I hope all of us and our families have a better year this year than last, however good 2025 was for you and yours.

The good news for 2025 includes

we are not in a major war
AFAICT no new major wars have started
our southern border appears to be under control
gas prices are down which will have run-on effects throughout the economy
the rate of inflation is holding fairly steady

Unfortunately, each piece of good news is accompanied by bad news

the war in Ukraine continues and shows little sign of ending
we are using military force far too frequently and casually
immigration enforcement has been harsh
electricity prices continue to rise which will also have run-on effects
asset prices are continuing to rise faster than inflation

One of the predictions for 2026 I’m running into fairly frequently is for a baby boomlet (possibly in 2027) among Swifties spurred by Taylor Swift becoming pregnant. Considering that I don’t frequent gossip sites or popular music sites running into that prediction so frequently is surprising.

As we near the end of the year I’m seeing quite a few predictions for next year, many of them either unremarkable or preposterous. This morning on a lark I asked ChatGPT what its predictions were for 2026. Here are the results:

1. AI spending hits a credibility wall in the form of pushback from boards of directors and CFOs for immediate measurable results from adopting AI.
2. A visible tiering of AI users emerges among power users, occasional users, or institutional avoiders including government, regulated professions, and unions.
3. White-collar hiring freezes spread, not layoffs
4. One major AI firm retreats from “frontier” scaling away from ever-larger models toward efficiency, specialization, or verticalization.
5. Electricity becomes a binding constraint. It should be noted that will give an edge to China in the adoption of AI.
6. Courts quietly restrict AI use in legal proceedings
7. Medical AI stalls at the liability boundary
8. A backlash against “AI fluency” hiring language
9. The first serious AI-driven outsourcing reversal appears. Work previously offshored will be reshored not to human workers but to AI.
10. Public discourse shifts from “Can AI do X?” to “Who is responsible?”

Some of those are verbatim. Some are paraphrases. If you asked the same question I suspect the answer would vary considerably. After several years of regular use on my part ChatGPT has a pretty fair sampling of how to respond to me. YMMV.

I asked several follow-up questions. I may report on those in the coming year.

There’s a commentary about the direction of the Democratic Party from Democratic political consultant Brendan Frasier at The Hill:

For years, there has been a debate about where the Democratic Party should go. One side is the wants the party to embrace democratic socialism; the other side supports the neoliberal framework that helped destroy America’s middle class, weakened unions and left rural America feeling abandoned.

What both sides consistently don’t see is that the Democratic Party succeeds when it roots itself in New Dealism.

In America, the term “democratic socialism” has lost its meaning. In Europe, it describes an economic system in which major industries and production are collectively or socially owned, and private capital is reduced, transformed or replaced through democratic processes rather than authoritarian ones.

This matters because saying “democratic socialism” terrifies entire blocs of voters that Democrats desperately need to win back.

and

During my time with the Ohio Progressive Caucus, I had heated arguments with members of the Democratic Socialists of America. Many believed in replacing capitalism and placing major industries under social ownership. Some even support a candidate running for Senate in Ohio named Greg Levy, who said that companies like Kroger or Procter & Gamble should be nationalized.

But these positions have almost no support among rural voters, suburban moderates, small-business owners or the very union families the party once counted as its backbone.

Does anyone else notice how nostalgic his remarks are? Perhaps more seriously, I think that Mr. Frasier is making a category error.

I wonder how Mr. Frasier reconciles his views with the modern American economy and the modern Democratic Party?

I’ll just provide a few examples of that. In 1930 trade constituted about 6% of U. S. GDP. Now it’s around 30%. We produced almost all of what we consumed. U. S. population was around 123 million when the New Deal was first announced. Now it’s nearly three times that high. Estimating household income 90 years ago is a bit tricky but most sources say it was around $2,000. Now it’s around $80,000.

The structure of the U. S. economy was different then, too. The largest economic sectors were agriculture, manufacturing, and services. Now finance, insurance, real estate, and leasing along with professional and business services and government constitute about 50% of the economy with manufacturing, education and healthcare, and other sectors trailing far behind, mostly in single digits.

The ratio of public debt to GDP was around 16% then; now it’s nearly 100%.

These are not merely quantitative changes; they imply a different political economy with different leverage points, constraints, and failure modes.

I think I have a pretty good idea of what the New Deal meant when Franklin Delano Roosevelt proposed it in his acceptance speech for the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 1932. I have no idea what it would mean now or how it could be effected and Mr. Frasier does little to enlighten me in his piece.

George Friedman’s take on Russia is somewhat different from Dr. Michta’s:

There is talk of Russia moving into Belarus, launching attacks on Latvia and Lithuania, and preparing a massive operation in and around the Black Sea. Many fear that if the Russia-Ukraine war ends without Russia being forced out of the relatively small territory it now holds, Moscow will surge into other areas to restore the borders of the former Soviet Union.

What is strange, given the Russian military’s performance in Ukraine, is that it still inspires such fear. Nearly four years since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia controls only about a fifth of the country and is bogged down in fighting over a handful of towns and villages along the front line. The fact is that Russia failed in its original mission, which was to occupy all of Ukraine, as shown by its failed attempt to capture Kyiv, far from today’s battlefront.

It is true that Ukraine cannot drive the Russians out of the territory they now hold. But it is also true that Russia in four years has failed to break Ukrainian resistance or gain substantial ground. Its inability to achieve its stated goals raises serious questions about Russian military power. Russia expected to take far more territory and did not imagine the war would still be going on today with so little to show for it. This cannot be the war Moscow planned.

concluding:

The dread of Russia arises from the Cold War, when the U.S. and its allies looked at the Soviet Union as an enormously powerful military. Some argued that the Soviet Union was not particularly capable in conventional warfare, even though, with U.S. aid, it defeated German forces in Russia during World War II. But on the whole, fear of Russian power shaped the political culture in the West. Today’s fears that any concession to Russia would unleash more Russian aggression are a product of that legacy.

But it is essential to recognize how weak and damaged Russia actually is, how strained its military is, and how its economic weakness makes rapid rearmament improbable. A settlement would cost Ukraine some territory and save many lives, but it would not empower Russia to strike out in different directions. To its west, east and south, Russia has suffered massive reversals since the Soviet collapse. Yet some outside Russia cannot come to terms with this new reality, and Moscow’s entire strategy in Ukraine is to pretend it does not need to end a war it cannot win.

Russia’s tragedy is that to convince outsiders of its strength, it must keep pretending it is holding back a force that would change the world. There is no such force. After the war, Russians will have to decide what they will do with the leadership that brought them to this place, not pursue more unwinnable wars. A settlement based on the reality of Russia’s failures is the lowest-cost option. But it requires a clear-eyed understanding in the West of the reality of Russia’s weakness.

That’s closer to my view than Dr. Michta’s but not identical to it. My view is that the main threat that Russia poses to Western Europe or the United States is nuclear which is why it is vital to maintain our own deterrence, contrary to the views of some, and our “nuclear umbrella” should extend to Europe including Ukraine but that Russia’s land and naval forces pose no real risk to us or our primary European allies, e.g. the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. To the extent that Russia threatens Europe it is of the essence that our allies maintain their own land and, in the cases of the United Kingdom and France, their naval forces.

In conclusion I would caution Americans that a Putin in danger of losing a war in Ukraine is not the largest looming risk. The larger risk is that Putin may, in structural terms, be a relative moderate within Russian politics—and that a successor emerging from a failed war and a discredited regime is likely to be more nationalist, less constrained, and more willing to rely on nuclear coercion to assert Russian power.

I also wanted to call attention to this post by Andrew Michta at RealClearDefense:

Russia is not and has never been a nation state in the sense of the consolidated societal and institutional framing that has undergirded the foundations of Western democracies. Since the 15th century when the Duchy of Muscovy began to shed the Mongol Yoke – for two centuries Moscow was a vasal state of the Tatar Golden Horde – Russia expanded and formed its civilization as a multinational empire. For centuries, Russia extended its reach across the Eurasian mainland and into Europe, defeating Poland and Sweden and colonizing Central Asia and the Far East. This rapid imperial expansion fueled top-down governance that rested on state-sanctioned violence and absolutism buttressed by ideology – tsarist at first, subsequently communist, and now a mixture of orthodoxy and professed “Eurasianism,” but always resting on the primacy of centralized, top-down governance. As the empire grew, the people shrank. Expansion became the sine qua non of the Russian state’s existence and the foundation of the ruler’s power. The might of the empire and the perennial homage paid to the leader – whether the tsar, the general secretary or now the president – was justified by the glory of the motherland and the Great Russian People (velikiy russkiy narod). Simply put, Russia cannot exist without its expansionist drive, for only continued expansion can generate the requisite centripetal forces to hold together the patchwork of nations imprisoned within the bonds of empire.

I think that Dr. Michta does a real service in trying to educate Americans on the history of Russian imperialism. In general Americans are indifferent to history which I think weakens our foreign policy. Russia’s eastward expansion in the 19th century is reminiscent of American westward expansion in during roughly the same period.

I do have a question for Dr. Michta. Is it actually true that Russia has incessantly tried to expand westward into Europe? Or is it the other way around, that European countries including Poland (in the form of the Polish-Lithuanian Empire) invaded Russia in the 17th century and was ultimately ejected from conquered territories in the 18th century? Germany invaded Russia during World War I and then, again, during World War II, killing millions of Russians.

France and Britain invaded Russia and then the Soviet Union in the 19th and 20th centuries.

I genuinely want to know. I’m trying to distinguish between Russian imperialism and Polish irredentism. There are contemporary political currents in Poland that articulate territorial claims grounded in historical memory, and they deserve to be taken seriously. The question, however, is whether such currents—contested, constrained, and non-hegemonic—are meaningfully comparable to Russia’s long-standing pattern of state-driven imperial expansion. Are we observing symmetrical national impulses, or fundamentally different political structures producing superficially similar rhetoric?

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.