As most of us predicted in anticipation of the meeting between President Trump and Russian President Putin in Anchorage last week little was accomplished but the president, as they say, tried to put the best face on it.

Today on the “talking heads” programs many of the media and political (Democratic) pundits took President Trump to task for not immediately imposing additional sanctions on Russia (as he said he would). On Face the Nation Colorado Rep. Jason Crow, after castigating the president for having produced a “historic embarrassment” for meeting with Putin at all made a useful observation to the effect that Mr. Putin only cares about three things: economic pressure, diplomatic isolation, and military defeat.

I think that provides a handy framework for considering the options in dealing with the situation. Of those I think that military defeat is the most easily dispensed with. Some minor saber-rattling on the part of the French aside, I don’t believe that any European country has expressed an interest in joining with Ukraine against the Russians. Is there any prospect for the U. S. entering into combat directly? I don’t see it.

That leaves economic pressure and diplomatic isolation. Are there any direct sanctions left to be applied against Russia? I don’t know of many.

I have no opposition to imposing indirect sanctions against countries continuing to buy oil from the Russians. That would include China, India, and Turkey, just to name some of Russia’s notable customers. The only way that could prove effective is if those countries see trade with the U. S. as more valuable to them than buying Russian oil. Do they?

To my eye we’ve been more successful at isolating ourselves on the world stage with our diplomatic postures than we have at making Russia into an “international pariah”. To my knowledge they’re active participants in more international organizations representing more of the world’s people than we are. NATO isolating itself is not synonymous with turning Russia into an international pariah.

So far as diplomacy is concerned there’s a century-old quip (attributed without evidence to Will Rogers) that diplomacy is the art of saying “nice doggie” while you look around for a rock. We appear to be stuck in the “nice doggie” state.

There’s a telling quote in George Will’s latest Washington Post column:

U.S. military aid for Ukraine has been inhibited by this: Our nation, which faces global challenges from two near-peer adversaries, has chosen to not have an adequate defense industrial base.

The column ostensibly compares our 1930s military build-up in the face of aggressive Germany and Japan to our situation now. I have two questions for Mr. Will.

1. Primacy, i.e. military supremacy, has been the objective of our military since the end of World War II. Does Mr. Will support that objective?
2. Assuming he answers that question in the affirmative, what would constitute an adequate defense industrial base to accomplish that objective?

I think there’s a major difference between now and 90 years ago. In the 1930s we already had whole supply chains in place. We mined the iron and coal; we produced the steel; we had lots of manufacturing that could be adapted for military uses. Today nearly every one of our major weapons systems requires components that not only do we not make here we don’t even have the supply chains needed to make them. Such are the costs of deindustrialization and too close an embrace of (allegedly) free trade.

There’s an old joke with the punchline “you cahn’t get theah from heah”. Okay, how do we get there from here?

Please do not construe anything in this post as a defense of the tariffs President Trump imposed on goods imported from India. I have already made my views on tariffs quite clear: I do not think that the U. S. should impose tariffs on the goods of any country other than China and China is a special case. Fareed Zakaria’s latest Washington Post column raised a number of questions for me and I wanted to point them out. In the column after summarizing the last 30 years of U. S.-India relations he criticizes the tariffs President Trump has imposed on India harshly:

With little warning, Trump has undone decades of painstaking work by U.S. diplomats. He placed India in the highest category of U.S. tariffs, now set to be 50 percent, in the company of Syria and Myanmar, while setting a 19 percent levy for Pakistan (which is now closely allied with China) and announcing joint, probably futile, efforts to look for oil there. He met with Pakistan’s army chief in private, and a Trump family-backed firm has had ties to the Pakistan Crypto Council — fueling suspicions that backroom deals were conducted.

That’s not where my questions are. A little above that he writes:

India is a prickly country. It was colonized and dominated by the West, ruled by Britain for two centuries.

Was India ever “colonized and dominated” by the United States? I don’t recall that. Please explain. I always like to learn new things.

I think he needs to be more specific than “the West”. India was colonized and dominated by Britain, France, and Portugal not “the West”. Or, alternatively, you could hold the view I’ve asserted here from time to time: the term “the West” is a phrase used by the British when they want to draw the U. S. into their wars, generally to pull their onions out of the fire. That’s why although they scoffed at the U. S. after we freed ourselves from their rule in our Revolutionary War and for more than a century thereafter we began to hear about “the West” when they went to war with the Central Powers and again when they went to war with the Axis Powers. Yes, the U. S. has things in common with Britain, e.g. we are, as G. B. Shaw put it, divided by a common language, there are a lot of people of English, Scottish, and Irish descent here, we were colonized by them, etc. India has many of the same things in common with Britain but it’s not reflexively included in “the West”.

Mr. Zakaria fails to mention that from independence until the 1990s India was, basically, an autarky. That was consistent with Gandhi’s vision for India. That closer relations with the U. S. developed in the 1990s and India opened its trade (slightly) in the 1990s were no coincidence. IMO they also had less to do with Clinton Administration diplomacy than they did with Indian realization that their experiment in “socialism with Indian characteristics” had failed. There are many in India who want to go back to strict “self-reliance”.

Something else that Mr. Zakaria conveniently fails to mention is the rise of Hindu nationalism in India. Prime Minister Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was founded in 1980 and has had control of India since 2014. Despite India having a Muslim population of 200 million Indians, the central value of the BJP is “Hinduness”. I question whether the United States can confidently ally with a country ruled by a party with Hinduness as its central value.

Mr. Zakaria continues:

India has long sought to remain nonaligned. Under Modi, it embraced a variation called “multi-alignment,” which, theoretically, allows the country to maintain good ties with all sides. Persistent American diplomacy and the rise of China had been chipping away at this stance, and slowly but surely India had been developing closer ties with America. No more.

Even if Trump again reverses course, the damage has been done. Indians believe that the United States has shown its true colors: its unreliability, its willingness to treat its friends badly. They will understandably feel that, to hedge their bets, they need to stay close to Russia — and even make amends with China. The country is united in its shock and anger at Trump’s insulting behavior.

Ham-handed as Mr. Trump may be, I think that Mr. Zakaria is misinterpreting events and India’s behavior. India’s first interest is India. It will work with other countries including Russia, China, and the United States when it serves their interests and won’t when it doesn’t. But the Indians are well aware that China is much more of a threat to them than the U. S. and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. When was the last time the U. S. and Indian soldiers exchanged fire? To the best of my knowledge never. When was the last time they exchanged fire with Chinese soldiers? Last week? A couple of months ago? That’s why I doubt there is any China-India alliance in the offing.

Moody’s Mark Zandi has an op-ed in the Washington Post which, shall we say, casts doubt on the unemployment rate:

The unemployment rate has historically been the go-to barometer for the economy’s performance. At just over 4 percent, unemployment remains low, and it has edged only a bit higher since the start of the year. Taken at face value, the economy is doing just fine.

But it’s not. If the labor force had increased this year at the pace it did last year, the unemployment rate would be headed toward 5 percent. Of course, low unemployment is great, but only if it is due to lots of new jobs, not an evaporating labor force.

And the labor force, which includes all those working and looking for work, is sounding the recession alarm bell. It has flatlined so far this year. Compare this with last year, when the labor force grew by well over 1 million workers, or the year before, when it increased by almost 2.5 million. Without more workers, it is tough for the economy to grow: A recession is more likely.

The labor force participation rate (LFPR) is the lowest it’s been since 1977. His explanation is the “severe restrictions on immigration”.

This time last year, the foreign-born labor force expanded at an extraordinary 5 percent yearly pace, translating into more than 1.5 million additional workers every year. In recent months, it has declined. The native-born labor force has picked up, but not enough to fill the void left by fleeing immigrants.

I think it’s more than that. I think that a number of factors including artificial intelligence, uncertainty about the effects of tariffs, etc. have caused businesses to hold back on hiring for the last seven or eight months.

Note, too, that the average private sector hourly wages have remained more or less flat since February 2025:

That doesn’t suggest businesses striving to hire workers who are unavailable. It suggests reluctance to pay more. And that doesn’t take the declining LFPR into account. A declining LFPR and wages that barely keep up with the rate of inflation are not good signs.

Quite a few people are speculating on the 1-on-1 between President Trump and Russian President Putin that starts tomorrow. Rather than speculating or linking to the speculations of others, let’s weigh in ourselves.

What will be the outcome of tomorrow’s meeting?

1. Trump will completely “cave in” to Putin
2. Not much
3. Not much but President Trump will declare it a complete victory
4. Trump and Putin will agree to divide Ukraine
5. Putin will propose “geopolitical armistice” (basically, spheres of influence) and Trump won’t reject it outright
6. Trump and Putin will agree to an end to the war in Ukraine on terms favorable to Ukraine
7. Trump and Putin will agree to an end to the war in Ukraine on terms favorable to Russia (pretty much the same as A or C above)
8. Trump and Putin will agree to an end to the war in Ukraine on terms somewhere in between favorable to Ukraine and favorable to Russia
9. Something else

I think the most likely outcome is C. I think that E is an outside possibility. I think that H would put Zelensky in a bind.

Please weigh in with your prediction in comments.

Yascha Mounk, taking note of the results of the recent “Understanding America Study”, posted the chart above and ruminated on it:

Decades of research have demonstrated that some of these traits are highly predictive of life outcomes; in particular, conscientiousness (“the tendency to be organized, responsible, and hardworking”) predicts everything from greater professional success to a lower likelihood of getting divorced. Extroversion (a tendency to be “outgoing, gregarious, sociable, and openly expressive”), is associated with better mental health, broader social networks, and greater life satisfaction. Meanwhile, neuroticism (understood as a propensity toward anxiety, emotional instability, and negative emotion) is strongly correlated with negative outcomes, such as higher rates of depression, lower life satisfaction, and poorer overall mental health.

He blames the Internet:

The internet was supposed to make us realize how much we have in common with those who are very different from us. It was supposed to make it easier to find romantic partners and friends. And all of that was supposed to turn us into better versions of ourselves.

The truth has turned out to be radically, and depressingly, different.

Despite making communication virtually costless to the average consumer, the internet has inspired a worldwide return to identity and tribalism.

While the development and pervasiveness of the Internet may be one among several factors I don’t believe it’s the sole factor and maybe not even the definitive factor.

In looking at the chart above I would point out that the three lines correspond to differing generational cohorts, e.g. Baby Boomers (“Age 60+”), Generation X (“40-59”), and Millennials and Generation Z (“16-39”). My interpretation of the chart would be that the Red Liners are aping and magnifying the divergence of their Light Blue Line parents from the old Dark Blue Liners.

If I had to encompass that divergence in a single word I think it would be “solipsism” and if I had to pick a single force it would be Sesame Street. To the best of my knowledge Sesame Street was the first educational program to introduce the style, pace, and tone of TV advertising to children’s television programming. Maybe an even better word would be “consumerism”. Only the very youngest Baby Boomers grew up watching Sesame Street but the majority of Gen X, Millennials, and Zoomers did.

At Reason Jonathan Adler writes about a study conducted by a couple of Northwestern psych profs which started out to be about psychology but ended up by being about something quite different:

Northwestern University researchers Forest Romm and Kevin Waldman report in an op-ed on the results of a series of interviews they conducted with undergraduates.

Between 2023 and 2025, we conducted 1,452 confidential interviews with undergraduates at Northwestern University and the University of Michigan. We were not studying politics — we were studying development. Our question was clinical, not political: “What happens to identity formation when belief is replaced by adherence to orthodoxy?”

We asked: Have you ever pretended to hold more progressive views than you truly endorse to succeed socially or academically? An astounding 88 percent said yes.

These students were not cynical, but adaptive. In a campus environment where grades, leadership, and peer belonging often hinge on fluency in performative morality, young adults quickly learn to rehearse what is safe.

The result is not conviction but compliance. And beneath that compliance, something vital is lost.

Practicing dissimulation to pass a course isn’t new. I faced the same thing myself 60 years ago. I declined to lie to the professor and received a lower grade in the class as a consequence. But the scale is troubling:

Seventy-eight percent of students told us they self-censor on their beliefs surrounding gender identity; 72 percent on politics; 68 percent on family values. More than 80 percent said they had submitted classwork that misrepresented their views in order to align with professors. For many, this has become second nature — an instinct for academic and professional self-preservation.

In other words not only are they learning dissimulation rather than critical thinking in college, they are cultivating it as a habit. Kant taught that lying is immoral because it denies the fundamental worth of others. Over a century ago George Bernard Shaw observed “the liar’s punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe any one else”.

Clearly, we are transitioning from a society in which many, particularly the well-educated, believed you could trust other people to one in which even the well-educated cannot trust their fellow citizens. That has profound policy implications.

When I read this report by Ben Coxworth at New Atlas:

Instead of going to the time and trouble of designing and building tiny robots from scratch, some scientists are now turning existing insects into remote-control cyborgs. A new “assembly line” could help, by converting cockroaches into cyborgs far faster than can be done by hand.

Putting it simply, cyborg insects typically consist of a large-ish insect – often a Madagascar hissing cockroach – that has been equipped with a small electronic backpack. Remotely controlled electrodes in that backpack stimulate body parts such as the insect’s antennae or eyes, causing it to start and stop walking, and turn left or right.

My immediate reaction to this was now imagine millions of these things on a battlefield.

I think that Mark Summerlin’s Wall Street Journal op-ed is fine as far as it goes. Here’s the opening:

The Bureau of Labor Statistics employment numbers for May and June have been extensively revised, from 291,000 down to 33,000 jobs added over those two months. Had the revised numbers been reported in real time, the Federal Open Market Committee could have cut interest rates at both the June and July meetings.

The Federal Open Market Committee is worried about inflation, but the economy faces two more-pressing problems: weak hiring and high mortgage rates. If the economy were to fall into recession, it would take at least four years to repair the damage.

Inflation isn’t a serious problem right now, running under 3%. Because the FOMC can neither control nor measure inflation with precision, the range from 1% to 3% should be considered on target. Long-term inflation break-evens—the bond market’s best guess of future inflation—remain glued at 2.3%.

Yes, the FOMC must be cautious about cutting so fast or so deep that longer-term rates rise. But mortgage rates near 7% have left the housing market weak, and financial markets will always provide clues to guide monetary decisions. The FOMC’s policy rate is sitting more than 50 basis points above the two-year Treasury bond rate, creating an inversion at the front end of the Treasury curve. This means that a 50-basis-point “catch up” cut wouldn’t upset the long end of the curve, as the market is already expecting such a reduction.

It’s in the next section that he begins to get into the weeds. Here’s the meat of it:

More important than even fiscal policy is the enormous change from the AI revolution. Companies are starting to achieve real efficiency gains from AI, which means that worker productivity is going to accelerate in 2026. When productivity accelerates, the economy expands faster and inflation falls, which could allow lower interest rates and cause a resurgence in the housing market.

This piece by Aki Ito at Business Insider comes closer to telling things how they are:

In June, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had a blunt message for his 350,000 corporate employees: There were going to be fewer of them in the near future, thanks to the “efficiency gains” he expected from AI. The proclamation generated big headlines and an uproar from staff. But it struck me as merely honest. He was acknowledging something that pretty much every CEO who sits atop a large white-collar workforce is quietly hoping to achieve sooner or later.

After all, Jassy hasn’t been the only executive to hint at a future of lower headcount. The head of JPMorgan’s consumer and community business predicted in May that AI will reduce the number of employees in its operations division by 10%. That same month, the CEO of Klarna said that the company’s investments in AI has already driven the company’s headcount to shrink by 40%. And the CEO of Ford — a company that employs tens of thousands of white-collar professionals — declared that AI will wipe out “literally half” of all white-collar jobs. Meanwhile, Kian Katanforoosh, the CEO and founder of the software startup Workera, tells me that he never wants to have much more than the 80 or so employees he has today, no matter how successful his business ends up becoming. “I truly believe we can go super super far without growing more,” he says. “I’m an engineer. I don’t want to have to manage so many people if I don’t need to.”

It’s not like CEOs ever enjoyed shelling out for the salaries or navigating the personnel headaches that come with the sprawling bureaucracies they employ. But for more than a century, armies of office workers were a necessary cost of doing business. To grow from tiny upstarts into titans of industry, companies needed an ever-multiplying number of HR reps, accountants, marketers, engineers, analysts, and project managers.

Recently, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, whom I think that however well-informed he may be on generative AI is hopelessly naive, predicted the first billion dollar company built on an artificial intelligence platform with only a single employee. And who will provide the billion in revenue? Other billionaires? That’s the opposite of Henry Ford’s idea of paying his workers enough to buy the automobiles they were producing in his factories. Don’t worry, he cheerfully continues. gAI will create new good-paying jobs we can’t even imagine.

Google’s former chief business officer, Mo Gawdat, quoted at PC Gamer has other ideas:

The AI industry has something of a stock line about its technology replacing existing careers: AI will simultaneously create new jobs we can’t even imagine, and people will start working in those fields. But Gawdat doesn’t buy that line, and in straightforward language calls the whole idea “100% crap” (thanks, Windows Central).

For the foreseeable future the jobs we can be confident will not be replaced by artificial intelligence, however better a job gAI might do, will be those of people who have the power to prevent it. That includes Fortune 500 CEOs.

The title of the op-ed with which this post began is “No Help Wanted, No Economic Growth”. What if that’s the new normal? I don’t believe that Mo Gawdat’s vision of a socialist paradise will be the outcome if for no other reason than those who still have jobs and incomes won’t pay for it. And the elected officials who also have power and don’t want their own jobs to be replaced by AI won’t vote for it.

The challenge that I would give to those who envision “new jobs we can’t even imagine” is to predict a date certain by which those jobs will begin to be created in numbers that exceed the number of jobs being lost. I don’t think they will take that challenge. I don’t think they can.