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Sabina Cherner is a communications intern at the Renew Democracy Initiative, which publishes The Next Move. She is a student at Tufts University, where she is studying international relations and economics.

Ariane de Gennaro is a communications intern at the Renew Democracy Initiative and an incoming JD candidate at Harvard Law School. She previously wrote for the Yale Daily News and worked in the office of Senator Mazie Hirono.

A few weeks ago, we were grabbing a burger at a popular joint when a pack of German soccer—sorry, football!—fans stumbled in. They had clearly just returned from Germany’s group-stage match against Ecuador at MetLife Stadium, still decked out in jerseys and bucket hats. After briefly conversing amongst themselves they asked what we’d recommend (the obvious answer: a double burger and the loaded, animal-style with the signature house sauce). A few bites in, one of the fans turned to his friends, still chewing, and in that thick, Central European accent declared that they simply don’t make hamburgers like this back home (which left us wondering if this German had been to Hamburg).

That’s the World Cup in miniature, and now that the tournament has closed, with Spain beating Argentina 1-0 in an exhausting extra-time final, it’s worth examining what the United States showcased to the world in the last five weeks hosting it alongside Canada and Mexico. For one summer, the US reintroduced itself to millions of people, not through fraught geopolitics, but through the spontaneous and entirely sincere America that exists between the highways and stadiums; the America of the burger spot where we encountered those curious German fans.

Videos of foreign fans marveling at free soda refills, discovering Buc-ee’s with religious awe, touring suburban Walmart’s as if they were at the Met, and road-tripping between host cities to see national parks they never knew existed. Football tourists were falling for a country that, by many surveys, they’d soured on in recent years.

In many host cities, Americans also rediscovered the wider world. In Lawrence, Kansas, the University of Kansas’ marching band rehearsed and performed Algeria’s national anthem to show their support for their temporary guests. Boston pubs experienced unprecedented beer shortages and introduced an extended “last call” curfew during the eventful, yet brief, week during which they hosted the Scottish Tartan Army. Strangers offered rides, meals, and hospitality to fans they are unlikely to cross paths with ever again.

None of these efforts were choreographed by a tourism board or a State Department strategy memo, and that’s precisely why it landed.

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It’s worth sitting with how strange this timing is: America’s reputation seemingly improving as its government tightens visa restrictions, empowers ICE agents to knock on the doors of citizens who post the “wrong” opinion online, and threatening to revoke broadcast licenses of networks who won’t air the president’s speeches. The better side of America that ultimately showed up for visiting fans from abroad persists in spite of the Trump administration’s hostile posture toward the world.

Nonetheless, the positive feedback comes as a welcome reprieve after years of the world dunking on American tourists, American politics, and American culture (or lack thereof). The World Cup, then, has been positive for international impressions of the United States—right?

Of course, it would have been impossible to avoid the uglier politics altogether. Fresh from a disruptive appearance at the NBA Finals, President Trump made a more direct intervention at the World Cup. In a knockout match against Bosnia and Herzegovina, one of the US’s star players, striker Folarin Balogun, received a red card, resulting in his suspension from the upcoming match in the Round of 16.

The United States would have to play without one of its strongest assets—that is, until President Trump gave FIFA a call. It was unfair, he said, to suspend a player for what shouldn’t have even been a red card. Trump normally doesn’t watch much soccer, but he knows these things.

FIFA—an organization known for its corruption—lifted the suspension in response to the intervention of its powerful host.

In the end, the United States was knocked out in a humiliating 4-1 loss against Belgium. The defeat was made all the more embarrassing by the unprecedented interference in favor of the American team. The situation seemed to offset the authentic joy that fans from around the world were experiencing on the ground. Up top, America was still consumed by political overstep and dysfunction.

Ordinary Americans spent a summer proving that our country still has real, exportable decency to offer the world. They did so unscripted and mostly unaware of the public diplomacy role they were carrying out.

Our president spent the summer undercutting that positive impression. Whatever goodwill the US earned from the World Cup was earned over countless small unremarkable interactions. Whatever stains on our reputation we suffered can be attributed to a man who cannot even watch a soccer match without trying to rig it in his favor.

Fittingly, the closing image of the whole affair was Trump himself, standing on the MetLife Stadium pitch on Sunday night, handing Spain’s captain the trophy. Spanish Captain Rodri raised it, La Roja celebrated a second title, and the American president got to be the man at the front of the photo anyway. A photo that was soon posted on the FIFA official social media with Trump conveniently cropped out, and then shortly posted by the White House with the president front and center. There is a strange, almost accidental honesty to the whole scene— the country did the work, and the man at the podium still found a way to make it all about him.

Hosting a global spectacle such as the World Cup has never been proof of a healthy democracy. Strongmen have used sporting events to launder their regimes’ legitimacy for decades—Russia providing a recent example with the 2018 World Cup, held after Moscow had already annexed Crimea and invaded eastern Ukraine. America showcased its more human side over the past five weeks, recouping some much-needed goodwill. Now, it’s our turn to show up as good citizens, hold our leaders accountable, and demonstrate that the best of our nation won’t be outweighed by the worst of our government.

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The Renew Democracy Initiative and The Next Move are excited to bring you Older/Wiser with Linda Chavez. Linda is a veteran of multiple presidential administrations, author, and columnist.

To commemorate America’s 250th, Linda speaks with Robert P. George, the McCormick professor of jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. Linda and Robert discuss the legacy of the Declaration of Independence, its radical principles, and how it operates as an ancient faith uniting a country comprised of diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds.

If you’re a premium subscriber to The Next Move, you are among the first to hear this episode of the Older/Wiser podcast. Early access to the full episode is just one of the ways we’re saying “thank you” for your support. Premium subscribers also receive automatic entry into exciting raffles and contests and invitations to Zoom calls with Garry Kasparov and other pro-democracy leaders.

If you’re not yet a premium subscriber, you can upgrade to watch the full episode now. If you’d like to get access to these perks and support our work, there’s never been a better time to join our community. Your support drives the work of the Renew Democracy Initiative, including bringing political dissidents to meet students, business leaders, and elected officials, as well as providing humanitarian assistance to frontline communities in Ukraine. Click here for an update on our on-the-ground work in Ukraine.

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The Renew Democracy Initiative, publisher of The Next Move, is pleased to join the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, publisher of The UnPopulist, as a media partner for the third annual Liberalism for the 21st Century Conference—LibCon 2026—in Washington, DC on July 16 and 17. Click here for more information and to register. Coinciding with America’s 250^th anniversary, the theme of the conference is the Reconstruction Agenda. The conference will assess the damage that authoritarian and demagogic politics have caused to the country’s liberal institutions and propose a path forward to rebuild accountability and confidence in the rule of law. The conference features a stellar lineup, including RDI Vice Chair Linda Chavez, along with Anne Applebaum, Francis Fukuyama, David French, Hong Kong dissident Nathan Law and many more. We’ll be there and so should you.

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Evan Gottesman is the director of communications and special projects at the Renew Democracy Initiative and managing editor of The Next Move.

Of all of President Donald Trump’s fibs, the Big Lie that the 2020 election was rigged is his favorite. Last night, the president devoted a prime-time address to the subject. It’s personal for Trump, whose ego is permanently bruised by his loss to Joe Biden.

By the standard of Trump speeches—admittedly, a low bar to clear—yesterday evening’s grievance session was something of a nothingburger. Trump appeared tired, lacking ferocity. Yet the Big Lie is bigger than one speech, and it is deeper than some sour grapes over an election held six years ago; it’s part of a politics of resentment that aims to sow doubt about democracy and ultimately induce surrender.

In the leadup to the speech, Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff described the president as “the world’s most famous sore loser.” Media outlets went through the motions of fact checking Trump’s address, observing that he did not substantiate his claims with concrete evidence.

This is all fair, but it’s not enough. The Big Lie is contagious. A YouGov poll released last summer found that more than a quarter of Americans, Republicans and Democrats alike, do not think the US is a democracy. Roughly another quarter are not sure. Our elections are supposedly rigged, so the United States is already not a democracy. Perhaps, one might begin to wonder, being a democracy is not so important after all.

It follows that Trump’s dishonesty demands more than just a five-Pinocchio rating and some sharp digs. A fatigued nation needs leaders who will reinforce Big Truths to displace the president’s Big Lie.

Here are just a few:

The truth is that American elections are safe and orderly. Voter fraud is vanishingly rare. Violence around election day is uncommon too. A bloodshed-free trip to the ballot box is not the standard everywhere in the world, nor was it always the case here in the US.

The truth is that our system of free and fair elections is worth celebrating. The very ability to choose our leaders is worth celebrating. Seventy-five percent of all people on Earth—more than six billion human beings—live under dictatorships. Many have sacrificed their lives and livelihoods for the things that we take for granted.

The truth is that liberal democracy really is—to borrow from Francis Fukuyama—”the final form of human government.” The past two centuries have been about extending rights to people who were excluded from the system rather than fundamentally overhauling it. Over 200 years, no one has come up with a better formula than one person, one vote, backed up by the rule of law and an expanding menu of civil liberties.

Don’t read complacency in these Big Truths. Having something to be proud of does not mean that our system is perfect, nor is it an invitation to rest on our laurels.

Indeed, there is one more Big Truth to consider, which is that the more established our democratic system, the more that’s at stake. There is a real possibility that federal agents will seek to intimidate voters during the midterms. The president may try (again) to overturn the outcome of an election. We have a lot to lose in those scenarios: ten generations of hard-fought progress, to be exact.

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Jay Nordlinger is a senior resident fellow at the Renew Democracy Initiative and a contributor at The Next Move.

There are some 1,300 political prisoners in Cuba, and two of them are Félix Navarro and Saylí Navarro. They are father and daughter. It is very rare for a father and daughter to be political prisoners. I can think of no other example.

Félix, 73, is in Agüica Prison, a notorious maximum-security facility. Saylí, 40, is in La Bellotex, a women’s prison. Both of these prisons are in Matanzas Province.

No one in the Cuban democracy movement is more esteemed by his fellow democrats than Félix Navarro. In March 2022, the Council for Democratic Transition in Cuba put out a statement, saying, “Félix Navarro represents all the solid values that enrich the human soul: order, justice, moderation, humility, and honesty.”

The statement continues, “Hardened in the face of the unjust sentences suffered for defending freedom and rights for Cubans, he has not lost an iota of his nobility, despite the cruelty to which he has been subjected, especially now, when his daughter has also been sentenced to prison.”

Saylí Navarro is cut from the same cloth as her father.

The National Endowment for Democracy, in Washington, will honor various people with Democracy Awards in a ceremony at Mount Vernon this September. One of the honorees (in absentia) will be Félix.

NED was founded in 1983 at the instigation of President Reagan. Last year, Elon Musk, when he was a senior adviser to President Trump in charge of cutting government, said this about NED: “That evil organization needs to be dissolved.”

Fortunately, that blessed organization still breathes.

Félix Navarro Rodríguez was born on July 10, 1953, in Perico, Matanzas Province. His family was a peasant family. Bright and curious—and with a desire to help others—Félix became a teacher. But in the 1980s he took the fateful step of democratic activism.

In 1992, he was arrested for such acts as distributing pro-democracy posters. He was sentenced to prison on charges of being “anti-revolution” and spreading “enemy propaganda.” He was released in 1994 but stripped of his license to teach.

Saylí Navarro Álvarez was born on March 11, 1986, on the Isla de la Juventud, the Isle of Youth. Her youth would not be like others’. She was six when her father first went to prison. The Navarros were subject to the indignities and horrors visited on an “anti-revolutionary” family: raids on their home, arbitrary detentions, etc. Young Saylí, filled with anxiety, experienced hair loss.

But she became something strong and extraordinary. “I had to grow up prematurely,” she said in a 2013 interview with Ivette Leyva Martínez. “I feel good about what I do, I assume it as something natural. My dream is to see a democratic and legally constituted state arise in Cuba.”

In March 2003 came the “Black Spring”—the dictatorship’s crackdown on pro-democracy groups. Seventy-five democracy leaders were imprisoned, including Félix Navarro. His wife, Sonia Álvarez Campillo, and their daughter, Saylí, were among the founders of the Ladies in White.

This is a group of prisoners’ relatives who attend Mass every Sunday, wearing white, and walk peacefully through the streets. Those walks are seldom peaceful, however: the ladies are harassed and attacked by agents of the state.

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Over and over, Saylí was detained, often violently. She said in that 2013 interview, “I never resist arrest, but they always use excessive force and hit you. I am able to overcome my fear because I know they are the ones who are committing a crime.”

Owing to her position as a dissident’s daughter, and a dissident herself, Saylí was denied the higher education available to others. But she is obviously wiser than most.

After about eight years, in late 2010 and early 2011, the Black Spring prisoners were released, in a deal brokered by the Vatican. Almost all of the prisoners were exiled to Spain, as a condition of their release. The last two prisoners to be released were Félix Navarro and José Daniel Ferrer—as they had refused to go into exile. They vowed to continue their work on the island, which they did.

On July 11, 2021, the island exploded, in mass protests. Many were arrested that day. On July 12, Félix went to his local police station, to inquire about those arrested—which was like him. He himself was arrested, along with the woman who had accompanied him: Saylí.

Félix was sentenced to nine years in prison, Saylí to eight. On what charges? You know, it doesn’t matter. If a dictatorship wants to imprison you, it just will. But, for the record, the made-up charges included “contempt,” “disturbing the peace,” and “disobedience.”

It probably goes without saying that the conditions in which the Navarros are kept, in their respective prisons, are vile and inhuman. Moreover, the 73-year-old Félix is in bad health: with diabetes, post-COVID pulmonary complications, and yet more ailments.

A few months ago—on April 8—Félix was savagely beaten in prison. They then handcuffed him and threw him into a punishment cell. Anamely Ramos, a veteran democracy activist, spoke for many when she said:

“Neither his age, nor his condition, nor the respect he commands has been sufficient to contain the violence. Félix should never have been in prison. … It is public knowledge that he is an innocent man.”

But he is not innocent of opposing the dictatorship and standing up for the rights of his fellow Cubans and human beings. Neither is his daughter.

In recent weeks, the auxiliary bishop of Havana, Eloy Ricardo Domínguez Martínez, has paid visits to both of them. He has proposed a deal: release at the price of exile. Both Navarros have refused.

Exile is a touchy subject. “Stay or go.” It is a personal, individual subject. There are great and heroic dissidents who accept exile, however grudgingly, with whatever agony. And there are others who do not. Some have no choice at all.

And whether you really have a choice can be gray …

Cubans, wherever they live, are in awe of the Navarros, and of the others like them. A totalitarian society tends to give birth to heroes. Cuba has.

Félix and Saylí are “patriots,” says Maria Werlau, the co-founder and executive director of Cuba Archive. “That, plus their great project of helping people, is considered dangerous by the Cuban dictatorship. Thus, they are paying such a high price. Their suffering breaks my heart.”

I suspect we will see the Navarros freed one day. And even Cuba itself.

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Sarah McLaughlin is senior scholar, global expression at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). She is the author of Authoritarians in the Academy, out now from Johns Hopkins University Press.

You’re relaxing with a cup of tea, winding down from your day, and thinking about tomorrow’s errands. And then you hear a ring at the doorbell. Followed quickly by another. And another.

When you finally open the door, you’re shocked to see not a neighbor or a delivery driver, but a federal agent. He knows what you said about the government on Instagram, and he’s here giving you notice to shut up.

A chilling encounter like this might dissuade even the most dogged critic from speaking their mind. In the United States, home of the First Amendment—a uniquely robust protection against censorship compared with other democracies’ rules—this kind of incursion should be unimaginable. These days, it isn’t, as a new lawsuit against Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials makes painfully clear.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), where I work, filed a lawsuit last week to vindicate the rights of a Rochester man targeted by federal officers for nothing more than an angry email castigating ICE’s actions.

That man, David Streever, wrote to the head of ICE and likened him to a Nazi after federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis in January.

“You are a monstrous human being and will go down in history as America’s Reinhard Heydrich, the butcher,” Streever wrote to then-acting ICE Director Todd Lyons, adding that Lyons “would never know peace” because of his guilty conscience.

Streever’s words were certainly strong, but that’s all they were: words. No threats, nothing outside the bounds of protected speech. After two more fatal ICE shootings in recent days—one in Biddeford, Maine and another in Houston, Texas—there will surely be more people who share strong words.

Streever’s three-paragraph email expressed a moral objection to the federal government’s conduct: the same kind of objection millions of Americans raise each and every year. But that didn’t stop federal agents from appearing at Streever’s door five months later and handing his wife a “WARNING NOTICE” alleging he may have violated federal law and insisting he “promptly” stop his “behavior”—and by that, they meant his constitutionally protected speech.

Streever was traveling with his young daughter at the time, so agents even tried to hunt him down at his hotel. When Streever warned his daughter that they may encounter federal agents, she cried, “I don’t want them to kill you!”

You could easily imagine such chilling acts from officials in Hong Kong or Russia—or even democratic Germany, with its strict speech regulations. But such anti-free speech behavior is certainly not the norm in the United States.

Americans should be alarmed to learn that the knock at the door might be happening next door. While neighbors host a family barbecue, ICE agents may be dropping off a threatening letter just down the street.

Unfortunately, not-so-friendly visits like these are a usual occurrence in much of the world. Across the globe, people who use the internet to speak their minds and engage in political life online pay a price anywhere from a warning visit by police to decades behind bars in horrid conditions.

Under Hong Kong’s campaign to protect what it deems “national security,” the city’s residents know that even a stray Facebook comment or Telegram post can result in arrest and a lengthy jail sentence. Simply celebrating the use of a protest anthem (rather than China’s national anthem) at a sporting event was enough to invite the police to one man’s home.

In Thailand, online insults to the monarchy are severely punished under the country’s draconian lèse-majesté laws—no mocking the king—while online forums and social media sites are a hunting ground for police to track down government critics. In one particularly disturbing example, a man was sentenced to over 50 years in prison for numerous Facebook posts critical of the king.

And from Uganda to Zimbabwe to Nigeria, social media users know that posting just a few words can bring officers, and danger, straight to their door.

These abuses aren’t limited to dictatorships. Even other democracies have deep free speech issues.

In the United Kingdom, police calls over online posts, including political commentary, have become routine. A 2025 investigation found that UK police detain thousands of people annually over online speech that merely annoys or upsets others, averaging 30 arrests a day under laws governing online and other communications. Even more bafflingly, the UK has long monitored what it deems “non-crime hate incidents,” which often resulted in people who tweeted perfectly legal speech receiving a visit from police or a black mark in a government database.

Germany, where politicians receive heightened protection against insults under the criminal code, often punishes online speech about political figures with a knock at the door—sometimes in a pre-dawn raid. In one especially absurd case, police raided a man’s home at six in the morning over a tweet calling a local politician a “pimmel” (Google it).

The United States should be different. It has the First Amendment—an especially strong free speech safeguard, even judged by the relatively high standards of the democratic world—and a proud legacy of shirking off the yoke of unaccountable power.

And yet, even America is drifting down the same oppressive path. Streever isn’t the only American to face unconstitutional consequences for expressing himself online in recent months. In January, Miami police questioned resident Raquel Pacheco after she criticized Miami Beach Mayor Steven Meiner on Facebook. A different Florida agency questioned a grandfather over a postcard he sent a senior state official telling him: “you lack values.” Last year, a Philadelphia-area retiree received a visit from DHS agents demanding he explain himself after he emailed a federal prosecutor criticizing the deportation case against an Afghan man who feared the Taliban would kill him. And this past May, FIRE secured an $835,000 settlement for retired Tennessee law enforcement officer Larry Bushart after he spent an outrageous 37 days in jail for posting a meme critical of President Trump after Charlie Kirk’s killing.

Indeed, the US is starting to look a little more like the very nations Vice President JD Vance rightly criticized for putting “free speech” into “retreat.”

“There is freedom of speech but I cannot guarantee freedom after speech.” The quote, attributed to Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, perfectly captures the risks one takes by speaking out. Sure, you can say what you want, but you might suffer the consequences after. That isn’t freedom at all.

We cannot guarantee freedom of speech, in the US or elsewhere, if the government response is a knock at the door and an official “notice.” If the guarantee means anything, it means no warning letters, no surprise visits, no threats. Even children sitting in their first American civics class could tell you that freedom is most adequately defined by what we are free from.

It’s time our leaders relearned that lesson.

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Garry Kasparov is the chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative, which publishes The Next Move.

Lindsey Graham knew right from wrong. He just chose not to act on that knowledge.

I met Senator Graham, who died Sunday, on a handful of occasions at gatherings like the Munich Security Conference and on the Hill. We even shared a brief phone call about possible measures against the Russian regime after one such encounter—though I can’t claim an especially close relationship.

What I can say is this: Lindsey Graham and I should have shared more in common than we ultimately did.

Graham came up as a Republican of the Reagan school, an enthusiastic champion of strong American leadership in the world and support for allies like Ukraine. As a Soviet-born Russian dissident who watched the Iron Curtain fall, this was my natural orientation in foreign policy.

Graham understood the stakes well, observing much earlier than many other Americans that Vladimir Putin’s aggression was “a struggle about whether a new dividing line is drawn across Europe: between nations that are free to determine their own destinies, and nations that are consigned to the Kremlin’s autocratic orbit.”

That was in 2008. Back then, such analysis was unfashionable in Washington. Recall how, four years later, Mitt Romney, echoing Lindsey Graham, drew a condescending retort from President Barack Obama: “The 1980s are now calling and they want their foreign policy back.”

Graham, it turns out, was quite prescient about Moscow. But being right doesn’t count for much if you walk in the opposite direction.

Beyond Russia, something else that the late South Carolina senator “got” early on was Donald Trump.

In 2015, Graham sized up the future president as a “a race-baiting, xenophobic bigot.”

The following spring, he put forward an even darker assessment of the future of the Republican Party: “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed.......and we will deserve it.”

Indeed the Republicans have been destroyed. Not electorally, but morally and institutionally.

The late South Carolina senator’s rebukes of Trump feel like dispatches from the ancient past, even though they’re only a decade old. After Trump was elected, those clear-eyed evaluations were quickly buried under thick, honey-sweet layers of flattery and appeasement.

Graham became President Trump’s most vocal ally in the Senate during both of his administrations. He would call Trump “Ronald Reagan plus,” or, depending on his mood, “Ronald Reagan plus plus plus.” Senator Graham claimed to see the light after January 6, only to come running back into MAGA’s familiar embrace.

As the age of Trump wore on, the brief, friendly interactions I had with Graham evaporated. At events where we both appeared, he seemed to be avoiding me. I don’t think the senator liked what I had to say about him and about his master in the Oval Office. Our common ground gave way to a yawning chasm.

In some respects, Graham’s story is not unique—it is the arc of every Republican who opposed Trump and subsequently got in line.

Yet some Republicans agreed with Trump’s sentiments. They simply couldn’t stomach Trump’s style. Their objections were cosmetic.

Graham was different. He was once a moderate with bipartisan instincts on issues like immigration and money in politics, and a man with strong convictions about democracy and world affairs. He had real, substantive differences with Trump. That makes his descent all the more galling.

If American support for Kyiv and other frontline allies was Graham’s animating principle, then he did tremendous damage to his own cause, leading isolationist, pro-Russian forces to the apex of their influence in Washington.

Graham died a day after returning from Ukraine. He had been pushing a new Russia sanctions bill, which his senate colleagues are now demanding move forward to honor his legacy. It’s a tragedy that, whether by providence or malicious interference (I believe in coincidences, but I also believe in KGB!), he will not be alive to see it pass. The bill, if properly executed, could have offered Graham a shot at some redemption.

It is an even greater tragedy that the enforcement of this bill, however good it may be on paper, will depend upon the most authoritarian, isolationist, pro-Russian president in American history, a president whom Lindsey Graham willingly enabled every step of the way.

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The Renew Democracy Initiative and The Next Move are excited to bring you Older/Wiser with Linda Chavez. Linda is a veteran of multiple presidential administrations, author, and columnist.

Linda speaks with Noah Bopp, founder and head of the School for Ethics and Global Leadership, about educating a younger generation that is navigating politics without the landmarks older Americans once took for granted. Linda and Noah discuss why so few young people believe democracy is working for them, how phones and social media are eroding attention and community, and what it will take — inside and outside of the classroom — to raise leaders who are both ethically grounded and internationally aware.

If you’re a premium subscriber to The Next Move, you are among the first to hear this episode of the Older/Wiser podcast—24 hours before the rest of the world gets to tune in. Early access to this podcast is just one of the ways we’re saying “thank you” for your support. Premium subscribers also receive automatic entry into exciting raffles and contests and invitations to Zoom calls with Garry Kasparov and other pro-democracy leaders.

If you’re not yet a premium subscriber and you’d like to get access to these perks and support our work, there’s never been a better time to join our community. Your support drives the work of the Renew Democracy Initiative, including bringing political dissidents to meet students, business leaders, and elected officials, as well as providing humanitarian assistance to frontline communities in Ukraine. Click here for an update on our on-the-ground work in Ukraine.

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The Renew Democracy Initiative, publisher of The Next Move, is pleased to join the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, publisher of The UnPopulist, as a media partner for the third annual Liberalism for the 21st Century Conference—LibCon 2026—in Washington, DC on July 16 and 17. Click here for more information and to register. Coinciding with America’s 250^th anniversary, the theme of the conference is the Reconstruction Agenda. The conference will assess the damage that authoritarian and demagogic politics have caused to the country’s liberal institutions and propose a path forward to rebuild accountability and confidence in the rule of law. The conference features a stellar lineup, including RDI Vice Chair Linda Chavez, along with Anne Applebaum, Francis Fukuyama, David French, Hong Kong dissident Nathan Law and many more. We’ll be there and so should you.

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This piece was originally published on Onward and Upward by Jay Nordlinger.

Jay Nordlinger is a senior resident fellow at the Renew Democracy Initiative and a contributor at The Next Move.

America is a “universal nation,” yes, but it’s also a specific one, a peculiar one. Here I borrow a word from the King James Bible, which refers repeatedly to “a peculiar people.”

We are a nation “in the air,” if you will—a nation of principles and ideals—but also a nation “on the ground.”

We come from England, and from Plymouth specifically, you might say. We have in our roots the Mayflower Compact and the Plymouth Colony.

A few years later, John Winthrop came, to establish the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Before his group left England, Winthrop said, “… we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.”

Of course, he was borrowing from the Sermon on the Mount, and what could be more universal than that?

Some 150 years after these Pilgrims and Puritans, we had the drama of our revolution. In 1976, our bicentennial year, my parents took us to Boston to walk the Freedom Trail, which traces revolutionary sites. This year—our 250th—a friend of mine has taken his own kids to walk the trail.

Part of our past is our civil war, which drenched America in blood. Is it past, entirely? (Cue William Faulkner, who wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”) Newcomers to America often have a hard time understanding our racial sensitivities.

Like many another people, we have our songs: “At the River,” “Shenandoah,” “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.” (Spirituals constitute an American songbook unto themselves.) “Blue Suede Shoes,” “Good Vibrations,” “Sweet Home Alabama.”

We have our lines of poetry: “I hear America singing” (“the varied carols I hear”). “A dream deferred.” The “City of the Big Shoulders” (meaning Chicago). When I was a kid, there was an ad slogan, capturing something essential: “Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet.”

When I was a student abroad, a lot of my fellow Americans wanted to blend in. They were loath to be taken for an American (and plenty of them had been taught to be ashamed of their country). I stood out like an American thumb, and still do.

At the moment, I am in Italy, where I was a student. You can spot me as an American from 200 paces: shorts, golf shirt, a certain comportment. I ask for ice for my drinks and (sometimes) butter for my bread.

I might as well sing “Yankee Doodle.”

And yet and yet …

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

I know some people who wish that those words had been omitted from the Declaration. “Airy-fairy rhetoric, universalist hokum.” But as some of us see it: classically and necessarily American.

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Important to many of us is what Lincoln said of Henry Clay in his eulogy of him: “Mr. Clay’s predominant sentiment, from first to last, was a deep devotion to the cause of human liberty …” Lincoln went on to say, “He loved his country partly because it was his own country, but mostly because it was a free country.”

You have heard of people who believe that they were “born American but in the wrong place”—meaning that they were born in a different country. I have known such people. Some were able to join us, and become citizens, and some were not.

I remember what Reagan said in his very last speech as president. He quoted a letter he had received: “You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”

Five years ago, I met a computer engineer and tech entrepreneur in Dallas, Mark Haidar. I had a talk with him at the George W. Bush Presidential Center. Haidar is included in a book of Bush’s paintings: Out of Many, One: Portraits of America’s Immigrants.

Mark Haidar—originally “Mahmoud”—grew up in Lebanon. His family suffered many hardships and horrors.

One day, two employees of the United Nations showed up at Mahmoud’s school. “This was the day that changed my life,” Haidar told me. They had brought with them two computers—by which the boy was fascinated.

He found something called “Encarta,” an early Microsoft encyclopedia. He began reading about the United States and discovered the Declaration of Independence—a document that excited him. He knew, in his core, it was true: Human beings have rights that no man or system can negate.

From then on, he had a tradition. Every time he got a new notebook in school—like a spiral notebook—he would write on its cover seven words: “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

America is important to us Americans, needless to say, but it is also important to the world at large: as an example of ordered liberty and human dignity; as an opponent of tyranny; as a haven for the oppressed.

One of the most moving, and painful, reporting trips I have ever taken was to Denmark last year. I talked to a bunch of Danes about America’s new posture toward their country: one of hostility and belligerence.

They were heartbroken. They had loved and defended America all their lives. One of these men was in tears, a sight I will not soon forget.

“So what?” some might sneer. “America First!” Well, America’s openness, generosity, and leadership have benefited one country above all: America.

There is an Italian expression, fare una brutta figura—roughly, to put forth an ugly face. Last week, an Italian friend remarked to me, “I’m sorry to say it, but, these days, America is putting forth una brutta figura.”

What can be done about it? Each of us, as individuals, can put forth the best face we can.

It was Carl Schurz who made possibly my favorite statement ever about patriotism. (He was a German immigrant who became a Union general, a US senator, and so on.) “My country, right or wrong—when right, to be kept right; when wrong, to be set.”

I also like what Miss Julia said. Formally, she was Julia L. Coleman, a high school teacher and administrator in Plains, Georgia. One of her students was Jimmy Carter, who liked to quote her: “We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles.”

I’m going to close with John Winthrop. Before setting sail for the New World, he told his fellow voyagers, “If we mess up this experiment of ours, our name will be mud throughout the world.” I have paraphrased, of course. You want the real stuff, however stern it is?

“… if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world”—a bad story, a negative example.

With freedom comes responsibility. (You have heard this a time or two.) I ask my fellow Americans, aspirant or actual: Would we have it any other way?

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Garry Kasparov is the chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative, which publishes The Next Move.

The country of my birth no longer exists, and on Saturday, my adoptive country will be 250 years old. The American republic has outlasted the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics more than three times over. On the occasion of the Fourth of July, I’d like to offer some reflections on its meaning to this Russian.

It would be easy for me to say that, growing up in the communist system during the Cold War, I was conditioned to hate America. But this would be greatly oversimplifying things. The truth is that the America of my Soviet upbringing was both distant and extremely close. The United States was at once the object of vicious propaganda and grudging admiration verging upon envy.

I remember how official Soviet attitudes toward the United States charted a sort of schizophrenic course. The Kremlin attacked the US in the present for segregation and “capitalist hypocrisy” while also hailing America’s revolutionary pedigree.

Vladimir Lenin even acclaimed the American breakup with Great Britain as “a model of a revolutionary war.” During Joseph Stalin’s later reign, one Soviet historian praised the Declaration of Independence as “a progressive document of its time.”

1776 remained almost untouchable in the USSR. It’s a historical irony that today’s American far left holds the founders in lower regard than Soviet Communist Party ideologues, who could not help but respect the rebels who humbled the imperialists in London.

My own Soviet education was… unorthodox. There was the influence of the Jewish side of my family, who were highly critical of the Soviet regime. As a chess player, I also had far more access to the West than my comrades, so I approached America with extra curiosity and reverence. I devoured as much information as I could about the USA before I even visited the place.

On the sidelines of a Brussels tournament in 1986, I approached grandmaster Nigel Short, a Brit, with a friendly trivia exercise. He had to name at least 10 of the 15 Soviet republics, and I would have to list off at least 40 of 50 US states. Nigel, who’d been to the Soviet Union, struggled to identify two thirds of its provinces, but I proudly exceeded my minimum with 42 American states named (apologies to the people of Tennessee, I have a strong recollection that I forgot to call out the Volunteer State!).

I finally made it to the US in 1988, stopping in New York and DC. That trip was a whirlwind. The energy of American democracy was magnetic even to a non-American like me, but it took me a while to find my footing in US politics. I’d seen Ronald Reagan demand Mikhail Gorbachev tear down the Berlin Wall, and I wanted to belong to whatever movement the fortieth president represented. Yet, just a few years later, I watched as the first President Bush took pains to appease the Soviets. Just months before the USSR collapsed, he warned Ukrainians not to declare independence. In that moment, George Bush sounded a bit like King George III.

I am also socially liberal, and I found certain areas of agreement with Democrats. Ultimately, however, I decided that my path would be non-partisan and independent. Yet the novelty of a political system with more than one party, a system where not joining a party was also an option, will remain exciting for this child of the Soviet Union for as long as I live.

I carried my enthusiasm for America back to post-Soviet Russia with hope for a blank slate upon which to plant the self-evident truths about human freedom to which I’d been exposed.

You and I both know what came next. After years of protest, an arrest, and several friends jailed and murdered, I decided that my campaign against Vladimir Putin’s KGB regime would be most effectively waged outside of Russia’s borders. Fighting a ruthless dictator, where better to go than America? This is a country founded by people who pledged to one another “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

All of that dynamism goes back to the Declaration, a blueprint for colonies reconstituted as “Free and Independent States.” America’s founding charter continues to be the model for liberation movements the world over. Declarations of independence from Korea to Kosovo have borrowed from language crafted two and a half centuries ago in Philadelphia.

It was for this reason that the United States of America stood apart in Soviet propaganda from Russia’s traditional rivals in Europe. Like the USSR, the USA was a country built upon an ideal, a new society. In this respect, America was not so much an immortal enemy as a fellow revolutionary state that had lost its way.

In reality, of course, it was the Soviets and their successors who constantly betrayed the principles of universal human rights. America is far from perfect, but for decades, its story was one of ever-expanding liberty. In Russia, the trajectory was one of instability, stagnation, and authoritarian decline.

Still, there are no fixed patterns in history. America’s continued success and openness are not guaranteed. For many Americans, this milestone Fourth of July may pass by as a kind of dull pain, a celebration seen as tone deaf amid the constant stream of insults and abuses flowing from the White House.

I am pushing back against the impulse to despair, and I appeal to you to do the same. America was the inspiration of my youth, and it has been my safe haven in more recent years. My wife and children are American citizens—thank goodness, by the way, for the Supreme Court’s ruling on birthright citizenship!

Ensuring this country’s future for the next 250 years and beyond means staking a claim to a proud legacy that goes back to July 4, 1776. Do not cede it to demagogues and extremists. Recognize that if you have something to lose, then you have something to fight for.

Happy Independence Day!

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Linda Chavez is the vice-chair of the Renew Democracy Initiative and chairs the Center for Equal Opportunity. A veteran of multiple presidential administrations, she is also the author of four books and was a nationally syndicated columnist for thirty years. She continues to write frequently on immigration, civil rights, and politics. Linda is also the host of the Older/Wiser podcast from RDI and The Next Move.

The Supreme Court’s Tuesday decision on birthright citizenship should come as no surprise to anyone who has read the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

The only surprise is that the Court’s ruling in Trump v. Barbara was not unanimous.

Five of the justices—Chief Justice John Roberts (writing for the majority) and Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson—read the plain language of the amendment as written. Justice Brett Kavanaugh concurred with the majority in striking down President Trump’s executive order denying birthright citizenship to the children of temporary legal residents and illegal immigrants, but on statutory rather than constitutional grounds.

But Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch twisted themselves into pretzels trying to explain away their position.

This week’s ruling should be the end of the debate on birthright citizenship—but I predict it won’t be. Opponents of birthright citizenship have a vested interest in trying to redefine what it means to be an American.

Chief Justice Roberts was robust in rebuking the arguments made by the Trump administration and his dissenting colleagues. Opponents of birthright citizenship have for years staked their interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment on the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” which they claimed excluded children born to non-citizen parents who, they said, owed allegiance to a foreign nation. Yet Roberts made mincemeat of this argument, citing the long history of an entitlement to birthright citizenship in English common law, which crossed the Atlantic with the original colonists and “was adopted with little fanfare after the Revolution.” Roberts noted that “This common law of citizenship—known as jus soli, or right of the soil—prevailed in ‘each and all of the states’ after American independence, and continued to emphasize reciprocal ‘allegiance’ and ‘protection.’”

Perhaps anticipating that their arguments on “subject to the jurisdiction” might fail, opponents of birthright citizenship lately have adopted an ancillary argument that allegiance is tied to where one is “domiciled,” which, they claim, cannot apply to temporary residents, much less illegal immigrants. As US Solicitor General John Sauer argued before the Court: “At some point before the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, the argument goes, it became ‘deeply rooted’ in this country that ‘[d]omicile is the key concept that creates allegiance.’”

Roberts dismissed this line of reasoning just as forcefully as he shut down the jurisdiction argument.

“The trouble is that there is scant evidence for this dramatically revisionist view,” the chief justice wrote. “Certainly no one said that such a change had occurred.”

It’s ironic that opponents developed this argument to square their views with the Court’s precedent in Wong Kim Ark (1898) That ruling revolved around a man, Wong Kim Ark, who was born in San Francisco to Chinese merchant parents. Despite his Californian origins, Wong returned to China at a young age. On a return trip nearly two decades later, US officials denied him entry on the basis that—in their reading—he was not a citizen.

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The facts of Wong belie their interpretation. The Court did indeed use the term “domiciled” to describe Wong’s parents’ status when he was born.

However, Chinese people were viewed as subjects of the emperor of China regardless of where they lived, and they were not eligible to become US citizens at the time. Indeed, in the years between the Wong family’s move back to China and Wong Kim Ark’s return to the United States, Congress passed the blatantly racist Chinese Exclusion Act.

The whole emphasis on allegiance among opponents of birthright citizenship smacks of the fear that some people can’t become fully American, even if they’re born here. This pernicious belief has found new life in the concept of “heritage Americans,” which is becoming popular on the right. A category with no legal basis, “heritage Americans” are those who can trace their ancestry to the Founding. All others, according to the concept’s proponents, aren’t fully American.

Abraham Lincoln certainly would have disagreed with this notion. In a famous speech he gave in 1858 celebrating American Independence and our Founders, he noted:

We have—besides these, men descended by blood from our ancestors—among us perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men; they are men who have come from Europe—German, Irish, French, and Scandinavian—men that have come from Europe themselves, or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals in all things. If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,’ and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration and so they are.

On the eve of the 250th anniversary of that Declaration, we must recall that birthright citizenship is not a vulnerability but one of the greatest strategic advantages of the American system. By welcoming children born on our soil fully into the American family from their very first breath, we incentivize rapid integration, social harmony, and shared economic prosperity. It is this unique mechanism that allows us to seamlessly weave diverse threads into a single national fabric.

It’s reassuring that the majority of the Supreme Court has upheld birthright citizenship—but the dissent of three justices and the Trump administration’s ongoing campaign against immigration remind us that we cannot take that right for granted.

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The Renew Democracy Initiative, publisher of The Next Move, is pleased to join the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, publisher of The UnPopulist, as a media partner for the third annual Liberalism for the 21st Century Conference—LibCon 2026—in Washington, DC on July 16 and 17. Click here for more information and to register. Coinciding with America’s 250^th anniversary, the theme of the conference is the Reconstruction Agenda. The conference will assess the damage that authoritarian and demagogic politics have caused to the country’s liberal institutions and propose a path forward to rebuild accountability and confidence in the rule of law. The conference features a stellar lineup, including RDI Vice Chair Linda Chavez, along with Francis Fukuyama, Anne Applebaum, David French, Hong Kong dissident Nathan Law and many more. We’ll be there and so should you.

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Max Mottola is a communications intern at the Renew Democracy Initiative, which publishes The Next Move. He is a student at The University of Chicago, where he is studying political science and economics.

Hanna Liubakova is a Belarusian journalist and political analyst. She is a nonresident senior fellow for the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. Liubakova was sentenced in absentia to ten years in prison by the Belarusian regime for her journalistic work and is wanted across the Commonwealth of Independent States.

Belarus has frequently been described as the “last dictatorship in Europe.” The country, wedged between Poland, Ukraine, Russia, and the Baltics, doesn’t make the news as often as its neighbors, but it’s the site of an ongoing fight for freedom between an embattled opposition and the three-decade regime of Alyaksandr Lukashenka. The government violently suppressed protests after a disputed election in 2020 and has joined Vladimir Putin as an accomplice in the invasion of Ukraine.

Yet since July 2024, Belarus has released approximately 850 political prisoners, including Maria Kalesnikava, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ales Bialiatski, and activist Siarhei Tsikhanouski, whose wife, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, ran against Lukashenka in the 2020 election.

The US brokered several prisoner release deals in exchange for sanctions relief on Belavia, Belarus’s national airline, and on potash, a key ingredient in fertilizer. These deals mark a thaw in diplomacy between Belarus and the West after years of isolation.

The prisoner releases present a human rights mirage, obscuring the Belarusian regime’s continued repression. Instead of an opening in the country’s political system, the Lukashenka government has created a revolving door of political persecution, releasing some critics while imprisoning others. Today, human rights groups estimate that over 1,100 opposition figures remain behind bars.

Will Western democracies fall for this ruse? US President Donald Trump, who called Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka “well respected” and “a powerful leader,” reportedly reached an agreement with the strongman for the release of up to 1,300 prisoners. That was in August 2025. Belarus has still not met its obligations.

To cut through the noise, I spoke with Hanna Liubakova, a Belarusian journalist and political dissident wanted by the regime.

Before we dive into the conversation, a note on language. At the interviewee’s request, the Belarusian President will be referred to by his Belarusian name, Alyaksandr Lukashenka, rather than Alexander Lukashenko, the Russified version more commonly used in Western outlets. This reflects the will of the Belarusian resistance movement, whose members vehemently oppose Lukashenka’s crackdown on the use of the Belarusian language. Belarusian was the sole official language of Belarus when it became independent of the USSR and remained so until 1995, when Lukashenka called a referendum to give the Russian language official status. While Belarusian and Russian are nominally co-equal, the Belarusian language has been largely sidelined in many spheres of daily life, while Lukashenka has criminalized other symbols of Belarusian nationalism. In the same referendum that elevated the Russian language, Lukashenka also revoked the white-red-white Belarusian national flag in favor of a near-exact copy of the flag of the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic—only with the communist hammer and sickle removed.

Max Mottola, The Next Move: Belarus has freed thousands of dissidents in exchange for lifted sanctions in a series of deals with the US. Why has Lukashenka opened negotiations with the Trump administration?

Hanna Liubakova: First, it is important to acknowledge the results. The American delegation, including Special Envoy John Coale and State Department representatives, has helped secure the release of hundreds of political prisoners. That is a significant achievement, and it is deeply appreciated by everyone.

As for why Lukashenka has become more open to negotiations with the US, I think there are several factors.

First, the Belarusian regime likely sees the current administration as more pragmatic and transactional, and therefore more open to making deals. Second, there is a history of engagement with the first Trump administration. Before the 2020 Belarusian presidential election, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Minsk, demonstrating that dialogue between Washington and Minsk was possible. That experience may have made Lukashenka more willing to engage again.

We should also look at the broader context. After the large prisoner exchange between Russia and the West in the summer of 2024, we saw similar discussions begin involving Belarus. At the same time, the regime has had to adapt to changing geopolitical and economic realities. Lukashenka has always sought to balance different centers of power and reduce his isolation when possible.

In many ways, this approach is not new. Throughout his political career, Lukashenka has repeatedly used political prisoners as bargaining chips in exchange for political benefits, sanctions relief, diplomatic engagement, or broader international recognition.

TNM: Do you think that these deals and Trump’s praise boost Lukashenka’s reputation and global standing?

HL: As for whether these contacts legitimize Lukashenka, I think the answer is more complicated.

Of course, many Belarusians are uncomfortable with language that refers to Lukashenka as a “president” or a “well-respected person.” Many of us do not call him president because he has remained in power through repression and electoral fraud.

At the same time, I do not think the primary purpose of such language is to legitimize him. My assumption is that it is part of a broader negotiation strategy aimed at securing the release of political prisoners.

The more important question is whether engagement produces results. So far, it has led to the release of hundreds of people. That is a real and tangible outcome.

At the same time, we should not lose sight of the bigger picture. Political prisoners continue to be arrested, repression continues, and the regime has not fundamentally changed its behavior. Any engagement with Lukashenka should remain focused on concrete results and should not be mistaken for political normalization.

TNM: Lukashenka came in as a virulently anti-Western figure. In neighboring Ukraine, Russian hostility has forced significant cultural, economic, and political realignment, as seen in Kyiv’s efforts to join the EU. Is a rapprochement with the West possible in Belarus with the country constrained by a Putin-friendly regime?

HL: I do not believe that Lukashenka will fundamentally change his ideological position. There is a common myth that he has been “balancing” between the West and Russia as a way of staying in power. In reality, he has also been balancing within his dependence on Russia—using limited engagement with the West primarily as leverage for his deals with Moscow.

Before 2020 and before the waiving of sanctions, Belarus did maintain relatively open relations with the US, the EU, and Ukraine. However, when Lukashenka faced his most serious political crisis during the mass protests in 2020, he turned to Russia for support. Putin provided it at a critical moment for his regime’s survival.

There have been cycles in this relationship: periods of tactical engagement with the West, followed by repression and sanctions, and then renewed reliance on Russia when Lukashenka feels threatened. This pattern has been consistent for decades. The difference now is not the logic itself, but the constraints. Since 2020—and especially since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine—the regime has far less room to maneuver. Its dependence on Russia has deepened, and its ability to pursue any meaningful balancing strategy has significantly narrowed.

At the same time, Lukashenka’s outreach to countries like China is both an economic necessity and a political attempt to signal that Belarus is not entirely without alternatives, even if those alternatives remain limited. This is also done to improve his position in conversations with Putin.

Ideology also matters. Lukashenka and Putin may not be best friends, but they are allies. The 1999 Union State Treaty was not imposed on Lukashenka. It was a choice that laid the groundwork for deeper long-term integration with Russia.

Given this trajectory, I do not see the current regime voluntarily pivoting toward the EU in any meaningful sense, except in a purely transactional way—if limited engagement helps reduce sanctions or unlock economic benefits. But this is not democratization or liberal reform. After more than 30 years in power, the system is structurally resistant to change. We should not expect a late-stage ideological transformation.

That said, it is important not to overlook Belarusian society. Even under repression, public moods matter. Many Belarusians want their country to be more open, less isolated, and more economically connected to Europe. This creates a form of internal pressure that the regime cannot fully ignore, even if it cannot be expressed politically. The West should keep this societal dimension in mind when assessing Belarus: the regime is constrained not only by Russia, but also by the long-term preferences of its own population.

TNM: How have Lukashenka’s efforts to direct migrants toward Lithuania, Poland, and other Eastern European countries, in what has been dubbed “migrant warfare,” affected European integration?

HL: The migration crisis was clearly orchestrated. The peak came in 2021, when thousands of migrants appeared at the EU’s borders with Belarus. Multiple investigations have documented efforts by organizations linked to the Belarusian regime to bring people into the country and facilitate their movement toward the borders of Lithuania, Poland, and Latvia. Given the level of control exercised by the Belarusian authorities, it is difficult to believe that thousands of people could have been transported to border areas without the regime’s knowledge. The regime was clearly aware of what was happening.

The goal was to pressure and blackmail the EU into easing sanctions and re-engaging with Lukashenka politically. He wanted the EU and Western governments to see him as both a troublemaker and someone they would ultimately need to talk to. He expected phone calls, meetings, and renewed diplomatic engagement as a way out of his international isolation.

There were, in fact, two phone calls from former German Chancellor Angela Merkel. However, she was already preparing to leave office, and the calls did not result in any meaningful political rehabilitation for Lukashenka. While he may have viewed the contacts as a success, the broader strategy failed. The EU did not lift sanctions. On the contrary, it adopted additional sanctions packages in response to the crisis.

That was the correct response. The EU demonstrated that it would not be blackmailed.

The situation has not completely disappeared. Attempts to cross the EU’s eastern borders from Belarus continue, with numbers fluctuating from month to month. What is striking is how closely these flows appear to correspond with political developments. For example, periods of communication between Belarus and Poland have sometimes coincided with a decline in attempted crossings. This suggests a high degree of control over the movement of migrants and the ability to redirect pressure toward different borders when desired.

What makes the situation especially cynical is that human beings are being used as instruments of political pressure. People have suffered, and some have died along the border. Given the regime’s extensive control over the country, I find it difficult to believe that the appearance of migrants was beyond its control.

We also have evidence that organizations connected to the regime promoted Belarus as a transit route to the EU, helped facilitate visas, and encouraged people to travel there under false expectations. In my view, this amounts to state-enabled human trafficking being used as a tool of political coercion.

TNM: Over the years, the West has tried to support pro-democracy opposition figures in Belarus. Does that possibility still remain?

HL: The Belarusian pro-democracy movement was not “created” by the West or built around a pre-selected leader. It emerged from a domestic political crisis in 2020, when a presidential candidate became a focal point for mass protest and was later forced into exile. Since then, Western support has primarily gone to institutions—independent media, civil society, and democratic representation abroad—rather than shaping leadership itself.

For ordinary people in Belarus, the issue is about basic conditions of life: stability, safety, and the ability to travel, earn, and live without fear. In that sense, the political debate is often less about ideology and more about whether the state can deliver normality and predictability.

Since 2020, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya has become a central coordinating figure for the democratic movement in exile, recognized internationally and working with a range of political and civil society actors. That role is real, but it exists alongside ongoing internal diversity and disagreement within the broader opposition ecosystem. But what is important is that there is a broad consensus within the Belarusian democratic movement on the end goal: a democratic, independent Belarus with free elections, rule of law, and accountable institutions.

TNM: What are the chances that Russia will try to replace Lukashenka with a more pliant figure?

HL: I don’t think there is anyone in Belarus who is more useful to Russia than Lukashenka. Putin knows who Lukashenka is and how to work with him. Lukashenka maintains control over the economy, the security apparatus, and the political system, and from the Kremlin’s view, he delivers what Russia needs.

I think it’s a myth that we’ve been talking about for decades that Putin is willing to have somebody else. What are the signs of that? Lukashenka meets with Putin more than anyone else and vice versa so there is a connection that exists there. There are no signals that Putin would like to replace him.

Some continue to speculate about Russian pressure on Belarus to send troops into Ukraine. Russia is certainly using Belarusian territory, infrastructure, and military assets to support its war effort. However, there is little evidence that the Kremlin is actively pushing for a large-scale deployment of Belarusian troops to the front.

Both Putin and Lukashenka understand the risks. The Belarusian military lacks recent combat experience and is not configured for sustained offensive operations in Ukraine. More importantly, Belarusian public support for direct participation in the war remains low. Significant combat losses could create domestic tensions inside Belarus.

For that reason, the arrangement that has existed since 2022—Belarus providing territory, logistics, training grounds, and strategic support while avoiding direct combat involvement—has served the interests of both Moscow and Lukashenka. Putin gains access to Belarus without assuming the political costs of Belarusian casualties, while Lukashenka avoids a potentially dangerous domestic backlash.

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TNM: You mentioned the Union State earlier. On the political level, this institution has helped create inextricable military and economic ties between Russia and Belarus. However, that doesn’t reflect how the Belarusian population views this partnership. How has popular Belarusian sentiment toward Russia changed since the start of the Ukraine war?

HL: I will refer both to research and to what I hear from people on the ground. There is also solid public data—for example, Chatham House research—that is widely available and easy to check. What that research consistently shows is that an overwhelming majority of Belarusians do not want their country involved in Russia’s war against Ukraine. One widely cited figure is that around 97% of Belarusians oppose participation. And this is not just the opposition or politically active groups—it also includes people who support Lukashenka or work within the state system. In that sense, this really is not “their war.”

For some Russians, their country is fighting and they may feel patriotic. For people inside Belarus, that’s certainly not the case. That doesn’t mean everyone fully rejects Russia’s narrative—propaganda does have an effect, and some people don’t connect all the dots. But they are a minority.

Despite years of propaganda—especially since 2022, but even since the annexation of Crimea and the Donbas war—that did not change the mentality of Belarusians. They don’t want to go and fight for Russia. We can certainly say that there is a clear understanding that Belarus is and should remain an independent country. Only a very small minority, usually a few percent depending on a survey, would say they would fully support joining Russia.

Where it gets more complicated is what people want instead. A lot of Belarusians will say something like: “We just want to have good relations with everyone.” With Russia, with the EU—ideally both. Of course, in reality that’s not really possible in today’s geopolitical situation, but it reflects something important: a desire to avoid confrontation, isolation, and war.

There is also a kind of realism in how people think about the West. Even if Belarus changed tomorrow, most people understand that EU membership is not something that would happen quickly. So expectations are shaped more by caution than by big political visions.

One more thing you notice in everyday life is how interactions with Russians in Belarus have changed. There are more Russian visitors now, and while Belarusians are generally open and welcoming, it sometimes creates tension in small, everyday ways—around language, behavior, even things like currency or assumptions about the country. For some people, it reinforces the feeling that “we are not the same.” Belarusians increasingly see themselves as separate from Russia. And despite years and decades of propaganda, the core position is consistent: they do not want to be part of this war, and they want Belarus to remain independent.

TNM: There have been recent reports of thousands of Russian troops closing in on or stationed in Belarus. To what extent does this pose the threat of a Russian invasion?

HL: There are Russian troops in Belarus—at least around 2,000, based on current assessments. Could Russia try to occupy Belarus? In theory, yes. But what would that achieve?

Occupying a country that does not want to be part of Russia would be extremely difficult. Russia has not succeeded in doing that in Ukraine. It annexed Crimea, but it has never managed to occupy an entire sovereign country. I do not see how it could do so in Belarus.

Belarus is not a divided country. There is no significant constituency arguing that Belarus should join Russia. Most Belarusians speak Russian, but they also want Belarus to remain an independent state. That distinction is important.

More importantly, Putin does not need to occupy Belarus. He already has a loyal partner in Lukashenka, who maintains control over the country. From the Kremlin’s perspective, Belarus already serves many of Russia’s strategic purposes. It functions as a military staging ground from which Russian forces can threaten or attack Ukraine. It has also been used to help destabilize neighboring EU and NATO countries, whether through the manufactured migration crisis or other forms of hybrid pressure, including incidents involving Lithuanian airspace.

An outright occupation would likely provoke resistance inside Belarus. I am not necessarily referring to military resistance—the Belarusian Army has limited combat-ready capabilities—but other forms of resistance would almost certainly emerge. I do not believe Belarusians would accept such a move quietly. That is why I do not see a Russian occupation as the most likely scenario.

That said, there are deeply concerning developments that should not be overlooked. One is the announced deployment of Russian nuclear weapons on Belarusian territory. This increases Belarus’s vulnerability by making it a potential target in the event of a broader conflict involving NATO or Ukraine.

It also raises a longer-term sovereignty issue. If Russia establishes a permanent nuclear presence in Belarus, removing it would be extraordinarily difficult, even if Belarus were to become democratic and fully independent in the future.

Another example is the planned deployment of Oreshnik missiles in Belarus. These developments demonstrate that Russia does not need to formally occupy Belarus in order to erode its sovereignty. Military integration, dependence in foreign policy, economic ties, and security cooperation already give Moscow substantial influence over the country.

In other words, the greatest threat to Belarusian sovereignty is not necessarily a Russian invasion. It is the gradual expansion of Russian control without the need for formal occupation.

TNM: How can the international community support the pro-democracy movement in Belarus?

HL: Belarus remains under severe repression. Hundreds of political prisoners are still behind bars, independent media have been forced into exile, and civil society organizations have been dismantled inside the country.

At the same time, democratic forces have not disappeared. Independent media continue to reach millions of Belarusians every month, civil society remains active despite enormous pressure, and many Belarusians continue to support democratic change. The democratic movement survives, even under some of the harshest conditions in Europe.

I would highlight three priorities of what can be done to help Belarusians.

First, maintain pressure on the regime. The Belarusian authorities respond to pressure, not goodwill gestures. We can see this today in the ongoing releases of political prisoners, which have often been linked to international pressure and negotiations. Sanctions are not an end in themselves, but they remain an important tool. They should be used strategically and should not be lifted prematurely. While prisoner releases are welcome, repression continues. New arrests are taking place, and the number of newly recognized political prisoners remains comparable to the number of those being released through US mediation. We should keep this in mind.

Second, support independent media and civil society. These organizations continue to reach people inside Belarus and provide access to information that the regime tries to suppress. The demand for independent information remains strong. Yet many Belarusian media outlets and civil society groups are facing growing financial difficulties. The reduction of international assistance and shifting donor priorities have created serious challenges at a time when the need for support is greater than ever. Sustained funding is essential if these organizations are to continue their work.

Third, continue accountability efforts. There are ongoing initiatives to bring Lukashenka and other officials to justice for international crimes. These include investigations related to transnational repression, the forced displacement of people (the ICC launched an investigation), Belarus’s role in Russia’s war against Ukraine, and the transfer of Ukrainian children to Belarusian territory. Democratic countries should continue supporting these efforts.

Accountability matters not only because justice is important, but because it sends a clear message that those responsible for serious abuses will eventually face consequences. If the international community remains focused on these three priorities—pressure, support for democratic institutions, and accountability—it can help contribute to Belarus’s democratic future.

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The Renew Democracy Initiative, publisher of The Next Move, is pleased to join the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, publisher of The UnPopulist, as a media partner for the third annual Liberalism for the 21st Century Conference—LibCon 2026—in Washington, DC on July 16 and 17. Click here for more information and to register. Coinciding with America’s 250^th anniversary, the theme of the conference is the Reconstruction Agenda. The conference will assess the damage that authoritarian and demagogic politics have caused to the country’s liberal institutions and propose a path forward to rebuild accountability and confidence in the rule of law. The conference features a stellar lineup, including RDI Vice Chair Linda Chavez, along with Francis Fukuyama, Anne Applebaum, David French, Hong Kong dissident Nathan Law and many more. We’ll be there and so should you.

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Garry Kasparov is the chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative, which publishes The Next Move.

This past Saturday, June 27, I was invited to deliver remarks at the Dubrovnik Forum, a conference on international politics, security, and strategy. I opened a session on modern warfare, the defense industry, and Europe’s strategic choices. In attendance were officials from the governments of many NATO members and other democratic allies.

Here is what I told them:

Thank you. I would like to thank Prime Minister Plenkovic, the Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs, and the other organizers of the Dubrovnik Forum.

I have lived in New York ever since I was forced to leave Russia in 2013, facing imminent arrest. However, I am here as a proud citizen of the Republic of Croatia. We have more than an EU passport in common—we share democratic European values. And because of that, I will always speak of Europe in terms of “we” and “us.”

Standing here, in Croatia, a NATO member, I take no satisfaction from stating: NATO is effectively dead.

I already got in trouble for saying “NATO is dead” at the Halifax Security Forum last year. It doesn’t faze me. But I can see some faces beginning to turn, so allow me to explain what I mean.

NATO—the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—as it was originally conceived is irrelevant.

In 1949, the alliance was established as a bloc of democratic European nations under American protection with one purpose and to fight one war. Not a war in Afghanistan or Libya. This alliance was meant to fight a war to defend the continent from a Russian attack.

Well, Russia has begun its westward aggression. In 2014—expanding that attack in 2022.

Where are the Americans, the supposed guarantors of European security?

Under the Obama administration, they did nothing—actually, worse than nothing, by continuing negotiations with Russia on climate change, the Iran nuclear program, and the Middle East, while largely ignoring Putin’s blatant violation of the international order on European soil. Under the Biden administration, they dragged their feet, providing assistance to Ukraine too little, too late. They lectured Kyiv about “escalation” as Russia dragged Ukraine into an ever more gruesome war.

Now, under the Trump administration, the United States is hostile—arguably an active collaborator with Moscow.

Where are we, the Europeans? We have allowed our muscles to atrophy. The European institutions that lifted the continent out of the ashes of World War II—and enabled a nation like Croatia to prosper after the turmoil of the 1990s—these institutions were built without a serious military component.

Security? The Americans will take care of that! This was always the assumption.

It was only last year that the European Commission finally established a Directorate-General for Defense Industry and Space.

For decades, we prospered—but even as we prospered, our safety was an illusion, paid for by American largesse.

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Now, we see that an alliance designed for collective security is functioning like a protection racket. This is the natural consequence of outsourcing our safety to Washington. We were blind to the isolationist mood rising at both ends of the American political spectrum.

So far, I have only given you bad news. But there is a silver lining, won through the sacrifice of thousands upon thousands of brave Ukrainians. Europe is indeed behind—militarily and technologically.

But Europe has a robust economy and manpower. Europe’s backwardness is the result of a political choice. We can catch up, with Ukraine as the cornerstone of a new European security architecture.

Ukraine is not only defying so-called “expert analysis,” fighting on into the fifth year of a Putin-planned three-day war—a three-day timeline, incidentally, shared by most Western governments. Ukraine is the only nation in Europe that is really preparing for the day after America withdraws. Ukraine is proactively building the post-American security order on the battlefield today. What they are doing is revolutionary.

Ukraine knocks out $50,000 Iranian Shaheds with improvised drones that cost a fraction of that price—far less expensive than American Patriots or even Israeli Iron Dome interceptors. Ukraine is ahead of many nations in integrating artificial intelligence into the battlefield. Ukraine will soon fly Swedish fighter jets in its air force rather than rely entirely upon American models. My country, Croatia, recently made a similar decision, purchasing French Rafales instead of American planes. Ukraine strikes back deep into Russia whether or not the worryworts in Washington give their blessing.

It is a tragedy that Ukrainians have paid a deadly price in order to reverse Europe’s technological and military decline. You can honor their sacrifice by supporting them—and following their example by pulling your weight abroad and innovating at home. It will ultimately be to the benefit of us all: advances in medical and consumer technologies are often downstream of developments in battlefield science.

Consider what Ukraine has accomplished despite the obstacles: Ukrainians only broke free of the Russian-Soviet Empire again in 1991, and their sovereignty has been under brutal attack for a third of its modern independent existence. Europe is wanting for willpower, not resources.

This is the challenge facing Europe and all countries that once counted on the United States for support.

I am joined at this forum by ministers from many such democratic allies: Japan, Germany, France, Italy, Lithuania, Albania, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Portugal, Kosovo, Hungary, North Macedonia… forgive me if I have missed any.

You will return to your capitals and debate the particulars of your foreign and defense policies.

But let these principles be your north star: a commitment to real European collective defense and homegrown technological excellence, the boldness to finally cut the umbilical cord with America, a serious recognition of the fact that Putin’s regime is devoted to perpetual war, and the self-respect to actually stand up and fight for our democratic way of life.

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The Renew Democracy Initiative, publisher of The Next Move, is pleased to join the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, publisher of The UnPopulist, as a media partner for the third annual Liberalism for the 21st Century Conference—LibCon 2026—in Washington, DC on July 16 and 17. Click here for more information and to register. Coinciding with America’s 250^th anniversary, the theme of the conference is the Reconstruction Agenda. The conference will assess the damage that authoritarian and demagogic politics have caused to the country’s liberal institutions and propose a path forward to rebuild accountability and confidence in the rule of law. The conference features a stellar lineup, including RDI Vice Chair Linda Chavez, along with Francis Fukuyama, Anne Applebaum, David French, Hong Kong dissident Nathan Law and many more. We’ll be there and so should you.

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This column concludes our mini series looking at America’s milestone birthdays—and how contemporary leaders handled those anniversaries. Read Part I on Calvin Coolidge at America’s 150th, and last week’s installment on Gerald Ford at America’s bicentennial.

Jay Nordlinger is a senior resident fellow at the Renew Democracy Initiative and a contributor at The Next Move.

A couple of articles ago, I quoted Donald Rumsfeld, who said, “You go to war with the army you have.” By the same token, you mark a major American anniversary with the president you have.

For our 50th, we had John Quincy Adams. For our centennial, we had Ulysses S. Grant. For our 150th, we had Calvin Coolidge. For our bicentennial, we had Gerald R. Ford. And today, for our 250th, we have Donald J. Trump.

In recent days, he has created a “culture war” over the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall. This “war” is an excellent example of Trump’s modus operandi. You can read details elsewhere. I would like to make a single point.

According to Trump, the Reflecting Pool ought to be “American Flag Blue.” Actually, a reflecting pool is meant to reflect—in this case, the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, and the natural surroundings.

Trump’s presidency is a reflection of our nation, is it not? “Here, the people rule.” In a democracy, the people say something about who they are in the political choices they make.

It was almost inevitable that we had cage fighting on the White House lawn. Before that, there was a weigh-in of the contestants at the Lincoln Memorial.

At the end of one of the bouts, a fighter yelled, “Michelle Obama is a man! Am I right, America?”

(There is a fixed belief in quarters of our country that the former first lady is, in fact, a man named “Mike.” I first learned of this belief about ten years ago.)

Speaking at Gettysburg, Lincoln said, “… we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground.” I do not believe that the White House or the Lincoln Memorial should be hallowed. These are not sacred spaces; they are civic spaces.

But, you know: a little dignity and respect.

In 2020, President Trump arranged to have a Fox News interview inside the Lincoln Memorial. I thought this was gross. Also: can you imagine if President Obama had arranged such a thing with, say, MSNBC?

William F. Buckley Jr. said, “Within every conservative is a streak of libertarianism.” (WFB is thought of, rightly, as a conservative, but he sometimes described himself as a “libertarian.”) I further contend that within every conservative—and every liberal—is a streak of populism.

Don’t most of us smile on thinking of Andrew Jackson’s (raucous) first inauguration?

I must say, however, that recent years have narrowed my populist streak to a barely visible thread.

It is a trick of populists to say that if you object to such things as cage fighting on the White House lawn, you are a snob, an elitist, who looks down on “real people.”

There are many things you might say in return—including, “You have too dim a view of ‘real people.’”

Over the course of my life, I have seen high culture largely erased from the public square. There is barely any room for “middlebrow” culture—Copland’s Lincoln Portrait, say.

In 1961, the Kennedys invited Pablo Casals, the venerable Spanish cellist, to play at the White House. (It was not his first time. He had played for President McKinley in 1898.)

Vladimir Horowitz, the great Russian pianist, played recitals for Carter and Reagan. (The latter awarded Horowitz the Presidential Medal of Freedom.)

Leontyne Price sang for Johnson, Carter, and Reagan. Marilyn Horne sang for Reagan, Bush 41, and Clinton. One could go on and on.

Kid Rock seems to be the artist laureate of the Trump administration and the GOP. Obviously, there is a place for Kid Rock in our culture—and in our official proceedings. Millions love him. But how about a place for the music of Ives, Barber, or the aforementioned Copland?

Might we hear a little poetry by Whitman, Dickinson, or Frost? (Robert Frost recited a poem of his at Kennedy’s inauguration.)

Everything is downward, downward.

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As for the festivities on July 4 itself, President Trump has announced that the nation will see “the most spectacular TRUMP RALLY of them all.” This is par for the course.

An old expression applies to Trump: “He has to be the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral.”

In the past, our presidents at least paid lip service to being “president of all the people.” Trump makes no effort at all. George W. Bush described himself as “a uniter, not a divider.” Trump is a master of division.

Here is a recent presidential missive, typical:

Last week, Barack Obama inaugurated his presidential library. In attendance were the living ex-presidents and their wives: the Clintons, the Bush 43s, and the Bidens.

In 2013, I attended the opening ceremony of Bush 43’s library (and wrote about it here). Sharing the stage with Bush were all the living ex-presidents and their wives—and the incumbent president and his wife, too: the Carters, the Bush 41s, the Clintons, and the Obamas.

“The establishment,” some people sneer. That’s one way of looking at it. Another is: “This is the way we do things here in America.” For instance, the outgoing president attends the inauguration of his successor. In January 2021, Donald Trump refused.

(Joe Biden attended both of Trump’s inaugurations—first as the outgoing vice president, second as the outgoing president.)

No foreign adversary maligns our country more than our president himself does. At the G7 summit in France this month, Trump said, “Look, our elections are totally rigged. We have rigged elections.” Who needs Kremlin propaganda?

I myself have been in Italy lately. And President Trump and the country’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, have been exchanging harsh words. Trump claimed that Meloni had “begged” to have her picture taken with him at the G7. Meloni said that this was a lie.

Does anyone doubt Meloni? Even Republican voters, in their heart of hearts?

When I was a student in Italy in 1984, a lot of people around me—Italian and American—despised President Reagan, and bad-mouthed America in the bargain. I delighted in defending both (and even got some grudging agreement).

All these years later, I find myself saying “Brava!” to the Italian leader, for telling the plain truth about the current occupant of the White House.

Above, I said “downward, downward.” I am in such a mood. In Verdi’s Falstaff, the fat knight says, “Mondo reo. Non c’è più virtù. Tutto declina.” Wicked world. There is no longer virtue. Everything is in decline.

Yes, I know: I’m a walking cliché. In every era, older people—especially conservatives—say, “The world is going to hell in a handbasket.” In my defense, however, there is no lack of evidence.

And yet, just as men have worse angels, they have better angels, as Lincoln said. May they swell in chorus, pronto!

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The Renew Democracy Initiative, publisher of The Next Move, is pleased to join the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, publisher of The UnPopulist, as a media partner for the third annual Liberalism for the 21st Century Conference—LibCon 2026—in Washington, DC on July 16 and 17. Click here for more information and to register. Coinciding with America’s 250^th anniversary, the theme of the conference is the Reconstruction Agenda. The conference will assess the damage that authoritarian and demagogic politics have caused to the country’s liberal institutions and propose a path forward to rebuild accountability and confidence in the rule of law. The conference features a stellar lineup, including RDI Vice Chair Linda Chavez, along with Francis Fukuyama, Anne Applebaum, David French, Hong Kong dissident Nathan Law and many more. We’ll be there and so should you.

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Evan Gottesman is the director of communications and special projects at the Renew Democracy Initiative and managing editor of The Next Move.

As Democrats muddle through primary season, the contours of their platform in this year’s midterms—and the 2028 presidential election—are becoming clear. Abolishing ICE, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, is emerging as a baseline position. For many candidates, having a future in the party means declaring that ICE has no future as an institution.

I’m all in for getting rid of ICE. Beyond its routine abuse of immigrants and the high-profile killings of two American citizens in Minneapolis, the institution is simply too rotten to go on. It isn’t weighed down by “a few bad apples” (as the excuse for misbehavior in law enforcement often goes); ICE is recruiting for bad apples, with ads featuring appeals to “protect your culture” and “defend the homeland.” Internal standards have collapsed: The Trump administration shaved 14 weeks off of the 22-week training period for new ICE agents and discarded lessons for officers on the Spanish language and the Immigration and Nationality Act. Meanwhile, ICE’s ranks have more than doubled since January 2025.

The inevitable outcome is that ICE is a politicized militia, its agents overwhelmingly ill-trained, ignorant about the civilians with whom they interact and the law they are supposed to defend, and motivated by all sorts of ugly beliefs. This is by design.

It follows that an anti-ICE policy makes sense. But that position invites a natural follow up, severely underdiscussed in intra-Democratic debates: With ICE gone, what comes next?

After all, the United States will still have borders to maintain and immigration laws to uphold. The question of what comes after ICE carries new urgency as insurgent candidates test the ideological boundaries of the Democratic Party’s big tent. The answer will illustrate whether Democrats are only interested in trendy talking points, or if they really want to govern and build something.

Last night, DSA candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier bested five-term incumbent Adriano Espaillat in the Democratic primary for New York’s thirteenth congressional district. Before yesterday’s election, Espaillat, the first formerly undocumented immigrant elected to Congress, would easily have been called a progressive on immigration. During the first Trump administration—before “abolish ICE” became mainstream—he introduced legislation to dismantle ICE and create a “new immigration enforcement regime.”

Yet it’s the second half of that equation—a new immigration enforcement regime—that feels tricky for the Democrats’ highly visible and increasingly influential left flank. Chevalier, Espaillat’s primary opponent and presumptive successor in the House, doesn’t believe in immigration enforcement as a concept, and she’s said so pretty bluntly.

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Consider Chevalier’s responses in an interview she gave to the New York Editorial Board just last week. Now-nominee, then-candidate Chevalier proclaimed that “all deportation is wrong.” She went further, dismissing the basic idea of national borders as “a very modern construct” that is “deeply dehumanizing.”

Her interviewers, perhaps incredulous at the congressional candidate’s extremism, try to throw her a line. Really, no deportations under any circumstances?

Really, Chevalier affirms.

“I have yet to come up with a reason for why deportation has been used in a way that isn’t rooted in deeply racist ideology,” she says.

There’s no recognition that, judiciously applied, deportation is a necessary instrument in the government’s toolkit. Is ejecting Nazi war criminals or Russian spies from US soil an action “rooted in deeply racist ideology?”

(Chevalier, who believes Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine is a consequence of America “bullying Russia,” might actually say “yes”).

According to Darializa Avila Chevalier’s blinkered worldview, the government should have no control over who passes through its territory, nor any recourse to remove dangerous individuals.

There is no equivalent to this approach anywhere in the developed world. European nations allow for free passage within the Schengen Area, but they retain traditional passport controls to enter the open-border zone. The total neutering of immigration enforcement that Chevalier envisions completely undermines the social contract by which citizens in a democracy entrust their leaders with the responsibility to keep them safe.

It’s both a bad idea and bad politics. In the 2024 presidential campaign, voters in swing states overwhelmingly preferred Donald Trump to Kamala Harris on immigration and the border. Amid daily stories of ICE cruelty and with the faces of Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good seared into social media feeds, most Americans now disapprove of Trump’s performance on immigration. Candidates like Chevalier risk undoing that reversal in public opinion. They take Republicans’ most outlandish caricatures of Democratic politics and make them uncomfortably real.

It’s tempting to pass off Chevalier’s talk of unregulated borders and zero deportations as fringe leftist theorycraft, but Chevalier is a future member of Congress backed by a former presidential candidate—Bernie Sanders—and by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a man frequently heralded as the future of the Democratic Party.

When it comes to immigration, Democrats must face two realities: First, that ascendant radicals are bad for the party, and second, that “abolish ICE” is a necessary but incomplete slogan. That missing “then what?” matters.

Democrats can walk and chew gum, leading the conversation about the day after ICE and what a humane, effective enforcement mechanism might look like while also calling for a more generous, streamlined immigration policy. They can and should debate how to ensure that ICE is not replaced by another iteration of the same rogue agency under a different name. They must continue to fight back against the Trump administration’s weaponization of the immigration system, including blatantly unconstitutional attempts to deport pro-Palestinian protesters over protected speech. And they can continue to support a pathway to citizenship for the undocumented, but the purpose should be bringing those people into compliance with our immigration statutes. In the end, answering the lawlessness of Donald Trump and ICE with a different flavor of lawlessness is no answer at all.

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The Renew Democracy Initiative and The Next Move are excited to bring you Older/Wiser with Linda Chavez. Linda is a veteran of multiple presidential administrations, author, and columnist.

This week, Linda speaks with George Mason University professor Justin Gest to discuss his new book Democratic Drain, and why the global movement of people is quietly reshaping the fate of democracy. From Hungary to Russia to the United States, Gest explains why the people most likely to emigrate are often those democracies can least afford to lose.

If you’re a premium subscriber to The Next Move, you are among the first to hear this episode of the Older/Wiser podcast—24 hours before the rest of the world gets to tune in. Early access to this podcast is just one of the ways we’re saying “thank you” for your support. Premium subscribers also receive automatic entry into exciting raffles and contests and invitations to Zoom calls with Garry Kasparov and other pro-democracy leaders.

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This column is Part II in a mini series looking at America’s milestone birthdays—and how contemporary leaders handled those anniversaries. Read last week’s installment on Calvin Coolidge at America’s 150th, and stay tuned for our coverage of Donald Trump at the semiquincentennial.

Jay Nordlinger is a senior resident fellow at the Renew Democracy Initiative and a contributor at The Next Move.

Last week, I wrote about President Calvin Coolidge and the speech he gave in 1926 about the Declaration of Independence. That year, America was marking the 150th anniversary of the Declaration.

Fifty years later, Gerald R. Ford was president. I remember that year, 1976, our Bicentennial, pretty well. I was 12.

With every passing week, I was becoming more interested in national and world affairs. The year 1976 was not only our Bicentennial, it was also a presidential election year.

Fresh on the scene was Jimmy Carter, the former governor of Georgia. On the Republican side, President Ford was battling with Ronald Reagan, the former governor of California, for their party’s nomination.

I listened to the GOP convention in Kansas City on the radio. (I grant you, this was somewhat abnormal in a 12-year-old.)

For years already, I had loved the American founding. And 1976 was a bonanza for lovers of 1776 and all that.

Circulating in our money were “Bicentennial quarters.” It was cool to get one—not just a regular old quarter.

On television (CBS), we had the “Bicentennial Minute.” Nightly, there would be some nugget about the Revolution.

I remember the tall ships, gathered in New York Harbor, and later in Boston.

I remember the royals, too: Queen Elizabeth and her husband, Prince Philip. They participated in our Bicentennial activities. Pretty sporting of them, I thought.

They gave us a “Bicentennial Bell,” cast at the same foundry in London as our Liberty Bell. The inscription on the Bicentennial Bell ends with “LET FREEDOM RING.”

That was very sporting, indeed. Those words come from “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” our patriotic song, which has the cheek to use the tune of “God Save the King” (or Queen).

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July 4, 1976, was a very busy day for President Ford. But, before getting to that day, I would like to touch on the day after—July 5. Ford presided over a naturalization ceremony at Monticello, Jefferson’s home.

He spoke to the new Americans about the place of immigration in our national story. People had always come from all over, he said, bringing something of the old, to blend with the new.

“Such transfusions of traditions and cultures, as well as of blood, have made America unique among nations and Americans a new kind of people. There is little the world has that is not native to the United States today.”

We have been able to offer citizenship to pretty much everybody. How? Because, said Ford, “we are uniquely a community of values, as distinct from a religious community, a racial community, a geographic community, or an ethnic community.”

Yes.

Our nation was founded, the president continued, “not on ancient legends or conquests or physical likeness or language, but on a certain political value which Jefferson’s pen so eloquently expressed.”

What did that pen express? “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” etc.

Everyone has his own idea of what it is to be an American. We fight about that nearly every day. Here is Ford’s idea:

“To be an American is to subscribe to those principles which the Declaration of Independence proclaims and the Constitution protects—the political values of self-government, liberty and justice, equal rights, and equal opportunity.”

And “these beliefs are the secrets of America’s unity from diversity—in my judgment the most magnificent achievement of our 200 years as a nation.”

Ford ended his remarks with an admonition:

“Remember that none of us are more than caretakers of this great country. Remember that the more freedom you give to others, the more you will have for yourself. Remember that without law there can be no liberty.”

Right on. Ordered liberty is the name of the game. The noun and the adjective are equally important. Liberty without order is something like anarchy, and order without liberty is—unfreedom.

About immigration, I would like to mention a simple fact. In our most recent presidential campaign, the two main nominees were Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Three of their four parents were immigrants. And the fourth—Trump’s father—was the son of immigrants.

This is classically American.

On July 4, 1976, while we were absorbed in tall ships and the like, there was big news from far away: Israel had rescued its hostages in Entebbe, Uganda, in a daring raid. Only one Israeli commando lost his life—Jonathan Netanyahu (brother of the future prime minister).

In the morning, President Ford delivered remarks at Valley Forge. He began, “They came here in the snows of winter over a trail marked with the blood of their rag-bound feet.”

That is an arresting sentence.

Further on, he told a story about the Battle of Concord. A veteran of that battle was interviewed at the age of 91. His interviewer asked, in essence, “Why did you do it? Why did you take up arms against the King? Had you been especially oppressed?”

“No,” came the answer, “never paid a penny for one of them stamps, never drank any tea, never heard of Locke. Only read the Bible and the Almanac.”

(The Stamp Act and the Tea Act were hated and resented by the American patriots, and the philosopher John Locke was a prime articulator of political freedom.)

Well then, why did he do it?

“Young man,” said the old man, “what we meant in going for those Redcoats was this: We had always governed ourselves, and we always meant to. They didn’t mean that we should.”

A few hours after appearing at Valley Forge, Ford spoke at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. He said, “Our Founding Fathers knew their Bibles as well as their Blackstone” (the standard book on law).

The population in general knew the Bible, if not Blackstone. Think of the Concord vet we have just heard from.

Our founders, said Ford, “boldly reversed the age-old political theory that kings derive their powers from God and asserted that both powers and unalienable rights belong to the people as direct endowments from their Creator.”

What’s more, “they declared that governments are instituted among men to secure their rights and to serve their purposes, and governments continue only so long as they have the consent of the governed.”

This is A-B-C—kindergarten talk. But it must be learned and relearned, in perpetuity.

Here is a shrewd point, made by Ford: “Seldom in history have the men who made a revolution seen it through, but the United States was fortunate.” How so? “The result of their deliberations and compromises was our Constitution, which William Gladstone, a great British prime minister, called ‘the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.’”

Have you ever thought about the relationship between the two “great charters” on which we are founded? In a pithy sentence, Ford said, “The Constitution was created to make the promise of the Declaration come true.”

He ended his speech by asking for “a moment of silent prayer and meditation in gratitude for all that we have received and to ask continued safety and happiness for each of us and for the United States of America.”

I have cited a lot of Fourth of July rhetoric—literal Fourth of July rhetoric. But, you know? I believe it all. And I hope that Americans will want to keep this unusual project going.

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The Renew Democracy Initiative, publisher of The Next Move, is pleased to join the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, publisher of The UnPopulist, as a media partner for the third annual Liberalism for the 21st Century Conference—LibCon 2026—in Washington, DC on July 16 and 17. Click here for more information and to register. Coinciding with America’s 250^th anniversary, the theme of the conference is the Reconstruction Agenda. The conference will assess the damage that authoritarian and demagogic politics have caused to the country’s liberal institutions and propose a path forward to rebuild accountability and confidence in the rule of law. The conference features a stellar lineup, including RDI Vice Chair Linda Chavez, along with Francis Fukuyama, Anne Applebaum, David French, Hong Kong dissident Nathan Law and many more. We’ll be there and so should you.

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Garry Kasparov is the founder and chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative, which publishes The Next Move.

When I wrote my column on Monday, the terms of the US-Iran deal to end the war remained as yet unknown. Early reports offered enough color to weigh in, but there were still voices cautioning patience.

“Don’t rush to pass judgment on the Trump administration,” ran the refrain. “Wait until you see what the actual document says.”

Well, now we have the actual document: a 14-point Memorandum of Understanding set to be signed on Friday. Read on as I break down the agreement, point by point.

P.S.: I will give Trump’s defenders this: The MOU is certainly different from some of the early reports. By that, I mean to say—the actual thing is worse than expected. Every surrender featured in the leaks is in the final draft, yet somehow even more egregious than rumored. The document is a dramatic capitulation in a war that should not have been launched in the manner that it was.

1: The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States, together with their allies in the current war, declare upon the signing of this Memorandum of Understanding an immediate and permanent end to the war on all fronts, including Lebanon, and undertake that from now on they will not launch any hostile action against each other, and will refrain from the threat or use of force against each other. The final agreement will confirm the provisions of this Article and the remaining Articles.

There are two key points here: “together with their allies” and “Lebanon.”

First: Lebanon. The latest war in Lebanon began when Hezbollah, unprovoked, joined Hamas’s assault against Israel on October 8, 2023—just a day after the massacre in southern Israel.

You can criticize the Israeli government’s conduct, but it’s clear that Lebanon would have been spared the misery of war had Hezbollah not dragged the country into an Israeli-Palestinian (note, not Lebanese) conflict. However, that would have run contrary to the Iranian regime’s wishes.

Now, after two-and-a-half years, the Trump administration is forcing a US ally, Israel, to end that fight on terms favorable to the enemy.

On to the question of allies: Who are Iran’s allies? Hezbollah. The Houthis. Hamas. Will these terrorist organizations—lawless groups accountable to no one but their masters in Tehran— “end the war on all fronts”? My instinct, and Hezbollah’s latest drone attack, suggest that the answer is a resounding “no.”

2: The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States undertake to respect each other’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and to refrain from interfering in each other’s internal affairs.

Here’s a funny joke! I’m not sure that either side actually believes this one. Does interfering in each other’s internal affairs include assassinating American citizens on American soil, as the Islamic Republic has tried to do on multiple occasions by sending hitmen after my friend Masih Alinejad? Is Trump aware that the Iranian government tried to kill him?

3: The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States undertake to negotiate and reach a final agreement within a maximum period of 60 days, extendable by mutual consent.

There are three possibilities with this one.

The first is that there actually is a final agreement in 60 days. If the text of this MOU is any indication, that agreement will be a weak one.

The next option is that the Trump administration gives Iran more and more time, generously extending the window for a hostile foreign dictatorship. Remember Trump’s fearsome 12-day ultimatum for Russia to reach a ceasefire in Ukraine? A whole lot of nothing happened after that deadline expired last summer.

Finally, there’s the possibility that this all falls apart and the parties return to the warpath. As with the 2015 nuclear deal, this MOU leaves the fundamental questions in the fraught US-Iran relationship unresolved.

Yet this deal is even weaker—and it comes fresh off of a war that left the Iranian regime battered but not broken. Next time, the Iranians will set the terms: the Trump administration is limited in what it can do before the midterm elections, and Tehran knows that closing the Strait of Hormuz works as a means of extracting concessions from America.

4: Immediately upon the signing of this Memorandum of Understanding, the United States will lift the naval blockade and prevent any interference or obstruction against the Islamic Republic of Iran, and restore traffic within a maximum of 30 days to its full capacity; the traffic of ships shall be proportional to the pre-war volume of traffic on the part of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The United States also undertakes to withdraw its forces from the surrounding areas within 30 days after the final agreement.

The Treaty of Versailles carried its infamous “war guilt clause,” pinning sole blame for the First World War on Imperial Germany. This paragraph is the MOU’s “war loss clause,” stating plainly that Iran defeated the United States.

Iran gets the blockade lifted just for signing the MOU. If a final agreement is indeed signed, Tehran gets even more—the withdrawal of US forces “from the surrounding areas.” It’s a full-on retreat. The United States cedes its most potent form of leverage to Iran “immediately”—it’s the very first word of paragraph four.

5: Upon signing this Memorandum of Understanding, the Islamic Republic of Iran will immediately take steps to ensure that the movement of merchant ships from the Persian Gulf to the Sea of Oman and vice versa is resumed within 30 days to the pre-war volume, taking into account the need for the removal of technical obstacles and the neutralization of mines by Iran.

This leaves the opening of the Strait of Hormuz up to Iran. Per the previous paragraph, which envisions an immediate termination of the blockade and an eventual complete US withdrawal, third-party enforcement is off the table. In other words, the hostage-taker gets to decide the manner in which they release their captive. And this is supposed to inspire confidence?

6: The United States undertakes, together with its regional partners, to create a comprehensive plan agreed upon by both parties for the rehabilitation and economic development of the Islamic Republic of Iran, while ensuring financing of at least $300 billion. The implementation mechanism of this plan, as part of the final agreement, will be formulated within 60 days.

As I noted in my column on Monday, anything involving Donald Trump and large sums of money reeks of corruption. Earlier reports suggested that the $300 billion for the reconstruction fund would come from the Gulf Arab states, where Trump and his family have all sorts of conflicts of interest.

The text of the MOU isn’t so specific: Not only is there room for fishy business deals in the Gulf, it’s also possible that the US could end up directly paying reparations to an enemy.

Congress must ensure that not a cent of American taxpayer money goes to an Iranian regime that murders its own people, destabilizes its neighbors, and supplies weapons for Russia’s genocidal war of aggression in Ukraine.

7: The United States of America undertakes to terminate all types of sanctions against the Islamic Republic of Iran, including the United Nations Security Council resolutions, IAEA Board of Governors resolutions, and all unilateral US sanctions, primary and secondary, in an agreed upon schedule as part of the final deal. The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States of America acknowledge the critical importance of the sanctions termination issue above mentioned, and expressed their intentions to immediately address these issues in the negotiations in order to achieve mutual agreement on them.

Here we see surrender in the form of the termination of “all types of sanctions” on Iran. Granted, this is left to a final deal whose ultimate fate remains up in the air, but it’s a declaration of the Trump administration’s intentions.

It all probably feels unthinkable to those who staked their hopes for a free Iran on Donald Trump. Just months after the Iranian authorities murdered tens of thousands of protesters, the administration is dangling total sanctions relief in front of the regime. However, wannabe-strongman Trump has already legitimized dictators in Russia, China, and North Korea. Iran is next on his normalization agenda.

Decades of normalization between the West and Putin’s Russia have already been difficult to undo, even after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. There is a lot of money on the line for companies and craven businesspeople who put the bottom line ahead of any moral red lines. The reintegration of Iran into the global economy would mean that if sanctions are imposed again in the future, there will be many companies and countries that have a vested interest in non-compliance.

At least that sanctions relief for the Islamic Republic is still somewhere off in the future. It’s not something that kicks in right away—right? Right?

8: The Islamic Republic of Iran reaffirms that it shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons. The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran have agreed to resolve the disposition of stockpiled enriched material pursuant to a mechanism that will be mutually agreed upon in accordance with the schedule mentioned in paragraph seven, with the minimum methodology to be down blended on site under the supervision of the IAEA. The two parties also agreed to discuss the issue of enrichment and other mutually agreed matters related to the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear needs, based on a satisfactory framework being agreed upon in the final deal. The final deal will confirm the provisions of this paragraph. The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran acknowledge the critical importance of the nuclear issues above mentioned. They express their intention to immediately address these issues in the negotiations in order to achieve mutual agreement on them.

Donald Trump and I share this in common: We both criticized the 2015 nuclear deal negotiated under President Obama, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA. In his first term, Trump even withdrew from that agreement.

Trump is now hurtling towards a nuclear deal even flimsier than the one he blasted for being too weak. The Iranian government doesn’t just get diplomatic and financial reprieve on the nuclear file, it gets it in the context of a US surrender after a failed war.

9: Pending the final deal, the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran agree to maintain the status quo. The Islamic Republic of Iran will maintain the current status quo of its nuclear program, and the United States of America will not impose any new sanctions and will not deploy additional forces in the region.

Here the United States boxes itself in. Iran gets to revert to the status quo ante on the nuclear issue, while getting a commitment of no additional US forces in the region. Meanwhile, the Iranian regime has plenty of non-nuclear means of wreaking havoc in the region.

10: The United States of America undertakes that immediately upon the signing of this MOU and until the termination of sanctions, US Department of Treasury will issue waivers for the export of Iranian crude oil, petroleum products and derivatives, and all associated services, including banking transactions, insurances, transportation, etc.

After reading paragraph seven, you might be forgiven for thinking that the massive sanctions relief that Washington is planning for the Islamic Republic will depend upon Iran meeting some conditions. At the very least, that payday would have to wait for the much-talked-about final agreement.

Well, just a few paragraphs later, we learn that this is actually incorrect. This administration just can’t help itself: the sanctions waivers start right away, once again, with no enforcement mechanism to make that “yuge” concession worth the cost.

11: The United States of America undertakes to make fully available for use the frozen or restricted funds and assets of the Islamic Republic of Iran upon the implementation of this MOU. The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran will mutually agree on the procedures related to the release of these funds during negotiations. Such funds, whether retained in the original account or transferred, shall be made fully usable for payment to any ultimate beneficiary designated by the Central Bank of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The United States of America undertakes to issue all necessary licenses and authorizations accordingly.

At this point, I am expecting to see a new Trump Tower rise over the Tehran skyline.

12: The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran agree that an executive mechanism will be established to monitor the successful implementation of this MOU and the future compliance of the final deal.

Once more, we have to ask: Where is the enforcement? Why is enforcement not included directly in the text of the deal?

13: After signing this MOU, and subject to the beginning of the implementation of paragraphs 1, 4, 5, 10 and 11 of this MOU, and the continuing implementation of these measures, the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran will start negotiations regarding the final deal exclusively on the other paragraphs.

Excuse me—”the United States of America and Iran will start negotiations”? What is there left for Iran to negotiate over? The MOU is already an incredible windfall for Iran and defeat for the US, even without a final agreement. America is in deep trouble if the Iranian leadership is familiar with the phrase “take the money and run.”

14: The final deal will be endorsed by a binding United Nations Security Council resolution.

Ah, that changes everything! The United Nations is a famously reliable institution, quite proficient at preventing and ending wars. I retract all of my critiques of Trump’s deal with Iran. Carry on (that is, unless Trump defunds the UN before it ratifies his own agreement).

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Garry Kasparov is the chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative, which publishes The Next Move.

To call the Trump administration’s pending deal with Iran anything other than a surrender—a corrupt bargain—requires having your brain switched off.

I realize that we don’t have the precise terms yet. I’ve read the appeals to reserve judgment.

“Never have so many opined on something currently understood by so few,” Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies admonished on X. “Let’s see the details before rushing to judgment.”

Dubowitz further bemoaned: “My feed is full of TDS [Trump Derangement Syndrome].” (For some measure of balance, he also complained about “Trump Messiah Syndrome” on the right—but, as we’ll see, this isn’t really something you can both-sides.)

I will certainly have more to say once we have the exact details, but the contours of the deal are already taking shape through reports and leaks over the weekend.

Iran will reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and the US will lift its blockade of Iranian ports—confirmation to the Islamic Republic that simply closing a waterway is enough to get the world’s only superpower to cry “uncle.”

The deal could force Israel to end its campaign in Lebanon even as Hezbollah continues to strike Israeli territory.

Vice President JD Vance has also confirmed that Tehran will get access to a $300 billion reconstruction fund if they meet certain conditions after denying the existence of any such fund just days earlier. More on that in a moment.

Make no mistake: This was the US suing for peace with Iran, not the other way around. The Trump administration could not have continued such an unpopular and economically damaging war into the midterm season.

ICYMI: Tune in to the latest episode of the Older/Wiser Podcast

Even as we await the text of an agreement, we can confidently judge: Any tactical victories in Iran are overshadowed by a massive strategic failure.

How can we know this? We need only look back at the record.

I sharply criticized President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. It gave away far too much without addressing the fundamental issues: the Iranian regime’s support for terrorist proxies, its Islamic fundamentalist ideology, and its oppression of its own people. With Tehran now collaborating with Russia on the slaughter in Ukraine, I feel even more strongly now than I did in 2015 that accommodation with this evil enterprise is not possible.

Yet throughout the JCPOA negotiations, I never doubted that Obama was operating in what he believed to be America’s best interest. Nor did I think that he was seeking to personally enrich himself or his associates in his diplomatic outreach to Tehran. Those are low bars to clear in a democracy, but the US has tragically sunk beneath them.

With Trump, you have to ask whether he’s looking out for his country or whether he’s simply listening to the dictator who flattered him most recently. As I noted back in December, it’s more than curious that Putin is so quick to get in Trump’s ear whenever the US president speaks with Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

And when it comes to Trump, you also have to ask whether any given policy is just a ploy to improve his bottom line. The proposed reconstruction fund should raise alarms for anyone who’s been awake for the past 12 years and has seen how openly this president intermingles his family business with the affairs of government.

That the $300 billion for the fund will come from the Gulf Arab states and not the US is hardly reassuring given presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner’s well-documented ties to the region. We should keep an eye on Eric and Don Jr.’s interests in the fund as well—the elder Trump sons have a stake in a Kazakhstani mining company that just got $1.6 billion in federal backing from Washington.

Donald Trump cannot be judged by the same metrics as any other president because he is so unlike every other president. Some will call this way of looking at things Trump Derangement Syndrome. I call it recognizing reality.

The real derangement is tribalism—many of the same people who confidently (and rightly) criticized the feeble Joe Biden’s indecisiveness on Ukraine are mum when it comes to Trump’s total capitulation on Iran.

Some of Trump’s most belligerent defenders—those most guilty of selective criticism—should revisit Matthew 7:3: “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?”

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A special message from the Renew Democracy Initiative: The Renew Democracy Initiative, publisher of The Next Move, is pleased to join the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, publisher of The UnPopulist, as a media partner for the third annual Liberalism for the 21st Century Conference—LibCon 2026—in Washington, DC on July 16 and 17. Click here for more information and to register. Coinciding with America’s 250^th anniversary, the theme of the conference is the Reconstruction Agenda. The conference will assess the damage that authoritarian and demagogic politics have caused to the country’s liberal institutions and propose a path forward to rebuild accountability and confidence in the rule of law. The conference features a stellar lineup, including RDI Vice Chair Linda Chavez, along with Francis Fukuyama, Anne Applebaum, David French, Hong Kong dissident Nathan Law and many more. We’ll be there and so should you.

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Sabina Cherner is a communications intern at the Renew Democracy Initiative, which publishes The Next Move. She is a student at Tufts University, where she is studying international relations and economics.

The New York Knicks won their first NBA championship in 53 years last night, beating the San Antonio Spurs and capping off a near-perfect playoff run. Is it any coincidence that their only loss in the Finals was the one game that Donald Trump attended?

To suggest that Trump was responsible for last Monday’s slip-up at Madison Square Garden might be delving a little bit too much into sports astrology. But the president’s appearance certainly brought down the mood.

Sports, like the presidency, can be a unifying force—in brief moments, they collapse Americans of wildly different backgrounds into a singular rooting interest.

Unity is not Donald Trump’s style.

Last Monday night, Trump became the first sitting president to attend an NBA Finals game, seemingly over the objections of an entire city.

That evening, the Knicks didn’t have to just beat the Spurs on the court—they had to overcome the chill that seemed to follow Trump into the arena.

The city felt the difference. Ticket holders were asked to arrive upwards of three hours early to account for security checks. All bags were banned per request of the Secret Service—to the particular dismay of a devoted cohort of Knicks fans who see the orange clutch of Karl-Anthony Towns’s wife as an essential good-luck token.

The beloved watch party outside the Garden—a neighborhood ritual throughout the playoff run—was canceled and displaced to Bryant Park.

Trump arrived at the game via motorcade from a helicopter landing near Wall Street. The president claimed his seat in a bulletproof glass-walled suite flanked by his granddaughter Kai, son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Knicks owner James Dolan, among others. Surveying the nearly 20,000 fans below, armed with a bucket of fries and a Diet Coke bottle, the commander-in-chief had the distinct appearance of a man trying to look at home somewhere he hasn’t been in quite a long time.

When Trump first appeared on the Jumbotron during the national anthem, the Garden erupted. The White House press pool described the reaction as “thunderous,” a cascade of boos that pivoted to roaring cheers only when the camera cut to Knicks Captain Jalen Brunson on the court.

The Knicks lost the game, 115-111. Their 13-game winning streak, the second-longest unbeaten playoff run in NBA history, was over.

Donald Trump grew up in Jamaica, Queens, made his name in Manhattan real estate, and built a persona so synonymous with the city that for a period of years it was difficult to imagine one without the other. Monday night was, in a sense, a sort of homecoming—but it was not a smooth one.

Trump has often found himself spurned in the city of his birth. The loud-mouthed outer-borough upstart was often rejected by Manhattan’s more-refined upper crust. In the 2024 presidential election, Trump received fewer than 839,000 votes in New York City, compared with more than 1.9 million for Kamala Harris. His approval ratings now hover around 35% nationally, nearing the lowest of his political career. The city that made him could not bring itself to vote for him, and that sentiment was audible during Game 3.

Unpopularity alone, though, doesn’t entirely explain what felt so unsettling about Trump’s attendance. It wasn’t just that Trump had shown up to a hostile audience. It was that he was so determined to show up at an event that his predecessors understood it was better for the president to avoid.

Barack Obama understood that distinction. A lifelong basketball fan who even had the White House tennis court converted for basketball, Obama deliberately avoided the NBA Finals while in office. In a recently resurfaced podcast conversation, he explained: the motorcade, the Secret Service, the whole apparatus is such a disruption that rather than enjoying the game, he worried he’d be “making it a less pleasant experience for everybody else.” He stayed home. This instinct, to weigh the cost of one’s own visibility, has historically crossed party lines.

ICYMI: Tune in to the latest episode of the Older/Wiser Podcast:

Trump’s approach, of course, has been notably different. Since returning to the White House in January 2025, he has attended the Super Bowl, the Daytona 500, multiple UFC fights, a FIFA Club World Cup Final, and the US Open—more high-profile sporting appearances than any president before him. Now, whether these appearances are acts of civic participation or performances of it, is a question Monday night did little to resolve.

Madison Square Garden itself was entirely enclosed by a makeshift wall (a wall that Trump actually finished!).

New York adapted as New York does. Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who paid out of his own pocket for a standing-room spot at the game, organized watch parties for his constituents—another pointed contrast with the president’s approach. Sports bars threw their windows open to the street, crowds spilled onto sidewalks, strangers craning their necks at the projected screens. People projected the game onto building walls, and set up makeshift projector sheets in backyards and playgrounds.

That’s how I watched Game 3: outside on a projected image, in a cluster of people I didn’t know. Trump’s arrival had certainly disrupted the city, but the sense of collective investment, the impulse to gather—the “New York” of it all did not falter.

The game was monumental: the Knicks’ last Finals appearance was in 1999 against the very same San Antonio Spurs—a run that ended in defeat for New York.

Now, this was New York’s moment: their team, their night, and it had been complicated, rather visibly, by one man’s desire to be in the room.

Representative Hakeem Jeffries put it plainly on CNN: “Why does Donald Trump always have to ruin a good thing?”

Both the institution of the presidency and the New York Knicks can survive one bad night at the Garden. The Knicks recovered with a historic comeback win on Wednesday culminating in a Game 5 victory in San Antonio.

What’s more disturbing is the erosion of the instinct that kept previous presidents out of the NBA Finals—an understanding that the office is not a personal entitlement to be in any room, but an obligation to each room that the president enters.

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