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

Concert halls have been filled with American music this year as our country marks its 250th anniversary. A self-consciously American concert took place at Lincoln Center, in New York, a couple of Sundays ago.

The sponsoring organization was the Together in Hope Project, based in Minneapolis. The organization has been carrying out a project within a project: Sing Democracy 250. The motto of this project is “Uniting in harmony to renew democracy’s promise.”

That is something to get the attention of a music critic who is affiliated with the Renew Democracy Initiative. (I have been the music critic of The New Criterion, the monthly arts-and-letters journal, for many years.)

A co-founder of the Together in Hope Project, Celia Ellingson, made some remarks before the concert at Lincoln Center. She concluded her remarks by saying that we Americans must do all we can “to ensure that our democracy is not just remembered but renewed for the next 250 years.”

On hand were three choirs, combined. One of them was a local group: the “oratorio choir” from Stuyvesant High School, an institution better known for its scientific whizzes than for its musicians. Playing with the choirs was the Main Line Symphony Orchestra, from Greater Philadelphia.

These forces were conducted by G. Phillip Shoultz III—GPS3. He also served as a kind of emcee for the evening. In his remarks to the audience—about democracy and its challenges—he sounded like a civic pastor.

The concert began, fittingly enough, with the national anthem. It was in A flat, rather than the customary B flat. And it had been arranged by Shoultz himself. It is a skillful, pleasing arrangement, different enough to be ear-catching, not so different as to be distracting or self-advertising.

There were two big works on the program, beginning with Redeem the Dream, a kind of oratorio. It was composed by Brandon A. Boyd, who works at the University of Missouri.

Redeem the Dream begins with lines from the Declaration of Independence—the most famous lines of all: “We hold these truths to be self-evident …” It continues with a canonical American poem: “Let America Be America Again,” written in 1935 by Langston Hughes.

The poem calls on America to live up to its promises and standards and ideals. To be its best self.

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At the beginning of this year, I reviewed a new work called American Lament, which sets parts of the Hughes poem. Music aside, I objected to bowdlerization.

“For instance, ‘every man’ becomes ‘everyone,’ ‘Indian’ becomes ‘Native,’ ‘Negro’ becomes ‘black man,’ and so on. Is that really necessary? Wouldn’t an audience understand that different words and phrases have been used in different eras?”

In any case, Redeem the Dream leaves Hughes in the original, which is wise. He is hard to edit or improve on. He knows rhythm and phrasing—and sensibility—better than most of us do.

Today, I am not wearing my music critic’s hat, but I will comment briefly on Brandon A. Boyd’s work, this semi-oratorio, if you will. It is eclectic. It has flavors of jazz, swing, pop, gospel. The choirs sometimes swayed back and forth, and the audience sometimes clapped along.

The work is full of affection, in addition to eclecticism. I was reminded, in some sections, of Wynton Marsalis’s Abyssinian Mass (2008).

After Redeem the Dream came US, another “semi-oratorio” (although maybe I can do without the prefix, in both cases). As Richard Haass explained in introductory remarks from the stage, the title refers to “us,” as in “We the People,” but also to the United States.

Richard Haass? The American diplomat who for 20 years was the president of the Council on Foreign Relations? What was he doing there?

In 2023, Haass published a book called The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens. And it is on this book that US is based.

The composer is Michael Bussewitz-Quarm, “whose music engages with pressing social and environmental issues.” (I have quoted from the composer’s bio.)

US is not dissimilar to Redeem the Dream, in that it is eclectic, affirmative, and listenable. One might groove along to it, as many a chorister did (and some audience members too).

The first of Richard Haass’s ten good habits is “Be informed.” The second is “Get involved.” The third, “Support the teaching of civics” (amen). The fourth, “Remain civil.” They are all pretty good, and well-nigh inarguable.

Unusual for a libretto, this particular one is mainly a series of quotations, from a range of Americans. These include presidents: Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR, JFK, Reagan, George W. Bush, Obama.

Other Americans include Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Harvey Milk, John McCain, and James Mattis. That’s variety.

I like what Frederick Douglass says, under “Be informed”: “A little learning, indeed, may be a dangerous thing, but the want of learning is a calamity to any people.”

Here is Wilma Mankiller, the Cherokee leader, under “Get involved”: “The desire to do something and contribute was stronger than the fear of speaking up.”

One of Haass’s ten good habits is “Stay open to compromise.” Naturally, we hear from the Great Compromiser, Henry Clay: “All legislation, all government, all society, is founded upon the principle of mutual concession.”

I quite like what JFK says, in this same category: “Compromise need not mean cowardice. Indeed it is frequently the compromisers and conciliators who are faced with the severest tests of political courage.”

When I was coming of age, I heard Reagan say, over and over, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” I used to roll my eyes a little. Sure, he was right in theory, I thought, but in practice? Suffice it to say, I don’t roll my eyes anymore.

This quotation is included in US.

The concert ended as it began, with an anthem: “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” popularly known as “the black national anthem.” Is this separatist? It is complementary, I think, and, regardless, it is a great entry in the American treasury.

“Lift Every Voice” became an issue in the 2008 presidential campaign, believe it or not. (This was Obama vs. McCain.) I wrote about it, here.

The song was written in 1900 to celebrate Lincoln’s birthday. The music is by J. Rosamond Johnson and the words are by his brother, James Weldon Johnson. If you will indulge a personal memory: I had the pleasure of teaching “Lift Every Voice” to summer campers in 1983, between my freshman and sophomore years of college.

This concert at Lincoln Center—Sing Democracy 250—was maybe a little corny, a little hokey. But that is so much better than cynical or nihilistic—or unpatriotic. The worse politics looks, the more we depend on civil society, which includes people who lift up their voice and sing.

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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 Advisory Board Member Anne Applebaum and RDI Vice Chair Linda Chavez, along with Francis Fukuyama, 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.

Coming out of yesterday’s primary races, there’s one Democratic candidate I’m particularly concerned about. His name is Adam Hamawy.

In New Jersey’s twelfth district, Adam Hamawy is poised to finish with just under 30% of the vote, topping a field of 13—yes, 13!—candidates who filed to run after the incumbent Democratic representative announced her retirement.

Hamawy’s most alarming attribute is his affiliation with the late Omar Abdel-Rahman, the so-called “Blind Sheikh” convicted for his role in a series of terrorist plots following an investigation into the 1993 World Trade Center Bombing.

Hamawy stood by Rahman when the latter proclaimed his innocence in the aftermath of the February ‘93 attack, and later served as a defense witness for the infamous Sheikh.

Why does this matter? As a moral question, if Democrats are going to condemn Republicans for instigating chaos and political violence, they ought to be consistent. There would be much justified outrage if a Republican candidate was found to have been involved in January 6—OK, unsurprisingly, several Republican candidates actually have been insurrectionists, and I think most readers of The Next Move recognize this as a bad thing.

You might say Hamawy was young, misguided. Yet, of his association with Rahman, Hamawy recently told one journalist: “I don’t know how I could have regret.”

One need only look at Hamawy’s closing rally to see how little he has changed since the heady days of the early 1990s. The rally headliners included pro-China “Orthodox Jews are inbred” streamer Hasan Piker and Chris Rabb, a Pennsylvania congressional nominee who shared a social media post describing the massacre of Jews at Bondi Beach, Australia as a Zionist false flag. (Rabb’s claim that the post was the work of a rogue staffer doesn’t pass the smell test.)

This is not someone who has seriously reckoned with extremism. You can tell a lot about a person by the company that they keep, and it is fair game to question Hamawy’s judgment and worldview accordingly.

Now, perhaps you don’t find the moral case compelling. So hear this strategic consideration: Far-left candidates benefit Trump and MAGA by giving them convenient foils to distract from the administration’s many transgressions.

Take the example of Maureen Galindo, a Texas congressional primary candidate who called for imprisoning and castrating “American Zionists”. There’s evidence that Galindo was actually backed, in part, by Republicans.

In another packed New Jersey primary field, AIPAC helped defeat my friend Tom Malinowski, a moderate liberal Democrat, opening the door for a leftist candidate to win. That looks like an own goal for the pro-Israel lobby—but since AIPAC has been captured by the MAGA right, it actually suits their objectives quite nicely, advancing a politically convenient image of Democrats as a party of Jew-baiting far-left extremists. The DSA is the best fundraiser for MAGA, and MAGA is the best fundraiser for the DSA.

Hamawy won in a deep-blue district and is likely to win the general election in November. That’s all well and good for Hamawy, but it doesn’t bode well for mainline Democrats in red or purple areas fighting to flip Congress—candidates like James Talarico in Texas, Alex Vindman in Florida, and any number of contenders in competitive House races.

However, it bears repeating that Hamawy was one of 13 candidates. The far-left is most successful when it can eke out a quarter to a third of the vote in a crowded field. We saw this in the special election for New Jersey’s eleventh district earlier this year, and we saw it in NJ-12 last night.

One of the most infuriating images out of NJ-12 shows three candidates—who earned 9%, 3%, and 5% of the vote, respectively—standing arm in arm on election day. Their smiles say “I just hope everyone has fun!” as if primary elections are a game and not a serious debate over the future direction of the party.

Any one of these candidates could have dropped out earlier and thrown their support behind someone representing a more mainstream liberalism. Instead, they ran to the end, like lemmings off the side of a cliff. For what? Vanity? Sunk-cost fallacy?

There’s an interesting parallel to the path that Republicans took in 2016 that’s worth noting here. Donald Trump waded into a packed primary and scored his first victory with just 35% of the vote, facing off against nine other candidates. The rest of the Republican field failed to coalesce around a single anti-Trump leader, and one by one they fell—and fell in line.

To anyone who wants to call me a sore loser, let me be clear: both these far-left candidates and Donald Trump won fair and square. But they also benefited from critical strategic failures on the part of their rivals.

It’s not all doom and gloom, of course. In New Jersey’s seventh congressional district, moderate Democrat Rebecca Bennett scored a convincing win with nearly half the vote in a four-person race. She has a chance to flip the district from red to blue—that is, assuming Hamawy’s reputation in neighboring NJ-12 doesn’t scare swing voters away from the Democratic Party.

For now, the lesson for American liberals and moderates is clear: join or lose. Extremists of all stripes ride to victory through the divisions in your ranks.

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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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Fatima Abo Alasrar is the founder of the Ideology Machine Project and a non-resident fellow at the Arab Gulf States. Her work has been published by Foreign Policy, the Stimson Center, and other leading publications and organizations.

Iran is pulling out of talks to end the war with the US and Israel as the three countries continue to exchange blow after blow. With hope for a deal between Tehran and the Trump administration quickly diminishing, each party will be gearing up to spin its side of the story to the world.

This conflict has made Iran an innovator in shaping the media narrative. Despite severely restricted Internet access, Iran is producing a remarkable amount of viral content. Much of it arrives in Lego form.

One of the main purveyors of this plastic propaganda goes simply by “Mr. Explosive.”

Explosive told the BBC that he spreads his message using Lego because it is “a world language.” The videos set rebellious English-language lyrics and AI-generated imagery to catchy tunes. They’re engineered to travel, portable across borders the Iranian regime cannot otherwise breach, and the toy-brick surface does the cruder work no straight propaganda could.

The images disable the viewer’s judgment by presenting as innocuous fun. A Lego Donald Trump tumbles through a blizzard of Epstein documents while rapped lyrics promise that “secrets are leaking and pressure is rising.”

The regime positions itself on the side of Americans disgruntled with a scandal-ridden administration, inserting the Islamic Republic into domestic controversies that have nothing to do with Iran at all. Beyond the Epstein Files, other homegrown American divides like the murder of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter also feature prominently in Mr. Explosive’s videos. A voice in the background says that Iran—that is, the Iranian government—stands for everyone the American system ever wronged.

Packaging propaganda as entertainment is hardly original, even if the medium of a Danish toy brand is.

Writing from exile in 1944 after fleeing Nazi Germany, philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer argued that the culture industry’s distinctive achievement was to exempt the spectator from any obligation to think—not using brute force to make people support something, but lulling them into submission through pleasure. Authoritarian regimes like Iran’s increasingly understand that mass entertainment neutralizes the critical capacity that propaganda used to have to overcome. The Lego operation is the contemporary form of that exemption, refined by a regime that has the most to lose from a thinking audience.

Pressed by the BBC, Mr. Explosive eventually conceded what he had long denied: the videos were not spontaneous bursts of creative expression, but were commissioned by the Iranian government for state projects.

And it makes sense that the Iranian regime commissions these videos. The images fit into a broader narrative about American hegemony, American injustice, American democracy in decline, and the humanitarian toll of US military action on Iranian civilians.

The critiques that Mr. Explosive and his team leverage at the US and Israel aren’t entirely without merit, but they are curated and distorted in service of an authoritarian state. Mr. Explosive will only ever showcase one side of the problem. That’s the nature of propaganda.

We don’t see minifigures mowed down by regime security forces, who have killed more Iranian civilians than any foreign airstrike. We don’t see brick-built drones holding the global economy hostage. Mr. Explosive doesn’t depict microscale authoritarians choosing to continue their many foreign misadventures—in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen—against the will of the Iranian people.

The uncomfortable truth is that the Lego videos trade on Iranian exhaustion, American weariness, and the Western guilt that comes from watching innocent children die as collateral damage. A clip that pins all of the world’s cruelty on Washington wins Tehran sympathy abroad while costing the regime nothing at home.

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The clearest foil to Mr. Explosive’s regime propaganda is the Iranian pop star Shervin Hajipour.

In 2022, Hajipour gathered statements from ordinary Iranians on social media, expressing why they marched after a 22-year-old woman named Mahsa Amini brutally died in the custody of the morality police. The singer-songwriter set those bold words of protest to music, and called the result “Baraye,” meaning “for.”

Baraye carried no toy-brick fantasies and needed none. The song attracted listeners from audiences who didn’t speak a word of Farsi, won a Grammy, and kept spreading even after Iranian authorities scrubbed it from the airwaves and from Hajipour’s accounts.

By every metric that propagandists aspire to, Hajipour’s Baraye was a success: more visible, more moving, more fluent in the “world language” than anything Mr. Explosive has ever assembled.

Baraye was the most successful authentic Iranian export in years.

For the dictatorship in Tehran, that was precisely the problem.

The regime arrested Hajipour and an appeals court upheld a sentence of nearly four years. Among the conditions of his sentence, Hajipour was ordered to write a new song about the crimes of the United States. The intent was notably transactional.

Iranian authorities wanted to commandeer an artist who had given voice to the suffering of regular people under the Islamic Republic, and redirect that voice outward, toward the United States instead. The regime ultimately pardoned Hajipour in September 2024 around the second anniversary of Mahsa Amini’s death, but the pardon was a calculated political move.

By that point, the prison sentence had served its purpose—intimidation, and sending a message. At the same time, keeping him in a cell was costing the regime more than letting him out.

Hajipour’s case caught the international spotlight because of his Grammy. Yet as many as 6,500 people have been arrested on spurious charges of treason and spying during the current Iran war. Those numbers come straight from the national police chief. Behind these statistics are thousands of families in limbo, not knowing whether their sons or daughters are coming home. Their mourning is not rendered in plastic, of course. None of it is subtitled for export. The regime confiscates the grief of its victims at the source.

This doesn’t mean that the United States holds the moral high ground, or that it has earned the trust of Iranians who would actually like to see the Islamic Republic go. American policy on Iran has been inconsistent for decades, swinging between engagement and pressure, sanctions and diplomacy, symbolic support for the Iranian people and abandonment of them when the political winds shift direction. Anyone who has staked real hope in the United States as a liberating force has not been paying close attention to the track record.

That history matters here because the regime thoroughly exploits it. Every American hesitation, every reversal, every promise that did not survive a change in administration becomes raw material for the kind of propaganda Mr. Explosive now manufactures in plastic. Washington’s inconsistency itself is Tehran’s content strategy.

And yet, that inconsistency still does not absolve the regime, which finds innovative ways to soften its otherwise brutal image as an authoritarian theocracy crushing its citizens in the name of religion. The next time someone watches a Lego video and marvels at its ingenuity, they should remember to look past the propaganda.

The very hand that armed Mr. Explosive with a megaphone is the one that put Shervin Hajipour in a cell.

After the Iranian regime killed protesters in Iran by the thousands between December 2025 and January 2026, before the intervention, Hajipour released a defiant new song on February 6. He titled it “Iranam”: “I am Iran”. He dedicated it to the dead.

The grief the regime demanded from Hajipour was for Washington. The grief he actually produced was for his own people, whose sorrows the regime still plunders.

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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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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.

In this week’s episode of Older/Wiser, Linda speaks with Walter Olson, legal commentator and senior fellow at the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies. Linda and Walter discuss the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais, the future of the Voting Rights Act, and the rise of hyper-partisan redistricting battles across the country. They examine how race and party politics have become deeply entangled in efforts to draw and redraw electoral districts, consider the unintended consequences of such efforts, and explore whether Congress still has the power—or the political will—to put a stop to these gerrymandering practices.

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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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 250th 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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Ariane de Gennaro is a communications intern at the Renew Democracy Initiative, which publishes The Next Move, 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.

Stanley Wang is a communications intern at the Renew Democracy Initiative. He is currently pursuing a master’s in economics at the London School of Economics and is a graduate of the College of William & Mary. Before RDI, Stanley served as an AmeriCorps VISTA member.

We’re coming off of graduation season. With the flood of congratulations and caps tossed in the air, the university is on many people’s minds.

Elite institutions tend to be the focus of national attention. Many people would give anything to attend these schools: The Ivies. Stanford. MIT.

They live rent free (thought certainly not tuition free) in the public imagination, from Good Will Hunting to Gilmore Girls. With presidents, tech innovators, and world-renowned scholars among their graduates, these schools are seen as a shortcut to influence, success, and prestige.

Lately, however, another type of elite college graduate has been in the news. Cole Allen, who tried to assassinate President Trump, earned his degree at CalTech. Luigi Mangione, who murdered healthcare executive Brian Thompson, is a graduate of Penn.

It’s time we took our top schools off of their pedestals and subjected them to some real examination. We have both attended leading institutions—Ariane is a graduate of Yale, and Stanley will soon finish at the London School of Economics (where Americans have a large presence). He is also a graduate of the College of William & Mary.

We know firsthand that the elite university may teach students how to be exceptional, but it does not necessarily show them how to be good.

It is a reality that many of the people who pass through these schools’ hallowed halls end up wielding great influence in politics, business, and media. It follows that top-ranked universities also have an outsized responsibility to the public.

An April 2026 Yale report tackled this exact issue. The Committee on Trust in Higher Education concluded, after a year of research, that Yale and its peer institutions have contributed to a decline in public trust in higher education. The report offered suggestions across a broad range of areas, from addressing grade inflation to protecting freedom of speech.

One key recommendation: adjust Yale’s mission statement.

The report asserts that part of the flagging trust in academia stems from “widespread uncertainty about the fundamental purpose and mission of higher education.” Is it simply a certification? A mark of prestige? Or are our universities meant to create good people; good citizens?

In 2016, Yale’s mission statement was revised to affirm a commitment to “improving the world today and for future generations through outstanding research and scholarship, education, preservation, and practice” and to educating “aspiring leaders worldwide who serve all sectors of society.”

This statement reflected a longstanding assumption that these universities exist not only to provide practical or academic education, but also to cultivate moral virtue with an eye towards improving society as a whole.

The school’s original 1701 charter stated that Yale, then the “Collegiate School,” was a place “wherein Youth may be instructed in the Arts & Sciences who through the blessing of Almighty God may be fitted for Publick employment both in Church & Civil State.”

The explicitly Protestant language has long since disappeared, but the underlying ideal remained: academic excellence paired with public service and a higher duty to civic life. This expectation makes sense. After all, shouldn’t we want those most likely to rise to power to possess not only intelligence, but character?

No, says Yale’s new report. Moral virtue is out of the university’s wheelhouse.

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The report recommended narrowing the university’s mission statement, and in late April, Yale did just that. The new statement declares that Yale’s goal is to “create, disseminate, and preserve knowledge through research and teaching.” No mention of virtue, public service, or civic life. No mention of how to apply the knowledge gained.

For a report ostensibly about institutional responsibility, Yale seems to be shirking it. It is not on us to create good, moral leaders, the argument goes. Leave that to someone else.

But if not in the universities that funnel graduates into the halls of power, where will people be trained to wield authority with care? If elite schools cannot make people good, it seems they should at least strive to make sure they are not careless, arrogant, or downright evil.

Yet the record is evidently mixed at best. Ivy League graduates are often publicly unpopular and even unsavory characters. While elite universities are often accused of leaning too far left, many graduates are among the most controversial figures on the right as well. Take Princeton’s Ted Cruz, Yale’s JD Vance, and, of course, Penn’s Donald Trump.

Of course, most graduates of elite universities are neither corrupt presidents nor perpetrators of political violence. More often, they are simply morally adrift, caught in the gap between “knowing good” and “doing good.” In our classrooms, we cover our eyes and pretend that this gap doesn’t exist. In ethics courses—if students even get around to taking one—we engage in eloquent deliberation between choosing the one person on the trolley tracks or the five, but students never learn how and when to actually pull the lever. So, too many simply don’t act. They leave college and take a path of least resistance, selecting careers from among corporate law, finance, and consulting as if they were choosing starter Pokémon.

And there is a much subtler and more common ethos among these students and alums that, while not overtly immoral, is still off-putting and, frankly, rude.

In the opening scene of The Social Network, a fictionalized Mark Zuckerberg (played by Jesse Eisenberg) has a relationship-ending conversation with his girlfriend, Erica.

Zuckerberg, a Harvard student, treats his partner—who attends Boston University—with shocking dismissiveness.

Attempting to extract herself from the conversation, Erica says she needs to go study.

“You don’t have to study,” Mark says.

“Why do you keep saying I don’t have to study?” Erica snaps.

“‘Cause you go to BU,” Mark matter-of-factly replies.

What would it take to erase this egoistic attitude? To create virtuous leaders again?

For one thing: we ought to move from a solitary focus on material success and output to values, service, discomfort, and practice.

That means doing difficult things for the benefit of others. Cold mornings spent volunteering. Long nights sitting with open-ended questions that no one grades you on, rather than simply solving problems for a gold star. That’s what higher education institutions might look like if they returned to the deliberate formation of moral character.

The elite university may not cultivate bad behavior intentionally, but it often engenders it by telling students they are extraordinary without giving them the moral framework to apply their talents with humility, grace, or care. The elite university produces brilliant people while being unwilling to interrogate what such brilliance should be for.

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

Since we are adults, let us stipulate that democracies often have to engage with dictatorships, and that foreign policy is not for the pure. A lot of nose-holding is involved. Paramount is the national interest, and realism is required.

Yet America has long been a nation apart—not merely “another pleasant country on the UN roll call, somewhere between Albania and Zimbabwe.” I have quoted a phrase from the first President Bush.

He saw America as “a unique nation, with a special role in the world.”

Once, President Carter was meeting with Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet foreign minister. Carter brought up the case of a political prisoner: Anatoly Shcharansky (later known in Israel as “Natan Sharansky”). Gromyko was nonplussed. The United States and the Soviet Union had nuclear arsenals to discuss. And the president wanted to talk about a prisoner?

Shcharansky, in Gromyko’s words, was but “a microscopic dot.”

Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan, always brought a list of political prisoners when he met with Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev—a list of prisoners that he (Reagan) was especially interested in. Gorbachev grumbled, “Too many lists.”

A very different president is Donald Trump. The matter of human rights does not seem to figure in his thinking. In fact, he is likely to pour praise on dictators—including anti-American ones. Toward the end of his first term, I did a roundup of his relations with dictators: here. A roundup of such relations in his second term bids to be equally full and pungent.

On his visit to China earlier this month, Trump said to Xi Jinping, “You’re a great leader,” and, “It’s an honor to be your friend.”

Xi presides over a one-party police state with a gulag (laogai). That state is committing genocide against the Uyghur people. Xi has crushed Hong Kong and threatens to swallow Taiwan. Etc.

A great citizen of China was Liu Xiaobo, the democracy leader and political prisoner. He received the Nobel Peace Prize, in absentia, in 2010. He died, still a prisoner, on July 13, 2017.

On that very day, Trump said of Xi, “Well, he’s a friend of mine. I have great respect for him. We’ve gotten to know each other very well. A great leader. He’s a very talented man. I think he’s a very good man.” And so on.

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In 2019, as Beijing was crushing Hong Kong, many people, including some members of his own party, were imploring Trump to “stand with Hong Kong.” Said Trump, “Look, we have to stand with Hong Kong, but I’m also standing with President Xi. He’s a friend of mine. He’s an incredible guy.”

You have noticed this “friend of mine.” John Bolton, one of Trump’s national security advisers in the first term, addressed this matter at the Copenhagen Democracy Summit earlier this month.

Trump “thinks he’s friends with Xi Jinping and with Vladimir Putin,” said Bolton. “And I will guarantee you, that’s not how they see Trump. I think they both see him as an easy mark.”

In a 2023 interview, Trump said, “They’re all top of the line.” He was referring to Putin, Xi, and Kim Jong-un. “President Xi is a brilliant man,” said Trump. “If you went all over Hollywood to look for somebody to play the role of President Xi, you couldn’t find—there’s nobody like that. The look, the brain, the whole thing.”

Trump is consistent in this belief. In Beijing this month, he said, “If you went to Hollywood and looked for a leader of China to play a role in a movie—he’s Central Casting. You couldn’t find a guy like him.”

The first US president to go to China was Richard Nixon. “The week that changed the world,” he called it: February 21–28, 1972. Accompanying the president’s party on the trip was William F. Buckley Jr., the conservative journalist. He was nauseated by what he saw.

“We have lost—irretrievably—any remaining sense of moral mission in the world,” WFB wrote.

He continued, “Mr. Nixon’s appetite for a summit conference in Peking transformed the affair from a meeting of diplomatic technicians, concerned to examine and illuminate areas of common interest, into a pageant of moral togetherness at which Mr. Nixon managed to give the impression that he was consorting with Marian Anderson, Billy Graham, and Albert Schweitzer.”

When Nixon toasted “the bloodiest, most merciless chief of state in the world,” said WFB—he meant Mao—“he did so in accents most of us would reserve for Florence Nightingale.”

After this latest summit, President Trump posted a picture of himself with his Chinese counterpart, writing a caption that made him sound like an excited and awed schoolboy: “The man I am walking with is President Xi, of China, one of the World’s Great Leaders!”

If Trump pours praise on anti-American dictators, he makes sure to pour scorn on American leaders who are his political opponents. Consider two examples: one from 2019, one from this month.

In May 2019, Joe Biden, kicking off his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, said, “Are we a nation that embraces dictators and tyrants like Putin and Kim Jong-un?” In retaliation, North Korea’s official “news agency” called Biden a “fool of low IQ.”

That is a favorite Trump phrase: “low IQ.”

In the White House, Trump issued a tweet, saying, “I have confidence that Chairman Kim will keep his promise to me”—concerning weapons—“& also smiled when he called Swampman Joe Biden a low IQ individual, & worse. Perhaps that’s sending me a signal?”

During this month’s summit in Beijing, Xi Jinping mentioned the “Thucydides trap,” whereby a rising power and a declining power come to blows. Someone must have explained the implications of this statement to Trump, which prompted a tweet from him:

“When President Xi very elegantly referred to the United States as perhaps being a declining nation, he was referring to the tremendous damage we suffered during the four years of Sleepy Joe Biden and the Biden Administration, and on that score, he was 100% correct.”

Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un may be monstrous Communist dictators, but at least they’re not “Sleepy Joe,” right?

At home, the two Trump terms have been a festival of lawlessness, vulgarity, and corruption. But our president’s sweetness on monstrous dictators may be the most painful thing about the whole ordeal.

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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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A note from Garry Kasparov: A week and a half ago, I got a call from my friend, RDI’s CEO Uriel Epshtein. Uriel was in the hospital. He was just coming to after a serious scooter accident. (The first thing I asked him was, “Are you sure this was an accident?”—you can never be too certain in our line of work!) Nevertheless, hearing proof of life was a relief. I invite you to read Uriel’s reflection on this brush with death.

Uriel Epshtein is the CEO of the Renew Democracy Initiative, which publishes The Next Move.

On May 17, I almost died.

I remember eating breakfast. And I remember finding myself in a hospital bed hours later. That’s about it… when I woke up, I couldn’t even recall who the president was (in retrospect this might have been a blessing).

The doctors told me that I had been in a serious accident while on my scooter. Nobody is really sure exactly what happened yet, but I suffered a concussion, fractured my sternum, punctured a lung, got eight stitches above my right eye, and mangled my knee badly enough that it may require surgery. My memory has been fuzzy for the past week. I find myself repeating things. My memory has been fuzzy for the past week… I find myself…

As the CEO of the Renew Democracy Initiative, I recently brought a delegation to Ukraine. We stood with our Ukrainian partners mere miles from where people were shooting and getting shot.

So, naturally, it was Washington, DC that nearly killed me.

I’ve never really bought the line that we should “live every day like it’s your last.” It’s a feel-good platitude; if we actually followed it to its logical conclusion, we’d be free of consequences and therefore free of purpose. That proverbial “last day” of our lives would have less meaning as a result.

And following my accident, I believe injecting meaning into our lives is more urgent than most of us realize.

To be honest, I’ve always felt like something of a loner. I was a nerdy kid—big surprise, I know—and the intensity of my work can be a bit isolating.

But in the past 10 days, I’ve realized I have a bigger community than I knew. After news of my accident began making the rounds, colleagues, friends, and loved ones visited me in the hospital. People called and texted me. I received more food than I know what to do with. I’ve heard from people whom I’ve been out of touch with for years. I’m grateful for all of it.

More than anything, I’m grateful to be rebuilding a sense of community that grounds me. But I’m also lucky that my work itself is meaningful. That I have the opportunity to fight for values that support everyone’s freedom to develop their own approach to meaning-making, whatever it is, without others telling them what it should be.

I’m inspired by the dedication of the political dissidents in our network, who have dealt with a lot worse and keep coming back to this work. However difficult the last week and a half have been, they remind me that I have the luxury to assume that my accident was, in fact, an accident.

My insight here is nothing new. My brush with death simply made it all the more visceral for me: that I find meaning in my pro-democracy work and in having a community around me.

A meaningful life might look different for each person. But I would encourage you to find whatever that thing is for you. Find a cause. Reach out to someone you haven’t spoken to. The former might feel daunting and the latter might feel awkward, but after what happened to me, I’ll gladly take difficulty or awkwardness over regret.

This isn’t just about me: If you follow RDI’s work or subscribe to The Next Move, you know that our ship has stayed the course. In the past week, we’ve published pieces from Senator Mark Kelly and former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen. We’re continuing to plan exciting events, civic education initiatives, and aid for our Ukrainian friends.

That’s all a testament to the commitment and professionalism of our small team, and the leadership of our board and advisors. We suffered what, in military terms, might be called a decapitation strike (albeit a temporary one, I hope!) and are continuing the work.

I want to thank you for your continued support. I’ll see you soon on an RDI podcast or at an event—maybe bandaged up or with a black eye, but I’ll be there. Although I’m not sure how I’m going to get there yet—my friends have staged a bit of an intervention for me: Cut back on scootering!

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Is NATO dead? Find out on our next premium subscriber Zoom call, featuring former NATO Secretary General and Prime Minister of Denmark Anders Fogh Rasmussen. The conversation—exclusively for premium subscribers—will take place TOMORROW, Wednesday, May 27 at 9am ET. For more information and registration, click here.

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.

On today’s episode, Linda speaks with veteran, immigration attorney, and MacArthur Genius Fellow Margaret Stock. A retired US Army Reserve lieutenant colonel, Margaret explains the plight of Afghan refugees left in limbo after America’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. From bureaucratic failures to the shocking proposal to relocate Afghan refugees to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Linda and Margaret examine how US immigration policy is abandoning those who once worked alongside American troops and discuss what our nation can do better.

Editor’s Note: Since the recording of this episode, the Democratic Republic of the Congo has seen a major ebola outbreak, meaning relocation to the DRC could be a double death sentence for Afghan refugees.

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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Issac Luna (Olvera) is a former US Marine Corps officer who fought for the Ukrainian military after the full-scale Russian invasion. He is the author of the book Reckoning Dreams and Fire, a memoir about his experience in Ukraine and other battles. Mr. Luna remains based in Ukraine. Follow him on X.

The American embassy warned of an impending Russian attack against Kyiv, which could include ballistic missiles.

It was about midnight, Sunday, May 24, 2026. My fiancée and I had just finished watching a nature documentary—zebras grazing in the Serengeti, sloths dangling from trees in Costa Rica. We had committed to going to sleep.

Thirty-two minutes later, we heard the dreaded phone alarm that signals an air threat. Something menacing was airborne, coming from Russia or the occupied territories. Too soon to know where it was headed or where it would land.

At about 1:00 a.m., I found out. They were coming to us. The air defense went into full mode. First came the sound of piston engines buzzing overhead. Hundreds of interceptor drones launched to head off the incoming attack. Machine guns opened fire, in case the interceptors failed. Then came a massive blast—an American Patriot or a German IRIS-T (I can almost tell the difference by now).

The cacophony of twenty-first-century warfare filled the sky. My fiancée Mariia and I sat tense. We knew we would not sleep. She put on extra clothes. She fears being pulled from the rubble in too little clothing—a rational and practical fear many Ukrainians have quietly developed.

Then the ground vibrated. Not just the building foundation, but something deeper, almost tectonic. The Patriots missed and something powerful—very powerful—hit.

It was an Oreshnik. It is a terrifying weapon: a hypersonic ballistic missile capable of carrying nuclear warheads. It travels at Mach 10 and separates in the upper atmosphere to unleash six independent warheads, each containing smaller submunitions. It is almost impossible to stop.

For the four million people living under this aerial battle, there is only one primitive means of protection: go underground.

We do not have a shelter in our building, so we move away from the windows and place our faith in probabilities. I have worked out the math before. Suppose this is a major attack: one thousand aerial threats. Ninety percent get intercepted. One hundred get through. Assume each kills ten people—one thousand dead. Kyiv has roughly four million residents. That gives you a one-in-four-thousand chance. About 0.025 percent.

Many Ukrainians have done some version of this calculation, even if only subconsciously. For a former military officer, the helplessness is devastating. So we try to sleep through the onslaught.

At 10:00am, neither of us knew how much we had slept, if at all. Mariia and I looked at each other, unsure if it was all a nightmare. It was—a living nightmare that has now played out for more than 1,550 days.

When I checked the news, the scale of the damage was devastating. Six hundred Shahed drones, thirty-three ballistic missiles, and fifty-seven cruise missiles. Data gathered by The New York Times suggests this was the largest Russian attack—not just on Kyiv, but anywhere in Ukraine—since December 2024.

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A popular market near us—normally packed with thousands of shoppers on a Sunday morning—was reduced to a heap of twisted steel and ash. Completely destroyed. The recently reopened Chernobyl Museum suffered a collapsed roof, and artifacts that had survived one disaster 40 years ago did not survive this one. One cruise missile, which ignites a booster rocket during its final descent to evade interception, crashed through the base of a high-rise building, carving a massive hole into the underground parking structure.

A water supply station, the Institute for Religious Studies, the Podil Opera Theatre, and the Kyiv School of Economics—all civilian sites—were damaged. More than one hundred people were wounded, but it was still too early to know how many will end up dead.

Living in a war zone for four years, I see both the worst of humanity, and the best of humanity, side by side. Air defense brigades—many composed of former college students, teachers, and retirees—intercepted 92% of drones and 60%of missiles. They validated my estimate of survivability. Rescue workers, poorly paid and fully aware that secondary strikes are possible, rummaged through rubble searching for survivors, including pets.

Yevhen, is a slim man in his early forties. He had sold his home to open a café in Kyiv. The café had opened for business the day before. Overnight, it was heavily damaged. But because some of his machines and coffee supplies survived, he reopened, handing out free coffee through shattered windows.

On the military front, Russia has failed to make meaningful progress.

During Russia’s attempt to take Kupiansk in Kharkiv Oblast, one Ukrainian website quipped: “The three-toed sloth sleeps eighteen hours a day, defecates once a week, and is still making better time than the [Russian[ 11th Army Corps.”

The sloth, according to the site, would have advanced 74 %faster and at a far lower cost. Over 35,000 Russian personnel were reportedly killed or severely wounded during April, the deadliest month on record, according to Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense.

In Moscow, where Putin had banked on public support and minimal disruption to daily life, residents can no longer dismiss the war as a distant “special military operation.” Drone attacks are increasingly common. Military-linked industrial facilities have been hit. Refineries and oil terminals far from the Ukrainian border have also reportedly been targeted. The road connecting Russia to Crimea along the Sea of Azov has increasingly become a highway of death, where Ukrainian drones strike military logistics almost at will.

Unable to produce a decisive victory on the battlefield, Putin has increasingly resorted to the one tactic he can always sell to his public as a victory: terrorism. Hence Sunday’s attack.

These attacks were enabled by a recent financial windfall. The war in Iran pushed oil prices upward, while Trump recently lifted sanctions on Russian oil, giving Putin a lifeline and replenishing the Russian treasury with at least a billion dollars a day.

The American government, through its embassy in Ukraine, warned of the attack. But it made no effort to use its considerable leverage over Russia to help prevent it, even though it could have.

Please consider upgrading to a premium subscription. Your support advances the work of the Renew Democracy Initiative, including delivering life-saving humanitarian assistance to frontline communities in Ukraine. To learn more about RDI’s work in Ukraine, click here.

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

In 1976, Petro Ruban made a wood carving in the shape of a book. On the book’s cover was the Statue of Liberty, along with the words “200 Years.” Ruban intended the carving to be a gift to the American people on the occasion of their bicentennial. He had worked eight months on it.

The Soviet authorities, however, confiscated the carving. In short order, they confiscated the wood-carver, too. That is, they threw him into prison—again.

Ruban was not only a wood-carver, he was also a Soviet human-rights activist. More specifically, he was a Ukrainian human-rights activist. Ruban was a nationalist, believing in independence for Ukraine. This made him doubly intolerable to the Soviet state.

Today, as you can see, the Kremlin is still intolerant of Ukrainian nationhood—to the point of an all-out war of subjugation.

Last month, I wrote an article titled “People vs. Dictatorships.” I emphasized the importance of distinguishing people, or peoples, from the dictatorships that rule them. Ronald Reagan was conscientious about making this distinction.

He would often cite the cases of specific political prisoners. In 1987, he spoke to a Captive Nations conference, held at the Ukrainian National Catholic Shrine in Washington, D.C. I quoted this speech in my article last month.

Reagan talked about Petro Ruban that day. He identified him as “a prisoner in Special Regimen Labor Camp No. 36-1, one of the most notorious of the Soviet camps.” He mentioned Ruban’s Statue of Liberty carving, etc.

Reading this speech of the president’s, I got curious about Ruban. I looked into his life.

Of particular help was the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, an organization started in Soviet days. It is affiliated with the Memorial society, a project started by Andrei Sakharov and his friends in the late 1980s.

(Sakharov, you will recall, was the great physicist turned great dissident.)

The purpose of Memorial is twofold: to document atrocities of the past and to promote democracy in the present. Obviously, Putin’s Kremlin has banned Memorial, along with Russian civil society at large. But Memorial people continue to operate in exile.

In 2022, Memorial shared the Nobel Peace Prize. (For an article of mine on the 2022 prize, go here.)

Petro Vasylovych Ruban was born on January 10, 1940. His birthplace was Konotop, a city in northeastern Ukraine. It was wartime, and Ruban’s father was a fighter pilot. “For having been captured by the Nazis, he became the victim of repression by the Soviets and never returned.”

I have quoted the Kharkiv group in its sketch of Petro Ruban’s life.

Understand that Soviet prisoners of war were considered traitors by the Soviet state. Stalin himself had a son, Yakov, who was taken prisoner. “In Hitler’s camps,” said Stalin, “there are no Russian prisoners of war, only Russian traitors, and we will do away with them when the war is over.”

Stalin had his daughter-in-law, Yulia, arrested as the wife of a traitor. She was imprisoned for a year and a half, and was never the same again.

(I wrote about Stalin and his family in a book called Children of Monsters: An Inquiry into the Sons and Daughters of Dictators.)

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Petro Ruban was first sentenced to prison in 1959, when he was 19. For the next 30 years, almost, he would be in and out of prison—mainly in. Twenty-five of those years, he spent in prison.

What were the charges against him? In a police state, this hardly matters, for the authorities will choose whatever charge seems handy. But one particular charge against Ruban is noteworthy: “bourgeois nationalism.” In other words, he favored Ukrainian independence.

In the Gulag, Ruban experienced the usual hardships and tortures. There were also periods of relief. For example, it was in prison that he learned wood-carving. In the rare years on the outside, he did such carving for a living.

Once, while in the Gulag, he helped smuggle out the prison diaries of Eduard Kuznetsov. In 1975, the New York Times published an article that said, “Kuznetsov’s diaries are the latest stunning addition to the most significant genre of contemporary Soviet letters: the prison stories and memoirs from the camps.”

When Ruban was rearrested in 1976, it was for the Statue of Liberty carving. But Andrei Sakharov guessed that there was also another reason: officials were taking revenge on Ruban for having helped Kuznetsov. (The latter man would be swapped in a prisoner exchange with the United States in 1979.)

Ruban was released from prison in 1985—but he was very soon rearrested and reimprisoned. Why? In part, because he had criticized the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. But mainly because he had applied to travel to the United States with his son, Marko, to seek medical treatment for him.

Marko, age about eleven, had been paralyzed in an accident. Ruban and his wife, Lidya, did not even have a wheelchair for him. They thought he could be helped with modern medical care in the US. But the Soviets did not take kindly to the request.

One report, published in 1988 by The Ukrainian Weekly, an exile outlet, gives a taste of Ruban’s spirit and character. Ruban “insisted that he should serve his sentence on the territory of his homeland, Ukraine.” For this and other offenses and effronteries, he was “constantly punished with solitary confinement.”

Thanks to Western pressure, Lidya and Marko were able to travel to the United States in January 1988. Reagan would travel to Moscow for a summit a few months later. Before Reagan’s arrival, in one of those gestures that became familiar in the Cold War, the Soviets released Ruban.

At the US embassy, Ruban sat next to Secretary of State George Shultz, no less.

In July of that year, 1988, Reagan gave his annual Captive Nations Week address. “Now, as you may recall, on this occasion last year, I spoke of Petro Ruban,” he said. He went on to say, “Last January, his son, Marko, was permitted to come here for medical treatment.” There was a story or two involved.

“When Marko got off the plane, his first words in his new country were, ‘I want to be able to stand on my own two feet.’ In his hands, he held something that he had labored on during the long plane trip from the Soviet Union. The boy whose father had been imprisoned for making a Statue of Liberty had embroidered Lady Liberty onto a towel.”

One more thing, from Reagan: “I’m happy to be able to tell you that Petro Ruban was released from prison and just last night arrived in this country to be reunited with his family. Petro and Marko are with us here.”

When Reagan died in 2004, Petro Ruban made a statement, which included these sentences: “I remember Reagan for his magnificent internal beauty. For me, he is the president who gave me freedom.

Ruban died in Kyiv—in independent, and not-yet-invaded, Ukraine—on September 26, 2011.

Let me ask a question: Who are the democratic leaders—the heads of state and government in the Free World—keeping an eye on political prisoners today? Speaking out for them?

Another question: Would political prisoners and other dissidents pay tribute to America today, as Petro Ruban did on the occasion of our bicentennial? We are now celebrating our 250th. Would their sons embroider the statue on towels?

There is no shortage of political prisoners to keep an eye on. In Russia, there are more political prisoners today than in the late Soviet period. Many of those prisoners are Ukrainian.

Here is one headline from the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group: “Russia sentences abducted and tortured Melitopol journalists to 26 years for pro-Ukrainian Telegram channel.” Those journalists are Denys Hlushchenko and Oleksandr Malyshev. (For the article, go here.)

Here is another headline: “71-year-old Ukrainian patriot Halyna Dovhopola unbroken after 7 years in Russian captivity, but ‘won’t survive another such winter.’” (Article here.)

There is astounding bravery in the world, to go with cruelty, tyranny, and depravity. I sometimes quote José Martí, the Cuban independence leader: “When there are many men who lack honor, there are always others who have within themselves the honor of many men.”

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

Donald Trump is back from China.

My colleague Evan Gottesman already wrote about the president’s trip in geopolitical terms: yet another abdication of American values and strategic interests to Xi Jinping.

I agree with that take, but I’d like to consider the China visit from a different angle: the president’s corruption.

Trump arrived in Beijing with several businessmen in tow.

It’s not out of bounds for a US president to include industry leaders in their entourage when visiting a major trade partner. Nevertheless, Trump’s actions require even greater scrutiny than his predecessors’ because of the openness of his corruption.

Here are just a handful of recent China-related examples of the president’s grift:

Last year, Trump gave a Chinese Communist Party affiliate a private White House tour—a reward for being a top buyer of the president’s memcoin ($TRUMP is a massive scandal by itself, if only people would pay attention).

Eric Trump, the president’s younger son, serves as executive vice president for development of the Trump Organization, which has extensive interests in China. Eric Trump joined his father in China “in a personal capacity.” (Imagine if the surname were Biden!)

In January, Trump purchased as much as $1 million in Nvidia stock, a week before approving some of the tech company’s transactions in China.

Lo and behold, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang also made it into the president’s delegation. Curious, isn’t it?

Americans of a certain generation may recall the popular saying (actually a misquotation), “What’s good for General Motors is good for America.”

Elon Musk was also included in Trump’s party in China. Is what’s good for Tesla good for America? I’m tempted to answer with an emphatic no, although Musk’s early involvement in the Trump administration—a terrible conflict of interest for a top government contractor—looks almost quaint compared with what’s come to pass more recently. In any case, the connection between Elon Musk’s personal wealth and the general public’s welfare is certainly much more tenuous.

The communiques published by each side after the visit touted achievements that their opposites were conspicuously silent on. The White House claimed $17 billion in Chinese agricultural investment—crickets from Xi and his underlings. Beijing heralded the reduction of US tariffs—something Trump would prefer not to spotlight.

Generously, we can say the net result for America is a big fat zero. Yet Musk still came home smiling. Trump’s sons are probably beaming too.

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Corruption is an aspiring strongman’s weakness. Authoritarians have a sort of warped social contract—people trade democracy for (the illusion of) prosperity and stability.

That mirage comes apart when the people see their fortunes fall while the leader and his cronies thrive. This is what happened in Hungary. As Viktor Orbán’s rule wore on, the gap between Hungarians’ wages and the salaries of workers in neighboring Central European countries steadily widened. All the while, Orbán and his associates got richer and richer.

Orbán’s naked corruption created an opening for Péter Magyar to score a landslide victory that even the would-be despot could not deny.

(The ousted prime minister’s allies are now racing to move allies are now racing to move wealth out of the country to avoid scrutiny under the new regime. Some are even seeking refuge in the United States of America, where the streets are gilded with fool’s gold.)

As Trump’s policies continue to shrink Americans’ wallets while flooding his personal coffers, the president’s opponents should mirror Magyar. A laser focus on corruption can unite people across the political spectrum. Voters may split on all sorts of thorny political issues, but they will rally in response to the type of gross malfeasance they can feel on their own skin.

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We are pleased to bring you this article from Anders Fogh Rasmussen, former NATO secretary general and prime minister of Denmark. Read on, then join The Next Move on Wednesday, May 27 at 9am ET for our next premium subscriber Zoom call, featuring Prime Minister Rasmussen in conversation with Renew Democracy Initiative Chairman Garry Kasparov.

For more information and to register, click here.

Anders Fogh Rasmussen served as secretary general of NATO from 2009 to 2014 and as prime minister of Denmark from 2001 to 2009. He is the founder of the Alliance of Democracies.

The post–World War II order has ruptured.

An Axis of Autocracies is consolidating, visible on the Ukrainian battlefield through North Korean soldiers and Iranian drones. United States foreign policy has turned erratic, with tariffs at levels not seen since the 1930s. China weaponizes economic dependence to extract political compliance from democracies one at a time, from Australia to Lithuania, South Korea to Canada. Democratic middle powers now face coercion, protectionism and multilateral institutions that can no longer protect them.

Middle powers may appear to face a binary choice: pursue unattainable self-sufficiency or accept a performative sovereignty as satellites of a great power.

This article sets out a third path.

At its center is a Democracies-7—a D7—consisting of Australia, Canada, the European Union, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea and the United Kingdom as founding members. Together they represent roughly $36 trillion USD in combined GDP, around 30% of the global total. They hold the economic weight to deter coercion, even from global hegemons.

The D7 would act as a vanguard, not a boundary, with concentric tiers of Associates and Partners engaging on specific initiatives creating variable geometries. At its outset we identify six areas of potential focus:

1. A plurilateral trade alliance to keep rules-based open trade alive as WTO reform stalls.

2. An Economic Article 5 to create a collective front of defence against coercion.

3. A Democratic Technology Initiative to shape standards, align export controls and invest jointly in AI, quantum and space.

4. A critical raw materials strategy to break China’s grip on rare earth processing.

5. A defense pillar, taking inspiration from Ukraine and the Coalition of the Willing.

6. Coordinated global investment as a credible alternative to China’s Belt and Road.

Governance of the D7 should be light: annual leaders’ summit, super-majority voting, and a lean secretariat to focus on outputs rather than bureaucratic self-aggrandizement. The door should remain open to the United States alongside others who wish to assume the mantle of global democratic leadership.

Democratic multilateralism can be forged through a growing web of bilateral and plurilateral arrangements between democracies, from those countries whose democracy is fully embedded through to emerging and imperfect democracies.

The approach has been demonstrated by the Coalition of the Willing on Ukraine, launched by UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron in March 2025, now encompassing 34 countries (35 including Ukraine). It operates outside of NATO’s consensus structure, which would have been blocked by (Orbán’s) Hungary and potentially others, yet it draws fully on NATO infrastructure, personnel and planning.

The architecture proposed here is designed to function without US participation—it is needed precisely because American leadership has been withdrawn.

But the door must remain open. The United States could participate as an Associate in specific coalitions, or eventually join as a D7 core member, if its political trajectory changes. In the meantime, D7 members will need to manage the tension between building an architecture that can withstand US economic coercion and preserving bilateral relationships with Washington that remain vital on security and other fronts.

On China, D7 members have very different economic exposures and political appetites. South Korea and Japan are deeply integrated into Chinese supply chains. The EU is China’s largest trading partner. Australia has experienced the sharpest deterioration in relations. These differences are real, but they are precisely what variable geometry is designed to accommodate. A coalition of five acting together is still more powerful than any member acting alone.

The premise is simple: those willing to act should be empowered while maintaining interoperability within a broader alliance. That principle can be replicated even in multilateral settings across trade, technology, raw materials, defence and development. What has been missing is a convening force.

The post-war order as we knew it is gone. The institutions that served democracies for 70 years are diminished, co-opted, or actively undermined by the great powers they were designed to constrain.

Nostalgia is understandable—but it will not bring that order back. The architecture proposed for the D7 is ambitious but realistic. It does not require utopian consensus. It requires a critical mass of democracies willing to act together on concrete problems—issue by issue—building trust and institutional capacity as they go.

The Ukraine Coalition of the Willing has demonstrated that this approach works. If democracies can do it for defense, they can do it for trade, investment, technology and critical minerals.

The collective economic, hard and soft power of the world’s democracies remains formidable. What is lacking is the political architecture to convert this competitive advantage into effective collective action.

The window of opportunity is narrow. Every act of unanswered economic coercion normalizes the practice. Every uncoordinated response to protectionism weakens democratic solidarity. The time to act is now, not with a single grand gesture, but with practical steps toward a new way of working together.

This article is adapted from a paper from the Alliance of Democracies. Read the full report here.

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Senator Mark Kelly is the senior United States senator from Arizona and a recipient of the Renew Democracy Initiative’s 2026 Heroes of Democracy Award.

Last month, the Renew Democracy Initiative, which publishes The Next Move, honored Senator Mark Kelly with the Heroes of Democracy Award, which recognizes people who have taken risks and made sacrifices for freedom. Now, we’re pleased to share Senator Kelly’s remarks from the RDI Heroes of Democracy Gala:

Thank you, Garry. Thank you, everybody.

Good evening, folks. I’ve never been in this room before. This is something.

I want to really thank the Renewed Democracy Initiative for the honor, and also for the work that all of you do every day to promote freedom, and fighting for all of those folks fighting for freedom around the world.

It’s really a privilege to be recognized along with so many individuals who have stood up, often at great personal risk, to speak the truth and to demand freedom.

Those of you who know me know that I never expected to be here. I’m the son of two cops. I didn’t grow up very far from here, in New Jersey. I went to public school. I became a Navy pilot, and then a test pilot, and then an astronaut.

And in my family, my wife, Gabby Giffords, was the member of Congress. And I sometimes think to myself, “If I was the person who would’ve been injured, would Gabby have become an astronaut?”

She says yes.

But on January 8, 2011, our lives changed forever. She was shot while meeting with her constituents in Tucson, Arizona, at a grocery store on a Saturday morning. And because of that, we both left the jobs we loved.

But I love this country, and I felt an obligation to continue to serve, but just in a different way. I think about that sense of service a lot, especially because I now sit in the Senate seat once held by John McCain.

John McCain was a hero of mine from my very first days in the United States Navy, even before that, a guy who served his country so honorably under the hardest of circumstances.

And he was a hero of freedom-loving people across the globe. He stood on that stage in Independence Square in Kyiv in 2013, alongside Ukrainian opposition leaders who were pushing for democratic reforms. He understood that fundamentally, human beings deserve the right to choose their own future, and his legacy will never be matched.

I don’t even pretend to compete, but it challenges us every day to live up to the example that John McCain set for all of us because America can do amazing things when we are at our best.

A couple of weeks ago, we had the opportunity to watch Artemis II travel further from Earth than any human beings have ever gone before—and faster.

It is an incredible achievement that only can happen here in the United States of America when all of us work together. That kind of country is worth protecting because not every country gets to do that.

Around the world, we’re seeing authoritarian governments operate in a very different way. They’re making people distrust each other and lose faith in their own system.

And we have to be honest, those pressures aren’t just happening somewhere else. They’re happening here at home as well. We’re seeing challenges to fundamental constitutional norms and rights like the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press, and the ability to hold leaders accountable without the fear of retaliation.

Learn more about the RDI Heroes of Democracy Awards Gala:

A few months ago, I released a video with a simple message. You saw it up there. I was actually wearing the same shirt. (I do have another shirt.)

But it was a simple message that service members must refuse illegal orders. That’s not controversial. It’s actually the law, and in our country, everyone must follow the law.

Well, Donald Trump didn’t like it. He called for me to be hanged, executed, prosecuted. The guy couldn’t even get the order right.

By the way, I’m pretty sure that was the first time that a president of the United States in 250 years called for a member of Congress to be executed. I mean, if it wasn’t serious, it would be kind of funny. But that should send a chill down the spine of every freedom-loving American, and every person around the world who looks to this country, to the United States, as a beacon of freedom.

And later, the secretary of defense... Let me say that again. The secretary of defense. The guy doesn’t get to change the name. He censured me, and now he’s trying to reduce me in rank, take away my pension after 25 years of service.

If this president and the yes people around him thought that they could intimidate me, I’ll tell you what, they picked the wrong guy. So I fought back and I sued him, specifically Pete Hegseth.

But this was never about me. This is about all Americans. It’s about all of us. They wanted to send a message to anyone thinking about speaking up that you better shut your mouth or else.

But it’s not going to work, ‘cause that’s not how this country works, and that’s not in the Constitution, a document I swore an oath to protect and defend.

There’s nothing more fundamental in our democracy than the freedom to speak out about our government. It’s actually a feature. It’s the right that guarantees all others, and that’s what I’m fighting for.

And it’s why the work of organizations like the Renew Democracy Initiative and the courage of dissidents around the world matters so much. You are defending something that is fragile and worth protecting.

And Garry, I am so grateful to be in this fight with you. So thank you. Thank you, not just for this recognition—I do appreciate it. What I really want to thank you for is the work that you do every single day to provide hope to people throughout the world.

And as my wife, Gabby, likes to say, “These are challenging times, but together we are up for the challenge.”

Thank you very much, everybody.

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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 to Catholic theologian George Weigel, distinguished senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and biographer of Pope John Paul II. From Donald Trump’s use of religious imagery to JD Vance’s criticism of Pope Leo, George and Linda examine the weaponization of faith in modern politics, the dangers of political “idolatry,” and the erosion of democratic discourse.

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

To the casual observer, the love letters Donald Trump is penning to Xi Jinping might feel like a window into an alternate reality.

“The man I am walking with is President Xi, of China, one of the World’s Great Leaders!” Trump gushed in a Truth Social post, sounding more like a teen who got a photo with their celebrity idol than the president of the United States.

Among his many titles, Xi is the general secretary of the Communist Party of China. Surely, the Donald Trump who lavishes praise on this communist leader could not be the same man who rattles on about the radical left.

Yet there Trump was in Beijing last week, going beyond the formal diplomatic motions to give Xi a bear-hug embrace.

We need to understand that Trump is a demagogue, not an ideologue. He will do what is good for number one. Xi is similarly flexible, as all Chinese leaders have been since Mao Zedong’s death half a century ago.

Despite being allergic to “socialism,” the MAGA rank and file will excuse Trump’s flirtatious behavior with China’s communist overlords.

“Everyone who is up in arms about Trump ‘kissing Xi’s ass’ needs to understand that this is realpolitik and dealmaking,” China hawk Melissa Chen wrote in a post on X as she sought to justify the president’s behavior.

Marxists twisted themselves into similarly awkward knots in the summer of 1939 when their hero, Joseph Stalin, made a deal with Hitler’s Germany, the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

Many reds back then put loyalty to the leader ahead of their principles. They had to get creative in order to justify the unholy marriage between Soviet communism and German Nazism.

(One communist, a young man named Erich Honecker, observed events from his cell in a Nazi prison. He is reported to have praised the pact as a diplomatic success for the USSR, even as he was jailed by the very people Stalin was now collaborating with. Later in life, Honecker’s hardline compliance with Kremlin positions would be rewarded when he was made leader of the Soviet puppet state of East Germany.)

Stalin toasted to the führer’s health, just as Trump now hammers out effusive Truth Social posts about Xi.

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

Trump’s defenders argue that we should treat him like a magician: watch his hands instead of listening to the words coming out of his mouth.

(As if the American president’s words never carry real-world implications.)

Per Melissa Chen: “With Trump, ignore the optics and ignore what he says. Just look at his actions.”

So let’s look at his actions. Consider the case of democratic Taiwan.

Back in February, Trump blocked a congressionally-approved $14 billion arms package for Taiwan.

Taipei remains in the lurch—the deal has been frozen for months, with no sign of movement after the president’s visit to China. Whatever happens, the very fact that Trump blocked the sale and left it open ended after meeting with Xi is a political victory for Beijing, as CNN’s Aaron Blake points out. Under the 1982 US-China Joint Communique, Washington asserted that it “has not agreed to consult with the PRC on arms sales to Taiwan.”

Marco Rubio is already parroting Beijing’s framing of “peaceful reunification” between Taiwan and the mainland. Anyone who has borne witness to the carnage left behind by Russian soldiers in Ukraine knows what “peaceful reunification” looks like on authoritarian terms.

Some are calling the secretary of state Marco Rubiotrop, but I think he’s more Molotov. During its 22-month romance with the Nazis, the Soviet Union turned over German and Austrian communists to the Gestapo, just as the Trump administration has indicated it would be open to selling out America’s Taiwanese allies to China.

The Nazi-communist pact was a disaster in the last century just as a MAGA-communist rapprochement would be a disaster in this one.

In December 1939, with the Red Army and Wehrmacht marauding through Poland and the Soviets on the march in Finland, the British Daily Sketch declared: “Our task in this war is to defeat Hitlerism, but it is still Hitlerism if the aggressor is called Stalin.”

Such consistency is badly needed now.

The thing is, Trump doesn’t actually care about communism (nor, for that matter, does Xi). The president admires China’s dictator because he is a big man who rules over a big country with big parades, big ballrooms, and no regard for human rights.

What’s necessary in order to counter this sinister collaboration is a truly consistent anti-authoritarianism.

Not just anti-communist, as MAGA says it is while wrecking America’s constitutional order at home. Nor simply anti-MAGA, as the left professes to be while getting mushy when it comes to enthusiastic fans of the People’s Republic like Hasan Piker.

Anti-all systems of invasive control. Anti-conformity and anti-coercion, whatever the label that goes with it.

More importantly, we need to be for something: For freedom of speech and conscience, for dissent, for liberty, and for prosperity.

The only thing that unites far-right Americans with Chinese communists and Soviet-nostalgic Russian nationalists is the desire to dominate. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact ultimately fell apart in catastrophic fashion. Authoritarian bargains are liable to fracture when empires butt up against one another, spheres of influence start to overlap, and the egos of “big men” come into conflict.

The values of free-minded people, by contrast, are not zero sum. Our shared principles are our collective strength.

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

Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a veteran politician, is known to be direct. He had barely greeted his audience before he said, “Let me be direct: The world we once knew, and the democratic foundations we once took for granted, are collapsing.”

Rasmussen was speaking at the Copenhagen Democracy Summit on Tuesday.

He was the prime minister of Denmark from 2001 to 2009. He was the secretary general of NATO from 2009 to 2014. Three years later, he set up the Alliance of Democracies Foundation, in Copenhagen. This “summit” is the foundation’s annual event.

Let me pause for a quick commercial: On May 27, we at The Next Move will host a Zoom conversation between our Garry Kasparov and Rasmussen. For information about this event, and to register, go here.

Preceding Rasmussen in directness was Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada—not in Copenhagen but in Davos, last January.

“Let me be direct,” said Carney. “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.” And “this rupture calls for more than adaptation. It calls for honesty about the world as it is.”

Up in Copenhagen, Rasmussen said, “The rupture in the post–World War II order has happened. The United States no longer has the will to lead. And from the perspective of Greenlanders, the global policeman has gone rogue.”

More on Greenland (an autonomous territory of Denmark) in due course.

Rasmussen was speaking “in sadness,” he said, for “much of my life’s work has been dedicated to the transatlantic alliance.” True. But “we do not have the luxury to lament what has passed into history. Our job is to build what comes next.”

So, what comes next? What’s the next move, from the perspective of this Dane and his partners?

Not a “G7,” which stands for “Group of Seven,” and includes the United States. No, a “D7,” standing for “Democracies-7.” (Sounds a bit like a movie title, as in Ocean’s Eleven.) This would be an alliance of seven “middle powers,” as Rasmussen says, borrowing a phrase that Carney used in Davos.

“These countries are not hegemons like China or the United States,” said Rasmussen in Copenhagen, “but they still have the money and the muscle to matter, collectively.” These middle powers “must grasp the torch of freedom and the burdens that come with it.”

The seven that Rasmussen has in mind are the European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and South Korea. (Is it cheating a little to count the EU as one country or power? We might entertain that question later.)

Rasmussen emphasized the overwhelming importance of Ukraine. “Ukraine’s security is our security,” he said, “and we are failing to meet the moment.” An EU or a NATO without Ukraine is hollow. Nonsensical. “Ukraine must be an integrated part of a new European security architecture,” said Rasmussen.

And “I want to be honest with you about the costs of defending democracy.” (Rasmussen had already mentioned the “burdens” of leadership.) “Higher defense budgets mean tough choices on welfare and taxes.” There are “real trade-offs,” and “I will not pretend otherwise.”

But, said Rasmussen, “we must consider the alternative”—the alternative to self-defense, and collective defense. The alternative is “a world where the strong pick off the weak; a world where democracies are treated as trading chips; a world of submission, of repression, of war.” And “that is not a world I will accept for my grandchildren.”

Typical politician’s rhetoric, maybe—but somehow, in Copenhagen, it sounded earnest and urgent. The Ukraine war is not hypothetical. Neither are Putin’s greater ambitions. Neither is the new direction of America.

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

Last year, I went to Denmark in order to report on the dramatically altered relations between Washington and Copenhagen. President Donald Trump had been threatening the Danes over Greenland. “We’ll get Greenland,” said Trump. “Yeah, 100 percent.” More than once, he refused to rule out military force.

Americans might think that this is “trolling” or “owning the libs” or “Trump being Trump.” But Danes are unamused and on alert.

Denmark’s refusal to cough up Greenland is one reason that Trump has turned his back on NATO, treating the alliance as some hostile power, rather than America’s creation, in the American interest. (Denmark is one of the twelve founding members of NATO, by the way—“present at the creation.”) Talking to the press last month, Trump was candid, as he often is.

“And you know, it all began with, if you wanna know the truth, Greenland,” said the president. “We want Greenland. They don’t want to give it to us, and I said, ‘Bye-bye.’”

Following Anders Fogh Rasmussen to the podium at the Copenhagen Democracy Summit was the prime minister of Greenland, Jens-Frederik Nielsen. He gave a diplomatic, though firm, speech, which he ended with a call for mutual respect—for civilized international behavior, rather than the law of the jungle, might makes right, and spheres of influence.

“Let’s sit respectfully around the table together,” said Nielsen. “Then nobody will be on the menu.”

Mette Frederiksen has been the prime minister of Denmark since 2019. With Rasmussen, she sat down for a conversation at the summit. They are different politicians: he a conservative (or classical liberal), she a social democrat.

Rasmussen told the audience that he and Frederiksen differ sharply on domestic policy. But on foreign policy, defense, and national security—they are as one.

He had an opening question for her: “How do you think the world’s democracies should respond to the strongmen of this world—Xi Jinping, Putin, Trump?” Look, I am nothing if not a realist about the American president. But even I had to gulp at this grouping.

Frederiksen is all for an alliance of the “middle powers.” The collapse of the old world order demands a new. “So we better hurry up,” she said. “We have to speed up. We have to scale up.”

Rasmussen often speaks of a “coalition of the willing,” using a phrase popularized by President George W. Bush some 25 years ago. (Denmark, of course, was a stalwart part of this coalition, with Rasmussen as prime minister.) In his conversation with Mette Frederiksen, Rasmussen said that a coalition of the willing must not be a “coalition of the waiting.”

Frederiksen was in full agreement. “A coalition of the waiting will be a disaster.” She went on to say, “The problem for us Europeans is that we still think and behave as we did in peacetime, and it is no longer peacetime.” Putin has seen to that. “Therefore, we have to change our mindset. If we don’t, Russia is going to win.”

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Denmark has increased its defense spending from 1.3% of GDP to 3.5. Frederiksen has implored her fellow Europeans to get serious. If Europe “is not willing and able to defend itself,” she said at the summit, “then who are we?”

About the Ukrainians, she spoke movingly. They have held off the Russians, sparing the rest of Europe, so far. “The main reason that Ukraine is still standing is Ukraine,” said Frederiksen. “It’s not the rest of us.” The Ukrainians have been denied NATO membership, they have been denied certain arms. “We have been asking them to fight for the entire European Union with one arm tied behind their back,” said Frederiksen. “That has been a huge mistake.”

She is palpably wary of peace negotiations between Russia and the United States—“so-called peace negotiations,” she called them, every time she mentioned them. “A bad so-called peace deal for Ukraine would probably be a disaster for the rest of Europe,” she said. “Any Russian win” would be a loss, for the Free World.

I titled my report from Ukraine last year “America Rattles Denmark.” The subheading was, “A report from an allied capital in a strange time.” My impression a year later is that Denmark is through being rattled. The shock of a belligerent Washington, or a transformed Washington, has worn off. A new day is upon us, whether we like it or not.

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

Last Thursday, I received the Friend of Ukraine Award at the Tryzub Awards Gala in Toronto. Here are my remarks from that evening:

Good evening.

To begin with, I’d like to thank our hosts, the Tryzub Gala Foundation, for their invitation, and for this prestigious award.

Dyakuyu.

Of course, the real heroes are the men and women of Ukraine, who are fighting every day and every night, not only for their nation, but for the entire Free World.

The war in Ukraine is like chess: it’s black and white. Anyone who can’t tell you who is good and who is evil there is willfully blind.

But unlike in chess, there can be no tie in this war. It is a contest of good versus evil, and you do not accommodate evil—even halfway.

This war demands moral clarity, not politically correct slogans cooked up by a committee. So let me say, loudly and clearly enough that they can hear me from across Lake Ontario:

Ukraine. Must. Win.

And there’s another part to it—something that even the most pro-Ukrainian politicians in Ottawa, Washington, and Brussels aren’t comfortable saying.

Russia. Must. Lose.

The Russian. Empire. Must. Fall.

Under the banner of the organization I founded in 2016, the Free Russia Forum, it is written: Victory for Ukraine, freedom for Russia. And it must happen in that order. Anyone who wants to seriously oppose Vladimir Putin must adopt that as their north star, and also declare, without stuttering: Crimea is Ukraine.

But this war is not just Putin’s war. It is Russia’s war. Nothing less than the Ukrainian flag flying over Sevastopol will extinguish the imperial virus that, for centuries, has plagued Russia and brought ruin to its neighbors.

So I will repeat: The Russian Empire must fall.

But saying all of this is the easy part. The more difficult challenge is one of strategy. Looking at the Russian invasion of Ukraine, you must survey the entire board, not just individual pieces.

The state of play is indeed complicated, especially from where we sit here in Toronto.

For decades, Canada’s strategy was based upon its status as—let us be blunt—a junior partner of the United States of America. You prospered under the protection of a benevolent giant to the south.

Well, as your prime minister noted in Davos just a few months ago, things are certainly different now.

The giant is not so benevolent anymore. The giant is orange in the face, prone to mood swings, and curiously aligned with the Russian way of thinking… and you’re starting to get flashbacks to 1812.

The answer to all of this is not to trade your role as a subordinate of one great power for another, swapping your arrangement with the US for, god forbid, China—one of Russia’s leading accomplices in its genocidal devastation of Ukraine.

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

The responsibility you shoulder now is to lead—as an equal partner with your allies across the Atlantic, who are navigating a similar challenge too.

For inspiration, you must look to your kin in Ukraine.

There is actually an interesting parallel in the relationship between Russia and Ukraine, on the one hand, and the US and Canada, on the other.

For centuries, Ukraine was chained to the Russian and Soviet empires. Because of this history of Kremlin colonialism, Ukraine shared many cultural, linguistic, political, and economic ties with Russia.

While Canada’s ties with the US weren’t forced upon you, you too share a common heritage with a larger neighbor, a natural choice guided by shared history and geography.

For centuries, Ukraine lived under Russia’s shadow, as you lived under America’s.

Yet, since 1991, Ukraine has proved that history and geography are not destiny. And since that fateful day in February 2022, Ukraine has been the spiritual leader of the Free World.

While Boris Yeltsin was shelling the Russian parliament and launching a genocidal war in Chechnya, Ukrainians held free elections and a peaceful transfer of power.

While Vladimir Putin was murdering political opponents, Ukrainians were doing the hard work of building democracy.

While Russia slid into the embrace of China and other authoritarian states, the Ukrainian people braved bullets and batons on the maidan and demanded their nation turn West.

And when Russia invaded Ukraine solely with the aim of destroying, Ukraine continued to build. Ukraine built a modern military powerhouse, raised the strongest army in Europe and became an innovator in drone warfare.

My organization, the Renew Democracy Initiative, has been delivering life-saving aid to Ukraine since day one of the full-scale invasion—$15 million worth in the last four years. Just this spring, RDI led our second delegation to Ukraine—going to the frontlines in Kharkiv.

My colleagues also saw firsthand how Ukraine is punching above its weight. They met with the commander of Ukraine’s most effective drone unit. If the president of the United States were actually a successful businessman, he might take note of the fact that Ukraine is inflicting eleven-figure damages on Russian targets using UAVs that cost just a few thousand dollars each.

The lesson Ukrainians have for all of you in this room is that global leadership is not reserved for empires. Your past… your geography… these are not excuses to abdicate your responsibility as a founding member of the democratic alliance.

If the people of Ukraine, just 35 years after the fall of the USSR, with missiles, and drones, and rockets raining down upon them, abandoned by the US administration, if the people of Ukraine can lead—then Europe must lead, and your gameplan must be for Canada to lead too.

It would have been nice if Canada and the world’s other democracies had time to grow into this leadership role, gradually, without having that role violently thrust upon them by buffoons like Donald Trump and JD Vance. But… how does the serenity prayer go? “Give me the grace to accept what I can’t change, and the courage to change what I can.”

Well, here we are. Time to muster that courage.

Slava Ukraini.

P.S. While I was in Toronto, I had the opportunity to meet Canadian-American journalist and past Tryzub awardee Diane Francis. She recently gave a great interview about where things stand between Moscow and Kyiv. I encourage you to give it a watch:

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Issac Luna (Olvera) is a former US Marine Corps officer who fought for the Ukrainian military after the full-scale Russian invasion. He is the author of the book Reckoning Dreams and Fire, a memoir about his experience in Ukraine and other battles. Mr. Luna remains based in Ukraine. Follow him on X.

When I lived in Las Vegas, I worked in casinos—the Flamingo, the MGM Grand, the Bellagio.

One night I was at a bar with Dave, a coworker about 30 years older than me. As we talked, he drank whiskey with water and played video poker.

I asked him what was the most he’d ever won. “Eighty thousand,” he said. I asked if that offset the losses he’d accumulated over time. He didn’t hesitate: “No way.”

I thought his habit was stupid, but I kept it to myself. Gambling is a personal vice. It was none of my business. But there’s another case of gambling I can’t ignore.

Gannon Van Dyke is also a gambler, but of a different kind. Using a VPN, he placed bets on Polymarket that Venezuela’s dictator, Nicolás Maduro, would be out of power by January 31, 2026. He put more than a third of his salary on that one hand.

In early January, Maduro was indeed deposed, and the wager paid out more than tenfold. Van Dyke made about $400,000, moved the winnings through a foreign crypto vault, and asked Polymarket to delete his account.

Claude Shannon, a mathematician widely credited as the founder of information theory, was once asked what type of information is best. “Insider information,” he answered. Van Dyke wasn’t just any market participant. He was a senior soldier in the US Army Special Forces, involved in the operation to capture Maduro. He had exactly the kind of information Shannon was talking about.

Van Dyke is now charged with illegally using confidential government information for personal gain. The military disciplines people every day, often not for violating laws, but for violating standards. The court will determine his legal guilt, but he is absolutely guilty of violating the trust and confidence placed upon him. His actions were unethical. They were dishonorable.

Systems that trade on uncertainty—casinos, financial markets, sports—are supposed to limit the use of unfair advantages. That is why insider trading is illegal. Yet we are accustomed to these abuses of access by business executives, by coaches and athletes, and by members of Congress. Each case erodes trust in the system and those running it. People question its legitimacy, and they stop participating in it.

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The United States maintains the most expensive military in the world, and Americans trust the military more than any other public institution. The citizenry funds it with the expectation that it will operate with discipline, professionalism, and ethical restraint.

To maintain that trust, the military operates under a separate system of rules. During my time in uniform I was constantly reminded of the standards—legal or not: “Don’t do drugs”, “pay your bills”, “get a haircut”, “wear a belt” (really!). The military even has a separate system of justice to deal with violations of these standards, all to enforce discipline and, in part, to protect the trust borrowed from the public.

As a noncommissioned officer, or NCO, with almost two decades in uniform, Gannon Van Dyke would have recited the NCO Creed many times. Part of it reads: “I will not use my grade or position to attain pleasure, profit, or personal safety.” By converting his trust and confidence into financial gain, he not only violated this oath, but betrayed the social contract Americans have with their military.

This is not only about ethics; it is also about our collective security. Markets are information systems, made up of data points. Adversaries do not require access to a full intelligence picture. They only need fragments—signals. They collect these bits of information and aggregate them to form a more comprehensive and actionable picture.

Operational security is not only about defending tangible assets, but also about protecting these subtle indicators from our adversaries. Van Dyke’s bet was a signal. He created it. The platform broadcasted it. Iran and Russia almost certainly exploited it.

There is nothing new about trying to profit from a military outcome. During the American Civil War, financiers and commodity traders speculated on Union versus Confederate victory: cotton prices, gold, railroad stocks, and government bonds all moved based on battlefield news. What is new is the infrastructure that makes this behavior scalable. Platforms like Polymarket turn war, elections, and geopolitical crises into tradable instruments.

But not all information should be aggregated, and not all events should be turned into markets—certainly not by soldiers participating in them. We already have the frameworks to deal with gambling, national security, and insider trading; they should be applied here.

We have come to accept ethical disappointments in other parts of government. We expect them from politicians, even assuming they’re unavoidable. But we must not accept them from the military. For those who deal in life or death on our behalf, the standard must be one of ethical behavior, not merely legality.

Whether or not US Army Master Sergeant Gannon Van Dyke is guilty, his case should be straightforward. So should his punishment. Given that his actions were dishonorable, he should be demoted and receive a dishonorable discharge from the Service. Anything less signals that this kind of behavior is acceptable.

Like my old colleague Dave, Van Dyke may have had one bet that paid big, but when all the factors are considered, he is a net loser. And if such actions are treated lightly, we all lose.

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Is NATO dead? Find out on our next premium subscriber Zoom call, featuring former NATO Secretary General and Prime Minister of Denmark Anders Fogh Rasmussen. The conversation—exclusively for premium subscribers—will take place on Wednesday, May 27 at 9am ET. For more information and registration, click here.

The term “regime change” is a third rail in US politics—but how do you play the game of world affairs with bad actors who break the rules? Renew Democracy Initiative Chairman Garry Kasparov joins Linda Chavez to discuss what it would mean to throw out entrenched dictators in Russia and Iran—and how the Trump administration is bungling the war in the Middle East.

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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Read on to the end of the article for an invitation to our next premium subscriber Zoom call, featuring former NATO Secretary General and Prime Minister of Denmark Anders Fogh Rasmussen—taking place on Wednesday, May 27 at 9am ET.

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

I’m on my way back from Toronto, where I just received the Friend of Ukraine Award from the Tryzub Gala Foundation, which recognizes people for their support of Ukraine.

(Of course, the real heroes are the men and women of Ukraine, who are taking on enormous risks and sacrificing every day and every night. Nevertheless, I’m flattered and grateful for the opportunity to help advance this most worthy cause.)

Last year, I rocked the boat a bit in a different part of Canada. It was at the Halifax International Security Forum, where I said that “NATO doesn’t exist anymore.”

“It’s a fake.” I went on to say. “It’s N-A-T-O, four letters.”

It were as if I’d committed heresy! Some people are still mad at me for saying this! I guess it makes sense that they responded this way, since my point was that Article 5 is actually an article of faith—not a functioning enforcement mechanism.

If Russia were to probe the alliance with a small incursion—say, nabbing one predominantly Russian-speaking city in Latvia or Estonia, would Spanish or Portuguese troops really get into a shooting war with Moscow?

Would Canada get involved?

What about the United States? Certainly not under this administration, but even with a Democrat in the White House, can we be so sure?

My belief was reinforced earlier this week at a forum in New York that the Renew Democracy Initiative organized with the Consulates General of Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Lithuania.

I participated in an illuminating discussion with Swedish Consul General Ambassador Erik Ullenhag and RDI CEO Uriel Epshtein.

There are some countries that would respond to a Russian trespass in Northern Europe. I strongly suspect that our Nordic and Baltic friends really do intend to stand up. Their representatives all signaled that historical experience, coupled with the more recent memory of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, has put them in a more ready position.

But the Nordics and Baltics, as courageous and committed as they are, represent only one part of the democratic alliance. Forcing them to carry the burden of defending the Free World alone is untenable, just as it’s unsustainable (not to mention unfair) to place that responsibility squarely on Ukraine.

A conversation on the future of the democratic alliance

So, if NATO isn’t working in its current form, the allies need to start thinking about what comes next. No mortal institution is sacred, but the values of mutual security, freedom, and prosperity are.

To help start that conversation, I’d like to turn to a friend who understands NATO’s challenges well: Anders Fogh Rasmussen.

Anders served as secretary general of NATO, and before that, for eight years as prime minister of Denmark (a country that, more recently, has had to endure insulting and dangerous threats against its territory from its nominal NATO ally in Washington).

I’ll be holding a Zoom conversation with Anders for premium subscribers of The Next Move, coming up on Wednesday, May 27, 2026 at 9am ET. We’ll discuss the future of NATO, Nordic and Baltic security, and, of course, the two million-square kilometer elephant in the room: Greenland.

If you’re not already a premium subscriber, you can upgrade to join our call with Anders. The registration link for our talk is just below the paywall.

And if you’d like to bring a friend, I encourage you to gift a subscription. They’ll get all of the same benefits that you receive, including access to our May 27 talk.

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As always, I don’t take one kopek from your contributions. All of your support helps to drive the work of RDI, including direct aid to Ukraine, organizing dissident-led civic education, and shaping the conversation here on The Next Move.

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