I’m not going to fisk this editorial in the Washington Post, critiquing recent actions by British National Health. Actually, I agree with some of their points.

My point in calling attention to it is to ask can you imagine the editors writing this two years ago? I can’t. It’s a remarkable change of voice on their part. Is their explicit criticism of U. S. progressives a first for the WaPo editorial page?

I’m reminded of one of Samuel Johnson’s witticisms:

Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

It’s quaint of me but I think that the U. S. military should be used to defend the United States. That was my immediate reaction when I read this editorial at the Washington Post:

A not insignificant cohort of President Donald Trump’s advisers want the United States to abandon widespread commitments abroad and instead become a regional power focused on the Western Hemisphere. The president’s righteous strike against Islamic State targets in Nigeria is a reminder that America is capable of much more.

“MERRY CHRISTMAS to all, including the dead Terrorists, of which there will be many more if their slaughter of Christians continues,” Trump wrote on social media after targeting jihadists in the state of Sokoto, which has been a hot spot for kidnapping schoolkids. Egregious sectarian language aside, Washington responsibly conducted the operation in coordination with the Nigerian government.

It’s a welcome change in a part of the world that has always been little more than an afterthought for the president. The question is whether this is a one-off decision or the start of a more consistent and coherent policy.

This paragraph is particularly interesting:

The U.S. once had a regional counterterrorism plan known as the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership, but a recent audit found the program underfunded, leaderless and mostly ineffective. The Pentagon has also been considering merging Africa Command back into European Command, which it spun off from in 2008. This could mean fewer resources and less attention for the region. In addition to the security reasons for continued engagement, the U.S. would be foolish to cede the young and growing continent to China and Russia.

and especially consider this passage:

Nigeria, a relatively wealthy country in the region, is still battling insecurity on several fronts.

What the editorial praises is not strategy but vigilante geopolitics—Batman in Africa.

I am a Christian. I am a Catholic. I agree with Pope Leo’s anguish over the people, Muslims and Christians alike, being killed by terrorists in Nigeria.

That doesn’t translate into my believing that the U. S. military should be used to fight terrorism in Nigeria.

I oppose our attacking Islamist terrorists on three grounds: military, fiscal, and legal. I don’t believe that airstrikes against Muslim terrorists in Nigeria are particularly effective. They’re showy but short-lived. None of our interventions in Africa whether in the Sahel, in Libya, or Somalia have been effective at putting down Islamist terrorism.

They’re also expensive. We don’t know for certain but a reasonable estimate is that the airstrikes cost between $1 million and $3 million (probably closer to the latter). U. S. missiles are expensive. The costs mount up quickly.

Whatever the editors think of Nigeria it is far from a rich country and it spends less than 1% of its GDP on its military—probably less than $1 billion per year.

Which takes me to my fiscal complaint. Deploying the U. S. military to find bands of terrorists in Nigeria is an incredibly inefficient strategy given its limited effectiveness and high cost. The primary issue is not whether we can afford to fight Islamist terrorism in Nigeria but whether this is the most effective use of our money.

Finally, from a legal standpoint using the U. S. military to attack Islamist terrorists with or without the consent and cooperation of the Nigerian government shouldn’t be the first recourse. It shouldn’t even be the third recourse. We are obligated by treaty not to use military force without the consent of the United Nations Security Council. Absent an imminent self-defense claim, international law strongly disfavors unilateral military action outside a multilateral framework.

IMO the recourses should be the Nigerian government followed by UN peacekeepers followed by a multi-national African force.

The TSCP mentioned above began as an initiative under the Bush II administration. Other than separating AFRICOM from CENTCOM it has largely languished for the last 20 years. IMO we should be providing military aid to the Nigerian government, accompanied by lots of oversight, and then becoming more involved in the TSCP, potentially providing funding also accompanied by substantial oversight. Why is it “underfunded, leaderless and mostly ineffective”? The editors are largely silent on that.

This is not a problem that yields to episodic force, because it is rooted in beliefs, not organizations. As I have contended in the past movements like Al Qaeda and ISIS are to be expected in any sola scriptura religion without a magisterium whose sacred text can be interpreted as justifying military force against unbelievers. It will be endemic. We aren’t fighting individuals or organizations but endemic beliefs and incidental attention isn’t enough.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and Seasons Greeting! Especially to regular readers and commenters here and their loved ones.

This year’s Christmas has been a sort of peculiar one for us. No tree. We didn’t send cards. No presents. We did have a nice Christmas dinner, though. I made coq au vin for the first time in many years. I use an adaptation of Julia Child’s recipe, which I think is the best. For example, I use pancetta rather than the bacon the recipe calls for on the grounds that I suspect pancetta is more like the French bacon that would have been used in the recipe than American bacon would be. It turned out beautifully. I served it with parsleyed potatoes and green peas.

We reached out to family members during the day.

As you may recall today is my birthday. It has been a difficult year for me—the first year I’ve actually felt old. That despite walking five to seven miles a day every day seven days a week, something I suspect not too many men my age would or even could do.

With courage, love, and God’s grace may we all have better years next year than this.

I have made no secret of my skepticism or, in some cases, outright disapproval of some of President Trump’s foreign policy moves. Consequently, the following should not be construed as approval of what we might call the “Trump Doctrine” on my part. In his latest WSJ column Walter Russell Mead reflects on Mr. Trump’s policies and observes that they’re actually working pretty well:

Wars in the Middle East, war in Ukraine, terror attacks from Washington to Sydney—2025 has been a rough year. With the Trump administration breaking every rule in the diplomatic playbook and generally upending long-established pillars of American foreign policy, it’s been both a confusing and an exhausting 12 months.

The question as we approach the end of the first year of Donald Trump’s second term is whether the president’s revolutionary foreign policy is making the U.S. and the world better off.

There are certainly grounds for concern. Administration policy toward China tacks between what many observers think is colossal recklessness (imposing tariffs of 145% on a powerful economy that can retaliate harshly) to what others see as stupefying obsequiousness (clearing advanced computer chips for export and allowing TikTok to stay open on favorable terms). The Trump approach to Vladimir Putin so far has vexed American allies without ending the war.

The frenetic nature of Trump tariff policy angers foreign governments and throws sand in the gears of commerce. From Congo to Cambodia, the rush to collect peace agreements, however superficial or short-lived, risks making American diplomacy look ridiculous while conflicts smolder unresolved. A miasma of corruption and suspicion hangs over the whole process as both adversaries and allies conclude that American support can be bought or at least rented.

These are only some of the substantive criticisms that seasoned observers level against Mr. Trump’s emergent foreign policy. But even if one takes all the critiques at face value, that doesn’t resolve the question of whether the global geopolitical situation is, from an American standpoint, in better or worse shape than it was a year ago.

Here, the news is surprisingly positive. First, the rout of Iran and the dismantling of some of its key regional allies reinforced the American position in the Middle East and undercut Chinese and Russian power and prestige. That China and Russia were neither willing nor able to protect their Iranian friends has had (and will continue to have) helpful effects worldwide.

In addition, despite the strains that Trump-era diplomacy has placed on both trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific ties, U.S. allies in Europe and Asia show signs of reviving strategic awareness and activism. Jolting our allies out of their deep slumber so they can again be useful partners is fundamental to America’s fortunes in the next stage of global politics.

He continues by pointing out that European countries will putatively assume primary responsibility for “Ukrainian survival”, that the Japanese are more hawkish than they’ve been in some time, and that the Trump Administration’s actions have illustrated China and Russia’s limited abilities to counter us in the Western Hemisphere.

I think there’s a lot of “rosy scenario”-ism in his remarks. Will our NATO allies actually take primary responsibility for Ukrainian survival? Will the Japanese accept real military risk? Is Iran’s “rout” durable or a temporary setback? Will events turn out as well as Dr. Mead seems to think? We’ll see.

I wanted to point out the risks and difficulties of the “Trump Doctrine”. For the last 35 years at least U. S. foreign policy has been predicated on continuing U. S. hegemony. To that end we have allowed or even encouraged our allies to be weak—militarily dependent, politically complacent, and strategically reactive. Unfortunately, over that period we have not undertaken the political, economic, or diplomatic actions necessary to ensure that remains a reality. We have not maintained the unchallenged economic primacy needed to maintain military primacy. I haven’t agreed with it but that it has been the prevailing doctrine is unquestionable.

My concern is not that the Trump administration is dismantling the old doctrine of American hegemony, but that neither it nor its critics have articulated what doctrine replaces it.

When the Trump presidency ends there will still be plenty of pundits who continue to assume that hegemony without the ability or even the inclination to take the actions that would be necessary to maintain it—practically the entire foreign policy and military establishments. Will they continue down the path on which President Trump is breaking trail or will they attempt to resume the status quo ante? I think the latter. Can we actually return to international norms and agreements after ignoring them? That is precisely the mercurial quality of our foreign policy that makes even our putative allies skeptical about us.

What I’m still missing is a coherent picture, either from President Trump or the remaining Cold Warriors of America’s place in the world. I honestly have no idea what anybody thinks is going to happen or even what they want to have happen.

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Richard R. Smith and Arafat Kabir call attention to a risk of generative artificial intelligence:

This month’s lackluster employment numbers spurred talk that artificial intelligence is destroying jobs. Whether or not that is showing up in the statistics, AI presents a different challenge than past technological disruptions—in large part because it is eliminating the entry-level positions that traditionally served as stepping stones to career advancement.

This shift helps explain a troubling pattern in workforce anxiety. A recent Pew Research survey shows that more than half of employed adults worry about how AI may be used in the workplace. A September Deutsche Bank survey reports that 24% of workers under 35 express high concern about losing their jobs to AI, compared with only 10% of those over 55.

It’s been historically true that younger workers embrace new technologies while older workers resist change. But AI seems to have flipped this dynamic. When AI automates routine tasks, organizations often find they need experienced employees who can combine AI capabilities with years of business knowledge. What those organizations don’t need is entry-level employees learning the basics. Data shows rising unemployment since 2022 among 22- to 25-year-olds in AI-affected sectors—even while employment for older workers remains stable.

The traditional bottom rung of the career ladder is disappearing. We need to think about how younger workers will be affected in an AI-driven future to ensure that we have enough talent to replace retiring workforces.

They present two possible remedies:

This begins with companies recognizing that AI represents a fundamental shift rather than merely another tool. One example could be focusing on “AI native” tracks in which, instead of starting new employees with routine tasks that AI can handle, they begin with AI oversight and optimization roles. They learn to train, monitor and improve AI systems while simultaneously building domain expertise—combining technical fluency with business acumen.

A second option can be a mentor-intensive development program that pairs junior workers directly with senior professionals—letting AI handle the routine tasks that used to fill a junior employee’s day. Instead of learning by doing grunt work, juniors learn judgment and strategy by working alongside experienced colleagues on higher-level problems from day one, building the business acumen and strategic thinking that AI can’t replicate.

In short they’re warning about a problem that is already emerging but will become dire in ten or twenty years and advising managers “don’t let that happen”. Rather than relying on an implicit moralism that assumes managers can simply choose to behave differently without facing personal or professional penalties, I wish they had focused on the political and economic realities that underpin the behaviors they are warning about.

That reminded me of a conversation I had with my boss (a regional manager for a Fortune 500 company) nearly 50 years ago. When I pointed out the risks and adverse consequences of the course of action he was advocating, he told me “If I don’t focus single-mindedly on my numbers for next quarter, my boss will put someone in here who will” or, in other words, “long term be damned!”. That was one of the things that convinced me to leave the corporate world and strike off on my own.

The question I wish that Dr. Smith and Mr. Kabir had addressed is why managers would act in the way they prescribed. For the last forty years at least short term thinking has dominated and people are very strongly predisposed to keep doing what has worked for them in the past.

It’s not enough that they’re risking cutting off the pipeline that would provide senior engineers, technicians, or managers in the future. Their focus is on the bottom line and stock prices because those are the incentives they have. How would incentives need to change for managers to do what the authors propose?

Absent changes to compensation structures, promotion criteria, or market expectations, exhortations to “think long term” are empty. Managers respond rationally to incentives, and for decades those incentives have rewarded short-term extraction over institutional continuity.

Last night as we were channel-surfing my wife said to me “We can watch President Trump’s address” to which I responded “That depends on your operative definition of ‘can'”. We didn’t watch it.

Did I miss anything?

In his most recent Substack Scott Sumner lists nine principles he continues to favor despite their fall from favor in the present “economic consensus”:

1. Fiat money central banks can always boost nominal GDP, if they choose to do so. They can also restrain inflation, if they choose to do so.
2. We should not pay interest on bank reserves.
3. We should not use fiscal stabilization policy.
4. We should balance the budget, at least in real terms.
5. We should have free trade with countries that don’t invade their neighbors.
6. Anti-trust should focus on high prices, not low prices.
7. We should avoid so-called industrial policies. (Check out Richard’s Hanania’s post on the subject.)
8. We should avoid rent controls, price controls and government ownership of business.
9. We should end residential zoning restrictions and move toward school choice, health saving accounts, carbon taxes, congestion pricing and progressive consumption taxes.

By and large I agree with him.

This post is a rejoinder to a remark by a commenter to the effect that “the stock market doesn’t always go up”.

How to read the graph above:

• The x-axis spans nearly four decades.
• The y-axis barely moves.
• Long flat plateaus dominate meaning there are many consecutive positive years.
• Increases occur only in crisis clusters:

• 2000–02 (dot-com / accounting scandal regime)
• 2008 (global financial crisis)
• 2018 (policy tightening scare)
• 2022 (inflation + rates shock)

Over the last 38 years the S&P 500 has only shown year-on-year decreases seven times.

That’s certainly not random behavior and it differs markedly from the behavior over preceding decades.

If the stock market “does not always go up” in any meaningful probabilistic sense, we would expect negative years to occur with some regularity. Instead, since 1987, negative S&P 500 years have been rare and highly clustered. The market goes up almost every year and only declines during systemic crises. In the previous period the stock market posted year-on-year declines a third of the time. The present pattern is incompatible with randomness and inconsistent with a market primarily driven by earnings.

However, it is completely consistent with a stock market that is underwritten by policy, both monetary and fiscal, and structural changes. The vertical annotations in the graph illustrate Federal Reserve interventions.

That has implications including decrease in “real investment”, e.g. building factories, greater income inequality, and increasing dependence of indices on a handful of stocks.

I think that Brown University is making a mistake.

Once an institution advertises (or allows it to be known) that it has:

• Extensive camera coverage
• Card access logs
• Campus police
• Integration with city law enforcement

it implicitly creates an expectation that post-event reconstruction should be fast and decisive. Silence invites speculation that they know more than they’re saying.

Law enforcement can plausibly cite an “ongoing investigation.” Universities cannot do so as easily. They are not neutral actors. They are reputational actors.

Any institution that relies on public trust and stakeholder confidence (donors, alums, students, faculty, etc.) is taking a substantial risk. It invites speculation that the institution knows more than it is saying, even when that may not be true. In a high-information vacuum, narrative fills the gap, and rarely in the institution’s favor.