claims of territorial rights in the region. India’s former chief economist Arvind Subramanian even projected the possibility of the renminbi becoming the world’s reserve currency possibly within the next decade. Subramanian’s 2011 book, Eclipse, had on its cover a photo of Barack Obama appearing to bow in greeting to an upright President Hu Jintao. At least to some, China seemed to be the rising power.
Whether or not the premise was accurate in 2012, to invoke it now is to willfully ignore reality. Since then, Xi Jinping has held a repressive grip on power. The communist leadership leads with paranoia, desperately afraid of its own citizens. There was the crackdown in Hong Kong against openness and dissent, the crisis of zero-Covid that led to social upheaval in Chinese cities, the collapse of the massive real estate bubble, and ensuing socioeconomic malaise. It is hard to buy into the fallacy of a Chinese juggernaut. In the words of Hoover Institution scholar Frank Dikötter, “Chinese communism is still communism.” President Trump may not be bowing to Xi Jinping, but his frequent references to Xi as a peer in what Trump terms the “G2” play right into Xi’s propaganda campaign to convince the world that China has equal status to the U.S. and should be seen as a counterparty in managing the world’s major issues.
China is not on the rise, and for Western analysts and government leaders to accept PRC propaganda is to misunderstand reality. Elite opinion shapers had previously convinced themselves that membership in the WTO would lead Chinese communism to succumb to capitalism and democratic reforms. From those same quarters, we now hear that the PRC is an emerging superpower and confrontation should be avoided at any cost. Elite opinion has been wrong on the PRC for about as long as there has been a PRC, and it is wrong today. China cannot sustain a centrally planned, Marxist-Leninist economy for the long run. China cannot match the U.S. in warfighting capacity or in alliances and partnerships. There is zero likelihood that communist China will achieve superiority in either area.
Where Beijing does have superpower status is in propaganda.
CODA
This song isn’t really about Russia (I don’t think . . .), but the title is timely enough given Moscow’s wartime difficulties to justify dropping in one of my all-time favorite Porcupine Tree songs: “Russia on Ice.”
Play it loud.
Until next week.