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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I might as well sing “Yankee Doodle.”

And yet and yet …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But, you know: a little dignity and respect.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everything is downward, downward.

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

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

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

Here is a recent presidential missive, typical:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

Ford ended his remarks with an admonition:

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

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

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

This is classically American.

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

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

That is an arresting sentence.

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

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

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

Well then, why did he do it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More from The Next Move:

This column is Part I in a mini series looking at America’s milestone birthdays—and how contemporary leaders handled those anniversaries. Stay tuned for our coverage of President Ford at America’s bicentennial and Donald Trump at the semiquincentennial.

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

“You go to war with the army you have,” said Donald Rumsfeld. By the same token, you mark a major American anniversary with the president you have. We are now celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

In 1826, on the 50th, John Quincy Adams was president. On the day itself—July 4, 1826—his father, John Adams, died. So did another former president, Thomas Jefferson.

In 1876, on the centennial, Ulysses S. Grant was president. (Short years before, on the field of battle, he had played a pivotal role in saving the Union.) In 1926, on the 150th anniversary, Calvin Coolidge was president. In 1976, for the bicentennial, it was Gerald R. Ford. And today, of course, the president is Donald Trump.

Here and now, I would like to focus on 1926. That year, Coolidge delivered an excellent speech—even a profound one—on the Declaration of Independence, and on the American founding in general.

That it speaks to us today—even in urgent tones—need hardly be said. But I will say it regardless: it does.

Coolidge delivered the speech in Philadelphia on the day after, i.e., July 5. His birthday, by the way, was July 4. He is the only president to have been born on the Fourth of July.

This president was known as “Silent Cal,” because he was taciturn. Do you know this famous anecdote about him? Whether it is true or not, it is illustrative.

When it is her turn in a receiving line, a woman says to Coolidge, “I have a bet with my husband that I can get you to say more than two words.” Coolidge replies, “You lose.”

He may have been sparing with his words—but he usually made them matter, as he did on that July day in 1926.

Coolidge described the Declaration of Independence as “the most important civil document in the world.” Its publication, he said, was “an incomparable event in the history of government.” That is not mere Fourth of July rhetoric—or Fifth of July rhetoric—but true, or at least arguably so.

“Amid all the clash of conflicting interests, amid all the welter of partisan politics,” said Coolidge, “every American can turn for solace and consolation to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States with the assurance and confidence that those two great charters of freedom and justice remain firm and unshaken.”

I believe we are in need of “solace and consolation” today, amid that “clash” and that “welter.” Do we care to turn to our “two great charters”? Are we sufficiently aware of them? They may be the only thing that can hold us together.

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When I was in college, I sometimes heard the American Revolution mocked as “conservative”—not a real revolution, such as France would see 13 years later! Well, Coolidge embraced this. Referring to the Declaration, he said, “It had about it nothing of the lawless and disordered nature of a riotous insurrection.”

(The words “riotous insurrection” might remind you of January 6, as they do me.)

Our founding was “in no sense a radical movement,” said Coolidge, “but took on the dignity of a resistance to illegal usurpations. It was conservative…”

If you want to start a brawl, just say, “America is an idea” (apart from blood and soil). In Philadelphia, Calvin Coolidge said that our founders established a new nation, yes, but also a new kind of nation: one built on ideas, principles, ideals.

He cited a big three—three “very definite propositions,” as he called them: all men are created equal; they have inalienable rights; the just powers of government come from the consent of the governed.

In 1926, as today, there were people who thought that the Declaration was outdated, that we needed something more suited to modern life. Coolidge would have none of it.

“If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final.”

Do you fancy yourself a progressive? Do I? What are we progressing from?

“No advance, no progress, can be made beyond these propositions,” said Coolidge. “If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward…”

Backward to when?

To a time “when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction cannot lay claim to progress. They are reactionary.”

Every day, I hear the claims of the “post-liberals.” To me, it usually seems that they are “pre-liberals.” The Enlightenment was a big mistake, and so was the American founding. Some of them say so outright (which has the virtue of candor).

You know what Benjamin Franklin said, after the Constitutional Convention. When someone asked, “Do we have a republic or a monarchy?,” Franklin answered, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Here is Coolidge:

“A spring will cease to flow if its source be dried up; a tree will wither if it roots be destroyed. In its main features, the Declaration of Independence is a great spiritual document. It is a declaration not of material but of spiritual conceptions.”

For example?

“Equality, liberty, popular sovereignty, the rights of man—these are not elements which we can see and touch. They are ideals. They have their source and their roots in the religious convictions. They belong to the unseen world.”

And here comes a warning:

“Unless the faith of the American people in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish. We cannot continue to enjoy the result if we neglect and abandon the cause.”

Government has a role, right? It does. “Of course the government can help to sustain ideals and can create institutions through which they can be the better observed…” There is a but coming.

“…but their source by their very nature is in the people. The people have to bear their own responsibilities. There is no method by which that burden can be shifted to the government. It is not the enactment, but the observance of laws, that creates the character of a nation.”

That last sentence deserves to be read twice, as does the whole speech.

I will leave you with a passage—another one—that is beautiful, thought-provoking, and, to my sense, true:

“We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren scepter in our grasp.”

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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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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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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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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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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.

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.

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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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Last week, Hamidreza Mohammadi told Radio Farda that his sister was “on the brink of death.” This was because of the torture and other abuse she had endured.

His sister is Narges Mohammadi, the Iranian political prisoner and Nobel peace laureate. She is a heroine of our time, a woman of almost super-human bravery and integrity. Now 54, she has been in and out of prison throughout her adult life—mostly in.

She was in prison when she received her Nobel prize in 2023. She had predecessors, in Nobel history.

Carl von Ossietzky was a prisoner of the Nazis when he received the peace prize for 1935. He died, still a prisoner, in 1938, at age 48. Liu Xiaobo was a prisoner of the Chinese Communist Party when he received his prize in 2010. He died, still a prisoner, in 2017, when he was 61.

Narges Mohammadi symbolizes the struggle of Iranian citizens against their dictatorship, and particularly the struggle of women—who have been in the forefront of the country’s democracy movement.

She was born on April 21, 1972, in Zanjan, where she is imprisoned, and near death, today. Her education in the brutal realities of the country began early.

“At the age of nine, when I heard my mother’s cries of mourning after the execution of her niece, a university student, and my grandmother’s lamentations after her son had been tortured, my childhood dreams were shattered.”

Mohammadi gave that testimony in 2023, after her Nobel was announced. She also said this:

“I was a 19-year-old girl when I was detained because of wearing an orange coat. At the detention center, breathless with disbelief, horror, and shock, I saw grim-looking men in black uniforms with whips in their hands who relentlessly lashed the bodies of four women …”

In 2003, when she was about 30, Mohammadi went to work for the Defenders of Human Rights Center, founded by the lawyer Shirin Ebadi. That same year, Ebadi won the Nobel Peace Prize. She would serve as Mohammadi’s mentor.

Mohammadi helped families of prisoners and campaigned against torture—including rape—and execution. Of course, she would often need such help herself.

She was in prison—Tehran’s unspeakable Evin Prison—in September 2022, when a movement erupted. A 22-year-old woman, Mahsa Jina Amini, had been killed by the “morality police.” This gave rise to a slogan, a chant: “Woman, Life, Freedom!” And those words became the name of the movement.

When the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced its award to Mohammadi a year later, the committee said that it was honoring this movement as well.

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The new laureate herself was able to communicate some stirring news. When women in Evin Prison heard about the Nobel to Mohammadi, they responded with a cry that resounded throughout their cells: “Woman, Life, Freedom!”

Mohammadi said, to the world at large, “Victory is not easy, but it is certain.”

Like Carl von Ossietzky and Liu Xiaobo before her, Mohammadi was not released from prison to collect her prize in Oslo. (That prize is bestowed in a ceremony each December 10.) Her family was there in her stead.

Mohammadi has always refused to go into exile. Her husband, Taghi Rahmani, and their twin children, Ali and Kiana, live in France.

From Ali, we have an interesting story. When the prize for his mother was announced in October, he was in school—checking his phone under his desk. “I couldn’t shout in class,” he said, “but I was so happy.” He further said: “We are afraid for my mom every day. The Nobel prize is a sign for her to continue straight on and not abandon the fight.”

At the ceremony in Oslo, the laureate’s absence was symbolized by an empty chair. On the chair, her Nobel medal and diploma were placed. Behind the chair, there was a picture of her—a picture selected by the prisoner-laureate herself.

The committee chairman, Berit Reiss-Andersen, said, “She has asked us to use this particular photograph, which expresses how she wants to lead her life—looking happy in colorful garments, exposing her hair, and with a steady gaze towards us.”

“Exposing her hair”? Mohammadi is a firm opponent of compulsory hijab, which she says is a tool of tyrannical control, not piety.

From Evin Prison, Mohammadi was able to write or dictate a Nobel lecture, which was read by her children in Oslo. Here is one passage:

“Democracy, thanks to its inherent capacity for freedom and equality, has been a fundamental demand of Iranian society, and, almost unanimously, civil society calls for fundamental changes and a transition to democracy…”

Possibly, the Iranian regime did not want this Nobel peace laureate to die in prison. In 2024, they gave her a medical furlough, for her health was failing (as why would it not?). But they rearrested her on December 12, 2025, horrifically.

She had attended and spoken at a funeral—that of Khosrow Alikordi, a human rights lawyer. The authorities said he had died of a heart attack; his colleagues and supporters said—credibly—that he had been murdered.

Arresting Mohammadi, agents beat her to a pulp, repeatedly kicking her in the genitals. If you can bear further details, you can find them in a bulletin from the Nobel committee, here.

Since the start of the war with the United States and Israel on February 28, the Iranian regime has cracked down on internal dissent with extra ferocity. Last week, they hanged a 21-year-old athlete from Isfahan, Sasan Azadvar Junaqan. His offense? “Moharebe,” i.e., “enmity against God.”

Whether Narges Mohammadi will still be alive by the time you read this, I don’t know. I do know this: in virtually every time and place, dictatorships imprison, maim, and kill some of the best people in their grasp.

A further taste of who Narges Mohammadi is can be had in an incident described by Berit Reiss-Andersen, when she was speaking about the laureate at the ceremony in Oslo:

“Recently, she was offered much-needed medical help at a hospital on the condition that she wear a hijab when leaving the prison. She refused and initiated a hunger strike. Finally, she was taken to the hospital for a brief examination under tight security—but not wearing a hijab. Her resolve is unshakable.”

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

Before Donald J. Trump and Trumpism, there was Patrick J. Buchanan and Buchananism. In 1995, William J. Bennett was talking with The New Yorker about Buchanan.

Bennett, you recall, had been a secretary of education under Reagan, and he was a leading light of what was then known as “neoconservatism.”

Buchanan, said Bennett, was “flirting” with fascism. He had a black-and-white view of the world: there were friends and there were enemies, period. “A real us-and-them kind of thing,” said Bennett.

When the article came out, The New Yorker had mistranscribed Bennett’s remark: “A real S & M kind of thing.”

Oops. This caused great hilarity among some of us.

We are definitely living in an us-and-them time. With social media—and the media at large—everyone is in his own “silo,” hearing his own point of view, to the exclusion of others. People worry about “polarization.”

This worrying can be overdone. A free society involves rough-and-tumble, and divisions will be sharp. I am of the school that says, “Beware calls for national unity. The callers may well mean, ‘Unify on my terms. Get with my program.’”

In a bracing essay, published a month ago, Simone Sepe put in a word for polarization—or at least the allowance of these sharp divisions. Sepe is a professor of law at the University of Toronto, and his essay was published by the Center for the Philosophy of Freedom at the University of Arizona.

The essay’s title? It borrows from a now-classic movie of 2007: There Will Be Blood.

All of Sepe’s essay should be read and pondered, but I will quote only the final words: “There will be polarization. There will be ideas. There will be blood.”

Sure—but let it not be too overflowing or too literal. (Sepe, needless to say, agrees with this.) Our society is cursed by violence, as we saw again a few days ago with another assassination attempt on President Trump.

In 2020, David French published a book called Divided We Fall. His working title had been The Great American Divorce. His subtitle is America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation. His answer, in a word, is “pluralism”—a renewed appreciation of this important concept.

In the American house are many mansions, so to speak. But they all exist under one constitutional, liberal-democratic roof.

French highlights an academic paper that does nothing less than “explain America,” he says. That paper is “The Law of Group Polarization,” by Cass Sunstein, published in 1999. Its author was then at the University of Chicago Law School and since 2008 has been at Harvard Law.

In French’s summation, this is the law of group polarization: “When people of like mind gather, they tend to become more extreme.”

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

Last week, I talked with Professor Sunstein in a podcast. We discussed a range of issues, including this old devil polarization, and its law.

In the 1990s, said Sunstein, he and collaborators studied jury behavior. They found that juries tended to be more outraged at corporate misconduct than their individual members were. In other words, the jury as a group was more outraged than its median member.

Sunstein went on to study political preferences among Coloradans. When left-of-center people got together to talk, they became more extreme, and the same happened on the right. Internal disagreements or nuances were muted; confidence increased (perhaps a misguided confidence).

A person on his own was more moderate than a person in a group—a person with his tribe.

When Sunstein was explaining all this to me, I thought, I swear, of Saeb Erekat, the longtime negotiator for the PLO. I encountered him one winter in Davos, where he spoke to a group of us journalists.

His fellow Palestinians in groups, he told us, would say to him, “Why are you bothering with these Israelis? Why are you even talking to them? Palestine is ours, from the river to the sea!”

But as individuals, when no one else was looking, they would scurry up to him and say, “Dr. Erekat, we are so tired of living like this. Can’t you bring us peace?”

Not to go all Charles Darwin on you, but tribalism is natural in man, and you can no more stop it than you can stop the tide. Some tribalism is healthful, I dare say. Think of sports rivalries, with their colors, fight songs, and war chants.

But even these rivalries can get out of hand. I have observed this in my home state of Michigan, with increasing enmity between Wolverines and Spartans.

Returning to politics, I think of a recurring phrase: “one of us.” Nixon used it. “Is he one of us?” he would ask. Tom Wicker published a biography of Nixon titled One of Us.

Margaret Thatcher used the phrase, too. There is a delicious anecdote about her (its veracity aside). Aides wanted her to draw on a sketch from Monty Python, the famous comedy troupe. Thatcher was not known for her knowledge of popular culture. She said, “Now, this Monty Python: is he one of us?”

Hugo Young published a biography of Thatcher: One of Us.

In 2012, the Obama-Biden campaign aired a television ad that I considered ugly. It ended with the words, “Mitt Romney. Not one of us.”

I myself used “one of us” for many years. I was on the board of a foundation that sought to promote diversity on college campuses by backing conservative programs on those campuses.

And by “conservative,” I mean, mainly, “liberal,” or “classical liberal.” We were interested in free markets, Great Books, Bach cantatas, and all that other square stuff.

The nature or success of a program often depends on a particular faculty member. And I would inquire of our board’s executive director: “Is he one of us?”

I blush a little, but only a little. We all have our affinities, including political affinities. If I have a tribe, it is Reagan conservatives, who could occupy about three teepees these days.

My usual line is, “We could hold our convention at a modest-sized Denny’s.”

But my greater tribe is the American republic, and my still greater tribe is liberal democracy, as in the Renew Democracy Initiative, whose publication you are reading.

I want us all to argue vehemently—even fight like hell—but “within institutional bounds,” as Simone Sepe says in his “there will be blood” essay. Under the roof of democracy, in the atmosphere of ordered liberty.

Have all the “us and them” you want—but remember that there is an ultimate “us” with common rights and a common home.

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

Two weeks ago, the Boston Symphony Orchestra traveled south to appear in New York’s Carnegie Hall. They opened with three scenes from Nixon in China, the opera by John Adams. As the title suggests, it’s about Nixon’s historic trip to China in 1972.

Our program notes for the evening said the following: “By the 1980s, when Nixon in China was conceived, both former US president Richard Nixon (1913–1994) and the late Chinese leader Mao Zedong (1893–1976) were nearly universally maligned figures.”

Sure. One was one of the most blood-soaked dictators in history, and the other was a corrupt politician in a democracy, who, on the verge of impeachment, resigned and went home.

Our program notes referred to “Western antipathy to Maoist communism.” Oh? What about Chinese antipathy to that communism? What about the dissidents over the years who have given their lives in standing up to it?

One more quotation: “Adams and his creative partners, realizing the significance of Nixon’s visit, took an approach that avoids satire and latter-day political critique in spite of their inherent antipathy to Nixon and his politics.”

You have to wonder what they thought of Mao’s “politics.” According to The Black Book of Communism—published by Harvard University Press in 1999—Mao was responsible for some 65 million deaths.

The sheer horror of Chinese communism has never quite penetrated the American or Western mind. This is a source of wonder and bewilderment to Chinese dissidents and their supporters.

I have been thinking about China lately, in part because of the Boston Symphony concert, but mainly because I recorded a podcast with Yaqiu Wang. She is a Chinese human rights activist here in the United States. She is affiliated with the University of Chicago’s Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression. She has also worked for Freedom House, among other organizations.

She was born in the 1980s to a family of peasants in Zhejiang Province. That’s what it said right on their registration cards: “peasants.”

“My birth is itself a human rights story,” says Yaqiu. She was the third child in the family, at a time when China had its one-child policy. The first child, a son, had been born with a disability, so the second child, a daughter, was legal. The third? Illegal.

Yaqiu’s mother hid the pregnancy, as best she could. When schooltime began, Yaqiu kept her distance from her sister (who was five grades above her). It was better for people not to know about this multiple-child family.

“When I was growing up,” Yaqiu says, “I always heard the propaganda that extra children were a burden to society.” That’s what the government called them: “extra children.”

“I carried that shame until I came to America,” she says, “where I realized that having siblings is normal.”

She came as an exchange student, at the University of South Carolina. She noticed something about Americans—something that all Chinese notice, she says: Americans have “freedom on their face.” They carry themselves in a confident manner, unafraid.

Courtesy of a congressman, Yaqiu had a tour of the White House. “I fell in love with American democracy,” she says. “I am one of those people who feel they were born in the wrong country.”

At the same time, she works for her fellow Chinese every day: arguing for their rights. She has had to cut off communication with her family back home, painful as it is. She does not want to invite any trouble for them.

In our podcast, I asked Yaqiu Wang about political prisoners. For years, I wrote about Liu Xiaobo, probably the most prominent of Chinese political prisoners. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010—received it in absentia. He died in 2017, still a prisoner.

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

Liu Xiaobo was, simply, one of the great men of our time.

There are many political prisoners in China today, and Yaqiu Wang gave me the name of one of them: Xu Zhiyong. He is a civil rights lawyer, born in 1973. He comes from Minquan County in Henan Province. “Minquan” means “civil rights,” believe it or not. Xu has said that the course of his life was practically predetermined.

In 2003, he co-founded the Open Constitution Initiative, which lasted until 2009, when the authorities shut it down. In 2010, he founded the New Citizens’ Movement, which is a network of democracy-minded people (a loose network, relatively hard to track and target).

Like most activists and leaders of his kind, Xu has been in and out of prison—although mainly in. He was arrested in 2013 and imprisoned until 2017. Once out, he resumed his activism, of course. In 2020, he was arrested once more and remains in prison today.

He has been tortured, as political prisoners, everywhere, routinely are.

Campaigning for him is his partner, personal and professional: Li Qiaochu. “It’s a great love story,” says Yaqiu Wang. Li was arrested in 2021 and imprisoned for three years and eight months. Once released, she went right back to work, campaigning for Xu, risking another arrest.

“People can be ‘crazy,’” Yaqiu observes, “but in such a heroic way.”

In 2012, Xu Zhiyong published a kind of manifesto concerning the New Citizens’ Movement. “This movement is a political movement in which this ancient nation bids utter farewell to authoritarianism and completes the civilized transformation to constitutional governance.”

The “goal” of this movement, Xu writes, “is a free China ruled by democracy and law.”

At the “core” of the movement is “the citizen.” And a citizen is “not a subject” but “an independent and free entity.” The citizen “obeys a rule of law that is commonly agreed upon” and “does not have to kneel down to any given person.”

In February 2020, as the coronavirus was spreading, Xu wrote an open letter to the ruling Communist, Xi Jinping, calling on him to resign. “What China needs above all other things is Freedom!” Xu wrote. “Only with freedom will creativity truly flourish and progress be possible.”

According to Yaqiu Wang, ordinary Chinese people strongly desire freedom and democracy. But it is very dangerous to express this desire. The likes of Xu Zhiyong and Li Qiaochu are never common, in any police state. But that does not mean that Chinese as a whole are happy with their lot.

She also has a message for citizens of her adopted country: “I really want Americans to know that what they have is very good, and they should cherish it”—and, if necessary, “fight for it.”

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For a stretch of years, there was a group of US congressmen who could be depended on to speak up for human rights—human rights anywhere in the world.

There are always people who will speak up for human rights in this country or that. And who will oppose this dictator or that. But human rights for everyone, and opposition to dictators everywhere?

That’s another story.

In April 2005, I wrote a story titled “Congressional Champions.” These were champions of human rights.

Among them were two Cuban-American Republicans from Miami: Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Lincoln Diaz-Balart. Other Republicans included Frank Wolf and Chris Smith. Democrats included Tom Lantos, Gary Ackerman, and Eliot Engel.

Referring to this group, Ros-Lehtinen quoted Shakespeare: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.”

Of that band, only Smith remains in Congress. The others are either retired or deceased. Eliot Engel died last week at 79. He served in Congress from 1989 to 2021.

Engel was a “Cold War liberal,” or a “JFK Democrat,” as he said to me. He also said that he was just about the last of the breed.

“I have always felt strongly about democracy,” he said. “We should promote basic freedom in the world. I have throughout my career been consistent in opposing both right-wing and left-wing dictatorships.”

The record proved it.

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

Engel was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1947. He was a month shy of 14 when John F. Kennedy was sworn in as president. Engel’s parents were working-class and Jewish. He was always aware of the Holocaust—it influenced his work.

Engel was alarmed by the “ethnic cleansing” of Albanians in Kosovo. And at the wholesale slaughter of Syrians, by the Assad regime and its allies. And at the targeting of the Uyghur minority by the Chinese government.

For him, the Holocaust hovered in the background.

Out of college, Engel became a schoolteacher and guidance counselor. Then he was elected to the New York State Assembly, where he served for 12 years, before going to Washington.

He wanted to sit on the Foreign Affairs Committee. Most congressmen, especially new ones, shun that committee, because it does them no favors. You can’t “bring home the bacon” to your district, and you can’t enhance your reelection. In fact, you may hurt it.

“He spends all his time on other countries and ignores folks right here at home!”

Engel, however, was different. As Josh Rogin noted in a 2020 column, the freshman congressman was presented with a questionnaire, asking him to list his three preferred committee assignments. On all three lines, he wrote, “Foreign Affairs.”

“I figured they would get the hint,” he said.

Throughout his years in Congress, he was opposed by the “activists,” as he called them. He meant activists and critics to his left. Engel provoked their wrath by supporting the Patriot Act of 2001, for example. And by opposing the Iran deal worked out by the Obama administration in 2015. He provoked and earned their wrath in multiple ways.

“If the activists aren’t happy with me, they’re not happy with me,” he told me. “So be it.”

They were really unhappy with him over Cuba. He was a staunch opponent of the Castro dictatorship, and a staunch supporter of Cuba’s democracy movement. “My party has a blind spot on Cuba,” he told me. “And the Republican Party has its own blind spots.”

(For The Next Move last January, I wrote an article titled “Blind Spots: On selectivity in human rights.”)

“Castro is a dictator,” Engel said, “and to me he’s no different from Saddam Hussein or any of those other guys.” Whether “it’s Somoza or Castro or that jerk in Venezuela, dictators should be opposed, and opposed vigorously.”

The “jerk in Venezuela” was Hugo Chávez.

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen began a program whereby congressmen “adopted” a Cuban political prisoner, in order to call attention to that prisoner’s fate—and “Eliot was one of the first to respond,” she told me, “even though he doesn’t have any Cubans in his district.”

“He’s such a mensch, such a great guy,” she said.

This congressman from the Bronx—barely known in America—became well-known throughout the Albanian world: in Albania itself, and also in Macedonia, Montenegro, and Kosovo. That was because he stood up for their rights—not least the right not to be killed.

In the summer of 2005, I traveled with him and his party to Albania and elsewhere, reporting on their activities and the region at large. In the Kosovar town of Peja, they named a street after him: “Eliot L. Engel Boulevard.”

After the 2018 midterm elections, he finally got the seat he wanted: the chairmanship of the Foreign Affairs Committee. He held it for only two years, however, as he was defeated in a Democratic primary in 2020. His opponent and successor, Jamaal Bowman, was very different from a JFK Democrat. Engel seemed like a last gasp of history.

Who today, in either house of Congress, in either party, is concerned about freedom, democracy, and human rights, all over the world? Who has taken the place of Engel and the rest? Precious few. Fewer than the “happy few,” the “band of brothers,” that Ros-Lehtinen spoke about, back in ’05.

Engel told me, “I have always felt strongly about America’s role in the world. We, as a country, aren’t perfect. We’re all human, we all make mistakes. But I think our vision—what we want to share, what can be taken from our experience—is overwhelmingly positive. I don’t agree with the Blame America crowd.”

He also said, “You can be progressive and still understand that the United States is a force for good. We don’t always get it right, but we try to. And when we have the ability to save lives, we ought to use that ability.”

Last week, after he died, I contacted Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, to ask whether she wanted to say anything about her onetime colleague. She did.

“Eliot was almost an extinct animal in the public arena: a bipartisan and principled statesman who was unafraid to call out oppressors no matter their political bent. To Eliot, an oppressor on the left was as dangerous as one on the right.”

He “sought out compromise and did not consider it heresy or treason to see issues from another person’s point of view.”

This “did not mean that he was easily manipulated. Quite the contrary. Eliot knew where he stood on issues and was always a reliable voice and vote in behalf of freedom, human rights, and democracy in every corner of the world.”

To me, Eliot Engel stood for an Americanism that barely exists in our country anymore. I look forward to a revival.

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Last week, I spoke with a young colleague of mine about coming of age. She came of age in the early Trump era. Trump Republicanism, the Trump style—it all seems perfectly normal to her (and why wouldn’t it?).

I, conversely, came of age in the Reagan era. So I have my own sense of what is normal and right, not having quite adjusted to our “new normal.”

President Reagan always took care to distinguish dictatorships from the people ruled by those dictatorships. President Trump seldom takes any such trouble.

Without a peace deal with Iran, he said on Sunday, “we’re blowing up the whole country.” He also said, “If they don’t make a deal, I am blowing up everything over there.”

If you were an Iranian—and as anti-regime as they come—how would you feel about that? How would that sound in your ear?

Trump wrote, “Our Military, the greatest and most powerful (by far!) anywhere in the World, hasn’t even started destroying what’s left in Iran. Bridges next, then Electric Power Plants!”

Again, how would you feel, how would that sound to you?

In a television address, Trump said, “We are going to hit them extremely hard. Over the next two to three weeks, we’re going to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong.”

Who is “them,” exactly? The bad guys? Who belongs in the “Stone Ages”?

We used to say that the US president was the leader of the Free World, responsible for assuring people under dictatorship that, whatever we could do practically, we were on their side. (More on this in due course.)

I recall President Reagan making a television address two days before Christmas in 1981. The Polish dictatorship, under pressure from Moscow, had just imposed martial law. Reagan said that Christmas was bringing “little joy to the courageous Polish people. They have been betrayed by their own government.”

Reagan announced some measures that the US was taking against that government—quickly adding, “These actions are not directed against the Polish people. They are a warning to the government of Poland that free men cannot and will not stand idly by in the face of brutal repression.”

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

Habitually, Reagan marked Captive Nations Week. This is how he put it in 1987: “For nearly three decades, Captive Nations Week has symbolized the American people’s solidarity with all throughout the world who courageously seek freedom and independence from Soviet domination.”

America, he said, “offers the world a vision of inalienable political, religious, and economic rights. This vision has always been shared among peoples subjugated by Soviet imperialism; and so has resistance, ever the catalyst of liberty.”

He also cited political prisoners, not just generally but specifically, by name: “people such as Gunārs Astra, Lev Lukyanenko, Mart Niklus, and Viktoras Petkus.”

Over and over—as a matter of both conscience and policy—Reagan and other officials of the era separated dictatorships from the people under their boot.

Here is the president in 1983, during Captive Nations Week: “Today we come to show solidarity with our brothers and sisters who are captives, not because of crimes that they have committed but because of crimes committed against them by dictators and tyrants.”

He went on to say, “To every person trapped in tyranny, whether in the Ukraine, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Cuba, or Vietnam, we send our love and support and tell them they are not alone.”

Reagan liked to use our “radios” to communicate with people abroad: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty; the Voice of America; and Radio Martí, which broadcasts to Cuba, and was established under Reagan.

Under President Trump, our radios have been all but abolished. (For a piece by me on this subject, published last year, go here.)

On December 31, 1986, over the Voice of America, Reagan delivered a New Year’s address to “the peoples of the Soviet Union.” He said, “The American people are deeply concerned with the fate of individual people, wherever they might be throughout the world. We believe that God gave sacred rights to every man, woman, and child on earth.”

This was not fare you would hear from Soviet state media. You would not hear it in Russia’s media today.

One more memory of Reagan—this one from July 24, 1987, when he went to the Ukrainian National Catholic Shrine in Washington, DC, to speak to a Captive Nations conference. He began by saying, “Let us look forward to the day when Ukrainian Catholics and members of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church will again be free to gather and worship in churches like this in their own homeland.”

Further on, he said, “Our global commitment to freedom does not mandate the sending of arms or troops, but at the very least it means that any people whose liberty is denied or whose independence is violated—that these people know we Americans are on their side.”

That was the way it was. That was the principle, the ethos. We were on their side.

Do the Iranian people know it, unmistakably? I hope they do.

On Easter, Trump tweeted, “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell—JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”

Who will be “living in Hell”? Just the ayatollahs and their goons? How about “Praise be to Allah”? Is that sincere or mocking? How would it sound in an everyday Iranian’s ear?

Six days after the terror attacks of 9/11, President George W. Bush went to a mosque to assure Muslims that our fight—the war that had been forced on us—was not against them. This was not mere politeness or political correctness. This was hard national interest—for we needed the support of countless Muslims.

Yesterday, in a post about Iran, Trump wrote, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

I ask once more: Can you imagine being an Iranian, hearing that?

In any event, a ceasefire is in place, as we go to press.

Looking back on Reagan, and beholding Trump today, I think of a French expression: Autres temps, autres mœurs—“Different times, different mores.” About five weeks ago, Senator Lindsey Graham (R, SC), said, “To Donald J. Trump: You just surpassed Ronald Reagan as the most consequential Republican president since Lincoln.” He went on to say, “You’re Reagan plus, plus, plus.”

One more French expression: À chacun son goût—“To each his own.”

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A week and a half ago, CPAC, an American organization, held one of its regular jamborees in Hungary. Hungary, under Viktor Orbán, is a seat of the “postliberal” Right. Many such rightists have visited Hungary in recent days, boosting Orbán for a sixth term in office.

Marine Le Pen of France was there. So was Matteo Salvini of Italy. So was Geert Wilders of the Netherlands.

Both the Kremlin and the White House are going all-out for Orbán’s reelection. I wrote about this two weeks ago, here (“Putin and Trump for Orbán”).

President Trump did not attend the recent CPAC conclave in Hungary, but he sent a video. Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, was scheduled to attend in person, but the war with Iran kept him at home, and he, too, sent a video. For good measure, his son Yair spoke to the gathering.

Prime Minister Netanyahu told the CPAC-ers, “I want to thank you for standing up for Western civilization.” Then, speaking about his Hungarian counterpart personally, he said:

“I want to thank my friend Viktor Orbán. He has been like a rock. … I know many world leaders, and I can tell you he is right there at the top. Viktor Orbán means stability, safety, security.”

As a rule, a country is the ally of another country, regardless of who is in office. In democracies, leaders come and go. But things have gotten very personal lately.

Standing alongside Orbán in February, and addressing him, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, “Especially as long as you’re the prime minister and the leader of this country, it’s in our national interest that Hungary be successful.”

Ponder this business of “Western civilization” for a second. It is an article of faith among Orbán fans that he is a champion and protector of that civilization. Here is a tweet from Steve King, an Iowa Republican who was in Congress from 2003 to 2021: “History will record PM Orban the Winston Churchill of Western Civilization.”

(My comment was, “Personally, I would accord that honor to Churchill.”)

To some of us, Western civilization includes liberal democracy: the rule of law, an independent judiciary, independent media, etc. In 2018, Prime Minister Orbán declared, “The era of liberal democracy is over.”

Also, does Orbán’s alliance with Putin square with Western civilization? How about his hostility to Ukraine and its cause? Does that speak to you of Western civilization?

Orbán supporters point out that he is staunch against immigration, particularly of the Muslim kind. I must say, I agree that countries should retain their national character. There was a slogan, and a song, in the 1970s and ’80s: “Let Poland Be Poland.” Yes, and let Hungary be Hungary, let France be France, and so on.

It’s up to immigrants to assimilate to the countries they go to; it’s not up to countries to assimilate to the immigrants.

But here is what I deny: that it takes authoritarianism to have a sensible immigration policy; that it takes a partnership with Putin to have a sensible immigration policy.

Back, now, to Benjamin Netanyahu, who is my main subject today.

I have been a Netanyahu admirer for a long time. You could even have called me a Bibi fanboy. At a young age, I was drawn to the Israeli Right. I regard Menachem Begin as one of the outstanding political figures of the second half of the twentieth century.

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The survival and flourishing of Israel is very important to me. I wrote about this in 2015, in a piece called “Hung Up on Israel.”

I think I first became aware of Netanyahu in the early 1980s, when he was deputy chief of mission at the Israeli embassy in Washington. Then he was Israel’s ambassador to the UN.

In my opinion, there was no better spokesman for Israel and its cause. He articulated principles and ideals—and facts—that were important.

Then, too, there was a mystique surrounding his family, as his valiant brother Jonathan was the only Israeli soldier killed during the raid on Entebbe. (This was the operation to rescue Israeli hostages in Uganda.) The raid took place on July 4, 1976, America’s Bicentennial Day.

Benjamin Netanyahu first became prime minister in 1996. His spokesman was David Bar-Illan, a pianist, whom I knew. Pianists as politicos—Israel is an unusual country.

In a later government, Netanyahu was finance minister. He was a liberalizer. Critics accused him of being “Thatcherite”—which was fine with me.

He returned to the office of prime minister in 2009 and has been there almost continuously since. Over and over, he clashed with President Obama—on Iran and other matters. I sided with Netanyahu. Did that make me unpatriotic? “America First!”

Well, tough. I thought Netanyahu was right.

In those years, I referred to him as the “Leader of the West.” (I applied the same designation to Stephen Harper, the prime minister of Canada.) In a forum once, I asked Paul Johnson, the British historian, “Whom do you regard as a major and impressive statesman today?” He named Netanyahu. “A man of destiny,” he said.

That sounded right to me.

As Netanyahu’s years in office wore on, my doubts set in. For one thing, I thought he was staying too long. He was not letting others in his party rise. Also, it seemed to me he was equating Israel’s security with his hold on power. But if the survival of a country depends on one man, who is mortal, it has no chance.

David Ben-Gurion, too, had a hard time exiting the scene. Frankly, I think my beloved Margaret Thatcher stayed too long. Speaking of beloved British prime ministers: Did Churchill really need that extra premiership in the 1950s? Did it do anything to burnish his record?

There was a touch of megalomania about Netanyahu. At his rallies, they chanted, “Bibi, King of Israel!” The democrat in me balked at that.

We should then note the charges of corruption. “But it’s the Left, it’s the media!” some of my friends say. That is reflexive in conservatives. “The Left, the media!” I understand this well.

Let me tell you something. I admired Reagan, and maybe over-admired him. I defended him at every turn: Iran-contra, Bitburg … Yes, I liked him, even loved him. But perhaps even more, I hated his enemies.

And you cannot let the “other side” win, ever.

In the summer of 2019, I was walking in Tel Aviv and saw the biggest campaign poster I had ever seen. It was on a skyscraper. I’m not sure how many storeys high it was, but—many. It showed Netanyahu and Putin in a chummy pose. The words read: “Netanyahu: In a league of his own.”

I was revolted—because I know who and what Putin is. I realize that nations must pursue their interests, and that the world is grubby, but I also know that there was a moral component to the founding of modern Israel.

Is Israel merely “another pleasant country on the UN roll call, somewhere between Albania and Zimbabwe,” to borrow Bush 41’s words?

At the end of 2022, Netanyahu formed another government—not especially conservative. It includes such figures as Itamar Ben-Gvir, a bona fide extremist. In Israel, my conservative friends were disquieted. In America? Not so much. They knew less. And the watchword had always been, “Bibi good, his critics bad.”

So too, the conservative or right-leaning media in Israel published robust debate about Netanyahu. Our own conservative or right-leaning media were less robust in this respect.

I also thought it was not especially good for Israel to be closely tied to the Republican Party—or any single party in America. The US-Israel relationship must be bigger than Trump and Netanyahu.

Here is a typical headline, from last month: “Trump demands immediate pardon for Netanyahu to focus on Iran.” (The article is here.)

Above, I mentioned Churchill and also Paul Johnson. In the 1930s, Johnson’s father had a negative view of Churchill. And he referred to him as “Churchill.” When the war came, the elder Johnson said something like, “We’d better get Winston.”

Paul Johnson, who was about twelve, noticed this: it had gone from “Churchill” to “Winston.”

I caught myself starting to say “Netanyahu” instead of “Bibi.” When I’m feeling warm toward the man, it’s “Bibi.” When I’m not, it’s “Netanyahu.”

About October 7, I will be brief: How could the government let Israel be naked unto its enemies, especially on the fiftieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War? I figured that the ensuing commission would make the Agranat Commission—the one that investigated the failures in 1973—look like a picnic.

But there was a war to fight, and Israeli and pro-Israel wagons circled, more or less.

Now the Iran war is upon us. Netanyahu realizes that Putin is an ally of Iran, right? And that Orbán has had cozy relations with Tehran, too?

In October 2022, Netanyahu published an autobiography: Bibi: My Story. This was eight months after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In the book, Netanyahu describes Putin as “smart, sophisticated and focused on one goal—returning Russia to its historical greatness.” We all have different ideas of “greatness.”

Putin has re-Sovietized Russia, abolishing civil society and independent media. There are more political prisoners in Russia today than in the last stage of the Soviet Union. Putin exiles, imprisons, maims, or kills his critics. He is committing war crime after war crime in Ukraine, as he seeks to subdue that nation and re-subjugate it.

If this is “greatness,” then to hell with greatness.

February 24, 2025, marked the third anniversary of the full-scale invasion. In the UN, Ukraine offered a resolution condemning Russia for its aggression and calling for the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine. The resolution passed 93 to 18.

Voting against the resolution were Russia, North Korea, Belarus, and Nicaragua. And Hungary (of course). And the United States. And Israel.

Of course?

Personally, I was sickened to see my country on that side of the vote—on the same side as Russia, North Korea, and the rest. Though it’s not my country, I was sickened to see Israel on that side too.

A question for you: If Benjamin Netanyahu puts paid to the Islamist regime in Iran and its tentacle Hamas—and maybe its tentacle Hezbollah, to boot—will anything that can be said against him pale in comparison?

Here at the end, I should “pull the trigger.” That’s what the late, great Norman Podhoretz instructed writers to do, especially in an opinion piece. You have to pull the trigger. You have to say what you believe, take a stand. Don’t leave the reader wondering.

The truth is, I’m ambivalent about Netanyahu. About “Bibi”! My only comfort is that others of my acquaintance are in the same boat.

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Editor’s Note: The Renew Democracy Initiative—publisher of The Next Move—is in Ukraine! We’ll be sharing daily dispatches from our delegation—read our first one here. Premium subscribers will receive each Ukraine Dispatch 24 hours before anyone else. Be the first to get on-the-ground news from the frontlines of freedom by upgrading to join our premium subscriber community today! All proceeds go to support the work of the Renew Democracy Initiative, including humanitarian assistance to communities in Ukraine.

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

Earlier this month, a Fox News host was talking with President Trump about the Iran war. The host said, “You think Putin is helping them?” (meaning the Iranians). Trump answered, “I think he might be helping them a little bit, yeah, I guess. And he probably thinks we’re helping Ukraine, right?”

Further on, Trump said, “It’s like, hey, they do it and we do it, in all fairness.”

First, it would be news if the United States were still helping Ukraine. Second, Trump’s instinct—on every occasion—is to defend or excuse Putin. Third, many of us will not accept a moral equivalence between helping Ukraine and helping the ayatollahs’ regime.

The Ukrainians are trying to save themselves from annihilation and subjugation by Russia. Russia’s ally, the ayatollahs’ regime, is as monstrous as the Kremlin.

We American conservatives always complained about “moral equivalence,” by which we meant a false moral equivalence, a false equating. The Soviets do it, we do it—there are no “good guys” and “bad guys” here.

Sometimes that was dressed up as realism. But it was always flawed, if not plain wrong.

One brief example, from 1978. The Kremlin was putting dissidents through show trials. Our ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, gave an interview to a French newspaper, saying, “In our prisons, too, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people whom I would describe as political prisoners.”

Young was, and is, a good and decent man. But what he said was both cuckoo and offensive.

President Carter, at a press conference, said, “I know that Andy regrets having made that statement, which was embarrassing to me. I don’t believe he will do it again.”

William F. Buckley Jr. had a line about moral equivalence. He worded it slightly differently each time, but here is one version: “The man who pushes an old lady into the path of an oncoming truck, and the man who pushes an old lady out of the path of an oncoming truck, are not to be denounced evenhandedly as men who push old ladies around.”

He should have lived to see Donald Trump and his administration. (But that would have done WFB no favors.)

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A sign of things to come came in December 2015, when Trump was running for the Republican nomination. On television, Joe Scarborough asked him about Putin. Scarborough made the simple point that Putin is the type to murder his critics and invade foreign countries. “Obviously, that would be a concern, would it not?” asked Scarborough.

Trump answered, “He’s running his country, and at least he’s a leader, you know, unlike what we have in this country.”

Not giving up, Scarborough said, “But again, he kills journalists that don’t agree with him.”

Trump answered, “Well, I think our country does plenty of killing also, Joe.”

That should have been enough for the Republican Party and the conservative movement. We had always decried such a mindset. But the Right was changing, dramatically.

Trump won the nomination with ease. In the summer of 2016, the New York Times asked him about civil liberties in Turkey. The strongman, Erdoğan, had cracked down on the country viciously.

“I think right now, when it comes to civil liberties,” said Trump, “our country has a lot of problems, and I think it’s very hard for us to get involved in other countries when we don’t know what we are doing and we can’t see straight in our own country.”

Trump continued, “When the world looks at how bad the United States is, and then we go and talk about civil liberties, I don’t think we’re a very good messenger.”

Again, Republicans and conservatives would once have thrown a fit, rightly.

Trump was elected in November. Shortly after being sworn in, he had a conversation with Bill O’Reilly like the one he had had with Joe Scarborough. (This was another television interview.)

O’Reilly said, “Putin is a killer.” Trump answered, “There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What, you think our country’s so innocent?”

This was not a campus radical, mind you. This was the president of the United States.

In June 2018, Trump flew to Helsinki to meet Putin. Before the summit began, Trump wrote, “Our relationship with Russia has NEVER been worse thanks to many years of U.S. foolishness and stupidity and now, the Rigged Witch Hunt!” The Russian foreign ministry answered, “We agree.”

How cozy.

American relations with Russia were indeed rocky. That was because of the Kremlin’s behavior, many of us thought: violating borders, murdering dissidents, interfering in foreign elections—all that.

Bless the name of Jeff Mason, a reporter for Reuters, who had a question for Trump at the summit press conference. Mason cited the president’s earlier statement about “many years of U.S. foolishness and stupidity,” etc. The question: “Do you hold Russia at all accountable, for anything in particular?”

“Yes, I do,” Trump answered. “I hold both countries responsible. I think the United States has been foolish. I think we have all been foolish.”

At least our president had graduated from blaming America alone to moral equivalence.

In the summer of 2020, the Afghan War was still on, and there were reports that Russia was supplying the Taliban with weapons—to use against our troops, of course. Asked about these reports, Trump said, “Well, we supplied weapons when they were fighting Russia, too.” (Trump was apparently referring to the Soviet war in Afghanistan.)

The pattern never changes. You might credit Trump with consistency.

In the summer of 2023, Trump was out of office and under indictment. He faced four criminal indictments: two at the state level, two at the federal level. Needless to say, he had abundant legal help.

On August 4, Secretary of State Antony Blinken wrote, “The United States strongly condemns Russia’s conviction of opposition leader Aleksey Navalny on politically motivated charges. The Kremlin cannot silence the truth. Navalny should be released.”

A Republican senator, Mike Lee of Utah, had a response: “Regimes that prosecute opposition leaders on politically motivated charges deserve strong condemnation.”

We can have a debate over the indictments of Trump—whether they were just or not. But this is undebatable: in America, Trump was reelected president, and in Russia, Navalny was murdered.

There is no moral equivalence.

Trump is now about 14 months into his second term, and he and his administration have always drawn a moral equivalence—at best—between Ukraine and Russia: between invaded and invader.

February 24, 2025, marked the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion. At the United Nations, Ukraine offered a resolution condemning Russia for its aggression and calling for the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine. The resolution passed 93 to 18.

Opposing it was Russia, of course. And the United States. Of course?

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, “We didn’t feel it was conducive, frankly, to have something out there at the UN that’s antagonistic to either side.”

In December 2025, President Trump was standing next to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach. A reporter asked Trump about Russia’s unceasing attacks on Ukrainian civilians. Did this not show Putin wasn’t serious about peace?

“No, he’s very serious,” Trump answered. “I believe Ukraine has made some very strong attacks also.” In what may pass for graciousness or sympathy, Trump then turned to Zelenskyy and said, “I don’t say that negatively.”

About a week later, Trump was again talking about Ukraine and Russia, and he said, “They both have done some pretty bad things. Look, that’s Biden’s war. That’s not my war.”

Actually, it is Putin’s war—and that of his allies: China, Iran, North Korea, and so on down the blood-drenched line.

A false moral equivalence is not only illogical, it is also stomach-turning, even abhorrent. On this, as on so many other things, conservatives and Republicans were right the first time.

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

When Vladimir Putin paid a visit to Budapest in 2017, Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister, said, “We all sense—it’s in the air—that the world is in the process of a substantial realignment.” Yes. But the extent and shape of that realignment, few could foresee.

Orbán has been in office for five terms. He’s going for a sixth. And both Russia and the United States—both the Kremlin and the US administration—have endorsed him. In their own ways, they are campaigning for him.

Hungarian voters will go to the polls on April 12.

If you don’t count Alexander Lukashenko, the dictator of Belarus, Orbán is Putin’s closest ally in Europe. And he is a beau idéal of the nationalist-populist Right in America: a rock star at CPAC, the Heritage Foundation, and so on.

George F. Will wrote something pointed in a column last month: “Putin’s only sympathizer in the European Union, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, might now have firmer support among American authoritarians (‘national conservatives’) than among Hungarians.”

Some Americans and other foreign enthusiasts have gone to Budapest to work for Orbán. That is, they are on his payroll. Still others go to visit, to sit at Orbán’s feet. They are pilgrims, in a way.

In 1981, Paul Hollander wrote a book called Political Pilgrims. It’s about leftists who traveled to the Soviet Union, Fidel Castro’s Cuba, Mao’s China, etc. Hollander was an American scholar who had been born in Budapest. He fled in 1956 when Moscow crushed the Hungarian uprising.

Given the stream of visitors to Budapest today—and to Moscow as well—there could be an update of Political Pilgrims.

The story of what Orbán has done to Hungary need not be detailed here, in this brief article. In 2018, Arch Puddington, of Freedom House, wrote, “Hungary has become a model for the dismantling of a European democracy by a democratically elected government.”

(That article appeared in The Weekly Standard under the title “Are Conservatives Giving Up on Democracy?”)

Patrick J. Buchanan is a very different man from Puddington. In that same year, he wrote that Hungarians “have used democratic means to elect autocratic men who will put the Hungarian nation first.”

The following month, Prime Minister Orbán declared, “The era of liberal democracy is over.” The British historian Simon Schama could not help tweeting a response:

“Well, no, Orbán, liberal democracy will see you and your nativists off because liberal democracy has John Milton, John Locke and J. S. Mill and you have Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen and Steve Bannon.”

I can assure you that, on the American right, those last three have a lot more fans than the first three do.

In Viktor Orbán, Donald Trump has found a kindred spirit. During a 2019 meeting at the White House, Trump said to him, “It’s like we’re twins.”

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It is unusual for a US president to endorse a candidate in a foreign election—in an election held in an allied country. The country is our ally, not an individual. But Trump is an unusual president.

“Viktor Orbán is a true friend, fighter, and WINNER, and has my Complete and Total Endorsement for Re-Election as Prime Minister of Hungary,” Trump wrote last month.

Three days later, his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, was in Budapest, standing by Orbán’s side. Said Rubio, “Especially as long as you’re the prime minister and the leader of this country, it’s in our national interest that Hungary be successful.”

Rubio gave, in effect, a campaign speech for Orbán. To say that this is unusual for a secretary of state would be an almost comical understatement.

And Vladimir Putin? What is he doing? How’s he helping out? A headline from the Financial Times (March 11) tells part of the tale: “Kremlin backs covert campaign to keep Viktor Orbán in power.” The subheading reads, “Vladimir Putin endorses plan drawn up by Russian consultancy that is under western sanctions.”

That report is here.

Another report, from Bloomberg (March 14), is headed “Orban’s Election Campaign Turns to Russia for Help in Final Stretch.”

A Wall Street Journal editorial (March 13) is related: “Viktor Orbán Carries Putin’s Water.” The Journal’s editors explain that Orbán is “blocking an EU loan that Ukraine needs to keep fighting Russia.”

In previous campaigns, Orbán has used George Soros, the Hungarian-American financier, as his primary bogeyman. (Never mind that Orbán went to Oxford on a Soros scholarship.) This year, the bogeyman is Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

On the campaign trail, Orbán said, “This election is about whether Zelenskyy gets to form a government or I do.” Will Hungarian voters actually fall for that? Orbán would know better than you or I. His party has a campaign poster that shows the Ukrainian president in a jolly mood and says, “Don’t let Zelenskyy have the last laugh.”

In a tweet, Orbán’s foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, claimed that the European Union “continues to make decisions according to the demands of @ZelenskyyUa.”

Szijjártó is a frequent visitor to Moscow, especially for the purpose of making energy deals. In November 2021, as Russian troops massed along the Ukrainian border, he received the Kremlin’s Order of Friendship. He has certainly earned it.

March 1, 2024, was the day of Alexei Navalny’s funeral. (Navalny was the Russian opposition leader killed in prison.) On that day, Szijjártó met with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, and photos showed the two of them laughing it up together. This was revolting, to some of us.

I can imagine a poster—different from Orbán’s, but borrowing from it: “Don’t let them have the last laugh.”

Maybe I could tell you something personal. I was once on a cruise that had Foreign Minister Szijjártó as a guest speaker. The ship was docked in Budapest. In a private gesture of protest—against the politics that Orbán’s government represents—I took a walk around town, while Szijjártó was aboard.

President Trump and his team never miss an opportunity to mock and scorn Zelenskyy—a man leading a country that is fighting for its survival against a Russian onslaught. A few days after the Iran war began, Trump wrote, “Sleepy Joe Biden spent all of his time, and our Country’s money, GIVING everything to P.T. Barnum (Zelenskyy!) of Ukraine.”

More recently, Trump said, as he always has, that Zelenskyy is the obstacle to peace in Ukraine, not the invader, Putin. “Zelenskyy is far more difficult to make a deal with.”

If that is so, maybe it’s because the deal Trump has in mind is Putin’s fondest wish, at the moment?

Linger over something: We Americans are at war with Iran. Russia is aiding Iran, as usual. Russia is helping Iran target our troops. Ukraine is helping us, in combating Iranian drones. Trump has eased sanctions on Russia. And is dumping all over Zelenskyy.

In Hungary, the United States and Russia—Trump and Putin—are backing the same guy: Viktor Orbán, whose bête noire, whose bogeyman, is Volodymyr Zelenskyy. If Orbán loses, there will be tears in the White House and the Kremlin, both. You recall Orbán’s words in 2017: “a substantial realignment.”

An old saying goes, “Politics makes strange bedfellows.” The current alliance for Orbán tells us a lot about our times, and what it has to say is bad, bad news for freedom and democracy.

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

There’s an old expression: “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.” In recent years, some of us have been meeting at the Ukrainian Institute of America, understandably. I was there last week. And last month.

UIA was founded in 1948 and is housed in a Gilded Age mansion on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I first visited the institute in 1999, when William F. Buckley Jr. took me to hear a talk by Robert Conquest.

It was a mark of Bill’s esteem for Bob that he attended that night. Bill was not doing that kind of thing very often in those years, especially at night.

Conquest was an invaluable historian and man of letters. He had just published his book Reflections on a Ravaged Century. (This was on the eve of the millennium, remember.) In 1986, he had published The Harvest of Sorrow, about the terror-famine in Ukraine. That same year, Bill Buckley hosted Conquest and others on television, to discuss the subject.

To watch the program—which I watched with wide eyes, back then—go here.

The terror-famine was inflicted by the Kremlin on the Ukrainians in the early 1930s. It is also known as the “Holodomor.” For decades, this monstrous crime was suppressed in academic and other circles. Bob Conquest meant a lot to Ukrainians, and still does.

I first saw him, and heard him, right before The Harvest of Sorrow was published, I think. I was in graduate school, and he came to campus to speak. It was from him that I first heard the name “Ukraine,” without a preceding “the.” I had grown up with the expression “the Ukraine”—a region of Russia, or the Soviet Union. But millions of people regarded it as a nation, with its own identity.

That’s what Conquest was saying.

It was a lucky stroke that I became a friend of his in later years. When he died in 2015, I wrote an appreciation of him, here.

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In 1999, when Bob spoke at the Ukrainian Institute of America, Ukraine was in its eighth year of independence. It seemed that this country could get on with life. But the incoming president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, would have other ideas.

That UIA event was co-sponsored by Freedom House, of which Adrian Karatnycky was president. It was not until 25 years later—in 2024—that I was again at the institute. I did a Q&A with Karatnycky about his just-out book, Battleground Ukraine: From Independence to the War with Russia.

In attendance that night was Mykola Melnyk, a Ukrainian military officer. He had joined up in 2014, after Russia’s initial invasion of Ukraine. A lawyer, he simply left everything to fight. In 2023, Melnyk was badly wounded, losing a leg.

It was inspiring, and humbling, to see him and converse with him. To me, he seemed to embody the spirit of a people fighting to remain free.

Last month, our Renew Democracy Initiative co-sponsored an event at the UIA. Our chairman, Garry Kasparov, spoke, and so did our CEO, Uriel Epshtein. In his opening remarks, Kasparov said, “Moral relativism didn’t defeat Nazism and communism. A steadfast belief in freedom did. We forgot that”—forgot it after the Cold War, somehow.

When I entered the UIA last week, I saw a sign that said “Unbreakable Ukraine.” I thought, once more, of Robert Conquest. One of his books is Stalin: Breaker of Nations. Putin, today, is trying to break Ukraine.

Stalin had many, many supporters and apologists in the Free World, and so did the Soviet Union at large. Today, so does Putin, and so does his Russia (re-Sovietized).

I did a Q&A with Kimberly Kagan, the military historian who founded the Institute for the Study of War. It is a nonpartisan, nonprofit research organization, and she is its president. Every day, ISW studies the Ukraine war, keeping track of the details.

There is a myth, said Kagan, that Russian victory is inevitable. The Kremlin peddles this line, and gullible Westerners echo it. But the facts contradict the line, said Kagan.

Reporters who cover the war know this as well. A recent headline in the Wall Street Journal said, “As War Enters Fifth Year, Ukraine Shows Russian Victory Is Anything but Inevitable.”

Last December, the American president, Donald Trump, said, “Russia has the upper hand. And they always did. They’re much bigger. They’re much stronger in that sense.” Yes, the Ukrainians have put up a fight, “but you know, at some point, size will win, generally.”

Wars are not like that, Kim Kagan pointed out. If they were, history would look a lot different.

I asked a big and painful question: Can Ukraine survive without the support of the United States? Gradually, Ukraine has reduced its dependence on the United States, Kagan said.

Which is good news.

At the same time, Ukraine could use the help of the United States, obviously. And Ukraine is important to us Americans too, whether we know it or not.

What the Ukrainians are doing right now, said Kagan, is defending both Europe and the United States against aggression—aggression not only from Russia but also from its partners: Iran, North Korea, and China. Ukraine is providing a “security buffer” against these aggressors, said Kagan.

Moreover, the Ukrainians are doing a lot of “discovery,” she said. Day by day, they are learning what can be done in modern warfare. Ukraine is no less than a “laboratory” in this respect, Kagan said.

Like Israelis, Ukrainians may not have wanted to become expert warriors. But life has forced them to.

In recent days, Ukrainians have been helping us Americans defend ourselves against Iranian drones—with which Ukrainians have had to cope for several years now.

Last year, the American vice president, JD Vance, said to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, “Have you said thank you once?” (Yes, Zelensky had thanked the United States for its support many, many times.) Well, I hope that we remember to say thank you to Ukraine.

My visits to the Ukrainian Institute of America have been moving. The Ukrainian people are setting an all-time example in patriotism, courage, self-sacrifice, and determination.

UIA’s website says, “The Ukrainian Institute of America, Inc. is a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting the art, music, and literature of Ukraine and the Ukrainian diaspora.” That is a lovely purpose. To dwell among art, music, and literature is practically heaven.

The institute can get back to concentrating on that someday. In the meantime, Ukraine is fighting for its life, and it is the central arena of the broader, momentous struggle between freedom and tyranny.

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An update on the Renew Democracy Initiative’s work in Ukraine

Since 2022, the Renew Democracy Initiative (publisher of The Next Move) has delivered roughly $15 million in humanitarian aid to frontline communities in Ukraine. That includes bulletproof vests, food, medical supplies, and sleeping bags, among other essentials. It won’t win the war by itself, but it keeps people warm, well-fed, and, most importantly, alive.

We recently ordered 70,000 meals ready-to-eats (MREs, an acronym familiar to anyone who’s spent time around the military), mostly for the Kharkiv region. Kharkiv is located on the Russian border and is the target of relentless bombardment. The first tranche—21,504 MREs to be precise—were delivered at the end of last month. Roughly half will go to civilians, and another half for the Ukrainian soldiers bravely defending their homeland.

On top of that, the Renew Democracy Initiative recently secured 31,000 warm meals for the capital city of Kyiv, where residents are enduring freezing nights and blackouts. We hope our Ukrainian friends like soup!

You can support RDI’s work by upgrading to join our premium subscriber community. RDI CEO Uriel Epshtein will also be leading a delegation to visit our partners on the ground in Ukraine later this month, so stay tuned for firsthand updates from the front here at The Next Move!

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

We have lived with Khomeini’s Iran for a long time. I should be careful about saying “we.” The Iranian people have borne the brunt of it, obviously. But that regime has been a curse on the world at large.

It was in 1979 that this regime took over. I was 15 at the time. As I noted in an essay earlier this week, that period is vivid in one’s life. We are learning about the world, becoming engrossed in its affairs, often tumultuous.

In recent days, I have been thinking about the almost half-century of the Islamist regime, especially the dissidents I have met and interviewed. I have been in touch with some of them, too.

I think of Manuchehr Honarmand, a journalist, whom I interviewed in 2010. He was born in Tehran in 1946. He went to a French primary school in Isfahan, and then to a university in the capital. When the revolution came, he told me, “they arrested anybody who looked respectable.” One was Honarmand.

He was able to leave the country, and then his real travails began, you might say. He was tossed from country to country, enduring hardship after hardship. He spent two years in a Venezuelan prison—Hugo Chávez was a close friend of the regime in Tehran.

“Before the revolution, I was a normal guy,” said Honarmand. But then the world—his world—got cracked. “I had gone to a French school, remember, and I had a free and liberal spirit. Under the Iranian revolution, I could not fit in for even one hour.”

In 2003, an Iranian woman won the Nobel Peace Prize. She was Shirin Ebadi, a human rights lawyer. The regime retaliated in various ways. For example, they stole Ebadi’s Nobel medal. (She got it back, she told me.)

I have written about Ebadi, and a host of other laureates, in a history of the prize, Peace, They Say.

Twenty years after Ebadi, another Iranian woman won the prize: Narges Mohammadi, who had worked closely with Ebadi. Mohammadi was a political prisoner when she was honored by the Nobel committee. She is a political prisoner today.

On February 11, the committee sent out something that sounded like an SOS: Narges Mohammadi had been beaten and tortured almost to death.

Marina Nemat, born in 1965, was arrested when she was 16. She spent more than two years in Evin Prison, one of the worst, most notorious places on earth. She was raped, tortured—all of it. She survived and went into exile, landing in Canada. She has dedicated her life to remembering the victims, past and present.

Sardar Pashaei comes from a family of dissidents. “I remember when I was five years old,” he said to me. “Members of the Revolutionary Guard came to our house at 2 in the morning and arrested my dad. I have never forgotten that scene.”

Sardar has lived in the United States since 2010. His siblings back home have been in and out of prison. A year ago, his sister Leila was arrested after giving a speech on International Women’s Day (March 8). In her speech, she denounced child marriage, mandatory hijab, and the execution of female prisoners.

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They are incredibly brave, these dissidents, these activists.

Among them is Masih Alinejad, well known to The Next Move and to the Renew Democracy Initiative. She is one of our Frontlines of Freedom Fellows. I first interviewed her in 2021, writing a piece called “A Free Spirit.”

She certainly is—but one who has to look over her shoulder, here in America. The regime back home has tried to kidnap and kill her repeatedly. She and her husband jump from safehouse to safehouse, but Masih keeps calling for freedom, using every platform available to her.

On Monday, I asked her, basically, “How do you feel?” She answered, “I feel a storm of emotions.” So do the other dissidents I have spoken with, and so must Iranians in general—those in Iran and those in the sprawling diaspora.

Sardar Pashaei is worried about his loved ones, obviously. The Internet in Iran has been shut down, and communication has been difficult. Some political prisoners, he understands, have been moved to “undisclosed locations.” What will happen to them?

As he and others point out, American and Israeli bombs can fall on innocent and guilty alike—prisoners and their interrogators, for example.

Sardar has heard talk of installing a king, and this concerns him. “After a century of tyranny, the Iranian people deserve democracy,” he says. This includes the protection of minority rights. (The Pashaeis are Kurdish Iranians.)

Marina Nemat, like many, has mixed emotions. She sees dancing in the streets, and she understands it. (How could she not?) At the same time, she remembers the dancing in the streets when the Shah went into exile. She has an awareness that things can always be worse.

The “Supreme Leader,” Khamenei, is dead, and so are other leading killers. But there are always people to replace them, Marina notes. The Revolutionary Guard is still in place. They are the “enforcers” of the regime, she says, its merciless agents. When the current war ceases, they may carry out ghastly reprisals.

Iranians are a talented and resourceful people, Marina says, but there is also a lot of psychological damage after decades of brutality. Can Iranians “pull a rabbit out of a hat” and build a better government, somehow? If not a democracy, then something less brutal?

These are early days yet.

Masih Alinejad details her “storm of emotions” as follows: “relief, grief, and responsibility.”

Relief because Khamenei “was the symbol and architect of decades of oppression. He ordered my killing directly when I compared compulsory hijab to the Berlin Wall and called on Iranian women to tear the wall down.”

Grief because his death “does not bring back the lives he stole.” In the latest uprising alone, some 32,000 people have been murdered.

And responsibility because “what matters now is protecting people and pushing toward real freedom, a better future without the Islamic regime.”

She sees that Americans are having their usual partisan fights (as is natural in a democracy, to be sure). She wishes they could be united in staunch opposition to the Iranian dictatorship, which is an American security problem, in addition to a problem for the victimized Iranian people.

When Khomeini and his movement took over in 1979, much evil resulted. From the downfall of that regime, much good can flow. Who can fail to root for it? While at the same time wondering, “After them, what?”

Will there be an “after” at all, and, if so, when?

For all these years, I have been in awe of Iranian dissidents—as I have been in awe of those from China, Russia, Cuba, North Korea, and elsewhere. Pardon the cliché, but I hope there are monuments to them someday. And if not, they can know that they have the admiration and gratitude of many of us.

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A note from Garry Kasparov: The Trump administration could soon launch a war with Iran without oversight or accountability. To navigate the crisis, we will need a deep understanding of America’s place in the world rather than allow ourselves to get distracted by the outrage du jour. That’s why I’m inviting our premium subscriber community to a Zoom conversation on the last half-century of American foreign policy with Ed Luce, Financial Times US editor and author of Zbig: The Life And Times of Zbigniew Brzezinsky, America’s Great Power Prophet, taking place on Wednesday, March 4 at 5pm ET/2pm PT. You can find registration details here.

To make this opportunity more accessible, we’re offering 30% off a premium subscription, now through March 4. I don’t receive a cent from your subscription fees—everything goes to supporting the Renew Democracy Initiative. RDI is bringing political dissidents to tell their stories to students, business leaders, and public officials. Delivering life-saving humanitarian aid to frontline communities in Ukraine. And, of course, driving the conversation here on The Next Move.

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

The recruitment ads of ICE, our immigration agency, merit a long article unto themselves. Some of them belong to the category of agitprop. Here in this column, I would like to concentrate on one particular pitch.

“Defend your culture!” says one ad. “For our country, for our culture, for our way of life,” says another. I will cite one more: “Protect your homeland. Defend your culture.”

Jeh Johnson, a former secretary of homeland security, said, “The recruitment rhetoric is ‘Defend your culture.’ What does that mean?” We might ask the same question.

Another question has entered the chat in recent days: What is “white culture” or “white identity”? A Trump State Department nominee has talked a lot about “white culture” and “white identity.” He worries about their “erasure.”

Questioned about this by a senator, the nominee mentioned, among other things, “foodways.” Insert your Velveeta joke here. Also, the “French” in “French fries” is not very American, is it? (White though it may be.)

One of the reasons I rejected the Left, long ago, was that they were obsessed with race and ethnicity, and played “identity politics.” (I’m generalizing here.) I was an E pluribus unum guy (as I still am). Today, the Right resembles the Left in myriad ways.

(For a piece of mine on this subject—on its foreign policy aspect in particular—go here.)

In my column today, I will not cover the ground of American culture. There are countless volumes on the subject. You might start with Perry Miller, the great historian who helped to launch American Studies. You might even start with Crèvecœur, who published Letters from an American Farmer in 1782. But I will offer a few thoughts.

When I was a kid, there was a jingle: “Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet.” (You pronounced that “Cheverlet.”) The next line went, “They go together in the good ol’ USA.”

Harold Hill cried, “Remember the Maine, Plymouth Rock, and the Golden Rule!” Who was he? The titular character in The Music Man, the 1957 hit by Meredith Willson. I wrote about it once, calling it the Great American Musical.

My piece is apparently unfindable on the Internet—but you can have it in a collection, for the low, low price of $13.85.

Speaking of musicals: The Department of Homeland Security put out a video, accompanied by a text that said, “This is our own, our native land.” The video used a song: “Climb Ev’ry Mountain,” from The Sound of Music, by Rodgers & Hammerstein.

Both of those fellows were born in New York. But the composer’s parents were Jews from the Russian Empire. (The family name, Rogazinsky, was made into “Rodgers.”) The lyricist was Oscar Hammerstein II. Oscar the First was a Jew from Germany.

Irving Berlin was a Jew from Russia (its empire). He gave us our all-American Christmas carol: “White Christmas.” He also gave us “God Bless America.” Dimitri Tiomkin was another Jew from the Russian Empire. He helped forge the sound of the American West—cowboys and Indians and all that—with his theme to Rawhide.

Aaron Copland helped forge that sound too (with his ballet Rodeo, for example). He was born in Brooklyn—but his parents were Jews from that same empire.

The Gershwins, too, were of that background. They wrote Porgy and Bess, which is arguably our national opera. The story is about black people in Charleston, S.C. Is the opera part of white culture or black culture?

It is part of American culture, and the musical culture of the world.

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On Easter Sunday 1939, Marian Anderson sang in front of the Lincoln Memorial. The great black contralto—“The Lady from Philadelphia”—had been denied use of Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution, those “Heritage Americans” (in recent parlance).

She opened with “My Country, ’Tis of Thee.” Then she sang a Donizetti aria, a Schubert song, and several spirituals.

Black culture? White culture? American culture? Culture culture?

We are a diverse nation, with multifarious cultural pockets. The daughter of a lobsterman in New England will not have a quinceañera. (Will she?) But no American should really be spooked by either a lobster or a quinceañera.

Still, there is a common culture, and every nation needs ties that bind, or “mystic chords of memory,” as an American once said.

Our common culture includes the higher and the lower—Walt Whitman, sure, but also his fellow New Yorkers the Bunkers, of All in the Family.

For poets, we have, in addition to Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Wallace Stevens … For novels, we have The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird …

(Some of us think that Stoner, by John Williams, published in 1958, deserves a place in the canon. This is an ongoing campaign, and frustration.)

When I was growing up, there was a painting by Winslow Homer on my wall. (Not the real thing, alas—a poster.) It was Breezing Up. You’ve seen American Gothic a time or two. And several Norman Rockwells. And Jackson Pollock’s creative drips.

Charles Ives stocked his Symphony No. 2 with popular tunes. Time was, most Americans would have recognized them. Does anyone know “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean” today? Maybe not, but it still belongs to our “mystic chords.”

The choreographies of Martha Graham are part of our patrimony. (Matrimony?) She teamed with Copland for Appalachian Spring. That is as American as high school football on Friday nights, and vice versa.

About Hollywood, we could go on and on. Hollywood has shown America to itself, and America to the world. In its golden age—there’s another phrase in current parlance—Hollywood was stocked with immigrants and refugees.

Do you know this anecdote? Otto Preminger passes a table of men speaking Hungarian. He stops to reproach them: “You’re in America now. Speak German!”

I have offered a few thoughts about the arts and sports and whatnot. But very important is our political culture. Our democracy. In one of those recruitment ads, ICE speaks of “our way of life.”

Well, what about the Constitution? What about our long-established norms? When you lose an election, you concede it. If you’re president, you attend your successor’s inauguration.

Those rioters on January 6 halted a constitutional process. They threatened the vice president, the speaker of the House, and others, with death. The president called them “patriots” and pardoned them all.

Immigration is part and parcel of our national story. The 2024 presidential campaign featured Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Three of their four parents were immigrants, and the fourth was the son of immigrants.

Repeatedly in that campaign, Trump said that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.” Immigration must be lawful, for without the law, we are lost. The adjective in “ordered liberty” is as important as the noun. But “poisoning the blood of our country”? Really?

A welcome of refugees is also part of our story, our culture. With shameful exceptions, we have provided a haven for the terrorized and persecuted.

Today, our door is shut to refugees—except, curiously, to white South Africans. Surely we can do better, be more ourselves?

In this country, you don’t put your name on someone else’s memorial. You don’t hang a giant banner of yourself on the Justice Department. This is not North Korea.

Presumably, fights over American culture and the American way—fights over “Who are we?”—will go on for as long as our country exists. I am not the last word. Neither are you, neither is ICE.

But, dammit, I agree: “Defend your culture.” Defend our constitutional republicanism and our civil society. Or, as we say at the organization whose publication this is: renew democracy.

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A note from Garry Kasparov: The Trump administration could soon launch a war with Iran without oversight or accountability. To navigate the crisis, we will need a deep understanding of America’s place in the world rather than allow ourselves to get distracted by the outrage du jour. That’s why I’m inviting our premium subscriber community to a Zoom conversation on the last half-century of American foreign policy with Edward Luce, Financial Times US editor and author of Zbig: The Life And Times of Zbigniew Brzezinsky, America’s Great Power Prophet, taking place on Wednesday, March 4 at 5pm ET/2pm PT. You can find registration details here.

To make this opportunity more accessible, we’re offering 30% off a premium subscription, now through March 4. I don’t receive a cent from your subscription fees—everything goes to supporting the Renew Democracy Initiative. RDI is bringing political dissidents to tell their stories to students, business leaders, and public officials. Delivering life-saving humanitarian aid to frontline communities in Ukraine. And, of course, driving the conversation here on The Next Move.

Subscribe now

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

News out of Seoul, as related by the Associated Press: “South Korea’s spy agency told lawmakers on Thursday that it believes the teenage daughter of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is close to being designated the country’s future leader as he moves to extend the family dynasty to a fourth generation.”

That daughter is Kim Ju-ae, who is 13. But hang on: her name may be something else, and her age may be 12 or 14. Such details—such elementary facts—are closely guarded in North Korea, the “Hermit Kingdom.”

It was from Dennis Rodman that the world heard the name “Ju-ae,” back in 2013. But he may have gotten it wrong. There are different theories on the matter. The truth is, no one knows, outside a tight circle.

Rodman is a former professional basketball star, and Kim Jong-un is crazy about basketball, as was his father, Kim Jong-il, before him. In fact, when Secretary of State Madeleine Albright visited Kim Jong-il in 2000, she brought along a basketball signed by Michael Jordan.

Jordan’s onetime teammate, Rodman, has gone to North Korea several times, and on that one occasion, in 2013, he apparently met the dictator’s daughter.

There is speculation that the dictator has three children: one born in 2010, a boy; Kim Ju-ae (let’s call her), born in 2013 (let’s say); and another child born in 2017. That third child is of unknown sex. Then again, that child may not exist, and neither may the first.

If Kim Jong-un has a son—indeed, an eldest child who is a son—why is he not the successor? Why has he never been seen in public?

Kim Ju-ae was first seen by the public on November 18, 2022. She and the dictator had a typical daddy-daughter date: they attended a missile launch. Later, the state produced postage stamps commemorating the occasion.

In subsequent years, Kim Ju-ae has often been seen at her father’s side. She even traveled with him abroad, to Beijing, in September 2025.

If Kim Ju-ae does indeed succeed her father, she would be the first female dictator ever. Seriously, there has never been one.

You may wish to count bad queens. “Bloody Mary” acquired that nickname for a reason. A Chinese empress named Wu Zetian was a piece of work. But I am not counting queens as dictators, in the modern understanding.

Nor can you count Indira Gandhi, who ruled by emergency decree for 21 months. That was a Jeffersonian paradise, compared with the regimes we’re talking about.

Hold on a second: what about Delcy Rodríguez, whom the United States basically installed as jefe in Venezuela last month, after seizing and extracting Nicolás Maduro? We might consider her on another day…

I wrote about the Kim family, and other families, in a book called Children of Monsters: An Inquiry into the Sons and Daughters of Dictators (2015). Kim Il-sung, the founding North Korean, created the first communist dynasty. His counterpart in Romania, Nicolae Ceauşescu, wanted to do the same, but his regime ended—along with the dictator himself—before he could pass on power to his monstrous son Nicu.

In all likelihood, Kim Il-sung did not have his heart set on a dynasty. But he saw what happened to the cult of Stalin in the Soviet Union. It was brought low. (It has since been revived.) He did not want the same to happen to his own cult. And he figured that the best way to ensure continuation of the cult was to be succeeded by a son.

Kim Jong-il was the eldest, yes. But he was not the automatic successor. He had to compete for it—against a half-brother named Pyong-il, in particular—and he was good at it.

Jong-il himself had six children, give or take. One was a daughter named Sol-song, meaning “snow pine.” The name was bestowed on her by her grandfather, Kim Il-sung.

By all accounts, Kim Jong-il was very fond of this daughter. He liked having her work alongside him. She was capable and beautiful. But she was female, and how could the next dictator be anything but a son?

Kim Jong-il passed over older sons to anoint his youngest, Kim Jong-un. This is an interesting story (and I relate it in my book). But suffice it to say, here and now, that Jong-un was really a chip off the old block: a natural, ruthless, ghastly dictator.

In Syria, Hafez al-Assad had a daughter—his eldest child, Bushra. He adored her, and she adored him, and power. She had an appetite for politics and dictatorship. Hafez included her in governmental councils, and she accompanied her father on foreign trips—as Kim Ju-ae already has.

But Bushra was … well, a girl. And Hafez had plenty of sons.

His eldest, Bassel, was a natural successor. He was a golden boy: handsome, talented, personable. His nickname was the “Golden Knight.” But Bassel was killed in a car crash in 1994, when he was 31.

That very day, Hafez summoned the next son, Bashar, home from London, where he had been practicing ophthalmology. There would be no more of that. Bashar would be groomed for dictatorship.

And he wound up killing many more than Hafez—no slouch in the killing department—ever dreamed of.

Would there have been a third Assad, had that regime not fallen in December 2024? Yes, probably. Bashar’s firstborn—named Hafez, after Dictator No. 1—was widely seen as the next in line.

In Haiti, François Duvalier—“Papa Doc”—had three daughters and then a son. The first daughter, Marie-Denise, was much like Bushra al-Assad. But she went even farther in government than Bushra.

When the dictator was ailing, Marie-Denise served as his lieutenant, even his proxy. The old man was known to say, “Clear it with Denise” (as he called her). “She’s in charge now.”

But, like Bushra, Marie-Denise was a girl, and Duvalier had that one son, Jean-Claude—nicknamed (not kindly) “Baby Doc.” Jean-Claude could not have been less suited to politics and dictatorship. He himself said that Marie-Denise should take over.

But it had to be Jean-Claude, who held power for 15 years, before being chased to France in an uprising.

The Soviet Union lasted about 70 years. Already, Communist China has lasted longer than that. Communist Cuba, which began on January 1, 1959, is nearing that mark. North Korea, like Communist China, has passed it.

In Children of Monsters, I wrote, “Whether Jong-un will be the last dictator from his family, no one can know. It seems unlikely the dynasty can continue. Then again, it seemed unlikely that it could endure, strangling North Korea, for as long as it has.”

Last year, I interviewed, and wrote about, Kim Yumi, a North Korean defector. One of the things that motivated her defection relates to this business of dynasty.

“A key moment for Kim Yumi came in November 2022,” I wrote, “when Kim Jong-un presented his daughter to the public for the first time.” Kim Yumi noticed a couple of things. And I will keep quoting from my article:

“Kim Ju-ae had Western-style clothes and a haircut to match. This was reflective of her immense privilege. Also, military officials—senior men—were bowing to her. Evidently, the dictatorship would continue, unto the fourth generation. There was no end in sight.”

This was tremendously demoralizing to Kim Yumi.

Yes, there is no end in sight. But how many really and truly saw the end of the Soviet Union coming? Paul Nitze, the great diplomat who knew as much about the Soviet Union as anybody, did not. (He told me so.)

I grew up with countries called “East Germany” and “West Germany.” Günther Herbig, for example, was an “East German conductor.” Young people may marvel at this, but when we started saying “Germany” and “German,” in 1990, the words felt very strange in my mouth.

We can hope that the Koreas will reunite someday—on democratic terms.

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